There is no single more pressing or poignant issue in men's lives than facing their fathers anew. It is essential for men to perceive ourselves as sons and fathers, moving both ways on a continuum. Our tendency has been to describe the father-son encounter in rigid terms when such bonds are actually complex and fluid.

Recognizing the subtle variations involved, I encourage men to work along a basic continuum ranging from abuse to abandonment to aloofness to availability to affirmation to affection. In our father-son odysseys we find ourselves somewhere, at different junctures, on that continuum. Where on the continuum would you place your father-son relationship when you were born, a child, a teenager, a young adult, currently? If you are a father, where would you locate yourself on the continuum with respect to your own children, particularly your sons?

An overwhelming number of father-son dyads register on the negative end of the continuum: conflicted, injured, incomplete. The wounds between father and son run deep; the grief is occasionally unbearable.

There are myths conveyed in various cultural stories urging men to "kill your father," destroy any vestige of father-son connection, cut yourselves off from dad forever. This is an extreme measure, but sometimes an irreconcilable situation calls for last resorts.

Novelist Erica Jong phrases it this way in Parachutes and Kisses: "Why do you think you're so destructive?" Isadora asked, "I mean, really? Is it only your relationship with your father? Don't get me wrong -- I believe in that sort of thing. I think that a man who never slays his father, never grows up -- as witness my last ex-husband, Josh -- but why are you slaying yourself?"

The same sentiment is reflected in the Buddhist admonition: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." This is a symbolic way of decisively separating ourselves from our fathers and creating our own identities. Psychotherapist Eric Fromm makes the same point: "Eventually, the mature person has come to the point where we are our own mother and our own father. "

As men engaged in Brother Spirit quest, we remind each other that it is usually possible to heal the wounds and celebrate the ties between fathers and sons. There are no time constraints. We have until both of us are in the grave. We men have the capacity to transform, even if not transcend, relationships of abuse, abandonment, and aloofness into bonds of greater availability, affirmation, and affection.

But this process is rigorous and requires all the emotional bravery and spiritual stamina fathers and sons can muster. Our particular father-son histories must be forthrightly acknowledged, not romanticized, and our special hungers and hurts faced, not denied, before genuine, durable progress can be made. Our father-son exchanges are too significant to succumb to quick, cheap conciliation.

The reality is that our fathers are not "nothing" and will never be "everything" we sons desire or need. Most fathers are "something"able to deliver some example and some meaning to our lives as sons. When we make peace with that compromised yet realistic vision of fatherhood, we allow our fathers to be themselves as we become ourselves, bonded without being enslaved to one another.

It is important to realize that reconciliation will not always be initiated by sons. In Homer's Odyssey, the warrior-king Odysseus returns and reveals himself to his teenage son Telemachus: "I am that father whom your boyhood lacked and suffered pain for lack of I am he." The story continues with Telemachus weeping as he flings his arms around his re pentant, brave father. Would that there were more fathers willing to retrace their steps, return to their sons, ask for forgiveness, reunite.

Too many men become "addicted" to negative memories and visions of our fathers, never unlocking the power of either our anger or our affection, just wallowing in self-pity. As Jungian analyst James Hillman notes: "As long as you complain about your negative fathers, you remain a son. Use the negative in your psyche as an initiator... Souls choose their parents. Blame your father, but then go to the second step and use this scar tissue."

The father-son relationship is a dance, requiring effort and good will from both partners. As sons we too have been abusive as well as affirming toward our fathers through the years. We shape and are shaped by the bond. Sons have a responsibility, equally important as that of fathers, in making the bond more truthful and gratifying. We are connected by hurt -- we must be joined in restoration.

I am perennially moved by reading Herbert Gold's splendid memoir novel of his immigrant Jewish family. In Fathers the author writes: "There was no moment of reconciliation between my father and me. We quarreled, we lived together, we remained in touch, we warred again on occasion, we made up, we looked ahead, we walked carefully with each other, we were part of a family. One day I noticed that the war with my father was over. I don't remember when that day came. It came more than once. There would still be quarrels, but we had agreed upon the lines of power. We each had our territory. We would each allow the other to live. We were allies."