#92. Evolution & Holy Communion

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You are probably thinking the words "Evolution" and "Holy Communion" don't go together. I think they do, of course. In fact, I think that they go together better than any other two words I know. But I admit it's not obvious. So once again I ask for your patience. Thanks!

We know that the religions of the Western world-- Judaism and its two offshoots, Christianity and Islam-- greatly value human persons. The gospels specifically stress that offering the smallest bit of help to any human being is equivalent to directly serving the ultimate cause of the universe.

But what about Western science? As I see it, with its understanding of the place of the human community in the evolution of life on Earth, Western science greatly enhances Western religion's respect for persons.

But because of our culture's emphasis on "soul" as the essence of a human person, Western religion at times degenerated into a disdain for the human body. Following Greek philosophy, the people of the Western world envisioned the soul as something separate from the body-- and along with that disdain for the body came a disdain for the world of nature as well.

In the process-- and this is the first of the two main thoughts I want to share in this post-- the Christian tradition unfortunately lost a major perspective on its own central rite of thanksgiving.

It was unfortunate because the basic Judeo-Christian response to reality isn't disdain for the world but thanksgiving for it and for our lives in it.

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The second main thought I want to share is that the evolutionary worldview of the New Cosmology is helping us to recover that profound attitude of thanksgiving which is at the heart of our Western world's religious traditions.

A point easy to miss is that the Judeo-Christian rite of blessing God is not a thanksgiving for a static world-- as the creation was seen to be in the patriarchal perspective. The ritual blessing at the heart of Western religion is a giving thanks for the created world understood as an on-going dynamic process-- exactly the way modern science sees it.

And a key aspect of this dynamic perspective is that we humans now know ourselves to be expressions of the world evolved to the complex level of personal consciousness. We now recognize that we are one with all things and conscious participants in the cosmic process.

So the central Judeo-Christian rite of thanksgiving is not just a blessing of God for the world; it's also a giving thanks for our participation in the creative processes of the dynamic world.

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I think it's especially important to note that this recovery of humanity's awareness of its communion with the physical universe-- "its recognition of the divine presence dwelling and working in all persons and things," as a reader says in a comment on post #90-- parallels Western culture's present movement away from the patriarchal perspectives of past centuries.

It's clear enough that thanksgiving for our existence in the world and respect for human persons are not characteristics of patriarchal manhood. Indeed, we know that it is precisely the attitudes of patriarchy which are responsible for a great deal of contemporary damage to the environment and for the on-going exploitation of the Earth's people.

In contrast to the dualistic and destructive perspectives of static patriarchy, Hebrew thought, as it is expressed especially in the Wisdom tradition of the Bible, is dynamic and creative.

And the very idea of evolution-- the central idea of contemporary science-- comes originally from the experience of the early Hebrews in their Great Escape from Egypt. I described its annual celebration at the Passover seder in the previous post (#91).

In the evolutionary context of modern science we can see that the New Testament is in total continuity with that powerful biblical vision of an ongoing transfigured cosmos. We know that Jesus and his earliest followers were part of the Wisdom tradition and so were no less characterized by the dynamic view of creation still in process.

With their expectation of what Jesus called "the coming of the Kingdom," the early Christians met weekly in anticipation of the Reign of God and in thanksgiving for their participation in that ongoing renewal of creation.

My point here is that those weekly gatherings in memory of Jesus have remained a constant in the Christian tradition for two thousand years, although their evolutionary perspective was lost along the way.

And as strange as it may seem to some, modern science is helping us recover that dynamic religious worldview. As I see it, this recovery is a major aspect of the contemporary convergence of science and religion.

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One of the reasons why talk about the "convergence" of science and religion still sounds odd is that, especially in American society, religion is usually identified with behavior: how we act-- or how others think we should act. For many, "religion" means either private morality at the individual level or political and social ethics at the academic level.

But religion isn't about behavior, it's about experience.

Specifically, religion is about that kind of experience of the numinous in the natural world which Thomas Berry describes as "coming from so deep within us that it seems to come from outside us." As I noted in post #90, Berry emphasizes that this was the experience of our earliest human ancestors and that the capacity for it is still in our genes today.

We know that in all the world's spiritual traditions, the emphasis is first of all on experience, not morality. Ethical behavior, both personal and communal, follows, rather than precedes, religious experience. 

Matthew Fox expresses this understanding nicely in a recent interview. Religious experience, he says, "finds its full expression in service and work of justice-making and compassion."

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So why do the patriarchal religions of the West put so much emphasis on private behavior?

By definition, patriarchy wants-- and indeed, needs-- to be in control. 

And what easier way to control people than by making them feel guilty about their behavior? Especially by telling them that the purpose of their lives is to escape from body and world.

In contrast to patriarchal dualism, the dynamic religious perspective understands the purpose of our lives to be our conscious participation in the world's evolutionary development. And-- from astronomy and biology to neuro-science, depth psychology and cultural anthropology-- all the branches of contemporary science support that perspective.

Another way to say it is that religion, in the dynamic-evolutionary perspective, is first of all a response to the mystery of our own existence. I've quoted the words of Karl Rahner many times in this blog. He says that "the great question of our time is not whether God exists, but whether we willing to be sensitive and responsive to the mystery which is always and everywhere making itself known to us."

"Sensitive and responsive," says Rahner. Two things!

