Developing Tendering Masculinities: Towards a Poetics of Imperfect Soulful Aging

Abstract

This conceptual and spiritual autoethnographic essay proposes tendering masculinities as a framework for late-life formation that moves men from performance to presence and from control to communion. Drawing on Jungian alchemy (nigredo, albedo, rubedo) and the movements of decolonizing, queering, and befriending, the piece integrates fieldnotes with theological and depth-psychological reflection to articulate three interwoven practices for elderhood: imperfection as belonging, brokenness as illumination, and holding opposites without hardening. The argument reframes masculine strength as reliable, relational tenderness expressed through micro-practices such as grief literacy, “weaponless speech,” soul friendship (anam cara), and collaborative mentorship within families and intergenerational relationships. Implications are offered for chaplaincy, pastoral counseling, spiritual direction, men’s groups, social work, and family or community contexts, with guidance on designing rituals of lament, contemplative listening, and communities of “steady tenderness.” By bridging depth psychology, poetic theology, and lived practice, the essay suggests that tendered masculinities can help families and relational systems cultivate stronger spiritual resilience, counter patterns of domination or disconnection, and contribute to communal healing. Limitations of single-author autoethnography and pathways for applied, practice-based research are noted.

“Anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.”.

—David Whyte

1. Introduction

“Early Monday morning. The train hums a soft metal prayer. I spy a gentle-looking man across the aisle reading a book on the cost of war—a rare visible act of courage, a small miracle. I approach him with trepidation. There is that of God amongst us. We speak of slowness and, pretty soon, poetry. Two men, side by side, counter-homohysteria, breathing in rhythm, offering each other the gift of unabashed presence. For that moment, the world mends itself.”.

(Gillani, Personal journal entry 22 October 2025)

This manuscript begins in such moments—ordinary crossings where tenderness between men interrupts the noise of performance. My life has invited—sometimes compelled—me to engage the intentional development of my masculinity and, now, its tendering. Aging has deepened this calling. Becoming a man again and again requires unlearning the reflex to harden and learning instead to meet the world with reverence, curiosity, and care. My fieldnotes hold these encounters: gestures of grace where unbelonging and letting go are not wounds but movements toward wholeness. I invite my mentors into these purposeful, circumscribed wanderings around the truth of (un)becoming. Rumi presses a palm into ours: “Close both eyes to see with the other eye” (Rumi 2004). Ḥāfiẓ adds “I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being” (Hafiz 1999). Their counsel harkens a deeper arrival of (un)being. In this register, middle and later life become a school for tendering masculinities: not a polishing or accumulation of virtue, nor an accumulation of possessions or the performance of austerity, but a surrender—an intentional disintegration into humus so that the self becomes good soil, nourishment for trees we may never climb. Not stronger–better–faster, but truer–softer–wiser.

This manuscript offers a clear, if provisional, framework and praxis for focusing attention on the real work. Tendering masculinities is proposed here as a poetic, psychological, and spiritual process of unbecoming: a movement from performance to presence, from containment to communion. Drawing on the grammar of depth psychology, this framework locates transformation in the agony the soul experiences in the conflict of opposites—the tension between fierceness and gentleness, grief and joy, power and vulnerability. The Jungian alchemical sequence of nigredo (blackening, the holy rot), albedo (washing, the brief clarity), and rubedo (warming, generosity with weight) serves as a symbolic architecture for this transformation. Tenderness is not repair; it is compost. It allows what has decayed to let go, to feed what might yet grow.

The framework is illuminated through mythic and literary mirrors. In the Hindu story of Radha and Krishna, viraha (separation-longing) ripens love more than possession ever could. In Layla and Majnun, desire matures into a reverent apprenticeship, leading to love without capture. These stories whisper what the sages already know: that wisdom often appears as ache and that repair and rupture are indispensable to the rhythms of life.

This essay extends the inquiry begun in The Poetics of Soulful Aging (Gillani, Personal journal, 2023) and reframes it as a method for late-life formation. It proposes an apprenticeship of (and to) love—that is, the willingness to be taught by imperfection, to receive brokenness as a doorway, and to hold opposites until a third way appears—as a spiritual and ethical curriculum for elderhood. The spirituality invoked throughout this essay is contemplative, postcolonial, and relational in register—closer to Lartey and Moon’s (2020) vision of care as liberation than to confessional piety, and closer to May’s (1982) understanding of surrender than to doctrinal observance. Drawing from poetic and contemplative traditions, it argues that masculinity, when tendered, becomes relational, fluid, and compassionate: a practice of belonging rather than conquest.

Crucially, this movement is not automatic. Aging can harden as easily as it can soften. Tendering masculinity is an intentional formation project—an ongoing practice of descent, discernment, and repair—rather than an identity achieved by insight alone. Jung’s insistence that consciousness grows through the tension of opposites, held long enough for a third to emerge, offers a disciplined grammar for this work (Jung 2003; Hollis 2005). In Rilke’s language, growth is not mastery but consenting to be “deeply defeated by ever greater things”—by grief, by limits, by love—and letting that defeat enlarge the soul rather than shrink it (Rilke 1994).

