The Masculine Exodus: Journey to the Father

The masculine life trajectory can be understood as a journey from the womb of our earthly mother towards and into the arms of our heavenly Father. This movement is a liberation from inclusion within the maternal/feminine by identification with the masculine or paternal. This is not an entire break from the feminine; rather, the mature, strong man eventually is able to relate to women from a liberated and generous virility in the mode of spousal and paternal love. On the road to this destination, there are four distinct, but interconnected, transitions…passages which are re-enacted and reinforced throughout a man’s entire lifetime: movement from Mom to Dad; from family to male friends; from Dad to other mentors and father-figures; and into the solitude of the desert for intimacy with our heavenly Father.

From Mom to Dad
The Oedipal resolution, recognized by Freud, is an identification with the father by which the infant son resolves his envy and dependency upon maternal enmeshment. By the age of two, the mother must symbolically “hand over” the boy to the father. She must release him as her possession or extension, entrusting him into the care of the man she herself loves and trusts. The infant imitates the trust and love the mother obviously has for his father and is able himself to confidently draw close to this large, strange, awesome presence. Eventually, he comes also to emulate the father’s reverence and tenderness towards the mother so that he grows into a wholesome, even holy masculine affection for Mom, and for all women. Frank O’Connor’s short story “My Oedipus Complex” is a masterful and moving memoir of a successful transition. He recalls his earliest years as euphoric union with his mother. Upon his father’s return from World War I, he is exiled out of mom’s bed to one of his own where he is resentful, jealous, lonely and disconsolate. With the passage of time, however, a dramatic event intervenes to comfort him: a new baby arrives and his erstwhile opponent, Dad, is himself exiled from the warmth of the maternal bed and becomes bedmate and best-friend to the grieving boy. The two comfort each other in their shared loss of feminine enclosure and warmth. This image, little guy and big, each mourning the loss of feminine enclosure, doing their best to console each other in a world become cold and hostile…this image sums up much of a man’s life. If each endures this disconsolate passage, he will return to the feminine not in need but in strength and generosity.

This transition is rarely complete and perfect and must be reworked by every man throughout his lifetime. Failure in this primal passage is probably a root cause for most forms of virile weakness and degeneracy: insecurity, homosexuality, rage and violence towards women, inordinate obsession with sex, debilitating dependency upon feminine affection and approval, inability to commit, and infidelity.

Fathers today spend twice as much time with their children as did dads in 1960. This bodes well for the oedipal passage. On the other hand, the large number of boys without fathers or father figures is THE defining catastrophic of our time. In addition, the smaller families of the contraceptive culture worsen things as emotionally frustrated mothers focus attention and affection upon only sons. In that sense the large families of the 1950s facilitated the passage as mom was so occupied with the other children that she could hardly obsess about one son.

This primal transfer of the baby boy from the mother to the father is the basis for the next three transitions which themselves reinforce and seal the initial exodus from enmeshment to wholesome interdependency and genuine generativity.

An Exception that Proves the Rule
One may wonder: what of all the young men growing up without fathers? Is their condition hopeless? Hardly! Providence has a way of supplying surrogate fathers in the most surprising and marvelous ways. An Oprah Winfrey show profiled Sidney Poitier and how he had impacted families, especially single women raising children alone, precisely as a surrogate father figure, albeit from a distance. The media presence alone, of a strong but tender paternal figure, powerfully impacted both women and children.

Closer to home I have a very concrete example. I am privileged to know quite intimately a most virile young man, outstanding husband, father and leader of men, whose father passed away when he was at the tender age for the crucial “handing over” from Mom to Dad. Through the years he was blessed with surrogate fathers but it was an enigma how he developed so nicely without the physical presence of a father at the end of infancy. This puzzle was solved in conversation with his mother. To this day (some 35 years later) she speaks of her husband as a living, loving and much loved presence. He is not “gone.” She happily reports that he has always been present in their family life and helped raise the children by his heavenly presence. She is so sincere in this that one feels his presence as she speaks so happily of him. Clearly, her trust in and love for her husband was so deep that his presence and influence has continued through the decades. The spousal communion of bride/groom, feminine/masculine, and maternal/paternal was so total that his spiritual/emotional influence continues despite his bodily departure. A woman of deep faith, her heart and her home has remained open to our Father and their father within the communion of saints. And so, the growing boy was not smothered by an anxious, grasping, possessive femininity, but liberated and empowered by a spousality/maternity open to the masculine, in a more markedly spiritual and emotional mode. We see here also that the paternal influence is always mediated by the mother who always has privilege of place with the child. It is the mother’s respect, trust, loyalty and affection for the father that ensures a successful passage to paternity.