Modern science helps us to be sensitive. Thanks to the evolutionary perspective, we are more aware today than ever before of the dynamic cosmos from which we have emerged and with which we are so much a part that we recognize that "all things are our relations."

And religion helps us to be responsive. Our appreciation of the world and gratefulness for our existence in it is the very heart of the Judeo-Christian response to reality.

So, as strange as the name of this post may at first seem, I think "Evolution and Holy Communion" is exactly right for the thoughts I'm attempting to share here.

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When we think about it, making sense of the Christian Eucharist in an evolutionary worldview should be easy. In post #90 I described Thomas Berry's understanding of the cosmic task of humanity-- to "return the world to itself and to its numinous origins"-- and Alexander 

Schmemann's expression of that same idea-- that "our primary role in the cosmos is to be priest."

But the perspectives of the static-dualistic religious context get in the way of the deeper realities expressed by the ancient words like "communion" and "eucharist."

In that static worldview, the word "communion" referred not to an action but to an object. The Eucharist was the blessed bread which was "received" from the hands of others during a service but which otherwise was kept locked in a special container or sometimes displayed for adoration.

In contrast to that view of communion as something which was given to those who received it, in the evolutionary worldview-- which was that of the early Christians-- the Eucharist isn't a thing but an action. It is a communal activity, an action shared in common by the gathered community.

And as an action done by the whole community together, the Eucharist is a communal affirmation-- a saying "yes" to ourselves and to all things as expressions of the Mystery of God. It is especially a recognition of ourselves as empowered by the energy of the dynamic holy Spiritus to carry out our public work ("liturgia" in Greek) of co-creative participation in the cosmic process.

And it's here-- in our common task-- that morality and ethics come in. 

Although still understood conventionally in terms of patriarchal prohibitions ("don't do this, don't do that"), morality in fact is nothing less than our creative participation in the cosmic process at the human level. Compassion and justice-making, as Matthew Fox says, are the kinds of behavior that follow from the fact that we are in communion with all things.

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In past ages, this basic understanding of the Christian Eucharist as a cosmic thanksgiving and as a rite of communal empowerment for participation in global humanity's cultural development became "eclipsed," as some religious thinkers politely put it. It was lost.

But it's being recovered. And the story of its recovery is a fascinating part of Western culture's history. Historically, the recovery of the dynamic understanding of Eucharist first emerged in a few monasteries in Europe sometime in the late 1800s.

What's especially fascinating is that this was just around the same time that Darwin's Origin of Species was becoming known to the general public.

While today everyone knows the name of Charles Darwin, almost no one-- yet!-- recognizes the names of religious researchers such as Odo Casel among Catholics, Gregory Dix among Anglicans and Nicholas Afanassiev among Eastern Orthodox. All of these thinkers were early contributors to the recovery of the dynamic understanding of the Eucharist.

It's only because of my personal life-long interest in both science and religion-- and specifically, in cosmic evolution and religious ritual-- that I'm aware of those late 19th- and early 20th- century religious thinkers.

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But I don't think it's just a coincidence that this recovery of the dynamic understanding of the Eucharist began around the same time that humanity was becoming more conscious of the evolutionary worldview of modern science.

From a long-range point of view, we can see that the same dynamic energy of the evolutionary process operating at the cosmic and biological levels is also empowering the process at the level of humanity's cultural development.

And while Western religion saw the dynamic process first, and called it "passover" and "transfiguration" and "new creation"-- and understood it to be empowered by the holy spiritus-- in our day Western science converges with this in-depth religious understanding of our place in the cosmos.

This convergence doesn't seem at all to be a coincidence. It seems to me to be a perfectly clear example of the Evolutionary Spiritus at work in human self-awareness as part of the evolutionary process taking place on our planet at the level of human culture.

And to put these thoughts in a very big picture, I don't doubt that a similar process is taking place on other planets in the cosmos where personal awareness has emerged. We can expect that the same kind of cultural development is being called forth elsewhere by that same dynamic Energy (urge, impetus, drive, holy spiritus) which has been behind the unfolding of the universe for the last 14 billion years.

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One final thought. Nothing of the more conventional understanding of the Eucharist is negated by seeing those teachings in the broader perspectives we have today as a result of both scientific and theological research.

There are no contradictions. Indeed, there is much enrichment!

Just as what's meant in the evolutionary context by "Holy Spirit" is precisely the divine life-force, the energy empowering the cosmic process, so it's equally clear that what's meant by "Holy Communion" in the evolutionary context is our union with all things in the created world and with the ultimate mystery of which we and they together are the epiphany.

Our contemporary context of cosmic-biological-cultural evolution was unavailable to the early followers of Jesus. We can see more easily today that the main point of the weekly gathering (ekklesia) by those early Christians is conscious awareness of and thanksgiving (eucharist) for humanity's place and role in the world.

The view of the world as cosmic process-- the evolution of material complexity and the emergence of personal awareness-- is the essence of the scientific view of reality. And communal thanksgiving for that dynamic reality as it is now revealed to us by science is the essence of the Judeo-Christian response to it.

So, as I see it, Western science and Western religion converge not just 
in greatly valuing human persons but in their awareness as well of humanity's communion with all things.

