Masculine spirituality

[PhuturePriest]

St. Therese has been very dear to my heart lately, so.... Agent Cooper Thumb Up for you. Her prose is an acquired taste, but over time, I've discovered there's a great deal of honesty, wisdom and humanity in her that often gets overlooked. At the moment, I struggle with the style of St. Louis de Montfort. That said, I'll give it some time.

Spirituality is as diverse as there are saints and people, to the point where I struggle to even attach labels like "masculine" or "feminine" to it, myself. And fortunately, everyone has a lot to choose from.

May I ask what it is about Saint Louis that you struggle with? I can venture a guess, but I'm always curious about this type of thing.

[Era Might]

I take them to be socially constructed boxes that men and women are crammed into and that make very uncomfortable living spaces. I don't think there is any such thing as 'masculine spirituality' or 'feminine spirituality' - there is the soul and God. Neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, but all one in Christ Jesus. I'm not saying that men and women don't have different experiences (having the capacity to carry and nurture life within you does affect who you are, even if you never give birth), just that it is facile and harmful to treat these basic differences as evidence that one sex is innately more romantic than the other, or that the other has a hardwired preference for CocoPops over Rice Krispies. It requires a huge suspension of logic.

I honestly don't know how to live in a world where "there is the soul and God." I'm not saying that by way of argument, just that I don't see any other way for human beings to be human except through gendered roles, which are not perfect, but are vital to the space in which we live. But I think you're reference to St. Paul is worthwhile, because there is a tension within Christianity about gender and sex and general...it's emphasis on celibacy and flight from the world make a lot of human culture difficult to assimilate (at least theoretically, historically the church has just assimilated itself). This topic is too large for this thread, but I agree with what Lilllabettt was getting at about gender and capitalism. But my experience of gender has been largely shaped through Latin/Central American culture, which is gendered in a traditional way that American life is not, so I am not really able to speak on the experience in American relationships. I have a Central American friend who is not "machismo" but he can't accept the American idea of 50/50 partnership between man and woman. For him it's always 60/40, and that's pretty much an accepted gendered relationship in that culture. I mention him because to come to approach that culture with an ungendered spirituality would fall on deaf ears...both men and women have certain expectations, primarily that of pursuer/submitter and worker/lover. He's a man, and I know men pretty well because I am one and have been around many. The sort of generic monastic spirituality to which I can easily accommodate (because I approach the world intellectually) does not work in the real gendered world. Anyway, I'm not arguing, just offering a real-world perspective, of course limited by the slice of the real world that I inhabit.

Edited August 14, 2015 by Era Might

[Ash Wednesday]

May I ask what it is about Saint Louis that you struggle with? I can venture a guess, but I'm always curious about this type of thing.

It's not the Saint himself, and certainly not his spirituality, more just the writing. The mistake I make is trying to read older writings like I would a modern book. Another writing in particular I'd like to tackle and digest right now is Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence. 

[Lilllabettt]

 

 

OK, well pink, and high heels, and hair dos and make-up -- these things are not what it means to "be a woman." Those things are not the essence of femininity.  It's actually kind of offensive when people attempt to reduce gender to such things - to what one wears or what toys one plays with. These expressions of gender are acceptable in capitalist society because, as you say, there is money to be made. But true gender identity has very little to do with how a person relates to things. It has much more to do with relating to people. 

I think we can get lost in word choice here. Daydreaming, romance, whatever we are going to call it. You know, being a romantic does not prevent one from being eminently practical as well.  You might emphasize the practicality in Mary's curiosity; I think what is remarkable is her unblinking acceptance that through some magical process she is going to be a virgin mother. A virgin mother. You can't make this stuff up. But Mary didn't give it a second thought. Her question boils down to, more or less: "I'm going to be a virgin and a mother? wow! What spell are you going to use?" 

There are mountains and mountains of cross-cultural research  going back decades showing that women are more religious than men. More likely to claim a religion, more likely to practice, more likely to pray, etc.  Now some religions are more female-dominated than others, but the fact regardless is that women are far more likely to be religious relative to men in the same culture.  

