Human Bondage
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“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!…
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….
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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
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“If words come from the heart, they will enter the heart. If they come from the tongue, they will not pass beyond the ears.”
― Rumi
We are afraid of our own humanness, of nature and therefore God, and our religions play on that fear. They erect a high barrier between us and God and feed our fears with tales of hellfires and eternal punishments. It’s pretty pathological if you think about it, but the effects are deeper and more widespread in our culture than we recognize. War and aggression are normal, growing food with poisons is normal, poverty and want is normal, destruction of the sacred earth is normal. And the split we see in the world is also in ourselves, though we probably don’t see it there because we’ve been taught to…
