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Chapter 17- Return
Dagobah. There Luke learns about the Force. And "unlearns" certain rules of the village mentality. Unlearning is part of initiatory loss and also part of deeper learning. Here Luke learns the spiritual values of inner peace and unlearns macho "anger, fear, aggression". Here he also learns of the possibility that his talents and passion can be used negatively. He can be seduced as his father was. Yoda almost predicts this.
Luke returns prematurely to his community to serve his friends. Yoda can only give his last teaching: "don't give in to hate." What Luke acts on is his instinctive learning of the connection between mission and community. Whether he is ready or not will be seen. But hopefully he has learned the values of the other side and the perspective of serving the world for the higher good represented by the Force. Initiation brings a new spirituality based on serving the good of the whole community first, even risking one's own life and 'good'.
So Luke returns.
Third Step
As a result of initiation, a man starts his life in the village as a boy, and he returns to the village as a man. His journey has changed who he is and what he does. A man's journey starts in community and ends in community. Yet all his relationships are changed. This new man is given a new name by his elders. His community recognizes him by a new name because he is a new person to them.
The initiated man returns with a boon, often described by his name. This boon is his newfound identity and the talents and vision he finds in his ordeal. The boon is for the renewal of the community, which can atrophy in patriarchal rigidity. His gift, as well as giving his life meaning, is also meant to transform his community. Indigenous societies waited excitedly for the new man and his boon.
This is the beginning of the third step in initiation, This is the return to the community that badly needs his presence. For the gift of initiation is ultimately given for the good of everyone in the initiated man's community.
If a community is not open to his gift, as happens in an elderless, modern society, his message can bring estrangement, ridicule, even danger and death. For instance, modern societies do not particularly want mature men. Mature men are not blindly obedient.
Yet a man who has been to the other side has a certain peace that is untouched by fear of death or its counterparts, scorn and debasement. This is because he has already faced death and found deep, inner values unshaped by popular opinion.
The mark of an initiated man is a deep peace that could be described as otherworldly. This is the peace that the Bible says passes understanding. This is Yoda's 'calm.' There is a detachment that seems like despair. Actually, it is a detachment that comes from a vision that the community does not yet understand, especially a modern community. It is often a vision that patriarchal cultures scorn. I rarely hear of a CEO talk of serving the community as a corporate priority. Now it doesn't go beyond serving shareholders
A man who started writing poetry in his therapy described the mature man he could glimpse in his own life:
Nothing is the same anymore. He is quiet now and does not need to drink on Friday evenings or worry about market volatility. Something greater is pulling him now and he realizes he is no longer in control. Just a pulsating flow of energy passing through the body from a source that cannot be described.
The Common Good
In the traditional Western myth, as outlined by Joseph Campbell, the hero returns to the community with a boon that saves the community from outright destruction or prolonged harm. The boon, like a medicine, rejuvenates and renews the life of the community. The Sioux have a belief that a mature man always acts with the awareness that his actions will either benefit or hurt the next seven generations. Their community spans time as well as space.
The valuable boon of a man's ordeal is the gift he gives others. As Robert Moore has said, "You can't be a mature man without a commitment to the public good." Or Fr. Richard Rohr, "Balanced masculinity shows itself in action undertaken for the sake of others". A man who strives for maturity must eventually take responsibility for the good of the larger community. He must put his personal ego needs in their proper place, as the ordeal has taught. This sometime means taking on the pain of the larger community and showing how the pain must be endured and transformed. Sometimes that pain can result in personal death, even while the community is being transformed. Jesus, Gandhi and King provide high examples of such witness. Most often the pain is feeling misunderstood and alienated, until the rightness of his vision is recognized. But the mature man has already been in confusion and misunderstanding. He has been immunized by his ordeal.
It is very hard for a man to think about the public good, and see the world through an elder's eyes, if he still yearns for pleasure and power. In Yoda's word he is too easily 'seduced'. The temptation will get too much for him, as he gets the attention of women and the adulation brought on by power. He will not have been immunized through initiation to the corrupting influence of power, including sexual power. Our own American politics is a testament to many immature men unable to handle the responsibility of power. The whole issue of sexual harassment is a symbol of men who use power to get pleasure. Corruption in government or corporations results from men putting their boy needs above the good of the community.
