“Yes and No, Masculine and Feminine”
In December of 1957, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. His sermon was based on the fifth chapter of Matthew where Jesus tells his followers that they must love their enemies. Dr. King instructed his congregation that they must focus on converting their enemies to friends rather than trying to conquer them. In his message, King suggested that there are some ways to love those on "the other side." First he said, is to develop the capacity to forgive. This doesn’t mean that we ignore the wrong that's been committed but rather it means that we will no longer let the wrong to be a barrier to relationship with that person. King said, "Forgiveness is a catalyst creating the atmosphere necessary for a fresh start and new beginning." King then noted that it's important to recognize that the wrong that we've suffered doesn't entirely represent the other person's identity. Our opponent, like each of us, possesses both bad and good qualities. We must choose to find the good and focus on it. Third, King noted, we must not seek to humiliate our opponent, but to win their friendship and understanding. He noted that such an attitude flows, not just from ourselves, but that it comes from the universal love that surrounds us and works through us. I’m inspired by King's speech because I witnessed the violence and hatred of the bigoted South. I think I’ve mentioned before participating in a march in Cairo, Illinois, where the town was run by the Ku Klux Klan, and the black housing projects and churches were so riddled with bullet holes that there was hardly a clear square foot. What’s impressive about King is that he gave his speech out of an intimate experience of being on the receiving end of hatred and violence. Just a year before this speech King's home in Montgomery had been bombed and his wife, Coretta, and their baby only escaped injury because they were in the rear of the house. What’s also impressive is that King was able to hold this ethic of compassion firmly while standing strongly in the face of oppression and injustice. One of the reasons I mention King is that today is Father's Day and it's a good time to focus on masculine spirituality. In my opinion Martin Luther King is, along with Desmond Tutu of South Africa and Mahatma Gandhi of India, an excellent example of the spirituality of which I speak. But lest you think masculine spirituality only has to do with men, I would also point to Mother Theresa as a woman who exhibited a strong dose of the masculine spirit. Now remember that masculine spirituality is just the flip side of feminine spirituality and that it takes both for any of us to be fully human. This actually has little to do with gender. Visualize the yin and yang symbol—the black and white symbol of black merging into white and vice versa. The masculine is the active principle and the feminine is the receptive principle. In practice we all have both types (active/receptive), it's just that “generally” men embody the active and women the receptive, although as awareness of this spreads we find more people with more of a balance. What we're talking about is what is expressed in Genesis when it The fact is that we need the balance of the feminine and the masculine, the active and receptive. A man without his feminine soul will dwell in the outer world with his head as his control tower. He will fix, manipulate, legislate, order and explain, and seek to dominate the world. The woman without her masculine side will go the other way. She will become submissive with only her heart to guide her into naive sentimentality. She will wheedle, and whine and be passive-aggressive as her mode of living. Neither of these is healthy. Our histories give us plenty of experience with both types. Our patriarchal history is replete with the overbalanced masculine principle that wants to conquer and control. This is the mindset that has our world on the brink of extinction as we loose contact with the natural order of which God has made us a part. The overbalanced masculine is a human in exile for they can never know the inside of things where the juiciness of life resides. The overbalanced feminine is likewise a human in exile because they are isolated from effectiveness in the world where creative expression forms meaning and purpose. What this means is that at some level we're all in need of conversion. We're in the need of conversion that Martin Luther King talked about, except the enemy that we're converting is an internal enemy. Men must be converted to the feminine and women must be converted to the masculine. We must be opened to that which often seems as "other," the alien, the not-me. If we're converted to this “non-self” then everything changes. Being converted, we can then see through the eyes of the other half. We see the enemy not as enemy but as spiritual help-mate. There's then nothing left to defend or protect once we have met and accepted our inner opposite. As Richard Rohr notes, "A masculine spirituality would emphasize action over theory, service to the human community over religious discussions, speaking truth over social graces, and doing justice over looking nice. Without a complementary masculine, spirituality becomes overly feminine (which is really false feminine) and characterized by too much inwardness, preoccupation with relationship, a morass of unclarified feeling and endless self-protectiveness." The modern church is caught on the horns of the false masculine and the false feminine. It's trapped in the endless discussions of theology, theory and doctrinal correctness on the one hand, and a continual navel gazing on the other that leads nowhere. The false masculine is the trap of those who are afraid of effective action because it would mean embracing their humility, frailty, and compassion for life. The false feminine is the trap of those with lots of leisure, luxury, and liberal ideas. They have the option not to do. Their very liberalism becomes an inoculation against the radical wholeness that Jesus demonstrates as the spirit's creative, justice loving, life giving, truth-telling movement in life. Our world is at a point where there is a dire need for a strong masculine spirituality balanced and guided by the feminine. When Jesus cleared the temple of the money changers it was this kind of wholeness that was in dynamic action. When Mother Theresa picked up the lepers of Calcutta and nursed them it was the active principle of spirit in action. When Gandhi and King stood compassionately in the face of injustice it was the compassionate active principle of spirit manifesting itself. These who were nurtured in the interiority of meditation and prayer were taking decisive action in response to their compassion for the poor and needy around him. Last week I spoke of the light within all of us that, as John O'Donohue notes, "draws no attention to itself, though it is always there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility, and our hearts to love life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as blessings." Another aspect of this same light and breath of spirit is that which recognizes our interconnectedness with the whole of creation. It is this piece also that empowers us to look with clarity at our world and recognize the greed and rapacity of transnational corporations, the destructiveness of malaria and AIDS, the destruction caused by hunger and homelessness and poverty. It is this same light that viscerally feels the injury done to the planet [to God's creation] by events like those in the Gulf of Mexico, by toxic waste dumps, by genocidal ethnic cleansing, by drug cartels fueled by our insatiable cravings, and by gangster governments and corporations spread around the globe who could give a rat's patootie about either their own people or the environment. As we observe Father’s Day, let us celebrate the active principle of spirit that moves decisively into the world to say “no” to the forces of greed, corruption, and selfishness; and a strong “yes” to the healing power of compassion, unity, and understanding. Peace and blessings |