Chapter 26 (3): Healing the Patriarch Within: A Personal Account of Spiritual Rebirth, the Divine Feminine, and Freedom from Toxic Masculinity
I sometimes say that I have lived two complete lives.
The first life began long before I had words for it. In many ways, it began in inherited pain: family patterns, emotional confusion, cultural conditioning, and the quiet but relentless shaping force of patriarchy. That first life lasted from my earliest beginnings through May 24, 1987. It was a life marked by confusion, restlessness, addiction, spiritual hunger, emotional injury, and a deeply embedded form of masculinity that I had absorbed without truly seeing it. It was the kind of masculinity our culture rewards in men while pretending it does not wound them: hard, defended, emotionally narrowed, spiritually undernourished, and trained to mistrust tenderness unless it appears under male authority.
My second life began when something broke open inside me.
On May 24, 1987, I had an experience that I can only describe as a visitation of the Spirit through an infinite motherly presence. It did not arrive as doctrine. It did not come through theology, institutional approval, or the permission of any religious authority. It came directly, intimately, and unmistakably. It was love, but not love as sentiment. It was a love older than fear, wiser than ideology, and more restorative than anything I had ever encountered. It held me as though I were being reborn. In that embrace, I began to understand that much of what I had been taught about God, power, manhood, suffering, and truth was radically incomplete.
What follows is my attempt to tell that story as fully as I can: the story of how I began to heal from toxic masculinity and patriarchal values through an encounter with what I came to know as the Divine Feminine; how organized religion both helped and hindered that process; how my personal metamorphosis revealed to me the deeper sickness of patriarchal culture; and why I now believe that the healing of men, women, institutions, and even our relationship with the Earth depends upon restoring a sacred balance between the masculine and feminine dimensions of life.
This is not merely a spiritual memoir. It is also an examination of a cultural disease.
Life Number One: Inheritance, Injury, and the Making of a Patriarchal Self
When I look back on the first part of my life, I see a person trying to survive forces he did not understand. I do not say that to excuse my failures, only to place them in their proper context. No one emerges into life untouched by family history. We are shaped by what we are shown, by what is withheld, by what is spoken, and by what is never allowed to be said.
My father was himself shaped by dysfunction. I came to understand, over time, that some of what he gave me was not chosen. He had been abused by an alcoholic father and suffered from unacknowledged wounding and distress, and in the tragic energy exchanges of unhealed family systems, distress is often passed down like a cursed heirloom.
My grandfather may also have suffered under a harsh paternal inheritance. The line of injury likely extended farther back than I could trace. Men wounded by men, then teaching boys that domination, emotional distance, and force are normal. Thus, history becomes psychology, and psychology becomes family culture.
My mother, by contrast, was a loving and reliable presence in my life. Corinne Beatrice Henry Paullin represented something quiet, enduring, and humanly faithful. She loved me. I knew that. Yet even love, when constrained by fear and powerlessness, can be forced into silence. There were moments when she could not protect me from the harsher energies in our home. I still remember one particular scene in which my father punished me with a belt while my mother stood by, unable to intervene. It was not only the physical event that mattered. It was the emotional lesson embedded within it: power decides, tenderness yields, and the child learns that love may exist but not always prevail.
That is one way patriarchy reproduces itself.
It does not only operate through laws, churches, governments, armies, and economies. It also lives in the body. It enters the nervous system. It shapes expectations. It teaches sons to identify strength with hardness and daughters to associate love with helpless endurance. It creates conditions in which boys are deprived of nurturing depth, then later praised for emotional limitations that are actually defensive adaptations.
I carried a chronic insecurity around love even though I knew my mother loved me. That is how deep early contradictions can go. A child may know he is loved and still feel existentially unsafe. Something in me longed for stable, unconditional holding, but the culture around me did not value such needs in boys or men. To need too much tenderness was to risk humiliation. To seek maternal depth beyond childhood was to be seen as weak, dependent, or unmanly. So, like many men, I learned to adapt outwardly while starving inwardly.
Looking back, I can also see how indifference entered me. Not because indifference was my essence, but because it was part of the emotional atmosphere I had absorbed. There was a period in my life when babies stirred little in me. In fifth through seventh grade, I teased shy girls and hurt their feelings. I did not consciously recognize the significance of those attitudes and actions, but now I do. Patriarchal culture often severs men, and growing boys, from sensitivity and receptivity, care, and wonder. It normalizes detachment. It converts vulnerability into embarrassment and tenderness into an optional accessory. In that state, even innocence can fail to awaken us.
This is one of the quieter tragedies of toxic masculinity. The phrase is often used superficially, as though it refers only to aggression, domination, or abuse. But its reach is broader. Toxic masculinity is also the deadening of reverence. It is the inability to receive beauty without controlling it. It is the reflex to rank, define, possess, or dismiss. It is the training that teaches men to live above the heart, outside the body, and at war with the feminine both within and around them.
By “the feminine,” I do not mean women reduced to stereotype. I mean that life qualities long associated with the maternal, relational, intuitive, receptive, nurturing, cyclic, embodied, and integrative dimensions of being. These qualities belong to all human beings, but patriarchy has gendered and devalued them. In doing so, it has damaged men as surely as it has oppressed women.