And what else can that be called other than a holy communion?

sam@macspeno.com

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P.S. Our communion "with the divine presence dwelling and working in all persons and things of the physical universe" has nothing about it of the sentimentality associated, for example, with having children dressed up in white clothing for their first holy communion.

On the morning after the announcement of the death of Osama Bin Laden, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director of the prophetic Shalom Center in Philadelphia, whom I've mentioned in several previous posts (#47 and #51), sent a note which helps us to see just how challenging it is to understand Holy Communion in its own native-- evolutionary-- context.

Rabbi Arthur begins: "How do we address the death of a mass murderer?"

He observes that in the commentaries on the story of the Passover and its celebration at the Seder, the rabbinical tradition says that God did not rebuke Moses and the children of Israel for singing and dancing when Pharaoh and his soldiers were drowned in the sea. But when the angels began to dance and sing as well, God rebuked them: "These also are the work of My hands. We must not rejoice at their deaths!"

He also notes that at the Passover Seder "we spill wine from our cups as we mention each plague, lest we drink that wine to celebrate these disasters that befell our oppressors."

"The legend," says Rabbi Arthur, "is not addressed to angels but to our higher selves."

We see just how challenging is the Judeo-Christian understanding of thanksgiving and of our communion with all things when we understand that our higher selves-- our deeper, truer, more inclusive selves-- may not rejoice in the death of any creature.

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#89. Recovery of Sacred Manhood

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Probably no one reading this post would disagree with the observation that, among the various animal species in the world, male mammals-- including male humans-- have rather odd male parts.

And probably no one would disagree that, while the half of the human race which has those odd parts regularly report they are sometimes not much under control, they are, at the same time, greatly valued and treasured.

But would you also agree that every human born into the world with those funny parts can assume that they entitle him to certain privileges not open to persons lacking them?

Probably not.

And yet, that is the basic assumption of patriarchal culture. Although it's rarely spoken aloud, it accounts for the exploitation of all persons lacking wealth or power-- especially for the oppression of women-- and for great damage to the Earth's environment.

Clearly, patriarchy is a pathological distortion of human manhood. And yet no one possessing those odd parts will give up the cultural privileges associated with them-- unless he is aware of a better alternative.

The main point of my previous post was that there is a better alternative. The main point of this post is that its recovery is an essential aspect of the immense transition happening in our time. In the long run, the New Cosmology depends on the recovery of sacred manhood.

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From the big picture Big History gives us we know that throughout humanity's long Hunting Culture period, sacred manhood was the norm for all human males and that it was lost only with the discovery of agriculture. Historically, patriarchal manhood can be understood as a misguided replacement for that loss: a backlash, characterized by disdain for matter, hatred of the body, and fear of the feminine that are the essence of Western culture's religious dualism.

Psychologically, patriarchy can be understood as the pathological absence of two of the four functions of human consciousness as it has emerged on our planet via natural selection. The two modes of human consciousness missing from patriarchal manhood are an awareness of our connectedness with all things and a sense of purpose for our existence.

Long time readers know that I've made use of the four-fold perspectives on the human mind in many previous posts, and that I find Jungian terminology and Native American imagery especially helpful. 

On the Medicine Wheel, relatedness is imaged by the warm and loving Green Mouse of the south; meaningfulness is imaged by the healing Black Bear of the west. In Jungian language, those are our conscious mind's Feeling and Intuition functions.

Just as Thomas Berry notes that our sense of the numinous is in our genes and that our earliest ancestors couldn't survive without some sense of alliance with the Ultimate, it's also true that we can't survive well today-- we can't thrive, psychologically-- without a sense of meaningfulness and the experience of relatedness which are essential aspects of sacred manhood.

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The thought that life has meaning is, of course, one the most frequently mocked ideas in our secular culture. It's very much like what the ancient Tao Te Ching says about awareness of the Great Mystery. 

Here's verse 41, in the version I shared in several earlier posts:

When balanced persons learn about the Mystery they immediately begin to live in accordance with the way it works. When individuals who are not yet in balance hear of it, they don't know whether to take it seriously or not. When foolish persons learn about it, they laugh. (It wouldn't be the Great Mystery, if they didn't!)

While it may be that persons hearing about sacred manhood for the first time "don't know whether to take it seriously or not," many people will never hear about sacred manhood. I'm thinking of politicians and business leaders, especially. But for those, male or female, stuck in the static world view of patriarchal manhood, it's likely that if they do happen to hear about sacred manhood, they'll probably laugh at it. "It wouldn't be sacred manhood if they didn't."

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I have two main thoughts I want to share in this post about the recovery of sacred manhood. One is that moving beyond patriarchy is not simply a matter of ensuring equal rights for women. It's something much broader: recovering the significance of those odd male parts for taking care of the Earth itself and benefiting all humanity.

The second main thought I'd like to share is that because religious dualism is a major aspect of patriarchal pathology, the recovery of sacred manhood means moving beyond the pathological attitudes of patriarchal manhood toward women, towards our bodies, and towards the very matter of the physical universe. It's a movement away from all the dualistic aspects of Western religion.

Patriarchal religion's dualistic rejection of matter, the body and the feminine has resulted in the loss of meaning and purpose in modern Western culture; the recovery of a sense of meaning and purpose to our existence-- the recovery of a healthy cosmology-- requires the rejection of Western religion's rejection of the physical world.

