"Delivering the Male"

A sermon by Bill Neely
Summer Minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church, Rockford IL

July 31, 2005

"Wake Up", instructs the home page of the Promise Keeper's web site. "Promise Keeper's: Men of Integrity," the page advertises. "If You Truly Want to Change The World, Change the Men," it declares. And, "Real Men Matter," it assures, all of this in the first 1 ½ inches of very well-used space at the top of their web page. You may remember the Promise Keeper's from the mid-1990's when they were the subject of significant media coverage. Their wildly popular multi-day male revivals filled football stadiums across the country with men of all ages, races, and Christian denominations. These revivals were intended to gather together thousands of Christian men who would dedicate, or re-dedicate their lives to becoming better men in a very traditional understanding of what that means.
These men gathered supposedly to commit to the seven promises of the Promise Keeper movement, promises that revolved and continue to revolve around being good Christians who commit to strengthening marriages, families, and society by reclaiming a central patriarchal role and identity for men in our culture, a role and identity that they claim has been abandoned. They advocated and still advocate that men take back these central roles in their families and spheres of society, not negotiate about them, but simply claim the roles of head of household and leader of community and everyone else will adapt. One must note that this hardly seems possible for a group as marginal as the Promise Keeper's claim men are, but then again, that supposition of male marginality is just one of many that I do not share with the group.
What I do share is the feminist author Susan Faludi's assessment that the rank and file men who became devotees of the Promise Keeper movement "were seeking to build something greater than the sum of their individually distressed lives." Faludi is the author of Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, and also wrote before that Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. She's a powerful writer who offers provocative insights about gender roles and relations in America. And concerning the Promise Keeper's movement, she noted that while the speakers and more visible presences at Promise Keeper rally's were and are quite often the same prideful and confident men who serve as leaders in various conservative Christian movements, the men in attendance are often less than proud, less than secure. They are everyday men, working at jobs with little security and worrying about their families drifting apart. They're seeking security and meaning in life and for many, the Promise Keeper rallies, attended just once or several times, offers the perceptions of both. Faludi followed some of these men around for a while, and one of the questions that she asked them was which part of the Promise Keeper rallies really moved them the most.
See, she had noted the obvious, that these men left these gatherings enthusiastic and optimistic about making positive changes in their lives, often changes that had little to do with the politics or the social engineering goals of the leaders of the movement. They left wanting to communicate more effectively with their wives, to get their financial homes in order. They left wanting to spend more time with their kids and wanting to develop and deepen their spiritual lives. They left wanting to be involved in honest, caring relationships with other men where they could speak freely and emotionally about the fear and uncertainty that they felt in life. Perhaps that was why, after the big stages with the musical acts and fiery speeches, after they had bought some Promise Keeper's merchandise and endured endless motivational phrases drenched in sports references and lingo, what many men told Faludi they valued the most about the gatherings were the chances to be together and to be real with small groups of men.
Periodically, small groups would circle as part of the program to share and pray together, and in the honesty and tenderness of these small gatherings, these men would find their tears welcomed as honest instead of questioned as weak. They would find commonalities in their anxieties over jobs that viewed them as disposable. They would find empathy as they admitted to not knowing how to really communicate with their families. They would find identification in each others admissions that they couldn't be the men that their fathers were, fathers who, sometimes, were a mystery to begin with.
Faludi noted that these men would often categorize these admission's to each other as acts of repentance, acknowledgments of sins that were often, in her words, unclear. The men felt they needed forgiveness for not living up to the ideal of manhood they held in their mind and in some cases, others currently held for them, and that frankly, men before them had created. And the value of the Promise Keepers for these men was not the pseudo-creedal list of promises that could be marketed onto coffee mugs and t-shirts. The value was in the small groups of men who could confess their supposed shortcomings to each other in circles of care and support. The value was in the brief, honest, and redemptive merging's of individual distressed lives into reassuring streams of common experiences. The value was in the spirituality that these men could create with each other.
