Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

by Richard Rohr

Overview

Based on decades of work, travel, and experience, Rohr, a Franciscan brother and best-selling author, unearths the complexities of male spiritual maturation and helps us to understand the importance of male initiation rights in both culture and the church.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780824524982
Publisher:	PublishDrive
Publication date:	09/01/2017
Sold by:	PUBLISHDRIVE KFT
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Fr. Richard Rohr is a globally recognized ecumenical teacher bearing witness to the universal awakening within Christian mysticism and the Perennial Tradition. He is a Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Fr. Richard's teaching is grounded in the Franciscan alternative orthodoxy—practices of contemplation and lived kenosis (self-emptying), expressing itself in radical compassion, particularly for the socially marginalized. Fr. Richard is the author of numerous books, including Everything Belongs, Adam’s Return, The Naked Now, Breathing Under Water, Falling Upward, Immortal Diamond, and Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi. Fr. Richard is academic Dean of the Living School for Action and Contemplation. Drawing upon Christianity's place within the Perennial Tradition, the mission of the Living School is to produce compassionate and powerfully learned individuals who will work for positive change in the world based on awareness of our common union with God and all beings. Visit cac.org for more information.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

INITIATED INTO WHAT?

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Now that I have gone through my initiation, I am ready for anything anywhere.

— PAUL'S LETTER TO THE PHILIPPIANS, 4:12

We do not have to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the heropath. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. Where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. Where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

— JOSEPH CAMPBELL, HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES

How do we explain the larger-than-life people we occasionally meet in every country, in most institutions, even the smallest churches, and hidden away in our neighborhoods? There always seem to be one or two people who hold the energy of a group together, strategic individuals whom the Bible would call "chosen people," men and women who move events and history forward, sometimes almost invisibly. Where do such folks come from? I have given up thinking that such people come from any one religion, any one school of thought, any particular race or nation, any specific socioeconomic sector, or even, indeed, that they are always perfect or moral in the conventional sense. Spiritually powerful individuals seem to cross and defy all of these boundaries.

Something else seems to have happened to them, and one way to put it is that they have somehow been "initiated." Initiated into their true self, initiated into the flow of reality, initiated into the great patterns that are always true, initiated into the life of God — choose the description with which you are most comfortable. Such initiations took specific ritual forms in every age and every continent for most of human history. They were considered central to the social survival of nearly every culture — and to the spiritual survival of males in particular.

Patterns of initiation are the oldest system of spiritual instruction that we know of, predating all institutional religions. They emerged rather universally in what Karl Jaspers calls Pre-Axial Consciousness, before the Axial Age (800–200 BCE) when we began to organize thought all over the world. There is much evidence that this Axial age has run its course and is now turning in on itself. We see it in the bad effects of rationalism, individualism, and patriarchy. I believe this is at the heart of many of our cultural and religious problems today. We now need to recapitulate the wisdom of the pre-Axial Age, together with the clarity and radiance of the Axial Age. I will be taking just such a both-and approach in this book, hopefully being fair to both ages and contributions. Jaspers would call this II Axial Consciousness. I would just call it the effects of the Spirit upon human consciousness.

Some kind of baptism (read: "initiation") is needed to start the path to spiritual maturity. Fire, water, blood, failure, or holy desire may all be precipitating events, but without a fall or a major dunking into the central mystery, a person has no chance of swimming in the right ocean. It is the necessary journey from the false self to the True Self. Without such a great defeat, we will misinterpret almost all religious words and rituals from our small ego position. We will use God instead of love God. Religion does not work at all unless there has been an encounter, especially a "close encounter of the first kind." We fall into an unnamable love, and a new freedom that many call God.

In the larger-than-life people I have met, I always find one common denominator: in some sense, they have all died before they died. At some point, they were led to the edge of their private resources, and that breakdown, which surely felt like dying, led them into a larger life. That's it! They broke through in what felt like breaking down. Instead of avoiding a personal death or raging at it, they went through a death, a death of their old self, their small life, and came out the other side knowing that death could no longer hurt them.

For many Western people, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is the preeminent example of this pattern, and he is often recognized, even by many non-Christians, as the most influential person of the last two thousand years. But the pattern is archetypal and hardwired in history, literature, and poetry. Jesus is a perfect exemplar of initiation in its full cycle. But there have been many others who have let "the single grain of wheat die" (a phrase found not just in John's Gospel but in the mystery religions of Asia Minor). Abraham, Buddha, Mary, Rumi, Joan of Arc, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, and the blood of all martyrs are the very fuel and fire of history. In fact, if your life does not somehow exemplify this full cycle, you are merely helpful or interesting, but not yet a moshel meshalim, a master of wisdom.

