Men as Mentors - Richard Rohr and Sergio Milandri - Part 12

Start with three minutes of silence or a piece of evocative music..

Part 12. Re-fathering.

We all have father wounds. From reading Rohr’s chapter on the father wound we can see how afflicted and stuck the male soul is and we may resonate with this and grasp why our own fathering was a mixed blessing. Notice the enmeshed feelings rising up in you as we open this topic and realize the judgments that are already fixed within.

However, we do have various choices. We can blame, reject, spit out and banish remembrance, or we can idealise and idolise and perpetuate idyllic memories. Alternatively we can continue to try hard like good boys and girls to please this man who we seemed never able to make happy. We can wish and promise and determine not to ever disappoint him or his memory again. But all of this can leave us spent on nothing but empty reaction.

Fathering has been many things for each of us and we need to look not to blame but to understand something of what our father lived through and what we experienced as a result. We are wanting to renew real fondness and healing trust.

The reality is that we are formed and we are unformed. We are functioning and we are broken. We are present to ourselves and we are absent. We want healing and we run from healing. We take responsibility and we hold others liable. We are a puzzling complexity to ourselves, as was our father to himself. And the social norms and expectations are a constant reminder of what we are undoing. Maybe more damning are our father’s unmet standards which have now become our own.

But the shoe is now on the other foot. Now we are doing the fathering. Both men and women bring the father element to life. Strange as it may seem, we need to be re-parenting ourselves in finding nurture and life-giving relationships, and helping others for whom we are role models and life-formers. (Life-farmers!) This may shock us as we easily assume that someone else needs to be responsible for our well-being.

What is the quality of our self parenting? Do we actively seek our healing and transformation or do we prefer the low road of blame and resignation? We are now the parent and we have the power of life and death, over ourselves, over others, over the world around us. How do we give life? Where do we take life?

But how do we do this if we have not known good fathering. Where do we start if we don’t know the way? But wait. Have we not been loved? What is this spark deep in our soul that knows when we are truly loved, that recognises full acceptance and needs no perfection, that knows there is a purer love beneath all our impure human ones. The other side is you, Father, for you have fathered me and my father and his before him. I am at the end of a long line of beloved, broken fathers. And me, God you have loved me so long. From before my birth you saw me and I had a place in your heart. You parent and re-parent me, tenderly sustaining the life you planted within. So I release you dear earthly father. You did all you could and gave what you had and it is up to me to do the next piece, to parent our broken humanity.

Reflection (10 minutes in silence)
What do you struggle with in your father? What choices do you have?

Journal (5 minutes)
Write down some of the main issues.

Connect with each other in the group.

This week. Reflect on your self parenting. Where are you doing ok and where are you weak? Read chapter 13 of Richard Rohr’s “From Wild Man to Wise Man”