The uninitiated man finds it too hard to discharge his responsibilities well. Often his unguided adolescent will sabotage his career, either publicly or privately. His adolescent, hidden by his polished persona, will take over periodically. The power of sexual excitement or the sexual excitement of power will overcome his persona. There will be no healthy Self to restrain the adolescent. The community suffers instead of being saved.
The mature man takes on the pain of the community instead of indulging his own pleasure. This is the time the mature man can use his anger, the anger of his warrior. This is the time he turns his rage at injustice into just anger. I am often asked by men what they are to do with their anger. I first talk to them about using their anger to set boundaries and let anger give them the energy to endure ordeal. However another use of anger is in work for those who have been unjustly treated. This is the anger of the Seven Samurai, the anger of Jesus in the Temple.
This work for justice is part of a mature man's mission. Anger at injustice in his community is his motivation. The warrior in him, when under the control of his kingly self, becomes fierce in defense of the undefended. But the answer is not violence that destroys, although it may involve measured physical force. More often the real answer is the confrontation of injustice even in the face of personal pain. As Aaron Kipnis says, "in the vision of masculinity we are moving toward, a man expresses his rage through empowered and compassionate action." He talks of anger at the "general global condition of distress." This is the anger of the good warrior, the anger of the warrior practicing bushido.
The mature man is a true public servant, though sometimes an unpopular one. He is usually neither elected nor paid. He is an elder trying to make this an elder society. If he is elected or paid, he uses his power for the good of others. He uses his power to empower others, not to prove his personal power over others. An elder feels responsible for the whole community and each member of it.
In Native American tradition a man is judged by how he handles the fruits of his talent. His manhood is judged not by how many riches he accumulates but by how much of his belongings he gives away for the benefit of his whole tribal community, especially to those with the least ability to take care of themselves. This is the virtue of the potlatch or the giveaway. A person who claims more than his just share is looked on as selfish. A man who feels responsible for even the least of his brothers and sisters is honored.
I am not espousing men to leave their families to become a guru or a hermit. I don't believe that we have to give our IRAs away to become mature. But I do feel that a mature man must go the painful route of separating from the values of the patriarchal world of self aggrandizement. I do espouse that a man listen seriously for a call to mission. I do espouse that a man, once having faced his ordeal, will find the fullness of his call and his life by authentically serving his community.
I encourage men to live continually in both worlds, the village and the forest, realizing his marketplace mentality must be secondary to the values he learned in the wilderness. I know that a man who finds that call and uses his gifts will naturally want to serve his community. He will not have to be reminded. And he will do it with an enthusiasm and peace that only he and his initiated brothers will understand.
Work and The Father Wound
For many men the call, where boon and mission intersect, is in their work in the world. A man's work is meant to serve his community first. The initiatory call will continually urge a man to find meaning in his work by serving his community. Mission always means service to community. The third big step in initiation involves a man's work in the community, how he exercises his boon. Men's work often involves their job.
I believe that today much of the depression that men experience can be traced to problems with work and job. The arbitrariness and lack of meaning in most men's work demoralizes them. Consequently, men's lives are a hectic search for something or someone to make up for the hours of pain and discontent at their job. This is where addictions or the pursuit of power comes in. High salaries are meant to compensate for low satisfaction. 'Golden handcuffs' mirror the reality of job imprisonment. Poor work quality is assumed, if workers are not strictly monitored. The work world becomes one big Dilbert cartoon.
My father's generation probably represents the low point in this downward spiral of the meaning of work. Coming out of the Depression and the continuing technological changes following the Industrial Revolution, the generation coming out of World War II looked for any job that could pay enough to raise a family, often having a technological base. These happened to be mostly industrial jobs, as there was a continuing shift from agricultural work. The farm itself was even becoming industrialized, as agribusiness was born. As Robert Bly points out, not long ago there was a profound connection broken between men and the land, and men and their sons. This situation would be a kind of hell to indigenous peoples. They would be out of contact with the natural world and their initiatory direction. Thus, they would be out of contact with the other side, the soul side that gave everything else purpose. They would also have nothing of purpose to get from their elders, and little legacy of meaning to give to their sons.