My first life unfolded within that damage.
It included addiction and chaos. It included searching for truth while carrying distortions I could not yet name. It included trying to become “a man” according to standards that left little room for the soul. It included participation in systems that had formed me, even when I inwardly suffered under them. I was not merely a victim of patriarchal culture. I was also one of its products, and I contributed my share towards its continued proliferation.
That recognition matters. Healing begins not when we assign blame outward, but when we become honest about the forces we have embodied.
The Wound That Motivated My Search for Truth
By the mid-1980s, the wound within me had become impossible to ignore. In 1984, at the encouragement of the Employee Assistance Program where I worked, I checked into the Care Unit at the old Lovejoy hospital, where I spent thirty days in recovery from my alcoholism. After interviewing my father, my primary addictions counselor, Claire, told me something I was not prepared to understand: my father had been trying to live his life through me my entire life. That truth landed somewhere deep inside me, but I had no framework yet with which to process it, much less to live beyond it.
I bounced between relapse and attempted recovery for the next two years. Then came what I can only call an epic fail. I descended into full darkness. After a suicide attempt following the Challenger explosion in 1986, I entered the unknown more completely. I was no longer merely trying to survive; I was searching for truth with an urgency born of spiritual desperation. I needed a reason to keep living. I needed light.
That search took me through dangerous terrain, both inwardly and outwardly. After bouncing through a variety of harrowing situations with some of the darkest characters our city had to offer, I was befriended, quite inadvertently, by an undercover federal agent. We would often talk about many things, but often I would mention to him that I had a search for truth to complete, or this trip to the dark end of life was in vain. When things became too frightening, even for him, and his relationship to me reached its limit, he physically put me into his car and drove me to my father’s house. As he dropped me off, he said words I have never forgotten:
“Bruce, I can no longer keep you safe. Your search for truth in the underworld is over. Now search for your truth with your father.”
In retrospect, those words marked a threshold. They were less an instruction than a summons. The underworld had shown me how far psychic exile could go. But truth, if I was to find it, would not be found merely in rebellion, extremity, or self-annihilation. It would have to be found in the very field of relationship that had wounded me. The father problem, the masculine wound, the family inheritance, the search for God, and the search for self were all more intertwined than I had yet understood.
I became clean and sober in 1987, just in the nick of time. My mother and father offered me meaningful and loving support for the next two and one-half years, as I had a poor paying job as an apprentice electrician. This fact is important, because it complicates any simplistic story I might tell about blame. My parents had wounded me, yes. But they also helped save me. Human beings are often mixtures of distortion and love, damage and decency. Patriarchy deforms people, but it does not erase their capacity to care.
The Culture of Patriarchy: More Than Individual Behavior
Patriarchy is often misunderstood as a complaint about men. It is not. Patriarchy is a civilizational pattern of imbalance. It is a worldview, a distribution of power, and a deep symbolic ordering of reality that privileges control over relationship, conquest over communion, hierarchy over reciprocity, abstraction over embodiment, and sanctioned authority over lived wisdom.
It is old. It is adaptive. It hides in plain sight.
Historically, patriarchal cultures have organized themselves around male control of lineage, property, warfare, law, doctrine, and public meaning. Women’s bodies become regulated. Children become shaped into roles. Spiritual authority becomes masculinized. God becomes imagined primarily as king, lord, father, judge, and ruler. Nature becomes an object, not a relation. The Earth becomes a possession rather than a living matrix of life. Economic systems then build upon these assumptions, rewarding extraction, scale, competition, and control.
This is not to say that every expression of masculine energy is harmful. Far from it. The sacred masculine has noble qualities: steadiness, discernment, protection, courage, moral clarity, devotion, structure in service of life. But patriarchy is not the sacred masculine. It is masculinity deformed by fear, separated from the heart, and enthroned above the feminine.
Once that distortion takes hold, nearly every institution begins to mirror it.
Religion can become authoritarian rather than liberating. Economics can become exploitative rather than generative. Politics can become cynical management of domination. Even science, for all its brilliance, can be interpreted through frameworks that reduce life to mechanism and dismiss forms of knowing that are relational, intuitive, and holistic.
I believe our culture’s ongoing resistance to practices that enhance intelligence, deepen empathy, and restore inner balance is not accidental. A truly integrated human being is harder to control. A person who has reconciled the masculine and feminine within is less vulnerable to manipulation by fear-based systems. A person who knows direct spiritual reality is less dependent on institutional gatekeepers. A person who recognizes the sacredness of life cannot so easily participate in economies of dehumanization.
For that reason, patriarchal culture has always had a strained, if not antagonistic, relationship with awakening.
May 24, 1987: The Beginning of My Second Life
On May 24, 1987, my life changed.
I was driving to visit my lifelong friend Randy Olson when I had an experience that interrupted the ordinary structure of perception. Into my normal awareness came an image and a presence that I can only describe as the Mona Lisa holding a baby, though the symbolism grew richer over time. What mattered most was not the image alone, but the energy accompanying it. I felt the love of the universe for the first time. Not as an idea. Not as a belief. As a reality.