The recovery of sacred manhood means the renewal of our sense that we do have a place in the vast scheme of things, that we do have a task to do. But it obviously won't be easy.

In Paleolithic times, those odd male parts were recognized as the physical and psychological means of empowerment for the sacred task of hunting. As I said in the previous post, although it's difficult today to appreciate that hunting was a spiritual activity for our Paleolithic ancestors, the ability to obtain food for the human community was in fact the very meaning and significance of being male.

Our cosmic task today is no longer hunting, of course. But it is something similar. It's "hunting" in the broader sense-- of exploration, of searching and seeking to understand, and doing so for all humanity-- "on behalf of all and for all."

Probably the best term to use today in place of hunting might be creative activity. In the evolutionary context of the new scientific cosmology, we can more easily see that creativity is the means by which we participate in the evolution of the universe.

We can also see that patriarchal politics and religious dualism are the opposites of the New Cosmology. They come from a pathological understanding of manhood-- that the mind is better than the body, that spirit is better than matter, and that men are superior to women.

For an especially fine expression of the limitations of patriarchal attitudes see the recent (March 8, 2011) op-ed column by David Brooks in the New York Times: "The New Humanism."

We can only move beyond the negative, pathological views of patriarchy by recovering a healthy understanding of human maleness. And since no male is going to give up the privileges accorded him because of his odd parts-- unless he has a better alternative available-- the healing of patriarchy requires the recovery of sacred manhood.

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We know that the patriarchal understanding of maleness is thousands of years old, so the recovery of sacred manhood isn't going to happen overnight. But the transition is in fact well underway. The current uprisings against tyrants and dictators in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as against politicians seeking to take away union bargaining rights in the American Midwest, are good examples. So are the increasing protests everywhere against church authorities for their cover up of clerical sex abuse.

Longer-term examples include the great increase in social concern for environmental issues which began in the late 20th-century, and the emergence of feminism much earlier in the 20th century. Probably the strongest example is the growing awareness of evolution itself. More and more people today are aware that the word "evolution" refers not just to a biological fact but to a cosmic condition that holds true for everything in the universe, from the development of stars and galaxies to the growth of a baby born into the world today.

I held off publishing this post until I could include here an announcement of the emergence into the human world of Anne's and my granddaughter Madeleine Mackintosh. She was born 1:15 am today, 19 March, 2011. Happy Birth Day, Madeleine! May all the men in your life be outstanding examples of sacred manhood.

While the lack of a sense of meaningfulness in the patriarchal perspective and the patriarchal suppression of individuality works against the recovery of a sense of meaningfulness, every positive change in attitude on the part of every person in our time makes a significant difference. That's the way evolution works at the human level.

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This means that for the recovery of sacred manhood, those who have those odd parts are called to "own" their meaning as images of the significance of our existence. And that those who don't are called to help those who do-- to help husbands, fathers, sons, nephews, cousins and male friends to take ownership of the meaning of their manhood.

In a sense, it sounds easy. But there is also a great resistance to sacred manhood because the patriarchal understanding has been the unspoken assumption of Western culture for so many thousands of years.

We know that we don't experience our present culture as life-giving. 

From politics and religion to business, industry and the military, patriarchal males still dominate the culture to a very great extent. And it's not about money, as Paul Krugman makes clear in a recent New York Times essay. It's about power and control.

If we are to move beyond the patriarchal disdain for matter, hatred of the body and fear of the feminine, we need to recognize that each individual male-- not just the CEOs of Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Business but every man alive today-- is being called by the cosmic process to help in the recovery of a sense of meaning and purpose of our existence.

All of us with the funny parts are needed-- not despite them, but because of them. Natural selection built human manhood this way precisely so that men can give of themselves "for the life of the people." Redemptive sacrifice, as I noted in the previous post, is a primary characteristic of the cosmic emergence process. At every level, action "on behalf of all and for all" is how evolution works.

Only with the recognition of this sacred significance of manhood-- seeing our place in the grand scheme of things, knowing that we have a cosmic job to do, recognizing the great work, as Thomas Berry calls it, of our role in the evolution of the universe-- can we end Western culture's pathological condition called "patriarchy."

And only with this change in attitude-- thinking in terms of the very opposite of patriarchal religion's dualistic disdain for matter, body and feminine-- can we move beyond the long-held presumption of a split between body and soul, mind and matter, matter and spirit.

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That separation-- Thomas Berry calls it being "doubly estranged"-- has been taken for granted for so long in Western culture that the very idea of questioning it is difficult for us to imagine. And imagining is, I think, probably our greatest challenge of all. Like our sense of connectedness and meaning, imagination itself is devalued in patriarchal culture and often dismissed with words like "You're just imagining it" or "It's only your imagination."

But images let us see what logic and abstract reasoning can not show us. And we are learning-- even in quantum physics, as I described in my posts about the Two Mavericks-- to accept imagination as a valid and irreplaceable tool for understanding human experience.

Our Paleolithic ancestor's experience of sacred manhood is still found to some extent in surviving indigenous cultures, and the rites and ceremonies of native peoples-- especially the Hunting Culture's orientation to animal spirits as they are experienced in the sweat lodge ritual and the vision quest-- are strong examples of the transformative power of images.

But the responsibility falls to all of us on the growing edge-- male and female, fathers and mothers-- who recognize the cosmic process and are aware that we have a role in it.

