They sing of love and courage and spiritual awakenings. Of sea journeys and mystical roots and the wisdom of fish. They sing of Maui and Jesus and hidden things that have no name. They pluck notes from the surf and rhythms from the tide and melodies from the currents of Time. They've been doing this for thousands of years -- old men, married men, young men, and boys. This is how male culture is transmitted...

We are water. Thinking water. And when we act like it our lives begin to flow...

You must act, but let go of the results of your actions
-- Bhagavad Gita

The enemy is not pain, but fear of pain
-- Fr. Richard Rohr

The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self
-- Albert Einstein

Confusion is mightier than the sword
-- Abbie Hoffman

The opposite of Hope is not Despair, but Acceptance
-- Krishnamurti

Heaven does nothing
Earth does nothing
From the union of these
    all things proceed
    all things are made
All things come from nowhere

Heaven and Earth do nothing
Yet there is nothing
They do not do
-- Chang Tzu

God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere
-- Meister Eckhart

Just raising consciousness is not enough. You must dare to love
-- Bede Griffiths

Love your enemy, and pray for those who persecute you
-- Jesus

The highest good is like water
Water gives life to the ten thousand things
And does not strive

It flows in places men reject
And so is like the Tao

No fight: No blame
-- Lao Tzu

WATER PEOPLE is a warm current that will inspire you and soothe you and strengthen you. A Stream of Meaning that will propel you straight to the Center of Life.

If you know someone bobbing and sputtering in the heavy surf of life, toss them a gift that will calm their soul and smooth their strokes. Toss them a copy of WATER PEOPLE.

Today I'm trying to address the topic of male-flavored spirituality

Richard Rohr, who had those great things to say about grandfathers, has this to say about masculine spirituality: "A masculine spirituality would emphasize action over theory, service rather than religious discussions, speaking the truth over social graces, and doing justice over looking nice. Without a complementary masculine side spirituality becomes overly feminine."

According to Rohr, who is a renegade Catholic priest, "Much of the modern sophisticated church is swirling in the feminine. It is one of the main reasons that doers, movers, shakers, and change agents have largely given up on church people and church groups. A false feminine spirituality is the trap of those with lots of leisure, luxury and liberal ideas. They have the option "not to do" -- not to do anything that makes them feel uncomfortable. Their very liberalism becomes an inoculation against the radical teachings of the Gospel, or Torah, or Koran, or Bhagavad Gita, or the Tao".

Ouch! That makes me fidget. I suspect it makes some of you fidget too. Rohr is asking us to think about how radical spiritual teachings really are -- about how, thousands of years later, they still grate against the presumptions of a highly commercial society.

There'll be more opportunities for us to fidget during this service. So remember...it's OK to fidget. I'll try to warn you when something to fidget about is coming up. Sometimes someone's heartfelt version of the truth is not very pretty or nice. Sometimes it's offensive and doesn't fit into our brains that easily. Male-flavored spirituality is like that. It's a little raw and loose around the edges.

Let me say a few words in general about spirituality, and then I'll zero in on male-flavored spirituality.

The entire universe is falling apart. We call that entropy. Except one force opposes entropy, and we call that evolution -- life organizing itself into more complex forms. The thing that drives evolution is called chaos, chaos theory, the constant experimentation of living and non-living forms.

Eons ago chaos experimented on a grassland ape to produce a larger brain. We still have that larger brain. One of the products of this larger brain was an awareness that invisible forces surround us and influence our lives. Gravity is one obvious invisible force. It's all around us, and we can't see it, and for all our science we still don't even know what it is.

Another product of this larger brain was fear. Fear of all the invisible forces that surround us. And we evolved a technique for dealing with our large brains and our large fears. Praying. Praying to relieve our fears. We are the biological heirs, the evolutionary heirs, of people who prayed to relieve their fears. It's my contention that praying is as much a product of evolution as is a giraffe or a hummingbird or our large brains. The most successful human beings -- our ancestors, our grandfathers -- the ones who passed on their genes to us -- were the ones who prayed. Every human culture has art and dance and music. And every human culture prays.

