Transcript Gender Differences in Spirituality

Gender Differences in Spirituality
It is dangerous, or at least dubious, to generalise about
gender differences. Often such generalisations end up
producing stereotypes that have little resemblance to
actual men and women, and do not reflect the diversity
found not only in each gender, but also in each
individual, regardless of gender. But with this caution in
mind, I want nevertheless to risk some basic points of
difference.
Typical problems in young men’s spirituality
• Does God exist? How can I know this?
• If God does not exist, then I am wasting my time trying to
develop a spiritual life.
• Young men want to ‘square’ faith with their sense of reality; it
these do not square, they are not interested in faith; much of
their energy is poured into trying to figure out if something
infinite exists and how the finite mind might be able to know
or experience this.
The reality question
• “It is hard to sway a convinced materialist like myself from his
constant scepticism about religious matters, at least I thought
it was before this course. But it is terribly hard to continue to
oppose the idea of ‘spirit’ when it is presented in poetry and
inspirational writings. Before the course, I blocked out religion
as irrelevant to my life, it made no sense to me at all in its
conventional, archaic and drab form. But when spirituality is
expressed in poetry, passion, and subjectivity, I have to take
another look, as these expressions are inspirational and move
me in an unexpected way. I now see that emotion and spirit
can be included in my world, and I can have such elements
without straying from reality.” – Steven
Freud argued that men are oriented to the
reality principle
• Steven speaks of being ‘moved’ in an ‘unexpected way’. He is
able to change his negative views on religion once he finds
that religion is speaking to him. I often notice that young men
are concerned about the problem of reality and how to adjust
to it. Steven says he is pleased he can have spirit ‘without
straying from reality’. Modernity has conditioned our notion
of reality, defining it in materialistic terms and excluding spirit
from the real. People dare not affirm spirit in case they
become ‘unreal’ to themselves and disloyal to their concept of
the real. However once spirit has been presented as a reality
accessible to their experience, they are prepared to turn
around. The NT refers to it: metanoia.
Are boys more ‘atheistic’ than girls?
• In one of my classes, every male declared himself to
be an atheist, while only one or two females did the
same. Most females in the class said they were in
search of God; or, if not, they were agnostic. Some
males claimed the agnostic females were fencesitting, and should come over to their side! They
were accused of being closet-atheists, who were
lying to themselves. This would precipitate vigorous
debate in class.
God versus the Male Ego
But one of the young woman said:
“Why do you guys think of yourselves as atheists? What’s with
you guys? And why would you even enrol in this course on
spirituality if you have these attitudes?”
One young man ventured an awkward reply: ‘I just wanted to
find out what youse others believe’, he said, as if the matter had
nothing to do with him. But the young woman would have none
of this, and replied:
“In my view you guys are so full of yourselves that you can’t
imagine an authority greater than your own egos. That’s what
your atheism is about – a refusal to accept a higher authority.”
Many times I have listened to this kind of narrative
from my female students:
•“I am trying to discover what God means to me, and
that’s why I’m interested in spirituality. My mother is
religious but I can’t support her religion because it is
too traditional and old-fashioned for me. I sometimes
talk to her about God, but I can’t get on her
wavelength.”
•“I can’t talk to my father about God, as he dismisses
religion as nonsense. I don’t know how my mother and
father have stayed together over the years, because
mother lives for her faith and my father threw it away
when he was a young man.”
Freud claimed that women are oriented to the principle
of relationship
• In my experience, women seem less concerned about
questions of the reality or existence of God, and more
concerned about what such a relationship means for them.
The female students attracted to the spirituality course tended
to assume that mystery exists in the world, and some call this
‘God’; but the existence of a greater mystery is assumed.
What worries the young men did not worry the young
women.
I found young women were concerned about God as love. This is
not a cliché for them, but very real. They want to love God
and to be assured that God loves them, whereas for the male
students this rarely emerged as a question, in my experience.
A problem or a relationship?
• It often seemed to me that for the young men spirituality was
a puzzle to be figured out, or a problem to be solved.
Whereas the young women saw it as a possibility of a new or
different kind of relationship.
• I noticed that the expression on the faces of the men were
often puzzled, and sometimes expressed bewilderment. They
were ‘hanging in there’ nevertheless. The young women
seemed to have different facial expressions: expectation,
hope, anticipation. They seemed to enjoy the course more,
and women outnumbered men by 2 to 1.