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One more thought. This kind of educational effort is the contemporary expression of what in previous times used to be called "religious education."

We need to help our kids be able to say (if only to themselves) words that the patriarchal masculine simply can not imagine itself ever saying. 

I have in mind the Native American prayers I've often quoted in these posts such as "Great Mystery, we see you all around" and "All things are my relations."

We also need to help our kids recognize that whatever good action they might be doing, whatever good things they may be accomplishing, whatever creative activities they are engaged in, they are doing "on behalf of all and for all."

Such words just make no sense at all to the patriarchal mind, but they are the essence of sacred manhood.

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If you feel you need some specific help with all this, it's good to know that pioneers on the growing edge have plowed the ground for the rest of us. The earliest of these unconventional men was not a psychiatrist, religious leader or business man, but a poet, the famous American poet Robert Bly.

Bly's thoughts first appeared in "What Do Men Really Want? A New Age Interview With Robert Bly" by Keith Thompson, in New Age Journal, May, 1982. His book, Iron John: A Book About Men, was first published in 1990 (Addison-Wesley) and has appeared in numerous editions since.

But in the last 20-30 years many other creative individuals have written about the recovery of sacred manhood. The following list contains books I think have been among the most helpful in the last several decades. 

Each has an especially down-to-earth and grounded perspective.

Sacred Manhood, Sacred Earth, by Joseph Jastrab (Harper Collins, 1994)

Beyond the Hero, by Allan Chinen (J. P. Tarcher, 1993)

Wildmen, Warriors and Kings, by Patrick Arnold, (Crossroad, 1991)

Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine, by Eugene A. Monick (Inner City Books, 1987)

Border Crossings, by Donald Lee Williams (Inner City Books, 1981)

(I would love to write a post about each one of these books! Chinen, Monick and Williams are Jungian analysts; Chinen also an MD and Monick also an Episcopal priest. Arnold was a Jesuit scripture scholar; Jastrab is the person with whom I did my three vision quests.)

I asked a friend in San Diego about books he found helpful with men's groups on the West Coast. He named two:

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the 

Mature Masculine, by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (HarperOne, 1991)

Personal Mythology: Using Ritual, Dreams, and Imagination to Discover Your Inner Story, by David Feinstein and Stanley Krippner (Energy Psychology Press, 2009)

I also asked Joseph Jastrab for his suggestions. He named:

The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine, by Matthew Fox (New World Library, 2009) Matthew Fox, says Joseph, "does a good job at surveying the very broad field of this exploration." He's "not as good at bringing it together in a cohesive way. But he does emphasize that the reclamation of the Sacred Masculine is essential to humanity's evolution now."

Joseph adds that Fox "also carries the fine credentials of having been silenced by the Vatican and eventually expelled from service as a Dominican. He may round out the professional background of your list of authors."

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If you are still wondering whether sacred manhood should be taken seriously-- whether the link between the sacred masculine and the New Cosmology is as strong as I've made it out to be in this post-- I'm delighted to be able to share with you this comment I found in the reviews of Fox's book on the Amazon website:

“'Matthew Fox might well be the most creative, the most comprehensive, surely the most challenging religious-spiritual teacher in America.' --Thomas Berry, author of The Great Work."

sam@macspeno.com

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#50. The End of Patriarchy

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This post is being published two years to the date from my very first post. It will be my last, at least for a while. It seems to be a good place to stop.

I started the blog with the help of my daughter, who encouraged me to share my thoughts about science and religion on the web. "They'll be there for decades," she said. And I couldn't have done it without her technical know-how. It took me a while (quite a while!) to catch on to how blogs work and to how I should go about saying what I wanted to say.

About half of my posts deal with what science has to offer with regard to an understanding of our place in the universe. Most of those ideas come from the human end of the science spectrum, especially from studies of the brain and nervous and from cultural anthropology. The other half of the posts are about the dynamic and developmental perspective at the heart of western culture's Judeo-Christian tradition. It's that evolutionary perspective that I see as the specific convergence-point of western religion and science.

I never got around to two big areas of that convergence which I'd hoped to include. One is sacred ritual. The best I was able to do along those lines is post #26 (Help From Uncle Louie). Ritual is a major topic in terms of both understanding and practice, and its connections with biological and cultural evolution are hardly obvious. So it's worth a blog of its own. Maybe someday.

My other big topic is sacred manhood. I included some thoughts about it in one of my earliest posts, #7 (Brief Autobiography) but, like ritual, its links with biological and cultural evolution are hardly obvious, and it has yet to appear in discussions of the New Cosmology. It's the topic of this post.

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You may be thinking "What does manhood have to do with science and religion?"

My response is "Everything."

Western people have been slow to recognize that we live in what T. S. Eliot calls, in his famous poem, the waste land. And we've been even slower to recognize what accounts for that fact.

The famous Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung, an especially significant pioneer in our understanding the human psyche, has pointed out that the Grail Legends are critically important for our time. He says that the stories about the search for Holy Grail help us to understand precisely why it is that we live in a such an ecological and cultural waste land.

Almost everyone knows something about King Arthur and the Round Table, but few of us are aware of the reason why his knights were looking for the Grail in the first place: as the result of a hunting accident, the king-- he's called the Fisher King in the story-- has what present-day sports newscasters politely call "a groin injury."

