Gender Differences in Spirituality

It is dangerous, or at least dubious, to generalise about gender differences. Often such generalisations end up producing stereotypes that have little resemblance to actual men and women, and do not reflect the diversity found not only in each gender, but also in each individual, regardless of gender. But with this caution in mind, I want nevertheless to risk some basic points of difference.

Typical problems in young men’s spirituality

• Does God exist? How can I know this? • If God does not exist, then I am wasting my time trying to

develop a spiritual life. • Young men want to ‘square’ faith with their sense of reality; it

these do not square, they are not interested in faith; much of their energy is poured into trying to figure out if something infinite exists and how the finite mind might be able to know or experience this.

The reality question• “It is hard to sway a convinced materialist like myself from his

constant scepticism about religious matters, at least I thought it was before this course. But it is terribly hard to continue to oppose the idea of ‘spirit’ when it is presented in poetry and inspirational writings. Before the course, I blocked out religion as irrelevant to my life, it made no sense to me at all in its conventional, archaic and drab form. But when spirituality is expressed in poetry, passion, and subjectivity, I have to take another look, as these expressions are inspirational and move me in an unexpected way. I now see that emotion and spirit can be included in my world, and I can have such elements without straying from reality.” – Steven

Freud argued that men are oriented to the reality principle

• Steven speaks of being ‘moved’ in an ‘unexpected way’. He is able to change his negative views on religion once he finds that religion is speaking to him. I often notice that young men are concerned about the problem of reality and how to adjust to it. Steven says he is pleased he can have spirit ‘without straying from reality’. Modernity has conditioned our notion of reality, defining it in materialistic terms and excluding spirit from the real. People dare not affirm spirit in case they become ‘unreal’ to themselves and disloyal to their concept of the real. However once spirit has been presented as a reality accessible to their experience, they are prepared to turn around. The NT refers to it: metanoia.

Are boys more ‘atheistic’ than girls?

• In one of my classes, every male declared himself to be an atheist, while only one or two females did the same. Most females in the class said they were in search of God; or, if not, they were agnostic. Some males claimed the agnostic females were fence-sitting, and should come over to their side! They were accused of being closet-atheists, who were lying to themselves. This would precipitate vigorous debate in class.

God versus the Male Ego But one of the young woman said: “Why do you guys think of yourselves as atheists? What’s with you guys? And why would you even enrol in this course on spirituality if you have these attitudes?” One young man ventured an awkward reply: ‘I just wanted to find out what youse others believe’, he said, as if the matter had nothing to do with him. But the young woman would have none of this, and replied: “In my view you guys are so full of yourselves that you can’t imagine an authority greater than your own egos. That’s what your atheism is about – a refusal to accept a higher authority.”

Many times I have listened to this kind of narrative from my female students: •“I am trying to discover what God means to me, and that’s why I’m interested in spirituality. My mother is religious but I can’t support her religion because it is too traditional and old-fashioned for me. I sometimes talk to her about God, but I can’t get on her wavelength.” •“I can’t talk to my father about God, as he dismisses religion as nonsense. I don’t know how my mother and father have stayed together over the years, because mother lives for her faith and my father threw it away when he was a young man.”

Freud claimed that women are oriented to the principle of relationship

• In my experience, women seem less concerned about questions of the reality or existence of God, and more concerned about what such a relationship means for them.

The female students attracted to the spirituality course tended to assume that mystery exists in the world, and some call this ‘God’; but the existence of a greater mystery is assumed. What worries the young men did not worry the young women.

I found young women were concerned about God as love. This is not a cliché for them, but very real. They want to love God and to be assured that God loves them, whereas for the male students this rarely emerged as a question, in my experience.

A problem or a relationship?

• It often seemed to me that for the young men spirituality was a puzzle to be figured out, or a problem to be solved. Whereas the young women saw it as a possibility of a new or different kind of relationship.

• I noticed that the expression on the faces of the men were often puzzled, and sometimes expressed bewilderment. They were ‘hanging in there’ nevertheless. The young women seemed to have different facial expressions: expectation, hope, anticipation. They seemed to enjoy the course more, and women outnumbered men by 2 to 1.