I was flooded with the sense of an infinite motherly presence.
There are moments in life when language reveals its limits. This was one of them. I felt held, embraced, known, and reborn. Tears came. Awe came. Gratitude came. I had to stop and give thanks to whatever creative force had broken through to me. The experience did not flatter the ego. It dissolved it. It did not make me feel important. It made me feel profoundly loved. That is very different.
For several days, the image and the energy intermixed with my ordinary field of awareness. My body responded with what I can only call divine horripilation, waves of sacred intensity moving through me. I was not merely thinking differently. I was being changed at the level of consciousness itself.
Only later did I understand the deeper symbolic meaning. The mother holding the child was not merely an external image. It was a revelation of my own rebirth. The child was, in some sense, me. The motherly presence was healing an ancient split within me, restoring something patriarchy had driven underground. The Divine Feminine was not coming to decorate my spirituality. She was coming to save my life.
That experience changed how I saw babies. It changed how I felt about innocence. It changed how I understood love. Suddenly, what had once been met with relative indifference was now met with curiosity, wonder, and appreciation. This may seem like a small detail, but it was not. It signaled that something foundational had shifted. A defended region of the heart had opened.
Between May 24 and July 21, 1987, I had three spiritual events that continue to guide me to this day. But the first was decisive. It introduced me to a truth I had not known how to seek: that the healing of a wounded masculine self may require not more discipline, not more theology, not more obedience, but an encounter with unconditional motherly love.
Christianity, Baptism, and the Failure of Institutional Religion
At the time, I had recently returned to sobriety and resumed attendance at Hinson Baptist Church. In my earnestness to follow the right path, I accepted baptism, which was scheduled for May 28, 1987. I was trying, sincerely, to orient myself toward spiritual life. Yet what happened next revealed to me the difference between living religion and institutional religion.
When I described my experience to the minister, he did not recognize it as a direct spiritual awakening. He did not respond with wonder, humility, or curiosity. Instead, he requested that I attend training so that my “beliefs” could be brought into alignment with what the American Baptist Church accepted.
That moment was clarifying.
I had undergone a direct experience of the sacred, one that brought peace, love, and rebirth. Yet the institutional response was concern for doctrinal conformity. The minister did not understand that what had touched me lay deeper than his framework. He interpreted my experience through the needs of the institution, not through the reality of the Spirit. What he served, whether he realized it or not, was not primarily truth but structure.
This is one of the great dangers of organized religion. Once institutional preservation becomes primary, living revelation becomes threatening unless it fits approved categories. Direct spiritual experience, especially when it carries feminine symbolism or bypasses male religious authority, is often treated as suspect. Patriarchal religion cannot easily tolerate a God who arrives without permission.
My disillusionment deepened during that same period because I also needed to be tested for AIDS. In those years, the threat of dying from AIDS was terrifyingly real. I had been involved in risky relationships during darker times in my life, including with women connected to extremely promiscuous bisexual men and intravenous drug activity. I was frightened and needed support.
I found none in the Baptist Church.
Instead, I encountered moral exclusion. Those with the potential for AIDS were regarded as outcasts from God, undeserving of support or respect from the “good Christian” community. Whatever compassion Christianity proclaimed from the pulpit, it was not manifesting where it was most needed. Fear, judgment, and spiritual arrogance had overtaken mercy.
That, too, is patriarchy.
Not all cruelty looks masculine in the obvious sense. Sometimes it appears as moral certainty. Sometimes it speaks the language of purity. Sometimes it hides behind doctrine while abandoning the suffering. A religion that claims to mediate divine love but cannot stand with the vulnerable is not merely incomplete. It is spiritually compromised.
The final rupture came when the lead minister claimed that only human beings have souls and that the rest of Earth’s creatures possess no basic spiritual essence. I was aghast. To elevate humanity by denying spirit to animals is a stunning expression of self-centeredness. It places man at the center of the cosmos and reduces the rest of life to spiritually inferior matter. It is, in essence, a theological justification for domination.
No wonder the Earth is under assault.
Religion needs to be examined and reexamined, for adherence to some of its beliefs becomes a trap that prevents us from overcoming the ills of our culture, and ourselves.[/caption]
If nature is not alive with sacred value, then it becomes raw material. If animals are spiritually empty, then exploitation becomes easier. If the world exists merely for human use, then extraction can masquerade as progress. Patriarchal religion has often supported this mentality by sanctifying male hierarchy and human exceptionalism at the same time.
I began to see organized religion, at least in many of its forms, as a vehicle not only for spiritual aspiration but also for ignorance, control, and the marketing of certainty. Truth was too often treated not as a living mystery but as a proprietary asset. The result was philosophical obedience rather than awakening.
“The Father Within” and the Missing Half of the Sacred
Jesus referred to God as “the Father.” I understand the historical and symbolic context of that language, but I also believe that this single emphasis contributed, over centuries, to a severe spiritual imbalance. Whether the distortion originated in Jesus, later interpretation, translation, institutional power, or some combination of all three, the outcome is undeniable: Christianity became intensely patriarchal.