Because this Special Issue attends to robust spirituality (understood here not in a confessional or doctrinal sense, but as the soul’s movement toward surrender, encounter, and relational wholeness—following May’s (1982) distinction between psychological efficiency and spiritual formation) in family and relational life, I read this inner work as relational infrastructure. When men lack communal containers for shame, moral injury, and loss, suffering can be displaced into contempt, withdrawal, or domination within intimate systems; in a networked media ecology it can also be recruited into grievance-based masculinities circulated through the manosphere (Shay 1994; Palmer 2018; Ging 2019). Family-systems language names this capacity as differentiation—the ability to stay connected without fusing, cutting off, or scapegoating—so that complexity can be held without hardening (Bowen 1978; Friedman 1985). Tendering masculinities, then, is not simply self-care; it is spiritual care for the relational commons.

As Part 1 reframed aging from Chronos to Kairos and from performance to presence, this sequel aims that arc at masculinities. Where I once named decolonizing, queering, and befriending as movements of soulful aging, here I apprentice those same movements to the masculine: from conquest to kinship (decolonizing), from script to aliveness (queering), and from armor to altar (befriending). The alchemical itinerary—nigredo, albedo, rubedo—serves as the grammar by which those older lessons become elder practice. John O’Donohue, the tenderest of masculinities, teaches us that the soul is shaped and seen through relationship. The Celtic notion of the anam cara (soul friend) offers a vital way of belonging for tendering masculinities: a friendship that blesses both truth and vulnerability, where two people mirror each other’s hidden beauty and co-cultivate a space of mutual seeing (O’Donohue 1997).

Tendering masculinities invites men beyond performance into presence. The structure of this framework unfolds through three intertwined movements: (1) Imperfection as Belonging—recognizing limitation as the ground of connection. (2) Brokenness as Illumination—receiving fracture as the place where light enters. (3) Holding Opposites Without Hardening—cultivating the capacity to contain tension until transformation ripens. Each section integrates fieldnotes, mythic echoes, and analytic reflection to illustrate how eldering may soften the masculinities we inherit. The project aims to bridge contemplation and praxis, turning theory into practice and presence into pedagogy. These movements form the experiential arc of the essay, a lived apprenticeship in tenderness. At the same time, the alchemical grammar of nigredo, albedo, and rubedo—blackening, cleansing, and warming—offers the symbolic and psychological map beneath them.

By bringing depth-psychological and poetic theologies into dialogue with qualitative fieldnotes, the work demonstrates how tenderness functions as both a spiritual method and an ethical stance in mid- to later-life masculinities. Rather than seeking optimization or mastery, it advances a theology of reverent unbecoming—a slow apprenticeship in love that aligns with emergent approaches to spiritual care, reflexive practice, and moral formation in aging. In this way, the essay bridges contemplative praxis with applied fields of practice and human flourishing. Ultimately, the prayer is that this essay offers a counter-narrative of hope in a time of hostile masculinities and noisy certainties. It invites readers—fellow travelers, elders, and apprentices of love—to walk alongside the author.

1.1. Positionality Statement

I write from the middle stretch of life, where certainty feels less useful than wonder. These years are teaching me to hold questions more gently—like hatchlings—and to let meaning unfold at its own pace. My work, like my living, grows out of crossings between cultures, disciplines, and identities that continue to teach me more than I can claim (and often more than I want to know). As a queer, transmasculine, immigrant scholar of color, I move through the world with a layered awareness of how (un)belonging and difference (co)exist. My understanding of spirituality is interspirituality—drawn from contemplative Christian, Sufi, and depth-psychological sources and from the postcolonial pastoral theology of Lartey and Moon (2020). It does not presuppose a single tradition but honors the soul’s movement across them. Gender-affirming care in midlife has shown me that transition and aging share a similar grammar of change: both ask for patience and trust, for the willingness to meet myself anew. Each stage reminds me how little is finally under control and how much depends on the kindness we offer to what is still becoming. I hold myself not as an expert but as a participant in the larger conversation about care, impermanence, and masculinities. To write at all feels like an act of obedience and listening—to the body, to the world, to whatever wisdom remains in the stardust we are all composed of. If there is a purpose in this work, it is to keep learning how gentleness might still be strong enough to mend what is breaking.

1.2. Structure

Given the Special Issue’s concern with robust spirituality in family and relational life, the essay treats elder men’s interior formation as a family-systems intervention: what changes in households and communities when men learn to metabolize vulnerability as tenderness rather than exporting it as control, silence, or grievance.

This essay continues the inquiry begun in The Poetics of Soulful Aging (Gillani, Personal journal, 2023), extending its movement from performance to presence into the terrain of masculinities. The framework rests on three interwoven anchors: Jungian alchemy (nigredo, albedo, rubedo) as a grammar of late-life transformation; the movements of decolonizing, queering, and befriending; and relational tenderness cultivated through friendship, mentorship, and the Celtic notion of anam cara (soul friendship).

The second anchor is a triad of movements introduced in the earlier essay: decolonizing, queering, and befriending. These gestures invite a shift from dominance to kinship, from certainty to curiosity, from self-protection to compassion. Decolonizing loosens masculinity’s ties to conquest and ownership; queering dissolves rigid timelines and binaries; befriending restores relationship as the measure of maturity. Together, they outline an ethic of tenderness that resists both sentimentality and superiority.