Spirituality as Longing for the Other• “Spirituality to me is a particular kind of longing. This longing

is almost an intense physical feeling that haunts me, and makes me ache for something. It is quite elusive, as what I long for is not immediate; I cannot see or touch it. It is a longing for something that is a long way off, and often leads me to melancholy.

• I recognise that what I long for is impossible to grasp, but the intensity of the feeling is strong. I cannot provide an easy solution to this longing, and recognise that the search will be long and hard. I am hoping that this course will help me to understand more clearly what I am longing for.” – Leah

Great Expectations• In my view, no young man would write this way about his

spirituality. This is a particularly feminine approach to the spiritual quest.

• In Leah’s statement we see the incredible expectations that students often brought to the class. Sometimes these expectations seemed unrealistic, and destined not to be fulfilled. However, sometimes this class could work a special kind of magic: an idea, a thought, an intuitive statement at the right moment, could cause a shift in perspective and set the student on a more creative direction. Often a shift or breakthrough occurred from what was said by other students, and was not necessarily the result of my own input.

Feminine Interiority• “Spirituality is a kind of inner knowing. You believe in

something that you haven’t seen before, but somehow you know it exists.” – Gorica

• “Spirituality expresses itself differently for each person, but for all of us it has the similar purpose of providing inner security in times of trouble, change, or stress.” – Georgette

• “Spirituality creates meaning and gives us a sense of who we are. It is the foundation of my life, and acts as guide, mentor and support in times of trouble or distress. It is ‘ground’ in me.” – Georgette

• For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Matt 11:30• “As I work toward a more conscious and careful spirituality, I

sense that I am encouraged to develop a higher level of responsibility in the way I live my life. Although others may see this responsibility as a burden, I see it as a great freedom.” – Ambika

• Spirituality as ongoing quest, journey, discovery: • “I remain humble before my own spirituality, because I find it

has so much to teach me about itself, and about myself. My ideas and hunches about the spirit serve me for a time, yet they often prove inadequate and I have to cast them aside to take on new ideas that I am presented with.” – Ambika

Women outperforming men in the course

• In my spirituality course, women constantly outshone men in their participation in the subject, their energy and wider reading, and in their final grades in the subject.

• When it came to interiority, I found the women were far more articulate in tutorial discussions and in their essays. The difference from the men was almost embarrassing to observe. Men wrote about what they thought or believed, but rarely did they write about their interiority with the insight and deft touch exhibited by the women.

Is spirituality a feminine concern?• It is important to observe that all the elements of our

discussion: soul, interiority, and rebirth come under the sign of the feminine. The soul is feminine, and has been seen in that light by the Greeks, who called the soul psyche (feminine in Greek), and the Romans, for whom soul was anima, also feminine. To discover the interior soul is a feminine mystery, and to give birth to the spirit in the soul is a miracle of the feminine.

• Needless to say, in our patriarchal culture, these feminine mysteries and processes have been sorely absent. One might almost say that the absence of spirituality in Christianity is due to the neglect of the feminine, without which no interior life can be possible. Not that the feminine is only found in women. It is a psycho-spiritual possibility in men.

Drawing on the feminine in spirituality• Spirituality appears feminine in that it is about receiving,

listening, opening before a greater mystery. • When women engage in spirituality they appear to express a

deeply feminine aspect of their nature. When men engage in spirituality, they meet with the obstacles of their own egos and worldviews. These obstacles can be surmounted, but only if they connect to the feminine inside them, the anima or soul within the masculine.

• When it comes to spirituality, men almost face an unfair disadvantage. They are better at religion than spirituality, because religion is more structured and less unknown.

The Need for the feminine in religion• We have constructed a man’s religion, for men and by men,

with a Holy Trinity which is predominantly male. A student of mine described the Trinity as two men and a bird! The feminine elements of spirituality, interiority and mysticism have been frowned on or relegated to the margins of patriarchal orthodoxy. That is why we don’t know how to ‘do’ spirituality today, and why many turn to the East to find out how to do it.

• In the history of the West men have been suspicious of the feminine and have often demonised it. The feminine has been associated with the body, feeling, emotion, sexuality, nature, creation. These are precisely the elements that are crying out for our attention in our religion and culture today.

• Here is one example from a student of mine, Joshua:

• “The notion of God that I grew up with in the church was, I see now, extremely limited. To think that God disapproves of certain styles of dress, music, or words, or any other thing that my church did not like, seems insulting to the infinite beauty and wisdom that is behind the creation of the universe.”