For many people, the image of God as Father may be meaningful and healing. I do not deny that. But when the divine is overwhelmingly masculinized, the feminine dimensions of sacred reality are marginalized. The maternal, nurturing, relational, and immanent aspects of divine life are pushed to the edges or replaced with sanitized substitutes. Men are encouraged to identify God with authority more than tenderness. Women are often spiritually included but symbolically subordinated.
My own healing required the opposite movement.
The God who came to me was not first a fatherly authority but an unconditional motherly love. That love supplanted the imbalance within me. It corrected not only the vestiges of my own father’s distortions, but also the larger spiritual inheritance of a culture over-identified with paternal imagery. What I encountered was not anti-masculine. It was balancing. It restored wholeness where hierarchy had ruled.
And then came the startling recognition: I was not merely loved by that presence. In some profound sense, I was that love, and so is everyone else beneath the noise of conditioning.
That realization was not an inflation of self.
It was the collapse of alienation.
Marie Schmidt and the Practice of Healing
The divine feminine women, Marie (left), my wife Sharon, and a balanced, healed me
In August of 1987, I met Marie Schmidt, a practitioner of Joel Goldsmith’s The Infinite Way, a movement rooted in mysticism and spiritual healing. She was around eighty-seven years old and taught every Sunday at the old YWCA on 10th Avenue in downtown Portland. I had seen a simple advertisement for her tape group while attending the International New Thought Alliance conference in Portland.
Marie became important in my life not because she offered spectacle, but because she embodied quiet spiritual depth.
Her group combined meditation with the taped teachings of Joel Goldsmith, a spiritual healer and mystic whose work began in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Marie had been holding these gatherings since 1962. She would sit at the front of the room, lead a fifteen-minute meditation, then play one of Joel’s hour-long cassette teachings. She had hundreds of tapes, eventually more than a thousand hours of recorded material, much of which I copied and studied intensely. I later converted many of them to digital format.
At first, I kept my distance. The group was mostly older people, and I was likely the youngest person there during the years I attended from 1987 to 1991. I was curious but cautious. Yet something in that environment felt different from the church. There was less insistence, less performance, less doctrinal enclosure. There was space.
Over time, I drew others into the orbit of that group, including friends from the International New Thought Alliance, Alcoholics Anonymous, and the Living Enrichment Center. I was hungry for truth, and I recognized that Marie possessed a kind of grounded spiritual clarity.
Then, in February of 1989, after I had broken off an engagement to Laurie H. and felt devastated, Marie offered me a healing session.
I was skeptical. I had little to lose and only some curiosity about this “healing business.” I went to her apartment in distress. We meditated together for fifteen minutes. At the end, she spoke what she heard from Spirit regarding me:
“More perfect than you are, you could never be.”
And also:
“All that is human is illusion.”
At first, those words seemed difficult to apply. How could such a statement meet the concrete pain I was carrying? Yet as I stood to leave and thanked her, I noticed something extraordinary: the emotional disturbance had vanished. I was at peace. The heartbreak that had consumed me had been lifted as though a great inner wind had blown through and carried away everything except peace and joy.
I do not claim that this made life easy or solved every difficulty thereafter. But it was real. I had been healed of that emotional wound in a way I could not explain by ordinary means.
Marie always insisted that God heals, not the individual practitioner. I respect that. She was not presenting herself as a magician. She was making herself transparent to a deeper current. And the message she gave me remained with me ever after:
More perfect than you are, you could never be.
That sentence cuts against patriarchy at its root. Patriarchal culture thrives on deficiency, comparison, performance, and control. It tells us we must earn worth through dominance, achievement, conformity, or approval. But if the deepest truth is that our essence is already held in perfection, then the entire economy of domination begins to wobble.
Marie Schmidt was an incarnation of the Divine Feminine, and I was vastly blessed through my years-long relationship with her.
Sharon, Family, and the Redemption of Relationship
Sharon is the woman on the left.
In 1989, the same year Marie helped mend a broken part of my heart, I met the woman I had been searching for my whole life. Sharon was already a strong, self-assured person when we crossed paths. She embodied the divine feminine, and her courage and commitment to growth drew me in instantly. I quickly knew she was my soul mate. More than that, she became a key architect of the second half of my life. Her presence didn’t just comfort me; it reshaped my entire world of relationships. Through our love and shared journey of spiritual growth, life revealed countless divine synchronicities. I also discovered a new depth of patience, generosity, and meaning in my relationship with my parents. I stepped into a life far beyond my greatest hopes and dreams.
This, too, was part of healing the patriarch within.
A wounded masculine identity often imagines healing as solitary conquest: self-mastery, autonomy, detachment, spiritual heroism. But much of my healing came through relationship, compromise, shared life, and tenderness. Sharon helped make those qualities livable and concrete. Our balanced energies became energetically entrained with each other, opening up both of our lives to a mystery and a majesty that defies human comprehension.