So let me say something about the elements of male spirituality:

1. Prayer is a recognition of the fundamental separation between man and god. Generally speaking, when you pray, you pray TO something: the supreme consciousness, the Great Spirit, the life force, the source of creation. This thing, whatever it is, is bigger and smarter than we are, and we pray to come into harmony with its will. A basic tenet of male-flavored spirituality is that "I am not God. I pray TO God."

   One way to understand this concept of the fundamental separation of man from God is to examine the opposite. Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin were not god-fearing men. They thought they were gods. They answered to no power higher than themselves. When men like this get into power the amount of human suffering they cause is incomprehensible.

   Male spirituality is outward-looking, not inward-looking. Outward-looking. It's not about us. It's about something much bigger than us...And we pray to it, this big thing, and ask it to respond to us -- to send us some insight of meaning and wisdom.

2. The intention of male spirituality is annihilation of ego. Annihilation of ego.

   The thing that's afraid when you are afraid is your ego. If you get rid of your ego there's no way to be afraid. The thing that gets afraid -- your ego -- is gone from your mind. When you pray to God you dissolve yourself in Him and move outside your ego. Praying transcends ego and removes fear. Praying is a part of our hereditary, biological make-up.

3. OK, here's something to fidget about. Get ready. Is God a He?

   To many many men, and some women, God is an invisible, formless, MASCULINE presence. Invisible, formless, masculine. To many many men, and some women, God is not a nurturer, he is a creator. He did not nurture and coax the universe into existence -- he made a Big Bang. It was a GUY THING. Loud, messy, explosive, riddled with problems -- and yet, suddenly there was something, where before there had been nothing.

   Let's look at the myth of Jesus. Jesus spent his whole life trying to find his Father, trying to reconnect with his Father. What was that about?...The absence of his father was a hole in his heart -- a hole that many young men feel in their hearts. Jesus was searching for a strong, fair, ethical, responsible, cosmic source of healthy masculinity...So are a lot of the gang bangers in our inner cities today -- kids from broken homes where divorce and welfare have pushed the fathers out of the families. These days ethical, responsible male leadership is as hard to find as...new Beatles songs...or a Wall Street broker handing out sandwiches to homeless people. The most successful men in our society are not the fairest, or most ethical, or most compassionate -- they are the scoundrels and cheats.

   My heros were assassinated. Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. Men hunger for ethical role models. Men need to seek an ideal of healthy masculinity somewhere. Maybe the best place is up in the sky.

   So please don't trivialize men or women who are looking for an invisible, formless masculine presence. They are seeking something very important to them. They are looking for a missing part of themselves. They are seeking a cure for the Father Wound. They are looking outward for truth and meaning, in a place beyond their ego, beyond self-concern -- and that is good.

4. One last point about male-flavored spirituality. I had to go all the way to India to learn this.

   In America we often tend to confuse psychic things and spiritual things. Psychic things are products of the mind, the psyche. Spiritual things are beyond color and form and sound and words. At the very extreme outer limits of what we can think and feel and imagine is where psychic phenomena stop and spiritual phenomena begin.

   They're both invisible. But they're different. And the easy way to tell them apart is that psychic things are about ego. Spiritual things are beyond ego.

   "Will my daughter marry a millionaire?" is a psychic question. Ego. "How can I discover my true self?" is a psychic question.

   "What is the will of the Life Force?...How can I dissolve myself in it? Surrender myself to it? Serve it?" These are spiritual questions. Beyond ego. Beyond a personal agenda.

   Male spirituality is definitely weighted more toward spiritual questions than psychic questions.

"We spend our lives running after pleasure and running away from pain. It's the realm of endless opposition. The spiritual life begins where this race ends."

(pause)

Male spirit is outward-looking.

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