Missing Father

“Perhaps my single greatest disappointment in most of the world’s religions is that they succeeded, against all odds, in making most people afraid of God! Do you realize how absurd and horrible that is? It pretty much makes it an unsafe and scary universe at the core, where no one is at home and everyone is paranoid. It makes the mystical adventure impossible…

A man without his feminine soul is easily described. His personality will move toward the outer world of things, and his head will be his control tower. He will build, explain, use, fix, manipulate, legislate, order and play with whatever he bothers to touch, but he will not really touch it at all—for he does not know the inside of things. He has no subtlety, imagination, ability to harmonize, or live with paradox or mystery. He engineers reality instead of living it. In fact, he is afraid of real life, and that is why the control tower of reason and pseudo control works overtime. It is the only way he can give himself a sense of security and significance. He is trapped in part of the picture, which is dangerous precisely because he thinks it is the whole picture…

Until males and cooperating females recognize this unwholeness, this anti-Incarnationalism posing as reality, we have no hope of loving or knowing God. We will, in fact, be threatened by wholeness and replace (as we generally have) any daring Biblical faith with little schemes of salvation. Thomas Merton called them “private holiness projects.” Psychologists call them ego agendas. In men’s work, we call it “building our tower.” Basically, this is a transfer of the business world of win…achieve…prove…succeed…control to the realm of the Spirit. And it just doesn’t work. It is the anti-gospel. There is a better way…

The vast majority of people in western civilization suffer from the “father wound.” Those who have this father wound have never been touched by their human father. Either he had no time, no freedom or no need, but the result is children who have no masculine energy. They will lack self-confidence and the ability to do, to carry through, to trust themselves—because they were never trusted by him. They fear and sometimes even hate the masculine side of God, for very understandable reasons. But the loss has been incalculable…

The spiritual man in mythology, in literature and in the great world religions has an excess of life, he knows he has it, makes no apology for it, and finally recognizes that he does not even need to protect or guard it. It is not for him. It is for others. His life is not his own. His life is not about him. It is about God.”

~ Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality