Sermons

Minister: Rev. Dr. Duncan Newcomer | My credential here is that I had the wisdom to predict the big tidal shift in congressional representation toward a higher percentage of women.

But that credential is not going to keep me out of the trouble I’m in here talking about the ascendancy of woman and the role of men.

It’s not really the best frying pan to be in.

I guess I have another credential. I wrote book called “Desperately Seeking Mary” about the psychological and spiritual journey toward the sacred feminine. From my own experience with Mary and Child at Chartres Cathedral in France in 2009 I have continues to find more and more religious and political truth in the ascendancy of the Feminine.

You owe this situation to the fact that there is still one woman, Margaret, who can trust one man, me, to talk about the role of women in our coming world.

I plan to honor her trust, and yours.

So here’s the deal.

One, I believe the two great catastrophes facing us—the end of earth and the end of civilization as we’ve known it, those two possible apocalypses can be, and in some sense will be, the spectacular rebirth of both the planet and culture.

Mostly likely neither Earth nor society will look much like how they look today in the not terribly distant future. But we have reason to believe there will be another renaissance, and we can choose to have that faith.

I heard a story recently that I can only remember the highlights. A famous professor’s young son came to him one day crying and in real anguish.

He had been learning about world history, the wars, and the real threats of climate change. The boy went on and on naming all the terrible things that he could now imagine knowing what he knew.

It reminded me actually of when I was 16 lying on the living room rug of our house in Kansas City finishing the novel “On The Beach” by Nevil Shute and reading about the plight of the destroyed world and the city of San Francisco after the nuclear war had ended. I was terrified and felt sick to my stomach. I can still recall, almost re-feel, that dread and emptiness. And in 1959 that was not an unreasonable story for the future.

Yet wonderful and terrible things have happened in the 50 years since then. And wonder and terror will be in our future. But can there be a winner. Can wonder beat terror?

So the professor first said,” So what’s the problem?” Then he put this arm around his young son and gave him a brief rundown of all the dark things that happened at the end of the Middle Ages, the wars, the plagues, the tribal societies and ignorance, and then he said “And do you know what happened next, son, The Renaissance. And the boy knew enough to want to go back to his books and read up on the Renaissance.

Now the uncertainty here is enough to drive us crazy and may perhaps only be met by a leap of faith. But there are two factors worth holding on to. One, the remarkable ability of the earth, its biology, its geology, its vegetation and waters, to renew and adapt and continue to grow and grow and grow, And, two, the human love of life itself in our ingenuous way of being.

So now in the short run we have two opportunities. One is to learn to love the earth so much and in such a deep and real way that we act as if it is sacred and do things, real things, to help save it or a remnant of it.

And two, we redefine what it means to be a man, so that women succeed at releasing all the pent up love and wisdom and power and generativity they have been brooding over for 30,000 years. Masculinity can be redefined. It is only a social construction of reality in the first place. The great myths of masculine initiation have been necessary because we have nothing like the sexual generativity of women and birthing.

The ascendency of women is simple. Women do not have the 30,000 year history of killing their own gender in order to have power. In systems theory we know that system tends to repeat itself, but the male system is not going to repeat itself if the unknown alternative feminine system continues to rise, and I don’t see how it could not. Feminine ways of being are far more sustainable, natural, organic, even locally sourced.

Just the other day several million women in India spontaneously held hands and made a road way boundary of some three to four hundred miles to protest the exclusion of women in an ancient sacred shrine in India. The courts in India had ruled that it was illegal to keep women out of this ancient shrine, but old male true believers violently objected. And millions of women answer with, oh no, you don’t! Such massive spontaneous uprisings are happening globally about rape and sexual abuse as well. This humanity rising in the ascendency of the feminine side of humanity.

This kind of grass roots upheaval is everywhere, and male fundamentalists everywhere are making their Alamo Stand.

How could they win? It may be a mess. The feminine genie cannot be put back in the bottle.

SO, then what are we men to do.

One, let me say that I love being a man. I love masculinity as I know it, and how it can be, and I do not hate myself, nor my rationed supply of testosterone, or my heritage. Mozart was a man. Buddha was a man. Jesus was a man. My father was a man. I affirm that one hundred percent.

But. Here’s the reasonable path to the future as I see it.

Men have four major ways of being in the world, call archetypes. Deep instinctual patterns of action and being. King, Warrior, Lover, Magician.

King. think of King Arthur, or King David or Solomon.

Warrior. Think again of young David. Of Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Robin Hood, the Navy Seals who killed Asama Ben Laden, or think of The Samurai.

Lovers. Let me count the men. Love men, men who were lovers. Keats, The Little Prince, Cary Grant. William Blake. Lord Byron. Don Quixote. Pablo Neruda, Martin Luther King, Jr..

Magician. The mercurial men who cross boundaries and create something out of apparently noting, as if by magic. Shakespeare. Edison. Picasso. Healers. Doctors. Astrophysicist, mainly men—but not necessarily so forever.

My thought is that we man can and need to fully choose three of the four archetypes available to us, and to give up the one we have most believed in, the King.

The King is a social fiction too as is masculinity with its delicate rituals to maintain its appearance. Like the knights in “Gulliver’s Travels” who wear different colored little thread to show their important and rank, like a red tie.

So the King thing just has to be over. Just like it was over for the American Colonies in 1776 with the English King, so Kings as a archetypes world-wide are over. Dominance and the use of power itself to dominate is no longer our sole prerogative. And that is one hard thing to give it. It is not easy at all to even recognize that that is what we are doing, and then to forswear it. Most Me Too men have had no idea, really, what they were doing wrong. It was a tradition. Patriarchy is a tradition. It is collapsing and will. But it is going down hard. Not without a fight. But how can it withstand the scorn and rage of the truth of equality, freedom and justice.

We have many, ways to encourage ourselves to give up the King thing.

Abraham Lincoln is one.

Thomas Merton is another.

Lincoln had deep feminine qualities and he hated slavery of all kinds and so he did not have the instinct to be only King, even though he used great power to hold the union together.

And Thomas Merton, the great Christian Mystic Monk ultimately saw the rebirth of Christ in the world as in the image of Sophia, the woman spirit. So too the 12th century Sufi Mystic Ibn ‘Arabi. He saw Sophia, the feminine goddess of wisdom and beauty as the salvation of the world. And so she is, perhaps always has been. Just, as she has known so well how to do, bidding her time for her moment, which is now.

Amen.