Fathering & Being Fathered: Healing Our Capacity for Action

Many of us, even as adults, struggle to take powerful action. It might be in a specific area of our lives – work, relationships, social justice – or it may feel like it is in almost all areas. Many things influence our capacity for adult, focused action, but one important influence is our personal and collective father wounding.

 

It’s not news that over the millennia of patriarchy, both the mother and the father principles have been distorted and injured, making it hard for us to receive fully and trustingly from life, and to act with natural and humble authority.

 

These injuries take place at both personal and collective levels. Many of us have specific hurts that we received from our fathers. Others, perhaps luckier with their personal fathers, nonetheless suffer from our collective distortions of fathering.

Fathers are specific people, and Fathering is also an archetype, a principle in which we all share. We are called to Father, and to be Fathered. But the wounds make this terribly difficult.

 

Where do we find resolution for this dilemma? How do we recover our much-needed Father-strength? One resource recently presented itself to me on a pilgrimage I took to the Red Rock region of southern Utah – the land itself. (Today’s photos are all from this trip.) Most often, the earth is talked about in Mothering terms, and that makes sense.

 

And yet, on this trip, I experienced the Father-ness of the land forms I encountered: massive buttes and mesas, vast deserts, bizarre and beautiful rock formations, hardy plant and animal life. As I traveled, I felt inclined to pray to the Father at the heart of it all, and it, in its own way, responded. I felt my own father wounds experiencing healing, and a new quiet power alive in me.

 

It makes me wonder about receiving guidance and direction in life: We all need it. Now, perhaps more than ever. The problem? A lot of the direction we run into in life isn’t trustworthy, is even abusive, deserving of appropriate skepticism. However, we also can’t live our lives without external guidance which help us have a coherent and happy life. This leads to a crisis in our shared life around trust and leadership.

My sabbatical in the desert seemed to say to me: this is a call for Fathering & Being Fathered. It’s a question I am deeply exploring now, for my own growth and healing, and with respect to the cultural challenges we all face.

 

In this workshop, I hope to share this with you, for the sake of your personal healing with respect to your specific fathers, but also for our collective need to Father and be Fathered; to experience safe authority and guidance, and allow ourselves to be guided in service to our visions and the world’s needs.

 

Please consider joining me on August 9th or 11th online for a 3 hour workshop to explore these questions, and to tenderly seek for a new way forward. Go to Fathering & Being Fathered for more information and to register.