Spirituality as Longing for the Other
• “Spirituality to me is a particular kind of longing. This longing
is almost an intense physical feeling that haunts me, and
makes me ache for something. It is quite elusive, as what I
long for is not immediate; I cannot see or touch it. It is a
longing for something that is a long way off, and often leads
me to melancholy.
•
I recognise that what I long for is impossible to grasp, but
the intensity of the feeling is strong. I cannot provide an easy
solution to this longing, and recognise that the search will be
long and hard. I am hoping that this course will help me to
understand more clearly what I am longing for.” – Leah
Great Expectations
• In my view, no young man would write this way about his
spirituality. This is a particularly feminine approach to the
spiritual quest.
• In Leah’s statement we see the incredible expectations that
students often brought to the class. Sometimes these
expectations seemed unrealistic, and destined not to be
fulfilled. However, sometimes this class could work a special
kind of magic: an idea, a thought, an intuitive statement at
the right moment, could cause a shift in perspective and set
the student on a more creative direction. Often a shift or
breakthrough occurred from what was said by other students,
and was not necessarily the result of my own input.
Feminine Interiority
• “Spirituality is a kind of inner knowing. You believe in
something that you haven’t seen before, but somehow you
know it exists.” – Gorica
• “Spirituality expresses itself differently for each person, but
for all of us it has the similar purpose of providing inner
security in times of trouble, change, or stress.” – Georgette
• “Spirituality creates meaning and gives us a sense of who we
are. It is the foundation of my life, and acts as guide, mentor
and support in times of trouble or distress. It is ‘ground’ in
me.” – Georgette
• For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Matt 11:30
• “As I work toward a more conscious and careful spirituality, I
sense that I am encouraged to develop a higher level of
responsibility in the way I live my life. Although others may
see this responsibility as a burden, I see it as a great freedom.”
– Ambika
• Spirituality as ongoing quest, journey, discovery:
• “I remain humble before my own spirituality, because I find it
has so much to teach me about itself, and about myself. My
ideas and hunches about the spirit serve me for a time, yet
they often prove inadequate and I have to cast them aside to
take on new ideas that I am presented with.” – Ambika
Women outperforming men in the course
• In my spirituality course, women constantly outshone men in
their participation in the subject, their energy and wider
reading, and in their final grades in the subject.
• When it came to interiority, I found the women were far more
articulate in tutorial discussions and in their essays. The
difference from the men was almost embarrassing to observe.
Men wrote about what they thought or believed, but rarely
did they write about their interiority with the insight and deft
touch exhibited by the women.
Is spirituality a feminine concern?
• It is important to observe that all the elements of our
discussion: soul, interiority, and rebirth come under the sign
of the feminine. The soul is feminine, and has been seen in
that light by the Greeks, who called the soul psyche (feminine
in Greek), and the Romans, for whom soul was anima, also
feminine. To discover the interior soul is a feminine mystery,
and to give birth to the spirit in the soul is a miracle of the
feminine.
• Needless to say, in our patriarchal culture, these feminine
mysteries and processes have been sorely absent. One might
almost say that the absence of spirituality in Christianity is
due to the neglect of the feminine, without which no interior
life can be possible. Not that the feminine is only found in
women. It is a psycho-spiritual possibility in men.
Drawing on the feminine in spirituality
• Spirituality appears feminine in that it is about receiving,
listening, opening before a greater mystery.
• When women engage in spirituality they appear to express a
deeply feminine aspect of their nature. When men engage in
spirituality, they meet with the obstacles of their own egos
and worldviews. These obstacles can be surmounted, but only
if they connect to the feminine inside them, the anima or soul
within the masculine.
• When it comes to spirituality, men almost face an unfair
disadvantage. They are better at religion than spirituality,
because religion is more structured and less unknown.
The Need for the feminine in religion
• We have constructed a man’s religion, for men and by men,
with a Holy Trinity which is predominantly male. A student of
mine described the Trinity as two men and a bird! The
feminine elements of spirituality, interiority and mysticism
have been frowned on or relegated to the margins of
patriarchal orthodoxy. That is why we don’t know how to ‘do’
spirituality today, and why many turn to the East to find out
how to do it.
• In the history of the West men have been suspicious of the
feminine and have often demonised it. The feminine has been
associated with the body, feeling, emotion, sexuality, nature,
creation. These are precisely the elements that are crying out
for our attention in our religion and culture today.
• Here is one example from a student of mine, Joshua:
• “The notion of God that I grew up with in the church
was, I see now, extremely limited. To think that God
disapproves of certain styles of dress, music, or
words, or any other thing that my church did not like,
seems insulting to the infinite beauty and wisdom
that is behind the creation of the universe.”