My father picked a career in engineering because it paid decently and there was a need for engineers after the war. He never thought of his self-satisfaction or a higher meaning. He was from an immigrant family. My grandfather came to America at 14, because there was little opportunity in his small town in Italy. He was thrown, like so many other immigrants, into a terrible initiation, with no elders to help him. My grandfather was a janitor, an intelligent, hard working man with no opportunity to use his greatest talents. He provided enough to send my father to college, so that my father did not have to work 14 hours a day in backbreaking work. He wanted my father to have choices. Education was his legacy. He didn't realize his greatest legacy was his amazing risk-taking warrior energy and dogged loyalty to his son.
My father took the first job that came along after college and World War II. He stayed with it for 43 years. He stayed in a job he didn't like because he didn't want to risk his family's welfare. He had choices, but he was afraid of the risk. He was increasingly unhappy at his work. He did what it took to be a man in his time, just as my grandfather did. He suffered for a higher purpose. He also gave me a legacy of choices. It is sad for me to realize I was given choices at the expense of his spirit. My father was able to hide his unhappiness from all of us siblings growing up. Like many of his generation he suffered his wound courageously and silently.
Work and Play
It is not supposed to be this way. We are all victims, as were our fathers and mothers, of a society that has lost direction. Since we are not guided to the other side, we have lost a moral and sacred ground that the village can never bring. Work becomes even less a service to the village, and more an individual quest for perceived material survival. As they say, "Gotta put food on the table."
The initiated man, however, finds intrinsic value in the work he does. He would do it even if he weren't getting paid. His motivation comes from deep inside. Through his work, he becomes more of who he is. Through who he is, he does good work. Through both, he serves the material and spiritual needs of his community.
I said earlier that the work addicted man looks like the mature man, because of the hours spent in dedication to the task. Yet here is the difference: essentially, the work addicted man is trying to find his manhood through his work. And not knowing manhood inside, he is desperately looking for outward verification that he does things that men do. The immature man says "I am what I do". Persona is enough.
Robert Frost talked in modern terms of finding this meaningful work in a wonderful poem, "Two Tramps in Mud Time". He talks of uniting one's true calling with a life work when he writes:
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation as my two eyes make one in sight.
And the work is play for mortal stakes, I the deed ever really done for heaven and the future's sake.
When a man wants to do what needs to be done for the community, with no thought to reward, he is coming upon his own manhood and his initiatory call. Then the work is not responsibility in the traditional sense, not a burden or a duty. Work becomes a sacred play, even when there is pain involved and there are serious stakes in the community.
Mircea Eliade, a mythologist and religious historian, talks of what happens to a man when he finds a life work. He refers to this life work as sacred or sanctified. This work has qualities that give it a specialness that mirrors a 'high' that others seek in dark ways, such as addiction. He talked of the volunteers in Mahatma Gandhi's liberation campaign who "could work 16 and 18 hours a day, singing, laughing and shouting out of sheer joy."
He said in an interview in the Spring, 1976 issue of Parabola that "any type of labor that is undertaken for an ideal such as defense or liberation of one's own country, preaching a religious, social or ethical message, and so on, can be performed in a kind of 'ecstatic' enthusiasm- one might also say 'outside of time' ". Notice the buoyant and otherworldly quality described in this kind of life work. Signs of the other side. The sense of being periodically invigorated is surely a mark of what is sacred work for each of us. Robert Frost's 'play' is Eliade's 'enthusiasm'.
Again the word enthusiasm, even joy. The mature man finds joy in his work, as well as in his life, even though there is pain and frustration. Maybe peace is a better term. Some men have found the precursor of this feeling in fatherhood. In healthy fatherhood there is no pay, not much status, and a lot of work and pain. Yet the peace that can come from nurturing a young, vibrant life is indescribable. The view from the other side does cause everything to look differently. Fatherhood, as it should be, seems to go so quickly, because a man is on the other side, outside of time. Since parenthood is also be a calling, healthy fatherhood is the melding of work and call.