On some real level, all truly great people have faced "the big one," and their greatness consists in knowing, as my father, Francis of Assisi, did that any "second death could do them no harm." This experiential knowledge of death's lack of final power is the essence of every true initiation experience. Such people live in a different realm beyond our usual fears, an alternative reality, different than the one we take for granted. If you somehow make that passover, then you are initiated. You cannot fake it by any mere belief system, any moral performance, the reassurance of belonging to a group, or any heroic endurance contest. Paul brilliantly lists all of these as the usual counterfeits for love (1 Corinthians 13). I would say they are the common substitutes the ego concocts when it has not really passed over from death to real life. An uninitiated ego becomes rigid about words and rituals when it lacks any real inner experience. There is a clear before and after to an initiated person, and afterward you know you are in a different psychic place; you are a different person. (In some cultures, old debts and contracts did not even apply to the newly initiated individual! You were truly honored as a new creation.)

In most of history, the journey was taught in sacred space and ritual form, which clarified, distilled, and shortened the process. It was not a lecture series. This is true traditionalism, and it is the foundation of what we later called sacraments. Life and its cycles initiate us similarly, until we hopefully get the message for ourselves. Many do not get it, I am afraid. They "rage against the dying of the light" until the end. Since rites of passage and sacred space have fallen out of favor in our consumer cultures, most people don't learn how to move past their fear of diminishment, even when it stares them down or gently invites them. They are not "prepared for the Passover" (Mark 14:16). I think that this lack of preparation for the passover, our lack of training in grief work and letting go, our failure to entrust ourselves to a bigger life, is the basis of our entire spiritual crisis. All great spirituality is about letting go. Instead we have made it be about taking in, attaining, performing, winning, and succeeding. Spirituality has become a show we perform for ourselves, which God does not need. True spirituality mirrors the paradox of life itself. It trains us in both detachment and attachment, detachment from the passing so we can attach to the substantial. But if you do not acquire good training in detachment, you may attach to all the wrong things, especially your own self-image and its desire for security. Self-interest becomes very well disguised, often passing for religion.

Primal cultures, those societies organized along tribal lines in Pre-Axial Consciousness, did not generally focus on the end of life or on last things. Fear of death, judgment, later reward, and punishment play very little part in their ways of thinking (unlike Christianity). Initiated and initiating cultures focused on getting the beginning right (thus the word initiation), and then they trusted that the end would take care of itself! First things instead of last things were their concern, and this focus makes all the difference in this world because it allows us to live in the present. It connects ordinary time to eternal time, uniting heaven and earth, rather than casting them as opposites, enemies, or one as a mere obstacle course for the other. I am afraid that moderns are utterly schizophrenic about the two worlds most of the time, except when we really love, really pray, or really stand naked in nature.

Our Christian word for this momentous first step is "incarnation" (the uniting of flesh and spirit), and it is the foundation for everything else, which then follows as logical consequence. As the early church fathers understood, "incarnation is already redemption," and you do not need any blood sacrifice to display God's commitment to humanity. Once God says yes to flesh, then flesh is no longer bad but the very "hiding and revealing" place of God. Then religion becomes much more an affirmation of life itself and love's possibility, rather than a funereal fear of death, judgment, and hell. True religion is always an occasion for joyful mysticism rather than a grim test of moral endurance.

The social and structural genius of initiating cultures is that every generation was given a chance to start anew and afresh. It was the remaking of each generation of men, as a group and as a social unit. It was a salvation of history, not just of individuals. The work of regeneration cannot be done alone because we are essentially social, interconnected beings. Therefore regeneration cannot be taught by mere words or sermons. It needs ritual experience, community support, and even the minor mysticism of firsthand experience to get the fire kindled in each group. No wonder African American Christians emerge from the baptismal river singing "O Happy Day"! No wonder a man's life did not really begin until he was initiated. Until then he was unborn, a ghost, not a man. Afterward, he was not defined by any small and perhaps dysfunctional family or violent history. He was reconnected to the whole cosmos, realigned with the big picture (Christians, read "Kingdom of God"). He was now a son — and such cultures were not afraid to say it — a son of God! This is what Jesus knew at his initiation, his beloved sonship and the pleasure or favor of his Father (Matthew 3:17).

Regeneration's ability to bring us joy is radical and needed hope for our present world, which is largely defined by remembered grievances, tribal identities, and past history. With improved historical records and easy access to them, we actually have better reasons for hating one another, for anger and violence toward one another, than ever before! Terrorism is now defining the shape of history for generations to come — precisely because our generations experience no regeneration. The Indians dislike us more than they did fifty years ago, as do many African Americans and most foreigners. The cycle of violence seems to be the shape of our future. Without the spiritual regeneration of each generation, we are paralyzed by our past, and the future is only more of the same. The current religious tone is no more than a bad novel of crime and punishment.