From Family to “the Guys”
The next masculine migration is from the protection of the family to the challenges and rewards of friendship with other boys. This involves competition and conflict as well as bonding and camaraderie. The boy will be tested and must prove himself. The most obvious arena for this is sports but it can take other forms such as the fierce argumentation of scholarship, as in Orthodox Judaism. Here again, failure to make this transition can leave deep deficiencies. Psychologists speak of the “sports wound” associated with the homosexual attraction as many with this condition have suffered an inability to perform in this area and a subsequent failure to bond with other boys. This process again continues throughout a man’s life well into adulthood. Unlike a woman for whom femininity is an endowment, fluent and effortless, a man must prove himself by some form of test and conflict. Classically, this entails a rite of passage demanding courage and ability which earns the young man the approval of the elders, his peers and himself. Thus “ordained” or “certified” as a “made man,” the young man experiences the confidence needed to make a total giving of himself to a religious vocation or marriage as a husband and father.

Male bonding, more than just testing and conflict, leads into the intimacy and loyalty of fraternal camaraderie. Most of our needs for affection and intimacy must be met by chaste same-sex friendship: men with men and women with women. When these needs are met by such friendships, we are freed from sexual compulsions and inordinate love dependency. We are empowered to love the other sex in generosity and lightness.
Unfortunately, our society has deconstructed traditional rites of male passage and left our young men bereft of any clear itinerary of formation. Many remain suspended in a state of adolescent insecurity and self-absorption. Nevertheless, this male passage is so primal and irrepressible that it remains vibrant, in the face of the feminist and homosexual assault on gender, in arenas like sports, military, religious/clerical circles, and academics.

From Dad to Other Mentors and Elders
The adolescent needs to be fathered by additional mentors and role models as he differentiates himself from his own dad: coaches, teachers, bosses, and so forth. A classic expression of this is Jesus, separated without notice from his parents and “lost” in the temple. He makes it clear to his mother, in painful candor, that he was hardly lost, but was “about his Father’s business.” He has reached a stage when he must leave his carpenter-dad to come under the influence of the broader community of elders. Every young man, having identified successfully with his own primary father (or surrogate father) moves on to broaden, deepen and individuate himself under the tutoring, coaching and encouragement of “secondary” fathers. Here again our society largely abandons our young men who are largely stuck in a peer culture through high school and college and beyond as we have largely segregated our emergent adults away from older mentors in a suffocating, media-saturated peer culture of narcissism.

This need for mentoring is not just a phenomenon of youth but continues for a man’s entire lifetime. Well into retirement the grandfather stage and up to death itself a man needs to be guided, protected, and fathered. A pernicious assumption of our society is that an adult, especially a man, must be autonomous, self-reliant, and absolutely independent. The truer reality is that each of us is always, always, always filial at the core of our identity: son or daughter of a fleshly mother and father, of our heavenly Father and our ecclesial Mother and, in our weakened, infirm state, desperate for guidance, correction, accountability and protection. Liberalism inflates each individual Ego into a demi-God but there remain subcultures which preserve a fierce ethos of humility, obedience, and authority: the military, 12-step programs, and of course Catholicism.

Into the Desert for Intimacy with our Heavenly Father
Eventually, however, our young man must leave even the company of the elders to go into the solitude of the desert, the territory of the Adversary himself, in order to be further tested and purified and finally find intimacy with The ultimate and absolute Father, his final and true refuge, strength and support. Stripped of any human or cultural support, be that family or friends or mentors, he must come to trust in God alone and surrender himself completely into His hands. The elders can point the way into the desert but the young man must venture there in solitude. St. John the Baptist most clearly represents this stage: he wore camel skins and ate locusts and wild honey. This is raw, stark virility at its best: naked and humble before the Father, victorious over the Evil One. In the desert, bereft of comfort and support, one becomes truly a son of the heavenly Father. Absorbing the radiance and splendor of the Almighty Father, one slowly becomes an icon of paternity. Blessed Joseph Kowalski was a Polish priest, known for his (filial) devotion to Mary, who ministered his fellow prisoners at Auschwitz. A sadistic guard pointed to those who had just been tortured and taunted him: “You are losing souls, Father, look at them…you are losing souls…what are you going to do?” The priest responded by falling to his knees, praying the Our Father (to his Father) and singing the Salve Regina (to his mother…Does this remind us of the Carmelites of Compiegne singing the same hymn en route to the guillotine in 1794?). They then drowned him in a sewer tank. Father Kowalski had been into the desert. He knew his Father, and his Mother. He had nothing to fear. He had defeated the Adversary. He was a man!