Together, in 1993, we chose to move to within two miles of my parents, sensing that as they aged they would soon need us. That choice reshaped our lives. It also reconfigured our extended family. Because we lived closer, my father’s brother and sister gradually became part of several family gatherings at our home beginning in 1995. During that period I grew to really love my uncle Ed and my aunt Susie. Uncle Ed especially captured my imagination with his stories of life and family, and I came to understand more deeply why my father was so connected with him.
Uncle Ed also possessed a gift my father rarely did: he knew how to deflect controlling energy without escalating into combat. My father finally accepted his brother for who he was, rather than for who my father imagined he should become. That lesson was not lost on me. In a family system shaped by patriarchy, one sees many forms of adaptation: compliance, resistance, collapse, rebellion, humor, grace. Uncle Ed practiced a kind of wise non-cooperation. He remains one of my great teachers in that regard.
He honored me from his deathbed by remembering the date of my birth, a gesture so simple and so human that it still moves me to tears. Memory, when joined with affection, becomes benediction.
On the advice of our physician, Sharon and I began taking vacations with my parents. Sharon and I were avid outdoors people, so it required real compromise to tone down our physical ambitions to meet the energy level of my aging parents. Yet the rewards were immense. In the year 2000, my parents, Pam, my aunt Susie, Sharon, and I traveled to Hawaii to celebrate my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. It was the trip of all our lifetimes, one of those luminous family moments that cannot be manufactured and can never be forgotten.
On that trip, at 46 years of age, my sister committed herself to pursuing degrees at Oregon State University, a decision that changed her life. My parents were never prouder than when we later watched her receive first her diploma and then her master’s degree. Growth in one family member can become a kind of collective healing. It enlarges the family imagination.
As a family, we continued to travel widely throughout North America: cruises to the Caribbean, journeys through the Yucatán Peninsula, climbing pyramids, exploring Mayan ruins, driving stretches of the Pan-American Highway through and around Costa Rica, cruising the west coast of Mexico, and generally loving life together as fully as we could. I have been blessed beyond my ability to adequately acknowledge those experiences. They affirmed the deep value of family connection and revealed that even relationships marked by old pain can become sites of joy, memory, and mutual devotion.
Eileen Bowden Retreat
In the summer of 1993, I attended a five-day retreat in Federal Way, Washington, at the Pacific Palisades retreat center overlooking Puget Sound. The retreat was led by Eileen Bowden, a student of Joel Goldsmith who had been chosen to continue teaching The Infinite Way because she “had the message,” meaning she had attained what was understood as divine Presence. Eileen lived and breathed the divine feminine presence, and she had a healing energy that infused all of her words and her relationships with others.
The retreat consisted largely of silent contemplation and meditation, with several group talks given by Eileen. She spoke extemporaneously for long stretches, not from intellectual preparation alone but from attunement to a sacred current. Our role as listeners was not merely to absorb content, but to enter a meditative state that contributed to the field of the experience.
What happened there deepened what had begun years earlier.
I became fully involved in the sacred energy of Spirit. My mind entered a stillness beyond ordinary thought. Peace and joy became total, immediate, and unmistakable. Some would call this samadhi, bliss, enlightenment, or heaven. It was a state of being even where the names ‘divine feminine’ and ‘divine masculine’ had no meaning, for it was a state beyond any verbal dualities. Names matter less than the state itself. It was beyond verbal intoxication. I carried that energy for a full week afterward.
And yet, when I returned to work as an electrician, I faced a difficult question: what is the value of enlightenment in the workplace? My co-workers were so out of touch with what I considered sacred that I could not imagine speaking openly about any of it. I felt pressure to blend in, to hide what had happened, to re-enter a world governed by rough masculinity and unspoken rules.
There again was patriarchy in one of its most mundane forms: the workplace as a theater of emotional suppression while men perform toughness, practicality, and narrowness. Anything too tender, mystical, or inward was left unspoken. I had to play by some of those rules, though inwardly I had changed. I returned with a more loving attitude and a much less aggressive perspective. Still, the split between inner truth and outer culture remained painful.
That split taught me something essential: private spiritual experience alone is not enough. If the surrounding culture remains patriarchal, then the awakened individual is pressured to conceal transformation, translate it into acceptable masculine terms, or leave potentially lucrative employment opportunities in male-dominated industries. True healing must become cultural, not merely personal.
The Alchemy of Reconciliation: Healing Generational Wounds
In the midst of this crucible of loss, an unexpected opportunity for healing emerged. My father, who had been both a source of emotional wounding throughout my childhood and young adulthood as well as a supportive family member in my adulthood, was now approaching his own transition. The man who had so frequently and rudely damaged my sense of self-esteem when I was young was now vulnerable, dependent, and in need of the very compassion he had rarely shown to me.
The contemplation of whether to extend myself to his care was one of the most difficult spiritual challenges I had ever faced. Every fiber of my being that had been shaped by past hurts wanted to respond with the same indifference he had often shown to my emotional needs. Yet something deeper—a voice of wisdom that had been cultivated through years of recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction—whispered of a different possibility.
After extensive consultation with my wife, we discussed at length the potential risks and rewards of extending our hearts and lives to the man who had caused such pain in my formative years. The decision that emerged from these conversations was not based on obligation or guilt, but on a recognition of spiritual opportunity—the chance to break generational cycles of emotional abandonment and to demonstrate a different way of being human.
In the spirit of fairness and as a tribute to my newfound sense of spiritual integrity, I felt compelled to extend the hand of love to my father in his final stretch of days. This was not forgiveness in the traditional sense—it was something far more radical. It was the recognition that every human being, regardless of their past failures or cruelties, deserves to die surrounded by love rather than isolation.
The experience of caring for my father became a masterclass in the transformative power of compassion. He would walk out into our beautiful yard that adjoined a creek, where he delighted and felt somehow completed and made whole by being surrounded by the natural world. In these moments, watching his face light up at the sight of flowers and feeling the warm sun on his skin, I saw past the role he had played in my life to the essential being that resided within him.
Something miraculous occurred during this process: for the first time in my life, I felt a complete and total unconditional love for the man who was now appearing as my father. This was not the love of a son for a father, burdened by history and expectation, but the love of one soul recognizing another soul in its journey toward the ultimate mystery.
I knew inside, with the complete authority of the spirit that resided within me, that my father was so much more than the role he had played in life. The limitations, the emotional unavailability, the wounds he had inflicted—these were not his essence but the accumulated debris of his own unhealed trauma, passed down through generations of men who had never learned to express vulnerability or genuine emotion.
There are some who thought that my father was a horse’s ass, but that is the view one sometimes gets when in second place, having been passed by his race horse of a mind. A man like my father, who lived a full life, could have his own book written about him, and not scratch the surface of all the people that he impacted, positively or negatively, and all of the experiences that he had, all of the humor that he shared, and all of the wisdom that he developed.
My sister, my wife, and I wrote several pages of “Beryl-isms”, which are quotes directly from my father about life in general. I have presented a few of his “top 50” statements, which he repeated many times over the last few years of his life. In parenthesis, I have included a few of my replies to his common statements that I used to give back to dad as part of our “conversation”..
1). Don’t wait too long to retire. People think they need to work those extra years, they work that extra one or two years, thinking they need the money, and death takes over, and they never make it to retirement
(Well, Dad, I retired early, but we will have to wait and see if that has any beneficial effect on my longevity. Right now, my main goal is to try to outlive you, oh immortal one!).
2). Oh those rich people, all of that money, and they still have to die anyway!
(And the rest of us, we have to die too, darn it!)
3). Why do you need to know, are you writing a book?
(Well, as a matter of fact I am!)
4). I really took the system, didn’t I?
(After being retired and on pension for 35 years, contributing $22,742 to your pension, and getting over one million dollars back, I would say that you did!)
5). Come back again when you can’t stay so long
(Well, I am working on that one!)
6). Don’t you have something better to be doing?
(Yes, but you are the priority of the moment, so try to enjoy it while I try not to suffer too much)
7). I sure am glad that I am retired, or is it retarded?
(Um, I won’t touch that one)
8). I might be here, but I am not all here
(Then where is the rest of you?)
9). You know, having a dog like Rocky adds 7 years to my life
(Yes but caring for your dog took 7 years off of mine!)
10). (to any waitress) Say, you sure are looking good this evening. Would you like to come home with me and serve me my favorite meal?
(Argh! So embarrassing!)
11). I am not trying to be pretty, and I never will win any beauty contests
(I can’t argue with you on that one)
12). The doctor needed a urine, stool, and semen sample, so I just left him my underwear
(Oh, boy, what a bad joke!)
13). You couldn’t hit a beach ball with a banjo! You couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn!
(Comments made to me both as a youth when pitching or batting on little league baseball teams, and while playing golf with him as a child and as an adult. His insults stopped making connection with me long ago)
14). When I get to Heaven, I am going to have a talk with the “Old Man” about my wife dying before me. Wives are supposed to outlive the husbands. Either I should have died first or we should have died at the same time
(Maybe mom finished her work before you did. In what form would you have wanted a simultaneous death, like in a murder/suicide, or in a car wreck?)
15). Son will we all meet again in heaven?
(Are you sure that you really want to hang out with the same crowd for eternity?)
16). Heaven is not ready for me yet, and Hell is afraid that I will take it over, so that is why I am still here
(Maybe you are still here to provide a few more lessons for the living. I know that I sure am getting a crash course!).
17). I am in no hurry to die. Nobody I know has ever come back from the dead and told me what a great time that they are having after death.
(Yes, and wayward religions continue to capitalize on that mortal fear, ignore the fact that heaven is here and now, and do not effectively teach us how to die to ourselves and our fears and suffering to experience heaven in advance of bodily death)
18). I provided care for you all of those years when you were young, now its your turn to take care of this old man
(I should have read the contract more carefully before my birth!)
19). You should always be best friends with your sister. Never let anything get in the way of that friendship, because she will find a way to love you to your death, as you should love her as well
(Well, Dad, you sure have shown commitment to both your brother and your sister, especially over the last twenty years. Somehow you all endeared yourselves to each other. Thank you for being a success in that aspect of family love, and overcoming the chaos created by your parent’s relationship. I think that Pam and I are on a good course right now)
And on and on it could go. My dad was a great story teller, and fountainhead of wisdom, one-liners, humor, self and other deprecation, and sarcasm. My personality was so much less colorful than my father’s, yet, it is easy to see that I truly am my father’s son. I have many of his same attitudes, and I replicated many of some of the same deficiencies in my own life that my father also experienced.
