by Peter Blood

Men have tended to dominate the leadership of most faith communities over the centuries, in spite of the fact that the membership of many churches is usually disproportionately female. This is no accident. It is my experience that men’s upbringing provides significant barriers to a close relationship with God. Modern middle and upper class white men in the U.S. are taught to be strong, independent, intellectually sharp, “in charge”, and to avoid vulnerability and emotionality.

As a white male heterosexual upper middle class male who was the son and grandson of highly competent and overly ‘in charge” New Englanders, I have had a life-long challenge trying to learn the path of holy dependency and open-hearted willingness in relationship to God.

This seems to me to be in direct contradiction to the call to lean on God and turn over one’s life to the One at the heart of all. I like to refer to this counter-intuitive imperative for men as “holy dependency”.

I wrote a paper for the two year “spiritual direction” training program I took at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation on men’s struggles to be vulnerable. This paper was later published in the Journal of Christian Healing as Healing the Male Heart: The Beatitudes as Radical Model for Masculinity.

I dealt with this topic in more detail at a talk I gave at Ohio Yearly Meeting sessions held in Barnesville in 2009. Although the main topic of the talk was “Experiencing God’s Love through Health Changes”, I felt called to speak as well about the barriers I have felt as a man to a life of willingness and inward trust towards God.

I have been involved in “men’s work” since 1969. I was part of a collective of the Movement for New Society called Men Against Patriarchy in the late 1970’s. We led anti-sexism workshops for men in the Philadelphia area. As part of this group I co-authored with George Lakey and others a manifesto entitled “Understanding and Fighting Sexism: A Call to Men”, which was later reprinted in a larger collection called Off Their Backs & Onto Our Own Two Feet, published by New Society Publishers.

I also co-led the annual gathering of Quakers in Pastoral Care & Counseling (QPCC) in 2001 with Jesse Paledofsky, Worth Hartman & Ben Tousley on the subject of “Ministering to the Male Soul.”