I often talk to men who realize that their work did not have the meaning it once did. Some realize that their work never did have meaning. They have often outgrown their jobs. I believe that most men who have started any initiatory work will find that their work starts to feel stale. This is because most men will still be working for someone else's vision, be it in a company or corporation. They will be following a father that they start to realize has nothing more to offer. They will find that they have their own vision of work that doesn't coincide with their corporation. This will be a crossroads for many men, and the substance of their ordeal. Their elder within will not shut up!
Mark Gerzon talks of changes in men's attitudes toward work as they approach midlife. In his book Listening to Midlife he outlines this crossroad in his section "Finding A Voice In Your Vocation." Since midlife is most often the time of initiation for modern men Gerzon talks of this time as "passing across a threshold into a deeper dimension of ourselves." This will involve finding ways "to express our whole selves in our work." This is when work is "not just a job, not even an occupation or a profession." His book has many good stories of how men and women crossed the threshold in midlife into more meaningful work.
Most men at mid-life need to either direct a company and incarnate their vision, be freed by a company to follow their own vision by finding a new voice in an old job description, or leave the father company to follow their own meaningful work. Otherwise, when they return to the village with a boon, they hide it away for nobody to see or use. Work is the way most men give their vision to the community. A man must be free to pursue his own vision or he is perpetually a son and a boy.
Downsizing has thrown many men into their initiatory ordeal. Some have been destroyed by this separation. Many others have used their ordeal well. Most men I have talked to, who have survived this ordeal, have said that the pain and stress of their transition was worth it. They came out the other side with a new sense of purpose in their lives and a great deal more job satisfaction. Most also admit that they wouldn't have believed this outcome as a possibility when separation first happened.
When men come to me for counseling, these work issues invariably come up, after the initial crises of separation are dealt with. If a man has the courage to face these issues, he comes to the final part of his ordeal, facing the possible meaninglessness of his whole life, robbed of the masculine persona of his career. There is a literal feeling of emasculation. In the extended, painful moments of this confrontation, he will gradually find some priceless gifts and experiences. He will see his life work taking shape. It is then he will see the next steps in his life, and most often be quite enthusiastic about them. The process can start and stop at any time.
Nontraditional Work
The work a man finds himself doing after initiation does not always coincide with his job, as Frost intimated. Sometimes a man finds that his job allows him to carry on his true vocation with the rest of his time. This can often happen with men who have found a calling through their midlife ordeal. They may not be called to change careers, but called to bring the focus of their lives to another meaningful work. I once gave a workshop for men studying to be permanent deacons in the Catholic Church. These were men who were married and had families, all at mid-life. They were preparing to be ordained ministers in the church, while still following their careers and their families. As one man said, "I have a job, but this is my vocation."
As a man matures the line between a job and work tends to blur. Men can turn their job into a sacred work with the right intention of service and love for community. Men can also turn their sacred work into what looks like a passionate job. Indigenous people could not tell the difference. Any work meant service.
In other traditions mature men devoted their lives to their community in a more conscious way after serving their family and community as householders. This traditional work would be considered nontraditional today. Fr. Richard Rohr talks about a mature masculinity in India, as I have mentioned earlier in talking of elders. He talks of a stage after a man has finished his householder stage, usually after the birth of his first grandchild. Usually his sons are working and providing an income, thus freeing him to go on to the next stage. This is the stage of life of the seeker. The seeker is sometimes referred to as a forest dweller. Not that all seekers go to live in the woods, but they often do go off to be alone. They seem to live a life of a monk, though they join no order nor live in a monastery. They read their scriptures, they meditate and they talk with gurus, seeking to understand the meaning of life. This is their structured ordeal. When Western men are retiring, these Eastern men are just starting a serious spiritual journey. When Western men stop at the householdership growth stage, the Indian man goes to a whole other stage.