Western culture has a severely damaged cultural understanding of manhood.

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Even for most thoughtful people in our society, the very fact that there might be any "understanding of manhood" is a strange idea. And the fact that we continue to miss it is part of the problem. Or that, when we do hear it, it sounds silly. ("Really, a groin injury?")

It's the same kind of problem I described in post #21 (Struggling with Words): we tend to be unconscious of the deeper realities which words like "science," "religion" and "person" refer to. The same is true with regard to "manhood." Maureen Dowd expressed the problem well in a New York Times op ed piece a few years ago: "There's something wrong with the male psyche," she said, "but I don't know what it is."

If talking about biological evolution in a religious context is strange, and talking about divine Sophia in a Judeo-Christian context is even more strange, then talking about manhood in the context of science and religion is-- alas-- very, very strange.

And yet, it's only when we become aware that western culture has an inadequate understanding of manhood that we can recognize that some other-- more adequate-- understanding might be available. My main point here is that we can't ever move beyond the patriarchal stage in human development unless we recognize, first, that males have an alternative form of manhood available and, secondly, that the alternative is an improvement over the patriarchal form.

As I see it, awareness that there actually is a possible alternative to the patriarchal masculine is nothing less than the turning point in the Immense Transition global humanity is currently experiencing. The growing edge of cultural evolution on our planet is precisely the movement of human culture "beyond patriarchal manhood."

Originally, I intended to call this post "Beyond Patriarchal Manhood," but I decided that "The End of Patriarchy" is a better name, in that it parallels post #11, "The End of Dualism." The main idea of that post is that thanks to neurological and cosmological studies, we don't need to think of persons as souls trapped in bodies and who have, thus, to escape from the world.

In a similar way, we don't need to think of human society or culture as trapped in the prison of patriarchal attitudes. Thanks to thinkers in both religion and the human sciences, we can, in fact, move beyond the cultural form of manhood called patriarchy.

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I shared my thoughts about humanity's growing edge in post #47. The central idea there is that, from the science side we see that our world is dynamic, not static, and from the religion side we see that humans have a responsible role to play in its on-going evolutionary development. In the language of the Hebrew Bible's wisdom literature, we are called by Sophia, the Wisdom of God, to become all that we can become and to contribute to the social-cultural conditions where that opportunity is available to every person on Earth.

The question is, of course, what prevents us from becoming all that we can be? What prevents us from taking our place as active participants in the cosmic process?

The answer, in a word, is patriarchy: the masculine alienated from the feminine.

Patriarchal culture denies meaning and prohibits feeling. In terms of the "quaternary" images I've used in many previous posts, patriarchy permits only women an expression of the Green Mouse Feeling function and denies the very existence of our Black Bear Intuition function by which we see the whole dynamic-evolutionary picture of the world and our place in it.

This is why religion became to a great extent something for women and children; it serves to keep them in their place. It permits the patriarchal control of society and it justifies injustice, inequality, human torture and the destruction of the environment. But, in the words of the Community of John XXIII I quoted in the previous post: "A patriarchal will to power cannot be just; justice is a process of relating according to a discipleship of equals. It is egalitarian rather than hierarchical."

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Human manhood is something far more significant than the patriarchal culture of religious dualism and of scientific rationalism has ever allowed us to know. In earlier posts I've repeatedly quoted Claude Tresmontant's statement that "war and violence are distortions of the cosmic process" and that the direction of the process is made clear by the Hebrew nabi: the movement of human culture in the direction of peace, pax, shalom.

From the evolutionary viewpoint, the entire Judeo-Christian tradition-- from the event of the Exodus to the prophets, the wisdom literature, the teachings of Jesus and the early Christian communities-- is all about humanity's cultural movement beyond the patriarchal control and exploitation of persons and our movement toward human freedom and equality.

From the static worldview, this still sounds odd. But from the dynamic wisdom perspectives of the Judeo-Christian tradition, it does not. Here's what the Matthew's gospel records Jesus as saying with regard to patriarchy: “Don’t let anyone call you ‘Rabbi,’ for you have only one teacher, and all of you are equal as brothers and sisters. And don’t address anyone here on earth as ‘Father,’ for only God in heaven is your spiritual Father. And don’t let anyone call you ‘Teacher,’ for you have only one teacher, the Messiah." (Matt 23:8)

And here's what the apostle Paul wrote about patriarchal authority even before the gospels were written: "Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ." (Col 2:8) In this context, it's especially important to keep in mind Paul's understanding of Jesus: he is "the dynamis of God and the sophia of God." (1 Cor 1:30)

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Because patriarchy seems to have been a necessary stage in humanity's cultural evolution, it's helpful to think of it as something similar to the adolescent stage of individual development.

The awkwardness of adolescence is part of growing up to become an independent free person, but adolescence is hardly the goal of human life. No teenager wants to stay at the adolescent stage of growth. And neither does humanity.

In our time, feminists saw that first. And despite the tremendous odds against them, they have made great progress. Males were slower to catch on. It started during the Vietnam era, but it was only in the 1980s that men began to wake up in larger numbers. And it wasn't until the first decade of the 21st-century that the American people as a whole became aware of just how horribly destructive the patriarchal will-to-power can be-- and voted instead to be on the growing edge of the cosmic process in its global movement toward peace and justice.

