Initiated Men

Part 43

After about five minutes, he stopped, and I was inspired to say, “Well, of course, there’s the simple biology of it, of being male. And all the mess that creates in one’s life.”

“What mess has it created for you?” asked Ben, in his own voice.

“Wanting and getting and then not carrying through.”

“Carrying through on what?”

“Becoming something more than I was. So, I just kept wanting and getting. Women, mostly. And then…leaving them. Creating pain. Going nowhere. Not wanting to be…responsible.” I paused. “We men certainly don’t want that. There’s nothing fun about responsibility. It’s the death of freedom.”

It’s the beginning of freedom.

Now I was hearing the voice without it having to come through Ben.

This is all I can help you with, Joey. It was my grandmother speaking. I can loan you my intuition until you open the cupboard and let out your own. That’s how I found you that day. Intuition. And that intuition also told me not to go looking, but I ignored it. Your grandpa used to rape me. Nobody would ever believe a married lady could be raped. I hated him, and I hated that you would grow up to be a man who could rape. So, I did what I could to forbid that, even knowing it was wrong to do that to a child. One day, I hoped to ask your forgiveness, but then I left. I ask it now.

“My grandmother is asking me to forgive her.”

“Yes, I know. I hear her. You must do it.”

“I forgive you, Grandma Alice. I’m sorry for what my grandfather did to you. I understand your rage, the judgment you were subjected to, the injustice of it.” I paused. “As a man, I take on the wrong that my grandfather did to you, and I will protect you.”

We are at peace. We here, you there.

“I’ve wanted but never had a woman,” said Ben in his ordinary voice in our ordinary space.

I was shocked and looked at him as one young man to another.

“What? Why? I mean, a handsome, intelligent guy like you...”

“Fear.”

“Of what?”

“Getting.”

“You were afraid of getting, because it implied responsibility?” I asked.

“Yes. I saw it only as getting, not giving, not caring. And I was terrified of making someone pregnant.”

“Yeah, there’s that.”

“I couldn’t ask some girl I’d known since we were children about such things as birth control, so…”

We sat in silence. I realized Ben had answered his father’s question—or at least part of it. Being a man meant taking responsibility for bringing children into the world—or not. I said this to Ben.

“But I think I’ve taken it to the extreme,” he replied. In two beats, we both started chuckling.

“Hey, you’re young. You’ve got lots of time to catch up,” I said. “And, you haven’t done stupid teenage-boy stuff to make you feel guilty.”

“Maybe I’ll do stupid, teenage-boy stuff in my twenties,” Ben lamented.

“Not you.”

He didn’t move for several seconds, and then he nodded.

“I met a woman,” said Ben. “Her name is Amalia.” He hesitated, and I could sense he was looking at me.

I extended a silent invitation for him to continue.

He lowered his head and spoke. “I met her in the dark… in a bar in Gallup. I don’t go to bars, and neither does she. I meant to go camping that night outside of town… but instead, I went to the Turquoise Bar, where all the rez rats go. It’s a dive, but that night, it was a spirit realm. All the ancestors were there, moving among the loud young brothers, among the lonely uncles drinking beer, and among the couples dancing. I felt my father there… I felt him in me. I felt his courage in me, which is why I was able to walk up to Amalia and ask her to dance, even though I’ve never danced.” He paused. “I feel the ancestors brought us together.”

I waited for him to say more, but after the silence had gone on for long seconds, I murmured, “Ahó, brother.”

I felt the heaviness in the air around us lighten, like when the blanket over the door of the sweat lodge was thrown open. I inhaled deeply and put my hands on the ground behind me, leaned back to rest on them, and tipped my head up to look at the stars, but they weren’t there. I blinked to make sure I was seeing correctly. “I can’t see the stars,” I said, feeling like something had gone wrong with my mind. I looked at Ben, and the space around us was so black I could barely make out his seated form six feet away.

“It’s clouding up. I think it may rain. It’s been feeling more humid since the sun went down,” he said.

“The monsoons,” I murmured, wondering why I hadn’t remembered about the summer rains and insisted we bring our tents in here. It was doubtful this narrow cylinder in which we sat would protect us from a downpour. Another adventure.

Ben cleared his throat, as if reading my meandering thoughts and attempting to bring me back to why we were here.

I sat up, closed my eyes, and focused again on Ben’s father’s question. I knew there was more to the answer, but I had no idea how to find what he was so sure lay within me. It seemed my mind had clouded up, too. Was forgiving my grandmother all I needed to do to become a man? I doubted it.

“Isn’t there some ritual we can do?” I blurted. “I don’t know how to keep going with this.”

“We can make a ritual,” replied Ben calmly.

“But how? Do you know how?” The idea of “making” a ritual didn’t compute for me. Aren’t rituals handed down? I mean, of course, they were originally created by somebody, but the whole idea is to participate in a process that’s outside of what you’d normally do.

“I think, for us, we need to be silent until the right words come,” he said, in that not-quite-Ben voice. “It would be good to have something to place our mind on while we do that, though, that’s easier to sit with than trying to figure out what it means to be a man.”

“That would be a relief.”

“Let’s pray about it.”