Why is that? Because women wear make up and pink?

Women are themselves mysteries in a way men simply are not. Especially in the area of sexuality, so closely linked to gender. Women do not ask themselves: did he have an orgasm? Is the baby mine?  For women this mystery is a reservoir of power; for men it is a rebuke, a humbling. The woman knows, the man cannot know unless she deigns to reveal it.  Women are far more comfortable with mystery, with the unknown, with magic, and the impossible. Men are much less likely to be comfortable with, far more likely to reject, assertions about reality that are unexplained.  

Also in the mountains of research: Men use reason and logic to wade through dilemmas, discern the truth, etc. Women use empirical evidence (their experience). Because women's experiences are a mystery to men. Men's experiences are not so much a mystery to women. 

This has nothing to do with shaving legs or plucking eyebrows.

 

 

[Gabriela]

I think a lot of it depends on how you interpret his personality/writing style too. Unlike St Thomas of Aquinas, who literally never refers to himself except to say I object that... Thomas Merton is very personal, relational, "spiritual but not technical" in a sense. (I'd say he's a more feminine writer that way!) So a lot of it is about interpretation of his person, what influences his inner world, what his inner state is. He's constantly spiritually seeking and changing, not settling or growing deeper in one obvious direction. Like Gabriela said he doesn't outright contradict the Church... but I read some of his later ideas as being dangerous. He found Christ and pretty much seems to have stuck with Him, but it's not really how traditional/usual Catholicism rolls. So if you're mature I'd say Thomas Merton is fine. 

Just my two cents though. He's certainly a complex man so no summary of him will ever really be complete. 

You make a very good point: His writing style does expose his inner world much, much more than many other writers who have been declared saints. Writing in that way certainly makes one a great deal more vulnerable to criticism. I wonder: If the other saints had revealed their inner worlds as openly as Merton, would we have canonized them, or would the devil's advocate have had too much against them?

My struggles in this world have been primarily interior, and so I appreciate Merton's writing—even his later writings—a great deal. I find in him an honesty, both personal and intellectual, that I have not found in any other Catholic writer. He's not afraid to expose his whole humanity, and that takes serious guts, because it opens one to so much criticism. But it also is the only way for a person to really allow others to understand and relate to him deeply. And that is why I give thanks to God that Thomas Merton, at least, was willing to "sacrifice himself", in a sense, so that others with serious internal struggles could see that they are not alone.

[bardegaulois]

Thanks to all who replied. There's a lot of grist to chew on here, to which I likely won't be able to respond individually as I was away most of the time this thread was up. Informing this whole idea is that I am planning on living much more of a "Benedict-Option" lifestyle soon, taking on duties for the community around me that others cannot do. It's not typically "churchy" by any stretch of the imagination, but taking on all of this vital work, combined with a horarium of the Divine Office, study, and spiritual reading, seems not like a burden but rather a duty, and duty comes first. Forgive me, but even though I know of a very rich tradition of very emotional spirituality, I can't help but see it as somewhat effete and self-indulgent, at least for a man of my station. And if it be laborious, as it shall be at times, then it is to be penance for my past transgressions and those of others around me.

In short, it's an obedient response to a definite call that manifests through necessity. Obedience would certainly have been a problem for me in the past due to the imprinting on me of having been at the short end of many misuses of authority in my younger days, but it takes a lot of time for people really to get over themselves in this culture of perpetual adolescence. Most never realize that they have to at some point, and that's likely at the root of a good many of the myriad social illnesses we face today. Thus, I have the necessities here and now in front of me that simply must be dealt with, even if my first choice would be to be doing other things, like saying or serving the Latin Mass daily or teaching theology. They are simply impossible for various reasons, and now I have to do what I've been given. Odd, though, there might be greater sanctity and virtue to be gained from what's in front of me, rather than my preferences, and that's really what matters in the end.