Though both men and women are in need of initiation today, in this book I will be focusing on the initiation needed by the males of our species. Women more commonly had fertility or puberty rites because they matured in a markedly different way. Many cultures and religions saw the male, left to himself, as being a dangerous and even destructive element in society. For whatever reasons, the male did not naturally build up the common good, but invariably sought his own security and advancement as a matter of course. In some ways, women were historically initiated by their one-down position in patriarchal societies, by the humiliations of blood (menstruation, labor, and menopause), by the ego-decentralizing role of child raising, and by their greater investment in relationships. Men have always seemed to need a whomp on the side of the head, a fall from the proverbial tower, their own blood humiliation (which became circumcision in an amazing number of cultures), in order to become positive, contributing, or wise members of the larger community.

As Ernest Becker argues so compellingly in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Denial of Death, the heroic projects of men are mostly overcompensations for a paralyzing fear of death, powerlessness, and diminishment. Until men move into death and live the creative tension of being both limited and limitless, he says, they never find their truth or their power. As he shockingly put it, we are overwhelmed that we are somehow godly and yet "gods who shit." Too often, egotism, performance, ambition, and bravado in the male proceed from a profound fear of this failure, this humanity, this death, this shit. The heroic project never works for long, and it always finally backfires into anger, depression, and various forms of scapegoating and violence. In avoiding death, a man ironically avoided life, and this central insight is what animated the various rites of passage in primal cultures, hoping to lead men into real life early in life.

Today young men try to self-initiate by pushing themselves to the edges and into risk in various ways. The instinct for initiation is still there in young men, but usually not the wisdom nor the guidance to go the full cycle and understand the message. We are finally healed by encountering "the real," which is precisely everything about reality, warts and all. To forgive ourselves of everything is the deepest kind of death for the ego. Such an initiation into death, and therefore into life, rightly saved a man. Catholics call it the paschal mystery or the passion of Christ. The word itself is a giveaway, because passion (patior) means to "allow" or "suffer reality." It is not a doing, but a being done unto. Today young men seek salvation through glib answers and heady beliefs in what Jesus did for them instead of walking the mystery themselves too. True religion is not about winning eternal life later by passing some giant SAT exam now. It is about touching upon life now, in this moment, and knowing something momentous yourself.

Classic initiation rites brilliantly succeeded in preparing men for both stages of their life: training young men for the necessary discipline and effort required in the ascent of the first half of life, and preparing them ahead of time for the necessary descent and letting go of the second half of life. Today we do neither tasks of life very well, if at all, and institutional religion just keeps performing the first task of creating boundaries, identity, and ego structures over and over again. Ancient peoples saw that if men missed their initiation, they became unworkable human beings, for themselves and for the community. Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality, a lessening ability to see, to adjust, to understand, to let go, to be human. It makes men finally incapable of the wisdom of the second half of life because they keep seeking the containment and private validation of the first half of life.

There is only one set of exceptions to this predictable narrowing and rigidification that takes place in people. Many handicapped and poor people, many people in minority positions, many who work with the dying and oppressed, most survivors of near death experiences, and true mystics in all religions are the glaring exceptions. They often grow more radiant, more flexible, and more compassionate with age. This is why the biblical tradition teaches that the "little ones" have a big head start in the ways of wisdom and spiritual initiation. If anyone tells you that you can be born again, enlightened, or saved, and going to heaven, and does not first speak to you very honestly about dying, do not believe that person. There is no renewal in all of nature without a preceding loss. Even the sun is dying every moment. You cannot be born "again" if you do not die first. The prosperity gospel is no Gospel at all. Death and life are in an eternal embrace, two sides of the same coin. We cannot have one without the other. It is the one absolutely common theme at the bottom of every single initiation rite that I have studied. Any initiation that does not experientially teach this paschal mystery is not an initiation at all.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Adam's Return"
by .
Copyright © 2004 Richard Rohr.
Excerpted by permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

A Word from Richard,
One Initiated into What?,
Two Why We Need Initiation in Modern Cultures,
Three The Two Births,
Four The Big Patterns That Are Always True,
Five Life Is Hard,
Six You Are Not Important,
Seven Your Life Is Not about You,
Eight You Are Not in Control,
Nine You Are Going to Die,
Ten What Is the Shape of the Male Soul?,
Eleven The Four Initiations,
Twelve All Transformation Takes Place in Liminal Space,
Thirteen So How Do We Do It?,
Fourteen Jesus's Five Messages/The Common Wonderful,
Appendix A Sample Rite,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,
Index,