• “After ‘losing my faith’ I spent some years as
an atheist, variously an existentialist, solipsist,
nihilist, hedonist. But I was attempting to fill a
spiritual hole with an intellectual peg. This, I
think, is the problem with most of the world’s
philosophies, and goes a fair way to explaining
why philosophers tend to be so depressed,
and often insane or suicidal.”
• “When I found God again, I was amazed to
find that there was no intellectual support for
the notion of God’s existence, and yet it was
something I knew through sheer intuition. On
one occasion, I feel that I met God, not in
body or in mind, but in spirit. I felt as if the
whole world fell into place, as if it made new
sense in its own way. Everything that exists is
a product of God’s imagination, and God loves
his Creation.” – Josh
• “Experience is a fundamental part of spirituality. It is
through experience that we learn about ourselves,
others, the world, and how we relate to it all.
Experience is powerful because it is your own. What
has attracted me to practising Buddhism is its
emphasis on listening to the teachings, and
experimenting with them in our actual experience.
You are encouraged to ask questions about the
religion, such as ‘How does this relate to my life?’
and also, ‘Is this actually true?’ Then, through direct
experience of the truth of the teachings, you develop
trust in them, can realize them, and know that it is
your experience.” - Jason
• “This was what I found lacking in my education and
upbringing in Catholic institutions. At school and
again at church, I was simply told that this is the
truth, that these are the rules, and urged to believe
in and subscribe to them. I was never encouraged to
experiment with or test the church’s teachings, and
so I never developed the feeling that this was my
truth, or these were my rules. I could never embrace
what I was being taught as it all felt so alien to me,
and I felt removed from it. Mass was just a hollow
ritual, the Eucharist was cardboard. It was all quite
easy to set aside, as I had never really felt part of it.”
• “What I feel to be spiritual – the intuitive, interior or mystical
side of things – I tend to locate not in church but in nature, in
other people, and in social justice or community service.”
• “ I think it is a very sad state of affairs concerning the Catholic
church that the only way I found out about the interesting
work of Father Thomas Merton, a mystic whose writings
speak directly to me because they are so liberating, was
through reading the wonderful autobiography of the Dalai
Lama. This was the year after I finished secondary school.
Ironically, it is only now, through my growing understanding of
Buddhism, and through my readings of Merton, that I have
begun to glimpse the spirituality and mysticism of
Catholicism.” – Jason
Drawing faith out of individuals
Karl Rahner put it well when he said:
“The theological problem today is the art of
drawing religion out of an individual, not
pumping it into him or her. The art is to help
people become what they really are.”
“The future Christian will be a mystic
or he [or she] will not exist at all.”
– Karl Rahner
• “The idea that we are part of God and that
God is part of us has never been looked upon
favorably in the West. This idea is usually seen
as blasphemy; the apartness of God must be
preserved. Yet there are times when there is
nothing we could be more sure of than that
God exists and it is our communion with him
that feeds our lives. I believe every woman
and man has had communion with God
whether they recognise it as such or not;
whether they remember it or not.” - Adrian
• “But we are reluctant to refer to this
experience as ‘God’, because we say to
ourselves, ‘What could a mere nobody such as
myself have to say about such an important
subject?’ When we feel the presence of God,
many of us are afraid to call it ‘God’ because it
does not fit any image of the divine that has
been recognised in history.” – Adrian
• “It is hard to sway a convinced materialist like
myself from his constant scepticism about
religious matters, at least I thought it was
before this course. But it is terribly hard to
continue to oppose the idea of ‘spirit’ when it
is presented in poetry and inspirational
writings. Before the course, I blocked out
religion as irrelevant to my life, it made no
sense to me at all in its conventional, archaic
and drab form.” - Stephen
• “But when spirituality is expressed in poetry,
passion, and subjectivity, I have to take
another look, as these expressions are
inspirational and move me in an unexpected
way. I now see that emotion and spirit can be
included in my world, and I can have such
elements without straying from reality.”
– Steven
• The philosopher of religion Bernard Lonergan summed up
effective spiritual practice in a simple but profound sentence:
“The fruit of the truth must grow and mature on
the tree of the subject, before it can be
plucked and placed in the absolute realm.”
Bernard J. F. Lonergan, The Subject (Milwaukee: Marquette
University Press, 1968), p. 3.
Bumper sticker seen in traffic:
“God is dead” - Nietzsche
“Nietzsche is dead” - God