The third anchor is relational tenderness, i.e., the invitation to turn from solitary striving to shared becoming. Through the lenses of friendship, mentorship, and the Celtic notion of anam cara (soul friendship), the essay imagines aging as a communal art form. Here, strength is redefined as reliability and wisdom as the willingness to be shaped by relationship. Friendship becomes a practice of attention and repair—how men learn to inhabit vulnerability without fear and to offer their presence as shelter. Taken together, these anchors form the ground of a poetics of imperfection: an approach that honors brokenness as material for beauty, and tenderness as a discipline of living truthfully with what cannot be controlled. This conceptual essay draws on reflective fieldnotes from clinical and community practice and engages scholarship on masculinities, spirituality, and aging to translate contemplative grammar into micro-practices usable in real encounters.

2. Background

2.1. Masculinities Theory

The field of masculinities studies has long been shaped by the concept of hegemonic masculinity, first articulated by Connell (2005). This dominant form of masculinized being is oriented around traits such as strength, independence, emotional restraint, provider-status, and social dominance and plays a key role in sustaining gender hierarchies and subordinating other masculinities (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). Scholars have critiqued the concept for tendencies toward structural reification and for under-attending to relationality, subjectivity, and the micro-practices through which masculinities are reproduced and transformed (Yang 2020). Recent debates have also traced how hegemonic logics can persist through seemingly progressive styles—what Bridges and Pascoe call “hybrid masculinities”—as well as through backlash formations shaped by a sense of aggrieved entitlement (Bridges and Pascoe 2014; Kimmel 2013). In response to these limitations, the notion of caring masculinities has emerged. Caring masculinities emphasize relationality, emotional openness, interdependence and caregiving as legitimate sites of masculine identity (Elliott 2016). Such models open space for men to enact masculinity through care rather than control. However, caring masculinities scholarship still tends to emphasize role shifts (e.g., fatherhood, domestic labour) more than the deeper interior formation and late-life spiritual renewal that eldering demands. Critical reviews note that the concept remains under-theorized with respect to the later lifespan, spiritual formation, and the soul-work of masculinity (Wojnicka and de Boise 2025).

2.2. Aging Masculinities

Turning to aging studies, masculine identities in later life reflect both continuity and rupture. Older men negotiate masculinities in contexts of bodily change, diminished physical prowess, altered social roles, and shifting expectations of usefulness, authority, and dependence. Research suggests that later life can render masculinity culturally “invisible” while still holding men accountable to stoicism and self-sufficiency (Thompson 2006; Calasanti 2005). This intersection of aging and masculinity offers rich terrain for exploring how the masculine self might transition from dominance to presence and from doing to being—particularly within family and intergenerational systems where elder men’s emotional availability (or unavailability) shapes the spiritual climate of relationships. Yet, within both masculinity and aging literature, the spiritual dimension—how men engage vulnerability, interiority, mutuality, and meaning in elderhood—remains underexplored.

2.3. Jungian Perspectives

The work of Carl G. Jung and subsequent Jungian commentary offers an important grammar for understanding masculine soul-work. In Aspects of the Masculine, Jung addresses archetypal patterns (hero, father, anima/animus, initiatory passages) and emphasizes that masculine development involves encounters with the unconscious, the shadow, and relational dynamics beyond dominance (Jung 2003). Jungian alchemy—often narrated through the movements of nigredo, albedo, and rubedo—functions here less as a literal sequence than as a symbolic map for late-life transformation: honest descent, clarified seeing, and integrated belonging. Contemporary Jungian writers similarly argue that the second half of life invites a reorientation from status toward meaning and from performance toward presence (Hollis 2005; Tacey 1997).

In the sphere of spirituality and brotherhood, research and practice indicate that male relational networks and contemplative communities can play a critical role in re-framing masculinity. Brotherhood circles, men’s groups, retreats, and practices of listening provide relational spaces where men can confess without spectacle, learn mutuality, and practice a more trustworthy tenderness (Gelfer 2009; Palmer 2004). Nevertheless, few studies bring together masculinities, spirituality, aging, and depth psychology in an integrated way—especially in a cultural moment when unprocessed suffering can be recruited into grievance narratives that damage families and the civic commons.

Perhaps no scholar bridges these domains more carefully than Gerald May (1940–2005), whose dual formation as psychiatrist and contemplative at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation made him uniquely suited to articulate their relationship. In Care of Mind/Care of Spirit (1982), May showed how psychological and spiritual care are complementary but distinct: one addresses the mechanics of how we come to be as we are; the other attends to why we exist and toward what we are called. In Will and Spirit (1982), he named this distinction as willfulness versus willingness—the masculine compulsion to manage life versus the spiritual posture of receptive surrender. This grammar maps directly onto the essay’s movement from control to communion.

2.4. Moral Injury as a Late-Life Crucible

Moral injury names the spiritual–ethical wound that can follow perceived betrayal, harm, or transgression—whether through what one has done, failed to do, or endured—especially when trust, authority, and identity are at stake (Shay 1994; Litz et al. 2009). In later life, such wounds may be reactivated by retirement, illness, estrangement, or the cumulative reckoning that comes when former strategies of performance no longer secure belonging. When moral injury remains unnamed, it can harden into shame, cynicism, and displaced anger that erodes intimacy and undermines spiritual resilience in families and communities. Spiritual care literature emphasizes practices of lament, confession without spectacle, moral repair, and communal accompaniment as pathways toward integration rather than retaliation (Brock and Lettini 2012).

