Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation Quotes

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Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and...

Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

If you do not acquire good training in detachment, you may attach to all the wrong things.

Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality.

Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

True baptism allows us to reframe, and contain, the reality of evil, without needing to blame anyone else, without any need for shame or vengeance. We are all in this together, and our common wound shows itself in different ways.

Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

Pain and suffering that are not transformed are usually projected onto others.

Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

With improved historical records, and easier access to them, we actually have better reasons for hating one another, for anger and violence toward one another.

Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment instead. It is such a willingness to live with bewilderment that characterizes the true wise man.

Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

Ability to laugh at evil, to relativize symbols without dismissing them is usually a sign of a rather healthy person. Puritans and reformers can never laugh.

Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners.

Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

The soul needs meaning as much as the body needs food.

Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

Final authority in the spiritual world does not tend to come from any kind of agenda success but from some kind of suffering. Insecurity and impermanence are the best spiritual teachers.

Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation