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Purpose: To experience solidarity, support, guidance, and accountability in our unique manifestation of our sacred manhood and specifically in its expression as fathers.
Need: In our respective cultures and our society at large, fatherhood as it was once understood and enacted is rightfully being challenged and threatened. For millennia in both the West and East, misogynistic regimes of power and privilege have provided men with the security of being told what and how Manhood and Fatherhood were to be felt and expressed. In this post-feminist era, boys are experiencing a crisis of identity as they anticipate and transition to being men. As homosexuality gains wider acceptance within our society, traditional manhood is yet further being challenged. The stereotypes of the past are no longer socially acceptable nor tolerated. Manhood as it might traditionally have been seen is on the chopping block.
However, in many ways, the growing intolerance (both in women and in men themselves) of traditional male stereotypes has left us with a vacuum in our society of models after which we may shape ourselves in this new age. As conscious men, we flounder in this state of mind because, though we repudiate our society’s sanctioned traits such as detachment, emotional neutrality, exclusive and judgmental rationality, physical dominance, and the like, we have little to no idea what it means to be a man if not these things. While we recognize the far-reaching damage that such manhood has led to, we also fear what appears to be the alternative presented, which is to merely cover such manhood up with ‘female’ behaviors and traits.
We are left in a quandary then: to be socially acceptable, ‘real’ men who in their attempts to prove just how manly they are leave in their wake a trail of hurt and fear; or to be ‘sissys’ and soft, cultivating stereotypical female traits.
Neither option seems viable, however, for in many respects we know that there must be something more. From the depths of our unconscious we have a deep yearning for some other way to be men than the ways we have been told and judged by. For many there is a sense of having been cheated because this yearning from within and the expectations from without have left us with a bleak outlook. Either we heed the voice within and face rejection, misunderstanding, and ostracizing or we opt for acceptance, inclusion, and social validity and ignore our own truth.
Those who would pursue the inner voice that calls us to be New Men therefore need support, for the New Men we seek to be are NOT lone rangers. They are strong, courageous, related men who are fully aware that the task they are called to shoulder is counter-cultural and as yet, unacceptable to the greater society. It is the task of manifesting our true Man-selves in our own psyches, families, and communities. This calling has been awoken in us as we undertake the amazing privilege and awesome responsibility of protecting, nurturing, and guiding our children into a new world.
Becoming and being Fathers requires us to inspect everything within ourselves, for we know that our children will absorb everything from our psyches. Our love for our children demands that we address our deepest fears, expunge our incongruent identities, and ultimately grow up as Men in spite of ourselves and our society. Our commitment to our children is therefore also a commitment to our authentic man-selves, not the men we have been told or given permission by others to be.
In a Ring of other men, journeying with the same commitment, we share in a common purpose even as we share our differing stories. We acknowledge that our collective wisdom is greater than our individual knowledge. We courageously state that society has failed us. Without arrogance or guilt, we realize that women, simply by virtue of not being men, cannot show us the way. And we believe that together, and only together, will we find ourselves.
And as we do so, we will change the world.
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