2.5. Spiritual Direction and Contemplative Tradition

The practice this essay envisions is also situated within the tradition of spiritual direction and contemplative formation. The Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, founded in Washington, D.C. in 1973, models exactly the kind of communal, attentive, soul-caring practice tendering masculinities imagines: an approach grounded in holy listening, relational presence, and the contemplative conviction that transformation arises not through mastery but through receptive encounter (Edwards 1980; May 1982). Lartey and Moon’s (2020) postcolonial vision of spiritual care as intercultural liberation further situates the essay within a pastoral theology that honors the plural, embodied, and politically situated nature of spiritual experience.

2.6. The Manosphere as Counterfeit Initiation

The term manosphere refers to a diffuse network of online spaces—ranging from “men’s rights” and “red pill” communities to incel and pickup-artist forums—organized around grievance-based narratives about gender and power (Ging 2019; Han and Yin 2023). Scholarship suggests these spaces can function as a form of counterfeit initiation: they offer belonging, explanatory closure, and a vocabulary for pain while frequently redirecting suffering into misogyny, conspiracy, and the policing of hierarchies between men (Van Valkenburgh 2018; Marwick and Caplan 2018). This digital ecology is sustained through “networked misogyny” and what Rothermel calls “evidence-based misogyny,” where selective statistics and pseudo-science are used to legitimate contempt and resignation (Banet-Weiser and Miltner 2016; Rothermel 2023). Not all engagement results in violence, yet research on online radicalization and exit narratives indicates that these forums can normalize relational dehumanization and intensify vulnerability for some men, particularly amid loneliness and perceived humiliation (Thorburn 2023).

Given these converging gaps, this article proposes tendering masculinities as a framework for elder masculine formation that foregrounds tenderness, attentiveness, relational presence, and contemplative soul-work. Tendering masculinities builds on caring masculinities but shifts focus from role and function toward process, inner alchemy, and communal presence. It asks how men in later-life seasons might move through imperfection to illumination to integration while remaining differentiated—able to hold complexity without scapegoating—in the intimate systems where spiritual life is actually lived.

3. Methods

This essay adopts a spiritual autoethnographic and contemplative qualitative approach to explore how tenderness emerges as a form of masculine and spiritual maturity in later life. Autoethnography uses systematic self-reflection to connect lived experience with cultural scripts and social structures, making it well suited for examining how masculinities are internalized, resisted, and re-formed (Ellis et al. 2011; Chang 2008). Short, dated fieldnotes drawn from ordinary life serve as sites of lived data. Written close to encounters, these fragments were revisited through interpretive reflection that weaves together depth psychology, poetic theology, and mythic imagination. The analytic rhythm followed a contemplative cycle of experience, stillness, dialogue, discernment, and return to practice, emphasizing attentiveness rather than categorization. The author’s standpoint as a transmasculine scholar, educator, and spiritual practitioner in midlife is treated not as bias but as an instrument. Ethical care governs narration: individuals are anonymized, descriptions softened, and interpretation guided by pastoral principles of reverence and consent. The aim is usable wisdom rather than generalization—knowledge that remains faithful to experience and porous to mystery.

The author recognizes the limitations of a single-standpoint autoethnographic approach (Moschella 2018). A phenomenological or pastoral ethnographic design—one that incorporates the lived accounts of other men engaged in contemplative formation, spiritual direction, or intergenerational mentorship—would expand both the evidentiary base and the representational range of this inquiry. The present essay offers a first-person grammar; future research will need to test that grammar in a community.

4. (Un)Findings

4.1. Holding Opposites Without Hardening

“A student burst into my office after class, upset about a grading comment. Her voice was sharp, demanding and agitated. Beneath her bitter complaints, I saw fear. I saw sorrow. I listened. Then listened more. I spoke with care but with firmness, the kind that protects both of us. When her shoulders softened, she said quietly, “Thank you for not matching my fire.” She did not need extra points—she just needed to be seen and heard.”

(Gillani, Personal journal 22 July 2025)

Human life continually unfolds in the space where opposites meet: tenderness and strength, grief and joy, silence and speech, instinct and intellect. Depth psychology names this field as the space of the opposites, a tension that is not to be eliminated but held until something new emerges—a third way that transcends yet includes both. In the context of aging and eldering, this practice of holding tension becomes less a technique and more a temperament—a cultivated way of being in which force ripens into steadiness and clarity matures into kindness.

Richard Rohr describes this movement as the passage from order to disorder to reorder, a sacred cycle that resists the temptation of premature closure. To fall upward, he argues, is to develop a strength that does not clutch and a clarity that does not wound (Rohr 2011). Parker Palmer offers a resonant companion insight: “Wholeness does not mean perfection; it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life” (Palmer 2004). To hold the opposites is to make peace with fracture itself—that is, to recognize it not as failure but as doorway.

The alchemical imagination gives this process form through three symbolic fires. Nigredo names the honest dark where certainty decomposes into humility. Albedo represents the cleansing light that allows for one steady step forward. Rubedo restores warmth, the embodied generosity that blesses rather than conquers. These are less psychological stages than spiritual postures and a grammar for living with paradox and transforming conflict into compassion.