It was tough watching my father deteriorate, which began in earnest after his radiation treatment for prostate cancer in 2005. After mom died in 2009, Sharon and I had him over for dinner every evening. He was anxious, and suffered horribly from grief, and deteriorating cognitive health. I took him to the doctor’s office for treatment for depression in late 2009, and the doctor ending up prescribing anti-depressants for me instead. He continued to threaten to kill himself, and I had to locate all of his guns, and empty them. In the process of emptying his rifle, I almost shot myself in the foot, sending a bullet through his bedroom floor.
Within three more years, late in 2012, Sharon insisted that Dad have his driving competency evaluated, as he appeared to no longer be capable of driving safely. When the doctor confirmed that Dad should no longer drive, my life as I knew it came to an end. The loss of his independence also became my own loss, as well. I became responsible for 100 percent of Dad’s life, health, nutrition, meals, baths, finances, home and lawn care, and spiritual support. Dad no longer managed his life, other than dressing himself, going to the bathroom (mostly), smoking his cigars, and eating the food placed in front of him
I found a way to love that man on deeper and more profound levels, as I continued to release my own expectations of how he should be, and how he should live. His sole concerns became his love for his dog, Rocky, and maintaining residence in his own home until his own death. He had lost all short term memory, and was basically unteachable the last 5 years of his life, though he maintained his dignity, his sense of self, his recognition of his family, and his love for his children, including my wife Sharon. At the beginning of 2016, I finally hired a support person to help me with Dad’s care, a loving young woman by the name of Madison, who we are still great friends with to this day. She helped for about 15 hours per week, which went a long way to take some of the burden off of Sharon and me.
When Rocky died in June of 2016, ten days after our own dog Ginger’s death, Dad’s final thread of love and companionship with his past was snapped. He asked me over 5000 times where Rocky had disappeared to, after his dog’s death. I watch my father call out 30 times or more, Every Day, to his deceased dog, Rocky. We made up a sign for him, so that he can see, in writing, that his dog is dead, that it died of old age, and that he is ‘in heaven’. But he never truly got it, because his short-term memory was gone. At times, I felt compelled to set him straight, and tell him he is neglecting this moment, where Sharon White and i lived, and instead he was worshiping the dead, where all of his grief and losses reside, but of course he quickly lost that. My heart broke for him, and for all of us
Our presences were just not quite enough to make all OK with Dad. But, we made him as comfortable as we could until his last days. He never took one medication, nor was I about to force one onto him. Dad’s final four years were a real labor of love for me, forcing me into early retirement from work, and the experience almost tanked me. But I learned how to love another human being unconditionally and completely, though the lesson plan exacted a price from me. I am only just now coming out from under the spells of anxiety and stress around the experience of care giving for my Dad, as well as being fully present for my friend Marty for the several months prior to his own death, which occurred five days prior to Dad’s death.
The last conversation that I had with my father was 6 hours before his death.
This is what we exchanged with each other:
Dad, you are still in bed, and its 2:30 in the afternoon, what’s up, it’s such a beautiful day outside.
You know son, I am always tired now, but I am about to get up.
Well, Dad, this might be the last sunny day in a long time, so why don’t you get up, and go out on the porch and have a cigar? I’ll put a chocolate bar on your table, and a drink for you.
I’ll get right up son. By the way, who is caring for me this evening?
Well, Dad, Madison is caring for you this evening.
Oh, poor Madison!
Dad, Madison benefits by being with you, as you do with her.
I will be with you beginning this Sunday morning, and I will be with you for the next three weeks as usual. You know we are planning one final trip to Hawaii with you, right?
Oh son, I am happy just staying at home. I have everything that I need here.
Well, OK dad. I am going to leave now, as I need to prepare for Marty’s funeral tomorrow.
When will I see you again, son?
Dad, it will be Sunday morning, OK?
OK, son, you know that I am dependent on you. Please take care of yourself.
Oh, dad, you know that I am dependent on you, too. You be careful too!
I love you, son.
I love you too, Dad.
I leave his room, not knowing this is to be our last exchange.
The next day, at 10:58 am, as I stand in back of the hearse, as a pall bearer in Marty Crouch’s funeral, I prepare to receive Marty’s body to place into the hearse. I receive a call from Madison, which I cannot take, so I hand the phone to Sharon. Sharon is informed that my father is deceased. Sharon has to leave the service for our friend and tend to my fathers’ body.
Oh, father, you really knew how to place your unique stamp on my life, didn’t you?
