Shipwrecks and renewal
Alan Heeks considers the need for older men to re-invent themselves
Somewhere between their mid-forties and late seventies all men will face a series of major or minor shipwrecks: redundancy, retirement, divorce, kids leaving home, health problems. Every shipwreck contains a heartbreak and a gift: there is a loss to grieve and the freedom of being cast up on an unknown shore. There is the challenge of making fresh choices. What is most poignant about these shipwrecks is that many men do not have the skills to reinvent themselves and to make the best of these situations.
There are good reasons why such shipwrecks are harder for maturing men than others. Men often identify and value themselves by externals – work, wife, children. Beyond fifty they are losing big, long-term parts of themselves that cannot easily be replaced, such as health, career, maybe marriage. Many men lack the emotional and social skills and the spiritual connection to feel centred, find support and embrace the opportunities which these losses can bring.
Where to turn?
As a man in his sixties, part of two ongoing men’s groups, and having led numerous workshops and retreats for men, I have explored these issues a lot and am now writing a book about them. Maturing men who seek metaphorical lifejackets, compasses and survival training for shipwrecks, will find surprisingly little by way of books, websites or workshops.
Whilst there is an extensive and lively men’s movement in the United States, there is not much on offer in the United Kingdom. Woodbrooke offers occasional men’s weekends. There are men’s rites of passage groups, which combine Christian and pre-Christian elements, created by an American Franciscan Richard Rohr. They are also available in the UK.
At root, these major shipwrecks can be seen as a spiritual crisis, posing such existential questions as ‘Who am I? Where am I going? What is my purpose in life?’ Poignantly, we can see that many men in this life stage are unwilling, or unable, to meet their crises at this level. They often take refuge in a wide range of escapist responses, many of them addictive.
The dark wood
A good map and compass for such crises is The Hero’s Journey, created by Joseph Campbell, an American anthropologist who studied the myths and legends of many native cultures and identified key stages of transformation. I have used this map with many men’s groups and have always found it helpful. Central in this process is the ‘dark wood’. It is equivalent to the shipwreck. This is what TS Eliot describes in the ‘Four Quartets’:
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know,
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In other words, the willingness to let go of the mask, to be swept overboard, fall into the depths, let go of all the structures of habits and self-beliefs, is central to the process of growth and transformation. We know that near-death experiences often connect people with the divine and these shipwrecks are at least a death of the ego, maybe more.
Prayers of the cosmos
One of the best processes for finding and deepening this spiritual connection, which I have found, is working with Jesus’ Beatitudes in the extended translation by Neil Douglas-Klotz, from the original Aramaic, in his book Prayers of the Cosmos. It is clear from Neil’s explanation that the translators who brought us the Bible did not understand a piece of colloquial Aramaic when they wrote ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven’. Neil’s extended translation of the first Beatitude is:
Happy and aligned with the One are those who find their home in the breathing; to them belong the inner Kingdom and Queendom of Heaven.
Prayers of the Cosmos includes extended translations, explanations of key words, as well as body prayers and meditations that enable one to experience the teachings more deeply, for both the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes. If one follows the Beatitudes in sequence, they offer a superb healing and retreat process. The third Beatitude has suffered as badly in translation as the first. The King James version, ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth’, always baffled me. Neil translates this as:
Healthy are those who have softened what is rigid within; they shall receive physical vigour and strength from the universe.
This is a profound way of understanding what is needed in the shipwreck letting-go. The Aramaic rukha, a key word in the first Beatitude, means both physical breath and spirit. Hence the spiritual journey, whether you are drowning or not, begins with every breath you take and the realisation that there is divinity in this.
Expression
Along with finding this spiritual contact, another key step for maturing men is to find the skills and courage to feel, express and hear emotions. This lack of emotional intelligence, so well explored by Daniel Goleman in his books, is a burden of men’s conditioning. Many men depend upon their wife and their work circle for support and social contacts. If these links are shipwrecked in the maturing years, they lack the skills to reach out, make friends and find new support. Every shipwreck is a blessing as well as a loss and I am hopeful that in coming years we will see many more maturing men learning to find the blessings.
For more of Alan’s insights for maturing men: www.menbeyond50.blogspot.com
The next weekend groups for ‘Men Beyond 50’ are 26-29 April and 6-8 July, see: www.menbeyond50.net
You need to login to read subscriber-only content and/or comment on articles.