Holding opposites requires both courage and patience. Work at the intersection of masculinities and aging suggests that later life often presses men into a new curriculum: balancing autonomy with dependence, solitude with companionship, strength with tenderness, and ambition with humility (Thompson 2006). What emerges is not a perfect synthesis but a deeper thoughtfulness, a maturity practiced through honesty and mutual care. The domestic and the cosmic meet in these rhythms—an unlearning of performance and a return to a spaciousness of enough. This does not indicate sameness but a capacity to accept otherness and thus to belong.

Elderhood wisdom, therefore, is not about triumph but hospitality. It is the willingness to allow tenderness and resolve, grief and joy, to sit together at the same table. Soulful aging becomes a pilgrimage away from the demands of smaller gods—status, success, efficiency—toward the Higher Self where belonging, love, and community take root. Such work must remain grounded in humanity. Perfectionism risks turning spiritual practice into cruelty. As clinicians and theologians of aging remind us, maturity is often found in the good-enough way—hope held between presumption and despair, scaled to the weather of actual days. Some days the third way may appear only as a softened sentence, a slower breath, or the willingness to listen a little longer. Even that can be holy. In fact, it most often does.

This posture runs counter to the culture of busyness and algorithmic outrage. The world rewards performance, certainty, and spectacle; digital attention economies monetize grievance and polarize complex realities into enemies and allies (Banet-Weiser and Miltner 2016; Marwick and Caplan 2018). Against this noise, the act of holding opposites becomes a form of nonviolent resistance and spiritual discipline. As Parker Palmer cautions, “violence is what happens when we do not know what else to do with our suffering” (Palmer 2018). Tendering masculinities refuses the conversion of pain into contempt; it chooses to metabolize suffering into grief, truth-telling, and repair.

Another motion must be written into the landscape of late-life masculinities: when older men lose clear social roles, experience moral injury, or face relational rupture, they may seek belonging and narrative coherence wherever it is readily available. Research on manosphere communities suggests common on-ramps include divorce and custody conflict, romantic rejection, unemployment, and loneliness—events that can be experienced as humiliation and then reframed as collective grievance (Ging 2019; Rafail and Freitas 2019; Thorburn 2023). In these spaces, initiation is offered without elders: pain is given a script of domination, and moral complexity is flattened into certainty. Tendering masculinities offers an alternative initiation: a practice of differentiation that stays in relationship without fusing or cutting off and that can name injustice and personal complicity without collapsing into either blame or self-erasure (Bowen 1978; Friedman 1985). In alchemical terms, the counter-map is simple: nigredo names the truth without bravado; albedo takes the next faithful step without demanding premature resolution; rubedo lets warmth return as steady compassion—speech that blesses without avoiding truth, presence that remains when comfort has left. The invitation of later life is to hold fire without burning, to welcome paradox without panic, and to live as if tenderness itself were an enduring strength.

4.2. Imperfection as Belonging

“He has been patient, work—my mentor—polishing my rough soul with grace and kind critique. I had failed again: the lecture fell flat, words scattered like seeds in the wrong soil. At 2 a.m. an email arrived, warm and unhurried: You did well, he wrote, and here are a few offerings to help you do better. Feedback is a gift if you choose it. I sat in the blue light, (un)ashamed and grateful. His generosity did not erase the mistake; it transfigured it. For a moment I understood how correction, when offered with tenderness, becomes a kind of benediction—a quiet, living proof that failure, too, can be a teacher when it is met with mercy.”.

(Gillani, Personal journal, 22 July 2025)

There is a way imperfection tutors belonging. The fracture that exposes our limits also exposes our need, and need invites others in. If we can trust others to step into our house of imperfection (Whyte 1997), they can walk through the rubble and find hidden gems. In that late-night exchange with my mentor, imperfection became a conversation rather than a verdict. My lecture did not land; I felt exposed. His email—kind, specific, unhurried—transformed embarrassment into education. Feedback, when offered with generosity, becomes a sacrament of community: it restores connection where shame might have built a wall. To be corrected without humiliation is to experience grace in human form.

This moment revealed something crucial about eldering and the masculine soul. The mentor did not rescue or flatter; he invited me into co-responsibility for growth. His care was not indulgence but steadiness, the kind of reliable love that believes you can do better because it has seen you try. In the ancient language of apprenticeship, this is how belonging is transmitted: not through perfection achieved, but through imperfection accompanied. The elder’s role is not to erase the error but to stay present through it, polishing the roughness until the shine reveals something essential.

Imperfection, confessed without spectacle, becomes an act of hospitality—a widening of the circle (Rilke 2005). The mentor’s mercy created a room large enough for both our humanness: his authority and my fumbling, his patience and my need. That widening is what Whyte and Rilke describe in different languages: the movement from self-protection toward transparency. Whyte’s questions—those that have “no right to go away”—arrive precisely when we fail at our image of ourselves; that is how they do their teaching. Start close in, he urges: one true sentence, spoken softly enough to keep the circle whole. That nearness—the willingness to begin where we stand—is how imperfection becomes intimate, even holy.