Through my relationship with my parents, I witnessed very early in life how women are oppressed, and how ignorant men try to dominate and control anyone or anything, including those that appear “unlike themselves and their own expectations”. It took many years before my mother was able to stand up to my sometimes loud- mouthed, judgmental, aggressive, harsh, and insensitive father. It took me 61 years to face down completely my own internalized image of what a man is, as well. To finally see how completely that negative ‘male’ internal structure permeates human consciousness in general, and in my own unconscious mind, in all of its diverse, obvious and subtle forms, finally transformed me. My own repressed nature found the ability to communicate its message to me and revealed itself in the form of the “divine feminine”. I I continue to refer to that activity as my “second birth” as a human being.
My father died on September 15, 2017. Dad died in his own bedroom on a Friday evening, and had the look of awe and wonder in his eyes and face. He had found his promised land, where loneliness, depression, and dementia disappears, and where ‘bums’ are converted back into the saints and angels that they always were, but were rarely recognized by others as being so. It took nearly my entire life to release my own misunderstanding and judgement towards my father, and allow for him to express himself in the only way that he knew how to, while still providing a loving protection for him in his time of greatest need.
In retrospect, my father only appeared to cast a shadow over my life. It was up to me to find my own unique voice in my search for truth, to rise from my own self-imposed shadows, and to be with him at last as a partner on love’s endless journey. Those who never learned to love my father missed one of the precious gifts of my life, though grace offers many other opportunities to bring light into our own. The healing journey I shared with him might appear miraculous to some, yet it is also ordinary in the deepest spiritual sense: one soul slowly releasing judgment and discovering compassion. I have no heirs, so in one sense that specific healing dies with me. Yet the love we shared in our family life will live forever in the mind and heart of God.
Patriarchal Religion, Economic Agendas, and Historical Continuity
The sickness I have been describing is not confined to private relationships or churches. Patriarchy persists because it is historically reinforced through economic and political structures.
A society built around control, ownership, competition, and hierarchy will naturally favor masculinized values severed from compassion. Established economic agendas often depend on people remaining fragmented: consumers instead of citizens, workers instead of whole beings, achievers instead of contemplatives. Exhausted people do not ask deeper questions. Spiritually disconnected people are more easily managed.
Patriarchal values support such economies because they normalize domination. If men are trained to suppress vulnerability and pursue status, they become easier to mobilize into systems of production, war, and competition. If women’s labor, both emotional and domestic, is undervalued, the system extracts even more while pretending that care is a private obligation rather than a public foundation. If nature is treated as inert resource, then environmental destruction becomes economically rational.
Historically, many pre-modern cultures held more visible reverence for feminine divinity and the cyclical, nurturing mysteries of existence. Matrilineal societies, goddess traditions, and earth-based spiritualities offered a counterpoint—sometimes an antidote—to the distortions of patriarchal order. Here the sacred was not only transcendent and paternal but also immanent, embodied, and maternal: the Earth as Mother, the cosmos as womb, the Divine as a dance of generative opposites.
But as civilizations centralized power—through monarchy, empire, institutional religions—the feminine was driven underground, burned at the stake, or bound in myth as either seductress or saint, seldom sovereign. The passage into “progress” often came at the price of a silenced Mother, both literal and symbolic. Colonialism exported this rupture, imposing not only foreign rule but also foreign gods, foreign gender roles, and a model of spirit that privileged conquest, rationality, and hierarchy over rootedness, community, and communion.
The modern world, with its technological marvels and industrial appetites, has inherited these imbalances as a kind of spiritual amnesia. We diagnose the symptoms—climate crisis, addiction, loneliness, alienation—but seldom trace them back to the ancient wound: the exile of the Sacred Feminine, the repression of our receptive, connective birthright.
Real healing, I believe, must move beyond mere critique. It requires a return, a remembrance—a fierce honesty with us about what we have lost in the rush to dominate and the courage to seek integration over victory. Healing the patriarch within is not an exercise in collective self-loathing, nor a romanticization of matriarchy. It is the slow, subtle, radical labor of rebalancing, dissolving false binaries, and learning to live with the humility that spirit does not fit our categories.
We need more than personal enlightenment. Mystical experience can dissolve much of the membrane of ego, but unless the insights that arise in stillness ripple outward—into politics, economics, family, education, and relationship—the structures of our culture will continue to propagate the old wound.
Change is difficult in the face of rigidity and closed-minded men, especially when they benefit from an inequality or injustice. Spiritual freedom has never been about guns, money, or religion.[/caption]
Remembering Wholeness
The journey is not linear. I fail often. I am drawn back, again and again, into the undertow of conditioning: the urge to prove, defend, possess, win. Yet I also return, again and again, to that deeper current, that motherly presence, which does not compete or compare but simply holds, blesses, and renews.
When I listen deeply, I hear the whisper of that presence—not only in prayer and meditation, but in the laughter of friends, the hush of forests, the gaze of a child, the oceanic silence beneath thought. I begin to sense that healing is less about fixing and more about remembering; not the acquisition of perfection, but the recovery of forgotten wholeness; not escape from the world, but a radical re-entry, bearing the gift of a heart restored to balance.
In the end, perhaps this is what the world asks of us: not allegiance to old hierarchies, but participation in a living mystery—one in which the masculine and the feminine meet, not as adversaries, but as partners in the sacred work of becoming fully, generously, and courageously human.