Out of this stage, and ordeal, emerges a mature man. Then comes an even further stage. The final stage of a man's spiritual development is that of the wise man. Having sought spiritual truths and the truths of his own soul, he has learned important lessons. He is then in a position to be a guru who is open to be sought after for wise counsel. He makes no money from his counsel. He is not a paid consultant. He gives freely of his time and accumulated experience to anyone who seeks his wisdom. I would call this man an elder serving his community. Richard Rohr calls him a godfather to the next generations.
There is also a model of masculine maturity in the Russian countryside that comes out of their Orthodox Christian tradition. Catherine de Hueck Doherty, an expatriate Russian baroness, writes about it in her book Poustinia. The process starts with a man experiencing a call, similar to the call experienced in ordeal. He could be any age, but usually in his 30's or 40's (women who were called were usually much older). His call would be to go to an isolated, secluded place, usually in the forest. The word poustinia means desert in Russian. The word also has come to mean any desert-like place, similar to the isolated places that the desert fathers went to in the 4th century AD.
A poustinik could be anyone, a peasant, a duke, a member of the middle class, learned or unlearned, or anyone in between. The poustinik would leave his earthly possessions behind, wearing the normal dress of a pilgrim, a linen shift with an ordinary cord tied around his middle. He took along a linen bag, a loaf of bread, some salt, a gourd of water. The poustinik would go to the outskirts of the village. He would pray in the forest until he would be led to the place he would dwell. There he would build his poustinia, a small, simple hut. Here he would pray and enter into 'the great silence of God.' He would take on the pain of the world, voluntarily, especially the pain of the poor. Out of his pain and prayer he would find the wisdom of God.
Poustinikki are different from hermits. Hermits would be shut off from the world. Poustinikki opened themselves to whoever came to them. They would always offer the meager, material hospitality they had, usually tea and bread. Many times they were sought after for their counsel, in matters both spiritual and social. Other times they were sought after for physical help, like getting in a late crop that could be destroyed by weather. The poustinik was there to pray and to serve. He lived off of whatever was given to him freely. He consoled, he understood, he loved-- and he asked nothing for himself. As of 1967, the forests of Russia were still peopled with many poustinikki.
Good work can take all forms, paid or unpaid, formal or informal, seen or unseen. The call can involve finding new work, changing one's job into meaningful work, or finding meaningful unpaid work while keeping one's responsibility as householder. The absolute necessity for every man is to honor his initiatory call to his community. The absolute necessity is for a man to believe in his boon.
The Twelfth Step
There are also some specific works that all men are called to. All men are called to be fathers and elders to the following generations of men. By fathers I do not mean necessarily biological fathers. I mean soul fathers. We will not finally be a wise, elder culture unless every man individually becomes initiated and takes up his role as father, and then elder, to the next generation.
Aaron Kipnis talks of "Twelve Tasks of Men".. His Twelfth Task reads: "Reach out to other men and continue awakening masculine soul together." Older men today are the only hope of the next two generations. For this work there will be no pay. There will be little recognition. But it is one hell of a good mission.
Elderhood is probably the greatest boon a man can give. Sharing of his wisdom and knowledge, gotten through ordeal, is ultimately the key to the meaning of life. Indigenous peoples knew this in their bones. The renewal of our society will only happen when enough men become elders and make commonplace the journey of initiation.
In the hero myths and many fairy tales, when the hero returns from initiation, he most often returns to take his rightful place as a ruler or king. Through the ordeal he has found the strength and wisdom to overcome the present ruler who has abused his office for personal gain, leaving the kingdom in chaos. The hero overcomes the dark patriarch. The new king rules with the idea of the greater good of the community, immune to temptations of the ego. He then is free to elder the next generations.
I want to close this chapter by giving you words from the shaman, Petaga, I quoted earlier:
I did not ask for my office. My work was made for me by the other world, by the Thunder Beings. I am compelled to live this way that is not of my own choosing, because they chose me. I am a poor man; see how I dress and the house I live in. My whole life is to do the bidding of the Thunder Beings and of my people and to pay heed to what the Grandfathers tell me.
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