The perception in the culture is that men usually do not grow closer together through that sort of sharing process, with that sort of intention. Typically men who grow close to each other are thought to have endured a similar or the same life threatening experience like battle in war or fighting crime. Or, men who have competed together on a sports team are expected to be closer to each other as they've endured, together, a lesser sort of battle on the football field or basketball court. But even the closeness associated with these popular ideas of how men deeply bond with each other carries with it an assumption of relative silence: that while men may recount the carnage of a battlefield with each other, sometimes their deepest fears felt in their moments of greatest peril remain unspoken. Athletes may spend year after endless year recounting the game winning shot or the home run that took the game into extra innings, but may never share with each other even once, what it really feels like to have that victory gradually mean less and less as life hits them with more and more. Plus, with increasing gender equality in the armed forces and the sports world, those boys clubs of yesteryear are becoming, slowly and painfully, but still refreshingly, extinct, as girls and women gain access to both the promise and perils of military and sporting lifestyles.
And I don't mean to diminish the bonds between those military guys and sports enthusiasts, but I do mean to say that closeness between people in general and particularly men, is sometimes expressed nonverbally and more intuitively. Those patterns are even seen in relationships between men who have grown together off of the playing field and far away from the battlefield. One of my closest friends is a man who has been in my life for more than half of my existence now. And while we've had conversations of meaning and shared deeply, our bond has become most apparent to me during times in our lives when we didn't say anything special but were just there for each other: at my wedding when he came in from out of town to be there, at his wedding when I did the same, when his first baby was born and I showed up at the hospital and he immediately went into the baby room, got his brand new daughter, wrinkly and warm, put her in my arms, smiled, and stepped away to speak with another friend. He was one of those jumpy, giddy new fathers, actually, he's kind of a jumpy and giddy guy in general, but there was something in the way he handed her to me and stepped back that said, serenely, I know I mean a lot to you, and I know she does to, and I trust that. It was nonverbal, intuitive, and spiritual.
These days, the friends that I make of either gender tend to be in seminary or the ministry, which means, by and large, we verbalize and emote like crazy. We're always talking about our feelings and sharing deeply and saying things like, "When you say this, I feel this ... , and, "what if we try to lean into that sadness or anger?" When I get an emotion I can name it and maybe yours, too. And I've grown to be more appreciative of these intentional verbal engagements designed at coming to know each other more deeply. In these processes, we really do come to know not only the other person better, but also we come to know ourselves more deeply, and additionally we come to understand the commonalities that we share as people alive in this world.
We gradually, through time and trust, come to know that the rays of joy that warm some of our life experiences seem, at their elemental level, to have the same eternal light as their source. We gradually, through time and trust, come to know that the blankets of despair that cover some of our days, are made from threads in the common human tapestry, a tapestry that we are a part of, even when we feel as though we're alone. We gradually, through time and trust, come to realize that the call of the Holy that speaks to us in rhythms and in reason, in song and in silence, calls each in a myriad of different ways to lives of humility and service. We gradually, through time and trust, come to realize that whatever we name the root of that call, be it atheism or theism, Christianity or humanism, paganism or Buddhism or agnosticism or anything else, we are seekers of an evolving Mystery that each person has her or his own evolving understanding of. We gradually, through time and trust, come to realize that there is so much more than the labels that we use, and sometimes hide behind, to name the Mystery in our lives. Those linguistic specifications and clarifications that we sometimes overindulge in, the result being that language becomes a shield with which we ward off deeper connection with each other and with what's beyond us. We gradually, through time and trust, put our faith in discussions about these ideas, and leave the ego-driven debate approach for matters of secular, and not spiritual, importance.
