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Reflections on Male Spirituality (Richard Rohr and Joseph Martos) - Highlight Loc

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Reflections on Male Spirituality (Richard Rohr and Joseph Martos) - Highlight Loc Grand Parents The following represents excepts from two of Richard Rohr’s books. Both relate to the subject of Grand Parents. Fr Richard Rohr is a Franciscan and has written numerous books and has a wide audience. From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality (Richard Rohr and Joseph Martos) - Highlight Loc. 2235-2332 | Added on Monday, December 12, 2011, 04:13 PM You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid…. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer…. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand. Well you may go on and live until you are 90, but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. —MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. The final stage of the wisdom journey is symbolized by the ruling image of the king, the holy fool, the old wizard, the saint or what I just like to call the grand father. I began with this compelling quote from Martin Luther King because I want to point out that sometimes younger men can already carry such greatness and largeness of spirit. I am not talking about old grandpas as much as “grand” fathers, men who hold, carry, purify and transform life in grand ways. Martin Luther King was named well because he was already an archetypal “king” at the age of thirty-eight! When you can even love your enemies, you are surely a king, and Martin Luther King made an art form of loving his enemies. I myself was blessed with a grand father in the person of my own dad—which is why, perhaps, I identified more with the archetype of the old man more than the boy even when I was young. My father was (he died in 1999 at age eighty- nine) a simple man, not highly educated, but very wise. He had the wisdom to know what he knew and to know what he did not know. He had the wisdom to trust that what he did not understand might still be good, even if he did not understand it. He had a natural respect for the goodness of others. And he could encourage others to trust in themselves and to go their own way, even if their way was not his way. Because of his ability to trust and encourage me even when he did not understand where God was calling me, I was able to become a priest and venture into a personal vocation that was very different from his. He did not need me to mirror him. He was able to mirror me. That is the healthy freedom and generativity of a mature man. 1 Even when I was an adolescent, my father grandly trusted and affirmed me. When I wanted to go out, he never demanded that I explain where I was going. He simply trusted me, and through his trust I learned responsibility. When I left so young to go to the seminary, he backed me up every step of my fourteen years away from home. After I became a public speaker, he and my mother would sometimes come and listen to a talk that I was giving, and I still felt that same trust, and even admiration, coming from him. He did not usually understand, I’m sure, everything I was saying. It was not his field of interest. He was a farmer and a mechanic and a painter for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. I can still see him sitting in the front row and trusting that whatever I am saying has to be good, just because I’m saying it. In this he was probably like most fathers. His respect for me enabled me to be the man that I am and to say what I have to say still today. When we can trust others like that—when we can trust God and trust life even when we do not fully understand—we too can be grand fathers. When we can let go of our need for everything to be as we want it, and our own need to succeed, we can then encourage the independent journey and the success of others. When we can let go of our fear of failure and our fear of pain, we are free to trust life just as it comes. We are able to affirm that, if God allows it, there must be something OK about it. That sounds like passivity or fatalism, but that is not what I mean at all. There is a letting go that is passivity, but there is a letting go that is egolessness, trust and surrender. The first is dangerous; the second is sanctity. The grand father is able to relinquish center stage and to stand on the sidelines, and thus be in solidarity with those who need his support. The strongest image of that in the Bible is probably, however, a woman. It is Mary standing at the foot of the cross (John 19:25). Note it says “standing,” that is, with dignity, holding the pain strongly until it is transformed. She is not hysterical, not prostrate, not accusing, not blaming, not even trying to take him down, or save his reputation—or hers. She is the clear feminine side of what we are talking about, the grand “mother” archetype. Grand father or grand mother energy is an energy that is quiet and secure. It has been tested and not found wanting. It does not need to prove itself any longer, and so it can approve and bless the efforts of others who are not yet sure of themselves. Children can feel secure in the presence of their grandparents because, while mom and dad are still rushing to find their way through life’s journey, grandpa and grandma have hopefully become spacious. They can contain problems, inconsistencies, inconveniences and contradictions— after a lifetime of practicing and learning. Grand fathers can deeply trust life precisely because they have come to terms with death. They know that pain is not the enemy, but that fear of pain is. They have lived through enough of life to understand that in the long run, life is stronger than death. Life has a vitality that may be temporarily slowed down, but 2 inevitably life energy will overcome the destructive forces of death. We see this principle at work on the large scale in many underdeveloped countries, where despite years of oppression people can still be hopeful and even happy. We see it also at work in other groups who are working to improve their situations, and where individuals overcome great odds, fighting against poverty, addiction and disease, to lead fulfilling and rewarding lives. Grand fathers recognize the surge of the divine spirit in the human situation. Because they can trust that ultimately God is in control, they can let go of their own desire to control reality and to bend others to their will. They can stop trying to force life, as they often did when they were younger men, and simply allow it to flow in the patterns that eventually—if not immediately and directly—lead to greater life. This is not to say that grand fathers are naïve. They have seen enough of death that they know what it looks like, even when it comes under the guise of false promises and clever rationalizations. But they can look beyond the ignorance of the young who desire money and success, power and pleasure, with the wisdom of knowing that in the long run these are transitory illusions. They have heard enough of politicians’ promises and advertisers’ claims to realize that these are largely empty, but they are not disturbed by the hollowness of talk because, in truth, they have begun to inhabit the next world. They have already begun to pass over. They have died many times, and they know that the next death will not harm them. “What have I ever lost by dying?” they say. Younger men need to fight against the forces of death in their own lives and in the life of their society—and rightly so, for their calling is to assume responsibility for the direction of life and to courageously work for their own good and the good of others. Grand fathers, however, understand that every human decision inevitably mixes good and bad, and that every social situation is a mixture of light and darkness. The courage of the grand father, therefore, is not to fight death but to affirm a life that is bigger than death. They recognize that, as Jesus said, “No one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18b), so they are free of the illusion that any other good is completely good or that even bad people are totally bad. They are beyond hating, and also beyond idolizing. They now know that the first half of life was as necessary as the second. To pretend to jump to the second half of life before fighting, needing, cursing and failing is often a lazy and dishonest posture.
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