• “After ‘losing my faith’ I spent some years as an atheist, variously an existentialist, solipsist, nihilist, hedonist. But I was attempting to fill a spiritual hole with an intellectual peg. This, I think, is the problem with most of the world’s philosophies, and goes a fair way to explaining why philosophers tend to be so depressed, and often insane or suicidal.”

• “When I found God again, I was amazed to find that there was no intellectual support for the notion of God’s existence, and yet it was something I knew through sheer intuition. On one occasion, I feel that I met God, not in body or in mind, but in spirit. I felt as if the whole world fell into place, as if it made new sense in its own way. Everything that exists is a product of God’s imagination, and God loves his Creation.” – Josh

• “Experience is a fundamental part of spirituality. It is through experience that we learn about ourselves, others, the world, and how we relate to it all. Experience is powerful because it is your own. What has attracted me to practising Buddhism is its emphasis on listening to the teachings, and experimenting with them in our actual experience. You are encouraged to ask questions about the religion, such as ‘How does this relate to my life?’ and also, ‘Is this actually true?’ Then, through direct experience of the truth of the teachings, you develop trust in them, can realize them, and know that it is your experience.” - Jason

• “This was what I found lacking in my education and upbringing in Catholic institutions. At school and again at church, I was simply told that this is the truth, that these are the rules, and urged to believe in and subscribe to them. I was never encouraged to experiment with or test the church’s teachings, and so I never developed the feeling that this was my truth, or these were my rules. I could never embrace what I was being taught as it all felt so alien to me, and I felt removed from it. Mass was just a hollow ritual, the Eucharist was cardboard. It was all quite easy to set aside, as I had never really felt part of it.”

• “What I feel to be spiritual – the intuitive, interior or mystical side of things – I tend to locate not in church but in nature, in other people, and in social justice or community service.”

• “ I think it is a very sad state of affairs concerning the Catholic church that the only way I found out about the interesting work of Father Thomas Merton, a mystic whose writings speak directly to me because they are so liberating, was through reading the wonderful autobiography of the Dalai Lama. This was the year after I finished secondary school. Ironically, it is only now, through my growing understanding of Buddhism, and through my readings of Merton, that I have begun to glimpse the spirituality and mysticism of Catholicism.” – Jason

Drawing faith out of individuals

Karl Rahner put it well when he said:

“The theological problem today is the art of drawing religion out of an individual, not pumping it into him or her. The art is to help people become what they really are.”

“The future Christian will be a mystic

or he [or she] will not exist at all.” – Karl Rahner

• “The idea that we are part of God and that God is part of us has never been looked upon favorably in the West. This idea is usually seen as blasphemy; the apartness of God must be preserved. Yet there are times when there is nothing we could be more sure of than that God exists and it is our communion with him that feeds our lives. I believe every woman and man has had communion with God whether they recognise it as such or not; whether they remember it or not.” - Adrian

• “But we are reluctant to refer to this experience as ‘God’, because we say to ourselves, ‘What could a mere nobody such as myself have to say about such an important subject?’ When we feel the presence of God, many of us are afraid to call it ‘God’ because it does not fit any image of the divine that has been recognised in history.” – Adrian

• “It is hard to sway a convinced materialist like myself from his constant scepticism about religious matters, at least I thought it was before this course. But it is terribly hard to continue to oppose the idea of ‘spirit’ when it is presented in poetry and inspirational writings. Before the course, I blocked out religion as irrelevant to my life, it made no sense to me at all in its conventional, archaic and drab form.” - Stephen

• “But when spirituality is expressed in poetry, passion, and subjectivity, I have to take another look, as these expressions are inspirational and move me in an unexpected way. I now see that emotion and spirit can be included in my world, and I can have such elements without straying from reality.”

– Steven

• The philosopher of religion Bernard Lonergan summed up effective spiritual practice in a simple but profound sentence:

“The fruit of the truth must grow and mature on the tree of the subject, before it can be plucked and placed in the absolute realm.”

Bernard J. F. Lonergan, The Subject (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1968), p. 3.

Bumper sticker seen in traffic:

“God is dead” - Nietzsche“Nietzsche is dead” - God