Healing Across Decades
by Ned Leonard
I arrived at my Men’s Rites of Passage (MROP) at Shrine Mont, Virginia, with ‘daddy issues’ I didn’t know I had.
The multi-day initiation process scraped me to my spiritual core. The True Self that Fr. Richard Rohr long ago convinced me existed and which I’d been seeking through Centering Prayer was right there, awaiting my arrival in the liminal space the MROP creates.
I’ve experienced church-oriented weekend retreats. Some helped accelerate my 39-year 12-Step recovery process. But in the months before my MROP, I was beginning to experience flashes of seething anger. They erupted out of nowhere, and I was losing the ability to stuff them away effectively. The inexplicable episodes were coming more frequently. I concluded depression must be stalking me again and sought a therapist.
Fifteen minutes into my session, I was assured that I wasn’t depressed; I was oppressed. She hypothesized my path to further recovery lay in the Al-Anon program. “But, but, I’m not living with an active alcoholic!” Even so, I found a meeting, and something in it began to work. I kept attending.
After a meeting one morning, two men approached me and said I seemed familiar with Fr. Richard Rohr. Did I know that a Rohr-devised men’s retreat would be taking place at Shrine Mont in about six weeks? They were going; I should check it out. A few weeks later, the three of us headed up the Shenandoah Valley for our Men’s Rite of Passage.
As suggested, I arrived with a photo of me as a young boy. I’m age 7 and in a rumpled flannel shirt. I know I’m wearing Red Wing Tuffy boots, although you can’t see them in the school photo. I’ve been in Alaska just over a month since my brother, mother, father, and I traversed the lower 48 in a 1955 Mercury sedan and took the Al-Can Highway up to Elmendorf Air Force Base. The suggested token of remembrance I chose to bring was a small brown ivory carving of a fur seal that my father wore on the slide of his bolo tie.
I realized my dad really was with me 40 years after his death when I was asked to articulate the voice in my head that told me I’d never quite measured up. That voice, reduced to a crippling phrase, echoed repeatedly as I made my way through a gauntlet of 50 men toward a comforting broad shoulder and an embrace that unreservedly affirmed me.
The next day, in silence since the night before, I sat among a small cluster of stones beside a path on North Mountain. I meditated on my surroundings and the truths being revealed to me, one by one. To find the spot, I’d cupped the ivory seal pup in my hands, using him as a compass to lead me to the place where I would spend six hours in contemplation. Using my unfolded hanky as a corporal, I’d created a sort of altar: my picture, the Five Truths, and the seal. Tall trees on the other side of a gully had fallen, creating a cruciform pattern on the hillside.
Unexpectedly, late in the afternoon, people began using that obscure path I was sitting by. I soon realized it served as a shortcut. As I sat there, my back to the trail, some ignored my presence. Others noticed and stopped talking until they’d passed. Then came The Gift.
I heard a young boy approaching, full of questions and observations, talking with his father. They spotted me and silently passed. When they were nearly out of earshot, I heard the boy, curious, ask what that man was doing back there.
I don’t know what his father replied (though I’m certain he did), because a wave of emotion overcame me. My heart was pounding; tears coursed down my cheeks and dripped onto my shirt. The sobs of an uninitiated boy erupted from the 74-year-old man he’d become.
The MROP opened the door to the most profound spiritual experience of my life, aside from being present as my two children came into the world and took their first breaths.
No prior initiation -- whether as a Boy Scout into the Order of the Arrow, as a DeMolay, or through my adult Baptism and Confirmation -- comes close to touching the depth and resonance of my MROP experience. The friendships I made at Shrine Mont have sustained me in the years since. Today I strive – hard – to live as closely as possible within my True Self as discovered during my MROP.
Ned Leonard lives in Arlington, VA