Darth Vadar
Darth Vadar means “Dark Father” and it is the perverse Skywalker paternity that ties together the entire Star Wars saga. Anakin Skywalker becomes a dark father first of all because he himself was never fathered. To the age of 9 he is raised by his mother and there is the suggestion of a miraculous conception, without a biological father. He becomes, then, an inversion of Christ, the son of the Father, as he is a superhero, bereft of a father, un-protected, un-faithful, non-obedient, self-assertive, deeply fearful and angry. Indeed, the underlying ontology of the Lukas’ series is a fatherless universe: instead of Creation, willed into existence “from nothing” by an almighty Father, the universe is pantheistic, uncreated, and infused with an inherent, non-transcendent Force. Anakin is already genetically endowed with an astronomical number of mid-chlorians, a mysterious biological-spiritual micro-life force (think Teilhard de Chardin!) connected to the Force. So, the core of his identity is vital power in a fatherless universe. He remains then overly-enmeshed with his mother and fails to transition to any father. Unfathered and unprotected, he becomes desperately anxious, and eventually rage-filled, despite his super powers, in regard to the vulnerability of his mother and later his secret wife. Yoda and the Jedi Council sense this danger from the very beginning. But his Jedi mentors Qui-Gon and then Obi-Wan Kenobi defy the Council and insist on training Anakin as a Jedi. This represents a second weakness in the paternal connection: his mentors are themselves defiant and disobedient to their legitimate authorities or father-figures, the Council. The Council is like the Catholic hierarchy and Anakin similar to the disciple of a dissident Catholic: loyal to one who is himself disobedient. The flow of authority, loyalty, affective obedience and humble power is broken. Eventually and miraculously, we know, at the end of the saga, benign paternity resurrects itself and triumphs, but in an arbitrary, incoherent, dues-ex-machina manner. This inexplicable triumph of paternity in a fatherless universe is an entirely incoherent ending to an otherwise consistently pantheistic legend. At the end, it seems, an inchoate hunger and trust in the Father cannot be repressed.

The Virile Itinerary of Jesus
Jesus himself, having left his Father, demonstrates for us how to return to him and perfectly exemplifies the four passages. Already as a baby he is presented, “handed over,” in the temple by Mary and Joseph and received by Simeon and Anna. As mentioned, at the age of Bar Mitzvah, he further distances himself from his blood family, curtly reprimanding his mother: “Did you not know that I must be about my father’s work?” He is equally abrasive in the next interaction between mother and son: “Woman, do you not know that my hour has not yet come.” And later he diminishes the value of her physical maternity by responding to the acclamation “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that gave you suck!” with the correction that “Blessed rather are those who hear the Word of God and keep it.” The few interactions between the two show us Jesus pushing his mother away and preferring the will of his Father. He is brutal in his assertion that his life about the the plans of his Father rather than the concerns of his mother. Only from the cross, his virile journey now complete in the tortured crucible of stark obedience, does he turn to his mother affectionately and appreciatively: “Mother behold your son; son behold your mother.”

In Jesus we see, in perfection, the movement away from dependency upon the feminine and maternal into intimate communion with the Father. We see that heaven prepared for him on earth not only an immaculate mother but a holy father to model and mentor him. We see him moving away from the warmth of the hearth into the temple, the desert, and aggressive spiritual combat. We see him bonding with a group of men, especially his 12 apostles and his three chosen ones. We see him entirely comfortable in his own masculinity and free and generous in his relations with women: those caught in sin and the sorrowful ones who are faithful to him on Calvary and to whom he appeared that Sunday morning. We see him finally reverent, caring and generous before the radiant femininity of his own mother, whom he assumed into heaven and crowned Queen of all heaven and earth, of the saints and the angels.