In the October issue of this newsletter the “Ed” issued the following invitation:

This issue contains views on spirituality from three women. It would be great to hear other views and particularly from a man's perspective. What is happening for men in [the] realm of spirituality…? How do men develop their spirituality, particularly when they move outside more patriarchal church structures

 

As a consequence I offer the following response in the hope of encouraging continued reflection and debate around questions of gender and spirituality.

 

While popular psychology differentiates people according to a wide variety of characteristics, and while these distinctions are tremendously useful in helping me understand myself and my relationships with others, psychiatrist and spiritual accompanier Gerald May suggests that the likes of saints Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross would draw the line at this kind of classification being applied to Spirituality – to my spirituality.

 

May notes with reference to these two, that they make few suggestions, and virtually no specific prescriptions, as to ways of responding to God. Instead, they offer that we “do what brings [us] most to love…and let God do the rest.” He further suggests that both these great Christian saints would balk at any statement that implies:“Because you're a woman [or man], your spiritual life and experience will be like this…”

 

Instead, they would affirm that:

“… The particular path a person's soul life follows is determined by God's unique, loving, and always unpredictable [activity]…”

“The deepest constants of the spiritual life are the same for everyone regardless of personality or gender. It's always a process of liberation from attachment, of growing freedom for love of God and person, of self-knowledge and the realisation of one's true identity [in Christ] in God.

…However [beyond those common foundations], our individual stories are coloured and textured by who we are as individuals and by God's unique ways of loving us – ways that can never be prescribed, only discovered.” ¹

 

I agree with May about there being “deep constants” common to our spiritual formation and growth, and also believe that there is a particularity, a uniqueness about the ways and means through which we each experience and respond to God.

 

For me, a dimension of masculine spirituality is about recognising that  – 

“Masculine spirituality is rooted, consciously or otherwise, in men's sense of self as men; that is, in men's social, cultural, physical, sexual and psychological experience, as distinct from that of women.” ²

 

So if spirituality can be gendered and defined by diverse human experiences, it follows that, to a point, specifically masculine experiences of spirituality are likely in and of themselves to be far from uniform. Masculine experience is –

“Formed by class, race and differing cultures [and more besides], fostering a diverse range of distinctive and sometimes competing masculinities. From this perspective there can be no single or normative spirituality among men [or women], but a plethora of spiritualities…”

 

That said, I'm increasingly looking for spiritual practices, contexts, spiritual friendships and ways of being “me” that encourage and enable both the honouring of my particularities as a male, while at the same time nurturing the “deeper constants” of the spiritual life that Teresa and John suggest ‘smooth out' the particularities of gender.

 

If “spirituality” has to do with “lived experience”, with ones experience of the living presence of God, then a distinctively Christian Spirituality is “nothing more-nor-less than life [lived] by the Spirit,” i.e. “one is Spiritual to the degree that one lives in and walks by the Spirit” ³ (e.g. Rom 8:1-16 in particular, and Gal 5: 13-25). In part then, spirituality for me has to do with my lived experience as a male, about how I as a male live my life increasingly as response and surrenderness to the Spirit.

 

My capacity to respond to God, and my ways of experiencing God are richer than any constraints my gender might impose upon me. And it is precisely at this point that I don't find notions of a “male spirituality” helpful or freeing – labels or boxes have a funny habit of reducing rather than liberating us. Thus, my ways of talking about a Jesus-centred spirituality are less concerned with Jesus' masculinity than with the broader categories of his humanity or personhood. I'm more interested in the mystery of his being the perfect embodiment of what it means to ‘image' God humanly (imago Dei). I'm interested in how he relates in his breadth of personhood to God, self and others.

 

Here's how I currently narrate my experience of spirituality:

 

My spirituality centres on the aspirational belief that in my cooperating with the Spirit, in my orientation toward God and in my living I am becoming increasingly human after the likeness and example of Jesus.

In becoming increasingly human I'm learning how, in the midst of all of life, to live more vulnerably, more freely, more lovingly, more honestly and authentically, and thus to live as a more integrated or whole person in relation to God, myself, and other persons.

 

St. Irenaeus, a church leader in the second century said that “the glory of God is a person fully alive.”

One of my favourite icons is the one on the right. Notice that Jesus is standing between two persons whose hands he is holding, holding to himself their maleness and their femaleness.  The two persons are Adam and Eve – the first imagers of God (Gen 1:26a, 27).

 

I wonder if St. Irenaeus' notion of a fully alive person is in fact a person who in Christ is able to explore, develop and live out their humanity in terms of both the masculine and the feminine.

In other words, I wonder if Jesus somehow holds out the possibility of reconfiguring what it means to be human. At the deeper levels of our humanity does Jesus somehow enable a breakdown of the ways in which gender so often divides us – both inwardly and outwardly? In Christ's resurrection, are richer and ultimately more fulfilling possibilities held out to us as females and males.

 

I wonder too if Jungian psychology has stumbled upon something important when it talks of individuation. ⁴ Jung held that every man and every woman has both “masculine” and “feminine” traits. In the male, masculine priorities are usually dominant on the surface and feminine qualities are recessive.

In women the opposite is true. Jung refers to the inner feminine as the anima and the inner masculine as the animus. He understands these inner-figures to behave in ways compensatory to the outer personality.

 

In a man, these are feminine characteristics, in a woman, masculine. Normally both are always present, to a certain degree, but find no place in the person's outwardly directed functioning because they disturb the outer manifestation, his or her established ideal image of themselves.

 

Am I somehow my truest self, not when I align myself exclusively to male or female ways of configuring spirituality, but rather in my being able to live out of an identity that honours both?

Am I somehow responding to the Spirit, and thus more able to fully experience God, when I can utilise practical ways of nourishing and better integrating the masculine and the feminine within me?

Paul Fromont