"Masculine energy across all boundaries is in need of health and justice and peace," the Rev. Dr. Michelle Bentley told an audience of nearly a thousand Unitarian Universalist ministers on Wednesday morning. Dr. Robert L. Moore echoed a similar theme, pointing to the social consequences when young males are not cared for and nurtured spiritually.
Bentley, the senior minister of 138-year-old Third
Unitarian Church
in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago, spoke of her own many experiences of
these social consequences. She recounted her experience as jury foreman considering
the legal fate of a young man charged with a horrific crime of violence as an
opportunity to do ministry at a deep level, and her deep grief for all the lost
and angry young men who commit such crimes. She told of the trip she took with
congregation members to the Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago, in sight
of Chicago's skyscrapers visible in all their power, and of the County Jail
complex. She told of her experiences teaching in the housing project and in
the County Jail's program for juveniles. She told of the experience of Third
Unitarian with a drug house across the street from the church. She reported
statistics and stories in the news: African American men convictions at rates
six times that of European American men; an increase in violent crimes by men
ages 18-24; the Columbine shootings; Timothy McVeigh; other white male murderers.
"It's in all our communities," she emphasized.
She also told of her congregation's programs to address the spiritual needs of men, including young men of the mostly African American neighborhood of Austin. From programs at the congregation's Harriet Tubman Place to a month of Sundays on men to a program to honor young male scholars, these examples provided her audience with positive models for their own inspiration.
"Religious communities," she concluded, "can provide nurture for the 'inner temple' - a place to internalize love, to become a cup to hold the good in you, and to help you go on to community building, justice and peace."
Dr. Robert L. Moore, whose books including The Archetype of Initiation and King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine have brought together insights from Jungian psychoanalysis and theology, spoke of the "necessary grandiosity" which can fuel creativity and transformation or, if channeled destructively, result in unconscious ritualizations, violence, and addictions.
Moore asked, "Why do some men do monstrous things?" Like Bentley, he recalled deeds such as Timothy McVeigh, who believed he was doing something heroic by blowing up a federal building with people in it. Then he asked, "Why do people in power not care?" Moore pointed especially to the prison-industrial complex, and the dollars poured into the creation of more and more prisons, instead of attention to the lack of spiritual guidance, the "crisis in spiritual eldership for both men and women." He also asked that his listeners think about two related questions, and how these phenomena are connected at the root: "Why do so many who do care lack the courage or creative energy to respond? Why do those who undertake transformative ministry so often burn out?"
Recalling Tillich's definition of spirituality as connecting to the transformative powers of being, Moore emphasized the need to "find the place where the fountain flows, where you get the great golden energies of the soul." The task of religious leadership, he said, is to find and develop cups -- religious practices and creative rituals -- to contain and channel those energies.
Moore spoke of the need for mentorship and spiritual guidance of young men (and young women), and of the need to contain "dragon energies" -- potentially destructive energy. The Eastern cultures, he pointed out, tend to see the dragon as a source of power and blessing and prosperity. In the West, a "Beowulf attitude" pervades: the dragon is to be killed or driven underground. "We cannot kill the dragon of human grandiosity," Moore cautioned, "without killing creativity." Such "dragon energies" become evil when people identify with the energy, or idealize it and project it onto "the other." Fundamentalists, intuiting that "dragon energies" need containment, retreat into limited ritual. Instead, Moore said, we need "spiritual leaders committed to the spiritual nurture of our species," leaders who see themselves as the "stewards of the spiritual treasures of humanity," creating rituals that work to channel these energies into their transformative potentials.
He described Unitarian Universalists as being in a particularly powerful position to lead in this work, to find and create and remember rituals that are "post-tribal and pan-tribal", to create spiritual vessels that work while honoring the use of reason in the spiritual life, to balance justice and mercy, to point to the majesty and potential glory of the human being. "What can you be at this special hour in human history?" he challenged the ministers.
This presentation was part of Ministry Days, General Assembly 2001, and was sponsored by CENTER (Continuing Education Network for Training, Enrichment and Renewal).
Dr. Robert L. Moore teaches at Chicago Theological Seminary, is the president
of the Institute for World Spirituality, and is author of a number of books
including The Archetype of Initiation and King, Warrior, Magician, Love: Rediscovering
the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. Dr. Michelle Bentley, a former student
of Moore's, is the senior minister of Third
Unitarian Church in Chicago, and founded the Austin Action Committee to
restore and rebuild the Austin community. She came to the Unitarian Universalist
ministry after a career in education.
Reported for the Web by Jone Johnson Lewis
General Assembly 2001 · Program Grid