Rilke gives us the same map:

“I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed,

for where I am closed, I am false. I want to stay clear in your sight.”

(Rilke)

The unfolding Rilke names is a posture of soul as much as of art. The mentor’s note was precisely that unfolding: an opening of what might have closed, an invitation to remain clear in each other’s sight. In the slow loosening of pride and defensiveness, relation begins. Imperfection is thus not a moral failure but a doorway through which the sacred reenters the ordinary. In this light, the fieldnote shows that in the appropriate gaze, the masculine reflex to withdraw or dominate can soften into dialogue. It demonstrates how correction, when offered with care, becomes an initiation rather than a source of shame. This is the praxis of tendering masculinities: meeting the bruised ego with reverence instead of recoil. It is the art of keeping company with what is unfinished and of being committed to the relationship and the person rather than to action or output.

Theologically, this is hope’s terrain. Hope is not the cheerleader of progress but the companion of limits. It stands in the ambiguous middle, where outcomes are unknown and the heart must decide again to stay open. Imperfection is where such hope breathes: when I cannot repair my image, I can finally receive you—and be received. To confess a crack is to make room for grace to enter, to invite the miracle of reciprocity.

In order to accept our cracks, the shadows of performance, perfection, and failure have to be invited in. Hollis (2005) sharpens the moral: the task of later life is not to be the good boy (pleasing, performing, disappearing) but to become the good man—truthful, responsible, capable of blessing—to trade impressiveness for usefulness. In such rooms, imperfection stops being a private shame and becomes a shared doorway. We begin to sense that to err is to rejoin the human choir, to find harmony in the minor key—widening circles, again and again, until the circle itself feels like home.

4.3. Brokenness Is Where the Light Gets In

I wait until our monthly meeting. The first plea, couched as a question, is—don’t abandon me in this walk of life. He listens. I have just been canceled by someone I once called a hero, and here he is, once again, helping me pick up the shattered pieces of my own small world. Rather than feeding my righteous anger, he meets it with compassion. “Life is long,” he says quietly, “and things heal. There is time to mourn this, and then there will be time to return to the dance.”.

(Gillani, Personal journal, 24 April 2024)

That moment glows in memory because it revealed a truth that no theory alone could hold: that brokenness, when met by tenderness, becomes illumination. His refusal to escalate my pain, his calm attention, his faith in time itself, these gestures became medicine. Masculinity, in this register, is no longer performance but protection of the tender. It is the capacity to stay when staying is hardest, to resist the seduction of outrage, and to offer instead the slow warmth that allows another’s truth to surface.

To speak of brokenness is to speak of attention. The fracture in a man’s life—a betrayal, a loss, the fading of status or certainty, aging itself—can either harden him into bitterness or initiate him into depth. Jung understood that the soul’s movement toward wholeness is not ascent but descent. The nigredo, the darkening, is not punishment but invitation; it decomposes the false self so that the deeper self might breathe. “Where there is ruin, there is hope for treasure,” wrote Rumi; Jung might say the same of the psychic night where the ego disintegrates and the Self begins to glimmer through.

In that mentoring exchange, my mentor enacted wholeheartedness: the choice to live from worthiness rather than shame. He did not rescue me or amplify my anger; he practiced presence. He made space for mourning to unfold at its own pace. In moral injury terms, he refused to let betrayal harden into a retaliatory identity; he helped reopen trust by offering witness, time, and non-spectacular care (Shay 1994; Brock and Lettini 2012). Palmer frames this movement as arriving at wholeness not by shunning what is broken but by embracing it (Palmer 2018). In Jungian terms, such embracing becomes integration: the reconciliation of opposites that births a fuller self.

For men, this work is doubly charged. The traditional masculine arc—domination, autonomy, certainty—often leaves little room for rupture. Aging, with its diminishment of control and prowess, becomes the crucible where these values are tested. If a man cannot welcome his own undoing, he risks retreating into resentment or hollow bravado. Contemporary scholarship on manosphere communities shows how perceived humiliation and moral injury can be reframed as entitlement and contempt, mistaking hardness for strength (Ging 2019; Van Valkenburgh 2018; Marwick and Caplan 2018). But when brokenness is met within community, the fall becomes formation. The wound, faced honestly, becomes the threshold of tenderness. My mentor’s phrase—life is long, and things heal—offered a cosmology of time larger than ego’s urgency. It echoed the slow rhythm of albedo, the washing that follows the blackening, the rinsing of anger into acceptance. In that patience lies the groundwork of elderhood. Such accompaniment is moral labor. It resists the spectacle of rage and the algorithm of outrage; it insists on gentleness as a durable strength.

In rubedo, warmth returns. The man who has walked through failure and forgiveness emerges less performative, more porous. His strength is measured not in conquest but in capacity: to witness without fixing, to hold without closing. In Palmer’s terms, this is a form of hidden wholeness—an embodied integrity that becomes a shelter for the soul (Palmer 2004).

4.4. Dancing with Grief to Evoke Tenderness

“He called—his voice breaking. His small dog, almost a child, had been run over. Two brown, bearded men—immigrants, each foreign twice over, each learning tenderness as a second language—sat on opposite ends of a trembling call. We spoke haltingly, across accents and distances. He wept for his companion and for the many times he had not been allowed to weep. I listened, and something in me widened: to be trusted with another man’s grief is to be invited into holy ground.”.