Oh, great. Not only did I not know how to be a man, I didn’t know how to pray, either. Prayer to me meant asking God to do something I wanted Him to do for me. In fact, the only time in my life I remember praying is after my grandmother caught me. I prayed, relentlessly, that God would keep her from telling my parents—just to bring my trauma full circle as we sat in this circle of rocks beneath a circle of sky in which there used to be stars. I was quite sure that wasn’t the kind of prayer Ben was talking about.

Stop thinking! Drop your mind into your heart. See what you find there.

I shook my head slightly to settle the mental clutter and then visualized dropping my mind into my heart. Instantly, I felt calmer, more in my body. At that moment, I felt something touch the top of my head. And then my shoulder, my nose. Rain. It was starting to rain.

“We have our ritual. We have our sacred space. We have our path,” said Ben. “Our spirit selves will speak when they need to be heard.”

Here in this place, with these two sons—one of blood and one of happenstance—moving freely, embracing, consoling, responding to their uncertainty.

Ben’s pain brought me back into my blood. Disappointed his father! Disappointed me? How can I let him know how wrong he is? All those years of silence, my quiet son, how could I know your suffering? And now, to think you believe such shame is fixed in your mind for all time. I must come up with a ritual to break through this ignorance. He must talk to me as Joseph spoke to his grandmother, but he has too much fear to initiate the conversation.

“It isn’t with words, Papa,” murmured Ben. “Not for me.”

Joseph sat in silence, eyes closed, and made a space for this exchange.

I know that, of course. I know my own son. But, even now, even with a mind as large as the universe, I can’t penetrate the nature of your shame. If you won’t tell me with words, how am I to know?

“I don’t know it in words. It lives in me. It’s the color of my soul.”

This is my doing. I never told you how much I cherished you and how proud you made me. Such simple things—just sounds in a mouth—but so difficult to put breath to. Because I was weak—then. I tell you now. You’ve honored me and brought me joy every day of my life. Believe this. Rejoice in yourself as I rejoice in you.

“Maybe this is my own brain talking, trying to make me feel better.”

“It’s not that,” said young Joseph, sitting across from him. “You took me, a total stranger, to the mountains that made you and then to a sweat lodge, where men bared their souls, and I became aware of mine. These are the actions of an initiated man. I see your scars of passage, my brother, and the wounds that bore them.”

Now the rain was falling in earnest. It was cold but not chilling. There was no wind this deep into the rocks, and the rain seemed to immediately soak into the gravel. The two men sat their blankets as the water dripped from their eyelashes and fringes of their hair, soaking their clothes.

Without thought, Joseph got to his knees, crawled around the fire ring on all fours, and knelt in front of Ben. He put both hands on his friend’s shoulders and stared into his eyes. Even in the dark, even in the rain, he could see the light in there, shining through the grief. “You have made me believe I can have a good life and be a good man—a man who honors himself, a man who protects without attacking, defends without violence, embraces his responsibilities as the tokens of meaning in his life, and, maybe, someday, will be able to love without fear. You are this man, too.”

Ben stared into Joseph’s eyes and then dropped his head. With his hands still on Ben’s shoulders, Joseph could feel the trembling of his friend’s body as he wept.

“I feel your father’s love for you, his sense of loss—which is even greater than your own. He’s right here, Ben, right here with us, and he needs you to let him know you recognize your full value—to him, to all of us.” He paused a moment. “Of course, I know nothing about this, but it seems to me that spirits can go wherever they want to go. They can reside within us—temporarily, even several at once—and move around from being to being. I think some spirits can do this even when they’re in their original bodies. When they move in and out of us, our soul changes—sometimes for a moment, sometimes forever.”

After a moment, Ben said, “When my father’s spirit asked, ‘What does it mean to be a man?’ I heard the words as an accusation that I wasn’t a man of honor and never would be.”

“It was an invitation, that’s all,” said Joseph, “and we accepted. We looked at ourselves.”

The rain fell harder, creating an enormous noise even though it struck only stone and gravel. It was difficult to see anything through the curtains of water or hear a voice over the roar.

Joseph leaned forward, placed his left ear against the left side of Ben’s head, and embraced him. After several seconds, he let his friend go and crawled through the soggy gravel back to his soggy blanket in the driving rain.

“It was your chanting that brought us here,” said Joseph. “Or whoever it was chanting through you.”

As quickly as it arrived, the rain began to subside. Within five minutes, there was only a drizzle, and now the sound of running water could be heard. They sat and listened in silence for long minutes. Once again, the air grew thinner, and they returned to their usual selves.

“Do you think a flash flood is likely in here?” asked Joseph at last.

“No. Too much interference. We may get some trickles, however.” He paused. “Are you tired?”

“No, man. I’m wired. I feel lit up. I could stay awake all night.”

“That might not be a bad idea. But perhaps we should change into dry clothes—and hope it doesn’t rain again.”

This they did. Joseph had only brought one change of clothes, so he climbed into shorts and a tee shirt with a light jacket on top. Dry socks, which was the best part. Ben donned trousers and tee shirt and wrapped his bedroll blanket over his shoulders. He decided to go barefoot. With the assistance of a flashlight, they arranged their damp clothes on surrounding rocks, and then resumed their places on either side of the fire ring. Through this whole process, neither spoke, as if they’d received the same signal at the same moment to be silent. Which they remained.

Initiated Men is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback versions here.