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One of the earliest publications I know which deals with an alternative to patriarchal manhood is a 1981 book by anthropologist and Jungian analyst Donald Lee Williams. It's called Border Crossings: A Psychological Perspective on Carlos Castaneda's Path of Knowledge. We don't hear much about it, but it zeroed in on what was then-- and still is-- the central issue with regard to patriarchy: men's use of their specifically masculine energy and power.

A 1982 interview of poet Robert Bly in New Age magazine brought the issue of sacred manhood to public attention. As Bly observed in that interview ("What do Men Want?") "men have been shut out of the inner world." His book, Iron John, A Book About Men, appeared in 1990.

Somewhat earlier, Eugene Monick, a retired Episcopal priest and Jungian analyst from New York City and the Scranton, PA area, published his especially significant 1987 book, Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine. More than anyone else I’m aware of, Monick pinpoints C. G. Jung’s own (unconscious) patriarchal stance regarding the feminine and paves the way for the emergence or recovery in our time of the post-patriarchal awareness of a co-equal masculine principle at the heart of the world.

A pioneer in implementing the practical experience of sacred manhood is therapist and leader  Joseph Jastrab of the Earth Rise Foundation. It was with Joseph that I made my three life-changing vision quests over a 16-year period beginning in the early 1980s. Written with Ron Schaumburg, his book Sacred Earth, Sacred Manhood: A Vision Quest Into the Wilderness of a Man's Heart appeared in 1994.

Although from a very different perspective, similar ideas about manhood were presented by the Jesuit scripture scholar, Patrick M. Arnold, in his 1991 book Wildmen, Warriors, and Kings: Masculine Spirituality and the Bible. It's impossible to summarize; it's filled with treasures.

Another biblical-- and specifically wisdom-oriented-- perspective is found in a book about the fourth gospel by a writer who I've referred to many times in these posts, Bruno Barnhart. In his 1993 book, The Good Wine: Reading John from the Center, Bruno notes that John's gospel offers a "new realization of the masculine." He sees that gospel as an explication of the consequences of Divine Sophia having "burst forth in Jesus" and in the concluding section of the book (entitled "One Hundred and Fifty-Three Fish") he describes the specific characteristics of what he calls the "Johannine masculine." It also is far too rich to summarize here. If you have the opportunity, check out Fishes #93 & #111.

A much more recent book, published in 2008, is Matthew Fox's The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine. The "ten metaphors" Fox refers to are archetypal images, found in the spirituality of many cultures, which empower men to own their specifically male energies. Fox acknowledges the pioneer work of Joseph Jastrab and Robert Bly and offers the thought that one of the reasons why that earlier work was not heard by the wider culture is because it wasn't linked with the broader spiritual concerns of western society.

In our day, those spiritual concerns have become known as the New Cosmology. They are linked with both the evolutionary perspectives of modern science and the wisdom perspectives of Western religion, and the sacred masculine is being recognized as an integral part of it.

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It's not surprising that the richest data about all this comes from the human sciences-- specifically from psychology and anthropology. The work of Allan B. Chinen, M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California (San Francisco), is especially stimulating. He uses fairy tales from around the world to present an extremely fruitful study of the meaning of mature manhood from both a pre- and a post-patriarchal perspective.

In his 1993 book, Beyond the Hero: Classic Stories of Men in Search of Soul, Chinen offers a unique emphasis on the recovery of Paleolithic imagery for mid-life men. He pieced it together, as he says, “from anthropology, archeology, paleontology and prehistory.” His main idea is that "males are not, by nature, warriors and patriarchs but are, rather, shamanic tricksters." It's that hunter-trickster imagery which, he says, "offers an alternative vision of male energy.”

Especially important is Chinen's observation that "the commonly held view-- that boys develop their masculine identity by rejecting the feminine-- makes male hostility, fear and ambivalence toward women appear to be inevitable." It's not, of course. The “primordial masculine” is, in fact, "co-equal" (as Gene Monick says) with the feminine.

I can't find the exact quote but Chinen says somewhere, "Scratch a contemporary male and you will find a hunter just below the skin." His point is that the hunter-wit, trickster-wisdom and shaman-spirituality of the deep masculine is still in our genes today and that it shows itself as life-giving energy given by the cosmos to mature men on behalf of the human community.

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The idea that the "primordial masculine" goes back to the Hunting Culture of the Paleolithic times sounds especially strange at first hearing, but it's not so strange if we keep in mind that the patriarchal form of manhood only appeared recently in human history.

Patriarchal culture takes up just two percent of that history. On a time-line, if we let an inch represent a thousand years, then the story of humanity goes back about the length of a football field. But patriarchal culture goes back only the last four or five inches.

So, moving beyond patriarchal manhood is both humanity's movement out of its awkward adolescent stage and a recovery of the primordial masculine of the Paleolithic hunting culture.

That's why aspects of surviving pre-patriarchal cultures, especially Paleolithic hunting culture rites such as the sweat lodge and the vision quest which have been preserved for us by Native American culture, have been so prominent in the work of people like Joseph Jastrab in our movement beyond patriarchal manhood to a recovery of the deep masculine.

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One more point. The deep masculine isn't just an early form of manhood; we owe the very emergence of our mind and heart to it. What follows is a foolish attempt at a brief summary of those ideas....