(Gillani, Personal journal, 12 April 2025)

Grief, when received rather than repaired, becomes apprenticeship. It softens what performance has hardened and moves the masculine psyche from thinking to feeling, from distance to presence. In the practice of tendering masculinities, grief is not an interruption of manhood but its initiation—the passage from defended strength to soulful vulnerability. To become tender is to learn to both give and receive grief—to allow lament to become language, and language to become connection.

Rilke called this the “hour of our deepest need,” when sorrow “enters into us as the joy of some new unfolding” (Rilke 2005). Such unfolding is the hidden curriculum of tendering: grief carves men open, excavating chambers where tenderness and courage can coexist. Patriarchal conditioning trains men to mute their pain, to master rather than feel, to repair rather than receive. But when a man lets himself grieve, he begins the slow decolonization of his own emotional life. He reclaims a native fluency of feeling, long exiled by scripts of dominance and control. Rohr (2011) calls this the necessary falling—the undoing of a first-half narrative that equates strength with invulnerability. Jung, too, located transformation within descent: the soul passes through darkness not as punishment but as initiation, the loosening of the heroic mask. In the lexicon of tendering masculinities, this descent is apprenticeship—the way men learn that wounds are not liabilities to be hidden but thresholds toward communion.

Depth psychology frames this apprenticeship through the grammar of alchemy. In grief, nigredo names the honest dark where armor cracks and certainty fails; albedo, the cleansing that comes when pride is washed through tears; rubedo, the return of embodied warmth. The man who has passed through sorrow no longer performs durability; he embodies steadiness. This triad names a lived rhythm of change through which men evolve from containment to communion.

When men share grief, they enact a countercultural form of belonging. Bonds made over tears, if held well, outlast ideologies of strength. David Whyte calls this “the generosity of presence, both through participation and witness” (Whyte 2015)—the unhurried attention that turns empathy into masculine courage. Within this praxis, eldering becomes the art of sitting with what aches until it becomes a form of beauty. To witness another man’s sorrow without recoil is to practice a radical masculinity that blesses rather than conquers.

This grief literacy is profoundly decolonial. It dismantles inherited hierarchies of stoicism and self-erasure that have silenced men of color, immigrant men, queer and trans men—the ones whose tenderness has been politicized as weakness or danger. To weep freely in a foreign tongue is to reclaim both humanity and homeland. It is to say I belong, not because I am unbreakable, but because I am capable of feeling deeply.

Through grief, tendering masculinities become a social and spiritual act. In weeping, men turn toward the communal rather than the competitive. In mourning, they recover what patriarchal conditioning exiled: intimacy, interdependence, reverence. Rilke’s words—“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final” (Rilke 2004)—become the anthem of this apprenticeship.

Grief, then, is not a wound to be hidden but a wisdom to be lived into tender eldering. It redefines masculine strength as the capacity to remain open when everything in us wants to close. This is the quiet revolution of tendering masculinities: men who no longer equate power with control but with care; who no longer seek to fix the world, but to feel it fully; who discover, in their tears, the sacred art of being human together.

4.5. Brotherhood and Apprenticeship

“We sit, side by side, sipping our coffees and speaking of our griefs. His 75 years of organizing wisdom is inextricably mixed with a juvenile sense of humor. Notions of God and flesh are intermingled, with the sacred and profane dancing together. We speak of real heartaches, tell each other things we have not told another soul, and in the moment of tension, crack a horrendous joke. It is the work of best friendship.”.

(Gillani, Personal Journal, 7 September 2023)

Brotherhood here is not a club but a craft: the slow apprenticeship by which men learn to be available without performing, reliable without ruling, sweet without disappearing. The same dialogue reframes mentorship as contextual, plural, and deeply relational—aimed not at control but at elevating ideas with others, anchored in reliability and protective loyalty rather than status display. The elder is liminal, sometimes failing, learning to watch, wait, and listen, to speak less and accompany more (Achenbaum 2024). The craft of male initiation and friendship is mythically old. In Radha–Krishna, viraha (separation-longing) becomes a school of tenderness: love ripens through non-possession, a brotherhood translated into practice as care without capture. In Layla–Majnun, eros is refined to reverence; desire becomes guardianship. And in Homer’s Mentor/Athena pairing, reliability is paradoxically “big” and “small”—to step forward or step back but stay in relation as the situation requires.

Brotherhood, then, is a bench and a ledger: two names we tend each week; a poem shared aloud; a question—where does it hurt?—and patience enough to stay for the answer. Lived this way, apprenticeship shifts masculinity from pleasing performance toward truthful responsibility: individuation for the common good, sometimes at the expense of the individual ego.

5. Practice & Implications (Contours of a Tendering Commons)

The framework of tendering masculinities—necessarily partial and open-ended—proposes that spiritual and moral development in later life arises through a sequence of softening: imperfection received, brokenness illuminated, and opposites held in reverent tension. These movements yield concrete implications across pastoral, educational, and community settings, particularly within families and intergenerational relationships where elder men’s emotional presence shapes the spiritual climate of the home.