And none of that is gender specific, nor should we limit our engagement in the creative processes of more fully coming to know ourselves, each other, and what's beyond us, to members of whatever gender we identify with. The greatest meal is one where we are all welcomed to the table, children and adults, people of all genders and sexual orientations, of all races and nationalities, of all classes and belief systems, to feast on the fruits of the emerging, but not yet fully realized, beloved community. But still, there is a place for people of similar experiences to come together and share as a group their common joys and struggles. There is a place for people of similar experiences to journey together on the often tender trails that explore what it means to be who they are and to be alive in these days. There is a place for women to gather together and speak about what it means to be a woman today, feeling secure in the common identity of the people in the room, and expressing how being a woman today influences one's understandings of ultimate meaning and personal spirituality. And there is a place for men to do the same thing.
That is why those fellows who gathered at Promise Keeper rallies found the greatest meaning in the small groups where they could be honest about their feelings and experiences. That is why, even though I disagree with so very much of the Promise Keeper's approach and theology, I completely understand the lure of men who feel insecure in their abilities to provide, to parent, and to partner in accordance with some ideal they were handed and still hold, to come together and share those identified shortcomings with others who understand. That is why their language of sin and repentance, incomprehensible to me in the context of not living up to some fictitious image of what being a real "man" means, is ultimately far less important than the shared understanding of how we exist in the world. Religion is phrased by language, but created by experience. The experience is the root of the spiritual life.
And for these Promise Keeper's and the female and male counterparts in liberal religious circles, the opportunities to come together and share experiences in safe, confidential, and nurturing environments, can be positively liberating for the people present. And the liberation is found through identification with others who have similar joys and anxieties in life. The liberation is found when we find ourselves bound with a wider sea of common humanity than we imagined, in those precious moments of happiness or fear, when we actually come to know the interconnected web that we speak of. The liberation is found not in a continuing facade of independent existence, but in the reality of knowing, influencing, and making the most of the ties that bind us to each other. The father of process theology, Alfred North Whitehead, was getting at this when he wrote, "The misconception that has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of independent existence. There is no such mode of existence. Every entity is to be understood in terms of the way in which it is interwoven with the rest of the universe." Liberation is not increased individuality, it is an increasing sense and recognition of the value and sustenance that one can give and receive in right relationship with the larger world.
Male and female spiritual circles can foster an awakening to these possibilities and sometimes, make them reality. It's interesting to note that the current Promise Keeper's campaign is titled "Awakening." I'm sure they and I mean something different by that, but we may have something in common, too. When I think of "Awakening" and spirituality, I actually think of an 1899 novel by the feminist writer Kate Chopin titled, The Awakening. The story is about a traditional woman in New Orleans who is bound by the societal expectations and demands of what being a proper wife and mother means. Her awakening is one in which she comes to know that the passions of her life involve, well, actual passion instead of the loveless marriage that she is in as well as more physical and intellectual freedom to move about and learn new things. Once she awakens, life can never go back to the way it was for herself and her family. Tensions build for her to reclaim her former role as subservient wife and "proper" woman, tensions that eventually cause her to, in what most reviewers see as a final act of independence, walk out into the sea and never return.
The "Awakening" that the Promise Keepers are speaking of has nothing to do with women's liberation, but it may very well have to do with bringing to shore some people growing weary of treading water in the too-fast and too-competitive seas of our culture. And once brought to some shore, these formerly tired swimmers can be refreshed and assured by the common strength of those women and men also stepping out of the water to refocus on what really matters in life: family, community, religion, service. Rather than stepping into the water, women and men these days need to step out and be with each other to recall and envision what is true in life. To recall and envision what makes us embrace the dawn and what we hold in our hearts at nightfall. To recall and envision, through the storms of expectations that may lead us astray, the common humanity that we share, and the common humility before the ultimate that we know. As women, as men, as all genders together, our vision will be cleared by the intention and honesty of spiritual deepening with each other. May we be bold undertakers of these opportunities. May we support each other in the work, and be patient as we learn to trust these processes. And may these efforts be seen in our contributions of comfort and understanding in the larger world.

Amen and blessed be.