Here I’m adding to the last post (read it here) with footnotes, intended to go deeper. Find earlier pieces on this theme here and here.
If you feel called to gather in person to explore and ultimately embody these ideas, come to www.storyfire.org
Authentic men’s work is an invitation to enter another world1.
One that existed long before any of us got here, and will continue to evolve.
In which every human life matters equally, and the ecosystem, planet, and universe are tended - and tend us.
It is an invitation to imagine our lives as both stardust2 and sacred3,
Woven into a miraculous web of common and cosmic good4.
Where you can bring what you have, and ask for what you need
Your wounds can be healed, and your calling clarified to co-create a safer, more compassionate, more beautiful, more alive world
To tell stories that are true but may not have “come true” yet, because we haven’t told them enough. Or lived them.
To learn and share together how to tell and live our stories and the stories of the world we find themselves in, in the most truthful, creative, and generative ways.
1. Me and We and Everything Else
The most authentic men’s work will embrace and initiate into lived wholeness5, which can be defined as the experience of knowing yourself to be a bearer of gifts and needs, woven as an individual into a community of people and planet, held by Spirit: a Me and a We and an Everything Else that both needs you to show up fully, and has the answer to your needs too. A men’s circle that turns inward and stays there has confused the medicine for the life. The destination is the whole symphony of humanity, the whole universe of life.
2. Gender and Other Stories We Tell
Gender matters, but gender isn’t matter. It’s a story6. The work will take seriously the wisdom of history, psychology, religion, culture, and all authentic stories about what it is to be human7. In men’s work this must include the study of gender. When taken seriously, this can be liberating for everyone.
3. Who Belongs to Men’s Work?
The best men’s work is socioeconomically accessible, culturally relevant, and transformative across difference — taking seriously that race, ethnicity, class, and ability shape what being a man means in different communities. These differences aren’t complications to manage, they are the work itself.
We should transcend the limitations of the concept of being “welcoming”, for welcome assumes an ownership of the work that does not exist. Also some folks from a vast range of backgrounds are already part of the work, often less visibly, often isolated, often at personal cost. They should be co-leading it too. What’s needed instead of “welcome” is intentional openness — knowing that whoever shows up will reshape the work, and that this is the point. There is no universal masculinity to initiate people into, only the blend of shared and different experiences of what cultures have told us it means to be men.
People who carry identities other than the most culturally privileged must be present at the foundation, not added later.
And while some folks will always feel called to meet in cohorts8, there should be no identity-based, financial, physical, or cultural barriers to receiving the truest gifts this work offers. That may sound idealistic, but men’s work should always keep prioritizing removing barriers to access.
4. Nothing is Not Political
Authentic men’s work will commit to conscious engagement with power in all its forms, for the sake of the common good, prioritizing the needs of the vulnerable. It must take “politics”, “religion”, “culture”, and “economics” seriously. This is not political partisanship, but simply standing in the tradition of all authentic humanity: to not engage with power, including elected power, is an abdication of integrity based on the false notion that being a person is the same thing as being an island9.
We all have and we all lack some power: the challenge to bring what we have and ask for what we need is not a political imposition, but an invitation to a life worthy of the name, where loving our neighbors as ourselves is both a responsibility, and a treasure worth seeking more than anything else10.
Know Yourself. Do your own work of growth, healing, accountability, vision, and service to and with the common and cosmic good. Don’t do it alone - consciously make yourself accountable to peers and mentors, across the gender spectrum11.
Imagine a world beyond “Men’s” Work. A man is not fully healed, indeed he is not fully human, until equitably integrating with the presence, gifts, and needs of women, and people across the entire spectrum of gender12.
It takes more than a loud voice13. Integrated archetypes or balanced roles: leadership as service, an open-hearted range of emotions across the spectrum from anger to joy to grief, courageous and compassionate action, resourcing the imagination toward what the room (or the world) needs, and conscious stewardship of life (yours, mine, ours, the ecosystem) are both the result and the path toward it.
Seek Wisdom, not only knowledge or “tools”. This work requires us to grow down as well as up.
Next time I’ll share more about the how, what I’m calling an elemental pilgrimage.
Please share this post with anyone whom you feel might benefit.
The world underneath the world we pretend we live in. The world of The Whole Story.
Everything in your body is made from stardust - solar grains. This is worth thinking about. A lot.
To ask whether or not “being made in the image of God” is meant literally or poetically is to limit the possible. Why can’t it be both? This is also worth thinking about. Perhaps even more than the stardust.
The common runs from the most ordinary and practical — food, shelter, safety, belonging — all the way through politics, ecology, and the great human stories we tell about why we’re here. The cosmic is the dimension of ultimacy: the metaphysical ground of things, the universe understood both literally and as a living poem of meaning. God, however you understand that word, at the root and destination of both. Nothing is too small to matter. Nothing is too large to ignore.
Bill Plotkin calls this “authentic adulthood”. I like that, as well as “the clarified self”, “the inhabited life”, “the arriving soul”.
There is no monolithic experience of gender, and concepts like “sacred masculine” and “divine feminine” must be handled with care, with the question always being what is the fruit of this tree? If there are more accurate, more inclusive, more life-giving terms that transcend gender or the implication that biological sex carries immutable psychological, cultural, or “spiritual” characteristics, we should use them instead. Beware of replacing one set of gender stereotypes “outside” healthy Men’s Work with another set inside it.
The most compelling ancient/mythical stories as well as contemporary knowledge about where we come from recognize that before we are gendered, we are human; and that the manifestation of what we call gender is more of a kaleidoscope than a binary.
People will always feel called to gather in particular cohorts, and there is real value in that. That also means that there is real value in sub-groups of men who share other identities in common being supported in sometimes gathering around those identities (including privileged ones) — not as corrections or additions to the “main” work, but as a way to honor and recognize the complexity of our differences as we come together.
The astonishing invitation: to decisively transcend the belief that some lives are worth more than others, and being willing first to live for that truth, second to give for it, third to sacrifice when necessary, and fourth - in very rare circumstances - to be willing to die to protect the vulnerable
It is not only entirely possible to be awake to questions of power, privilege, and difference, but to discover that it is a deep source of delight to ask myself how I can serve from my gifts the needs of others, and a deeply healing path to discern my needs and who to ask for help.
“Men’s work” cannot be complete if it is led only by men.
People who have been socialized as men in a gender-binary or patriarchal society need to be healed together, but not so they can stay separate from people who have been socialized as women or who experience their gender as expansive beyond simply “male” or “female”. The point is Beloved Community, which is not a weak but a fierce concept - and while there is value in cohorts like “men’s groups”, just as there is value in a book group or a community baseball league, not to mention a movement to build affordable housing for people who have been economically excluded, a dedicated attempt at curing cancer, or to bring about a true, equitable, deep democracy, in the end these cohorts mean less (and sometimes even defeat their own purpose) if they remain inwardly focused. Part of the point of men’s work may be that we wouldn’t need men’s work anymore.
The manosphere is a bad answer to a good question. The best criticism is to offer an energized response of creative, courageous, leadership-as-service that is not only the right thing to do, but will attract some guys who are currently hypnotized by, or settling for, outwardly macho but inwardly actually deeply insecure ways of being; so insecure that they will sometimes literally harm people because they can’t cope with diversity or the idea of sharing power.
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