Sermons Archive
Father Figures
Father Figures
Rev. Lydia Ferrante-Roseberry
June 21, 2009 Boulder Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
SERMON
A few years back, I saw a cartoon that I’ve never forgotten. It showed a large auditorium, with only a few people sitting in it, hither and dither. Above the stage: a large sign that read: CONVENTION OF THE ADULT CHILDREN OF NORMAL PARENTS!
Lets face it, in this world, its hard to be a ‘normal’ parent. I had the most ‘normal’ parents in the world for their time, immigrants though they were, but I still needed years of therapy and plain old mid-life maturity to figure that out.
I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, in a family with very well defined parental roles. My father, a family physician, was the provider, my mother, the caretaker of the home and the children. Never did I see them operate outside of these roles within my family system. As a teen and young adult, I could only identify with the limitations that presented to my mother, who would have loved to have had a professional life. Now, I also see how limiting and stressful it must have been to my father to take on the full responsibility of being ‘provider’ in that traditional 1950s meaning of the word.
The limitations of that role have lead to limitations in his relationships with his adult children, although we are all clear that the love is there.
*****
In the early 1990s, using the work of Carl Jung, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette identified four archetypes of the mature masculine: the King, the Warrior, the Magician and the Lover. [1]
The King brings with him the energy of order and law, not only codifying what needs to be done to create a just and creative ordering, but embodying the ‘right order’ – whether that be translated as the Christian “Logos”, the Hindu “dharma” or the Chinese “Tao”. In mythology and traditional theology, the king is the male god-head, the ‘central archetype’, often seated at the center of the world. Images abound of the King-God on top of a hill, at the center of it all, bestowing orders: from Yahweh’s message to Moses on the mountaintop to the “Father God” on the mountaintop who gives Black Elk a series of revelations for his people.
But this king also has an important secondary function –that of bestowing blessing and fertility. Ancient people always associated fertility – in people, crops, herds and the natural world in general – with the creative ordering of the cosmos by the gods. In pre-patriarchal times, it was the earth Mother that was considered the primary source of fertility. But over time that was replaced by a male sacred-king archetype. The male Jewish-Christian and Muslim monotheistic god is considered responsible for creation, but never seen in partnership with an equally creative female counterpart. Likewise, in ancient Egyptian mythology, the male Sun-god Aton is responsible for putting the Nile in Egypt to ensure that land’s fertility for generations to come.
Along with fertility, the King archetype is responsible for ‘blessing’ – seeing admiring and bestowing honor upon those who deserve it. There is a beautiful ancient Egyptian painting of a Pharaoh standing in his kingly balcony, being embraced by the rays of the Father-Sun, Aton, and in turn, throwing rings of gold down to his followers.
The Warrior archetype is much maligned in our culture, and I admit to having a hard time with it myself. It represents that assertive, aggressive energy that gets things done. Its ends justify the means with this energy. Moore and Gillette remind us of what has been accomplished in history by this energy, not what has been destroyed. They use the example of the ancient Egyptians, who were for centuries a very peaceful people. After building a remarkably stable society, in about 1800 BCE, they were invaded and conquered by a fierce Semitic tribe – the Hyksos, and lost everything. In the sixteenth century BCE, the Egyptians eventually fought back. Not only did they take their own territory back from the Hyksos, but with their combination of king and warrior energy, they built a vast empire, and spread the highly advanced Egyptian art, religion and ideas over a much broader area.
Aggressive energy rouses, motivates and energizes. It is the energy of the samurai ‘do’ –always ready, trained, alert, and discerning. There is a discipline to mature Warrior energy, with both and inner and outer emphasis on control. In addition to training, the Warrior lives with awareness of his own imminent death. While Warrior energy is often destructive, the mature Warrior destroys only that which needs to be destroyed so that something new can emerge.
The Magician is the knower of special knowledge and the master of technology. In ancient cultures, these people would be the shamans, medicine men, wizards, witch doctors, and advisers to Kings. We can extend that magician purview to all knowledge that takes special knowledge and training to attain – doctors, lawyers, techies, and the like. With secret knowledge comes power.
It was the magicians along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and along the Nile who created civilization as we know it now. They invented the secrets of language, they developed mathematics, astronomy and law. They would be the equivalent to today’s ‘cultural creatives’.
Magicians often served at the pleasure of kings, offering them wisdom, but also honest appraisal of their majesty’s integrity. Merlin, King Arthur’s magician functioned in that role, helping King Arthur think things through, and in the process, sometimes deflating the King’s ego in the process.
The early Christian group the “Gnostics” were magicians, inviting people into a secret knowledge of the life and teachings of Jesus. This movement, which was centralized on self-knowledge, was not popular with those who wanted to create a hierarchical Christianity, and they were soon persecuted out of existence.