Just as most non-human primates are today, our primate ancestors were primarily plant-eating dwellers of rain forest environments; there, food is abundant. When, several million years ago a major climate change caused much of the rain forest area to evolve into grasslands, foraging for plant food became more difficult; the result was a shift to the use of meat.

Hunting became a necessity for the survival of life. Hunting requires cooperation, and cooperation requires good communication. Human speech appeared among our earliest human ancestors precisely because of the need for cooperative hunting. It is a unique form of communication on our planet, and gave rise to our uniquely human mind-brain.

You can see from that very brief summary that it isn't easy to understand how the brain, mind and culture evolved together with language. I've found the work of Terrence Deacon, Professor of Biological Anthropology and Neuroscience at the University of California (Berkeley), to be especially helpful. Deacon's research is described as "a combination of human evolutionary biology and neuroscience in the investigation of the evolution of the processes underlying animal and human communication."

In his 1997 book, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain, Deacon spells out clearly the evolutionary origins of human speech in the need of our earliest human ancestors for what today we call "community organizing."

Our first ancestors had two main concerns. One is their need for the high-protein food which meat offers. Hunting was a necessity, and it was up to males to be the hunters; women with children just can't do it. The stealth needed for hunting, for example, simply isn't possible with children present. And males can't do it either-- on their own. They need the cooperation of other males.

The second concern of our earliest human ancestors was that just as the women need to trust their men to provide them and the young back home with meat, so men also need to trust their women that the children they are providing for are, in fact, their own, and not those of some other male. In evolutionary terms, it's a question of genes: natural selection promotes the provisioning of a male's own offspring.

So, just as a woman has to count on her man for provisioning her and their children, he has to be able to count on the young being his. And both have to be able to count on the members of their communities to clearly identify and respect what we would call today their "marriage" bond.

It was this combination of needs-- for male provisioning of females, for mutual collaboration for the hunt and for the social recognition of mates-- which together resulted in human speech. And because language is unique-- it's a non-biological (non-genetic) solution to these many problems-- the result was the emergence of what we call today "culture."

As I've said repeatedly in these posts, the basic pattern and underlying structure to the entire cosmic process as we Earthlings experience it is "matter, life and mind," but the evolutionary process doesn't stop with the emergence of individuals.

The next stage in the process is what I called in post #22, "The Other Half of 'Person'." The essence of the New Cosmology is that the developmental sequence of the cosmic process is matter, life, mind and communion. As I said in post #22, just as DNA can do things that its chemical components can't, and we human beings can do things that our brain cells can't, in exactly the same way, human communities can do things that individuals can't.

And central to the emergence of those first human communities is the grounded masculine.

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It's central to our understanding of the contemporary movement beyond patriarchal manhood that we recognize that from an evolutionary perspective, human culture emerged from the equality of males and females, the provisioning of females and young by males, and the recognition by the human community of "who belonged to whom." And that it was language which was needed for this "community organizing" and so is the origin of our specifically human brain, mind and heart.

I'd say "of the human soul," too-- if the words "soul" and "spirit" didn't carry such heavy dualistic connotations. Dualism is the result of the patriarchal masculine's alienation from the feminine and, in the contemporary transition "beyond patriarchal manhood," it is precisely that alienation which we are moving away from. But if we can hear "soul" or "spirit" in non-dualistic terms, then we can indeed say that human communication, necessitated by the need for cooperative hunting among males and recognition of the marriage bond by the community, appeared at the very dawn of the human mind, heart, soul, spirit.

In any case, I hope you will agree that it's delightful to think that probably the very first words spoken by a human community were a two-million-year-old version of mazel tov.

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The focus of patriarchal manhood on competition, status and hierarchy may have been a necessary stage in human maturation, but it's clear that humanity's cultural evolution has depended on the grounded masculine from the very start.

Authentic relationships, mutual collaboration and taking care of those in need are the essence of the primordial masculine. And, as I described in the previous post, they are also the essential aspects of a contemporary evolutionary spirituality.

So a "new realization of the masculine" isn't as strange as it may first seem. Indeed, in our day we can see that the recovery of an alternative to the patriarchal masculine is necessary if we are to be active participants in the growing edge of the evolutionary process on Earth.

Bruno Barnhart describes this "new realization of the masculine" as "an immanent creative relation to the world (cosmos, creation), expressed in a transformative power which operates within others persons and, more broadly, within the creation itself."

What Bruno calls "transformative power" is the same shamanic-trickster energy and hunter-wisdom central to the thought of the authors mentioned above, Donald Lee Williams' in Border Crossings and Allan Chinen's in Beyond the Hero. It's also a major aspect of that ancient monastic vow I described in the previous post and which Merton delighted in: personal transformation in conversation with all the things of the world.

In terms of the quaternary tools I've used repeatedly in these posts, it is a recovery of our Black Bear Intuitive function, a recovery of our ability to see the big picture-- of the mystery and meaning of our existence. And it's a recovery of what Karl Rahner calls the existential experience of being graced and blessed.

It all fits together!

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So, that's it for now. My thanks to everyone who in any way offered encouragement and support for this blog project, with special thanks to Anne for her ever-patient proof-reading.

I'm planning to keep the blog active and will post whatever comes in by way of comments and criticisms, questions and suggestions for further thoughts. Maybe you will send something?

sam@macspeno.com