As a
celibate male religious I can make little sense of my state, unless I find some
way to awaken and love my own inner feminine soul. Without it, I am
merely a self-centered bachelor, a would-be creator, a dried-up root. A
man without his feminine soul is easily described. His personality will
move toward the outer superficial world and his head will be his control
tower. He will build, explain, use, fix, manipulate, legislate, order and
play with whatever he bothers to touch, but will not really touch it at
all. For he does not know the inside of things.
In
fact, he is afraid of it and that is why the control tower of reason and
pseudo-control works overtime. It is the only way he can give himself a
sense of security and significance. He is trapped in part of the
picture, which is dangerous precisely because he thinks it is the whole
picture. He is trapped inside the false masculine. Corporately,
this has become the myth of Western civilization. It is largely written
by men who have controlled the power, the money, the corporations, the church,
the military, the morality books. What we call reality and are almost
totally addicted to is largely a construct of men who have frankly never worked
on their inner lives. They have not gone inside, they have not learned
trust, vulnerability, prayer or poetry. They, and the civilization we
have inherited from them, are in great part unwhole or even sick.
Until
males and cooperating females recognize this unwholeness, this
anti-Christianity posing as reality, we have no hope of loving the full
Christ. We will in fact be threatened by his wholeness and replace (as we
generally have) a daring religious faith with little schemes for
salvation. Basically, this is a transfer of the business world of win /
achieve / prove / success / control to the realm of the Spirit. And it
just doesn’t work. God knows, we have tried for enough centuries!
There must be a better way. And there is. It’s called conversion.
Conversion to
what? Conversion to what we might call the no-me.
Richard Rohr