Magician energy is the archetype of the awareness and insight. Magicians only use what vastness of knowledge they have for the good of others.
The Lover is connected with the energy of vividness, aliveness, and passion. The lover is sensual – engaged with life physically through a love of nature, sex, food, touch, and smells and connected to the world empathically. The Lover archetype is not only about the sexual side of life, but about the entire experience of life. This means that while the lover craves joy and pleasure, the Lover archetype does not, and cannot shy away from pain. Within the lover, they are interconnected.
The Lover archetype scandalizes Christianity, and Judaism for that matter. But we see the lover appear in Christian mysticism, where the permeability between humanity and God is often explored through erotic imagery.
As a tradition that honors the world of the senses, Hinduism fully embraces the Lover, and is dripping with sacred love poetry, the Kama Sutra being one example. Hindu temples are also known to depict wildly erotic acts, something we’d never see at the Vatican, or even at UUA headquarters for that matter.
No one man can embody these four archetypes. One is always dominant. Yet, in what Moore and Gillette call the mature masculine, the archetypes dance together. They also bemoan the fact that in our culture today, we do little to enable boys to connect with all four of these archetypes, and mature in a balanced way.
When I was a young adult, my mother offered me sage advice: “Don’t ever expect one person to meet all your needs.” She was helping me discover mature love within myself as I maneuvered in the dating world.
But doesn’t that relate to our experiences with our parents as well?
We don’t have a choice about who our father or mother are. We get the parents we get, and, as children, expect them to be everything for us.
No father is king, warrior, magician and lover in equal balanced measure. Releasing our fathers of that expectation that they be everything we need as a guide through life, and forgiving them of their short-comings is a primary journey on the road to maturity.
There’s a saying in the psychology world that one needs to take responsibility for what one is not responsible for. No one is responsible for the family through whom they were born. No one is responsible for their early childhood. Yet, as we mature, we need to take responsibility for healing from whatever baggage our particular upbringing left us.
That is why it is so vitally important that we have other male role models in our lives.
Looking back to my late twenties and early thirties, I can see how the professional relationships I had with men who could have been my father’s age, also served to provide for me some of what my own father was unable to give me.
I had a mentoring relationship with a community organizer and Methodist minister named Don Elmer. Don essentially made a cold call to me just as I’d accepted my first community organizing job – a job that turned out to be a disaster, and which I left after three months. For years after I quit that job, Don and I met for lunch, touring many of San Francisco’s hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurants. (I sure do miss that food!) I learned a lot about the Diamond Heart work he was engaged in, and helped support him during his partner’s breast cancer, while he provided a kind, accepting ear, as I shared everything from organizing strategies, to love woes, and my discernment process for seminary. Both of us knew something much deeper was at work in what I would call our spiritual friendship, but he named it for us once. I represented the child he had never fathered. And he, I know, as magician and lover, represented those under-developed parts of my king-warrior father.
No one person can be everything for you. Not even a father, for all the projections we place on that role. What a gift to have others in our lives who can provide those missing pieces for us. What a gift it is when find ourselves in those special roles for others.
I close today’s sermon with a story from the Jewish tradition.
There once was a king whose sorrow was unending, because, although he was loved by his queen, their love had not borne a child.
He offered a reward for anyone who could help the royal couple fulfill their dream.
Old woman came to visit them:
Your majesty, she said, there is no system for washing out the human waste from your kingdom, and much sickness. All the waters are the same. Use your army to dig canals through the city so that the waste may go one way and the drinking water another.
Seemed odd, but he did it.
The pestilence that had attacked the city was gone, people were healthier, but still no child.
Called her back – to kill her.
Only fulfilled part of your requirement. Give each serf and peasant a parcel of land that is enough to sustain them.
King unsure, but did it.
Serfs and peasants, for the first time in history had enough to eat.
No child!
Brought her in to kill her.
Last requirement: Dismantle the army!
Men and boys stayed home, fields better maintained, land at peace.
No child!
Brought her back
Your wife was barren, as was the land. Your people died of sickness starvation and war. Look now at your land. You have given your people health, wealth, and security and peace. You have given them a better way of life and your name will be spoken in reverence for generations. You, through acts of loving kindness, will be the father of, and remembered by, all the children of this land.
The king knew the old woman was right. His children would now number with the stars and he would be remembered forever.
On this Father’s Day, let us honor all the fathers we have among us, and indeed all the men, who be father figures without even knowing it.
© Copyright 2009 Rev. Lydia Ferrante-Roseberry. The author has given permission to reprint this piece. Any reprints must acknowledge the name of the author.
[1] Moore, Robert and Douglas Gillette. King, Warrior, Magician, Love:Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Male Masculine. Harper San Francisco, 1990.