{"id":943,"date":"2015-01-02T14:04:12","date_gmt":"2015-01-02T13:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/?p=943"},"modified":"2015-01-02T14:04:12","modified_gmt":"2015-01-02T13:04:12","slug":"male-spirituality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/2015\/male-spirituality","title":{"rendered":"Male spirituality"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The whole notion of male spirituality has bothered me ever since the &#8220;<a title=\"Wild at Heart\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wild_at_Heart_%28book%29\" target=\"_blank\">Wild at Heart<\/a>&#8221; phenomenon.\u00c2\u00a0 I&#8217;ve heard many greet that adventurer&#8217;s manifesto with enthusiasm, while I myself felt misrepresented and misunderstood by it, and resisted it as something that appeared to force all men into the daredevil mold.\u00c2\u00a0 (Must I add that bravado isn&#8217;t me?)<\/p>\n<p>So when the June 2012 magazine VBG-Bausteine of the Swiss InterVarsity equivalent contained a report on a course on male spirituality, I read it with interest and apprehension.\u00c2\u00a0 Felix Ruther summarized his own course on the topic: I&#8217;ll attempt a summary of the summary here as a reminder of what stood out to me.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Men tend toward liturgy, Ruther says.\u00c2\u00a0 Fewer words, more ritual, and knowing what is to be done make most men feel more at home.<\/li>\n<li>Praying is unmanly: it&#8217;s an admission of weakness, after all.\u00c2\u00a0 But it&#8217;s also a great way to get the continually busy man to stop, look around, and ask the deeper questions: what does God want of me?\u00c2\u00a0 What do I want, and where do I stand?<\/li>\n<li>Men prefer to model themselves after myths and mythical beings, not the psyche (I don&#8217;t understand the psyche part, but I&#8217;m leaving it in).\u00c2\u00a0 There are four essential mythical archetypes:<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ol>\n<li>Responsibility (Father\/Patriarch\/King)<\/li>\n<li>Competition (Warrior)<\/li>\n<li>Vulberability (Lover)<\/li>\n<li>Independence (Prophet\/Jester\/Magician)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Ruther says that if one of these archetypes is preferred without counterbalance, men descend into a skewed masculinity: the king becomes a tyrant or weakling, the warrior a sadist, the lover an addict, and the prophet a hurtful nag.\u00c2\u00a0 He calls men to integrate all archetypes: to fight for the good, to be captivated by beauty, to create safe havens for others, and to seek and speak truth.<\/p>\n<p>This multidimensionality &#8211; whether fully accurate or not &#8211; is what I felt was missing from &#8220;Wild at Heart,&#8221; which I thought reduced manliness to a one-dimensional adrenaline quest.\u00c2\u00a0 If Eldredge had stepped back from his own frustration with the church to see the bigger picture, his wake-up call could have been much more effective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The whole notion of male spirituality has bothered me ever since the &#8220;Wild at Heart&#8221; phenomenon.\u00c2\u00a0 I&#8217;ve heard many greet that adventurer&#8217;s manifesto with enthusiasm, while I myself felt misrepresented and misunderstood by it, and resisted it as something that appeared to force all men into the daredevil mold.\u00c2\u00a0 (Must I add that bravado isn&#8217;t me?) So when the June 2012 magazine VBG-Bausteine of the Swiss InterVarsity equivalent contained a report on a course on male spirituality, I read it with interest and apprehension.\u00c2\u00a0 Felix Ruther summarized his own course on the topic: I&#8217;ll attempt a summary of the summary here as a reminder of what stood out to me. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=943"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":944,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions\/944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}