For chaplains, pastoral counselors, and spiritual directors, practical nigredo-stage practices include: holding silence after a man names a failure rather than moving to reassurance; asking ‘What does your body know about this?’ before any cognitive reframe; and designing group rituals of collective lament in which incompleteness—not resolution—is the shared offering. These micro-practices teach that worth is not contingent on performance.

5.1. Imperfection as Belonging—Cultivating Humble Presence (Nigredo)

Elders, caregivers, and mentors are invited to model humility as belonging rather than failure. Naming limitation without shame opens relational space for others to enter. In mentoring, simple confessions (“I forgot,” “I don’t know”) become acts of inclusion. For educators, designing classrooms that welcome incompleteness—silence, pauses, questions without resolution—teaches that worth is not tied to mastery but to mutual presence. Imperfection thus becomes the fertile soil (nigredo) where community takes root.

5.2. Brokenness as Illumination—Practicing Hopeful Witness (Albedo)

In communal engagement, moments of fracture—grief, regret, moral injury—can be reframed as portals of light. The practitioner’s task is not to repair but to accompany the wounded to hope “between despair and presumption.” Story-sharing circles, poetry, or ritualized lament allow elders to integrate pain without erasing it. In men’s groups, holding silence after testimony lets the “light of hope” emerge gradually. This albedo phase cleanses the impulse toward performance, reorienting care toward witnessing rather than fixing.

In practice, albedo-stage rituals might include: shared lament liturgies drawing on diverse faith traditions; communal silence following testimony; or simply the pastoral commitment to stay present after the words run out—what May (1982) calls the atmosphere of spiritual direction: being in prayer together, with no agenda but presence.

5.3. Holding Opposites Without Hardening—Forming Communities of Steady Tenderness (Rubedo)

The final movement invites integration—where vulnerability and strength, grief and gratitude, stillness and action coexist without contradiction. Practitioners can design intergenerational programs, mentorship pairs, or classroom rituals that practice this balance: firm boundaries with gentle tone, clear speech that blesses rather than wounds. Elderhood becomes a pedagogy of warmth (rubedo), teaching younger men that courage and compassion can mature together.

Rubedo-stage communities of steady tenderness might take the form of: (a) intergenerational mentorship pairs in congregations or community organizations, where elder and younger men covenant to mutual vulnerability; (b) contemplative retreats in the Shalem tradition, structured around silence, shared reflection, and communal discernment; and (c) family ritual practices—evening check-ins, seasonal laments, blessing ceremonies—that make tenderness a household liturgy.

One underexplored implication is the elder man as informal spiritual director within his own family system: not as authority but as witness, the one who names what is happening without needing to fix it. May’s (1982) description of the spiritual director’s fundamental posture—attentive, non-anxious, unattached to outcome—describes exactly what rubedo-stage elder masculinity aspires to offer. In each of these forms, warmth is not sentiment but pedagogy—the embodied demonstration that courage and care mature together, and that the measure of an elder is not what he has built but what he has learned to bless.

5.4. Attending to Manosphere Drift: Spiritual and Digital Discernment

A further implication is contextual: in a networked media ecology, men’s pain can be algorithmically recruited into grievance-based masculinities. Practitioners working with families, men’s groups, or pastoral settings can therefore treat digital discernment as part of spiritual formation—helping men name how online content intensifies contempt, scapegoating, and “us versus them” certainty. Concrete practices include: (a) normalizing moral-injury language (betrayal, shame, regret) so it can be metabolized rather than exported; (b) creating “exit ramps” through peer accompaniment and referral pathways; and (c) teaching families and communities to recognize early signs of hardening (withdrawal, weaponized speech, obsessive consumption of grievance content) and to respond with firm boundaries plus compassionate invitation. Scholarship on the manosphere underscores the need for such interventions that combine relational accountability with pathways back into community (Ging 2019; Rothermel 2023; Thorburn 2023).

Lartey and Moon (2020) invite practitioners to recognize that men’s vulnerability to grievance-based online communities is not culturally uniform: men of color, immigrant men, and queer men may encounter manosphere spaces as secondary dislocations—spaces that promise belonging while reproducing the racial and gendered hierarchies that originally excluded them. Intercultural spiritual discernment must account for this double bind. Concrete community-level practices might include: (a) pastor-led conversations about digital consumption as a spiritual formation issue; (b) spiritual direction sessions that treat online grievance consumption as a symptom of unmet needs for belonging and meaning (May 1982); and (c) intergenerational mentorship programs that offer the narrative coherence and male belonging that manosphere communities counterfeit, but without the contempt. Families, too, are sites of discernment: when a son or father begins exhibiting early signs of hardening—withdrawal, weaponized speech, obsessive consumption of grievance content—the family system’s capacity to respond with firm boundaries and compassionate invitation is itself a form of postcolonial spiritual care (Lartey and Moon 2020; Bowen 1978).

6. Concluding Ruminations

Across these movements, tendering redefines elder strength as relational steadiness rather than spectacle. Whether in interpersonal, familial, or community work, the measure of transformation is not productivity but presence: slower reactivity, weaponless speech, and a greater willingness to bless. These practices turn the poetics of soulful aging into a reproducible ethic of care—small gestures through which communities, classrooms, and care circles become commons of tenderness.

This essay has argued that tendering masculinities is an intentional late-life formation project: a set of practices that move men from performance to presence and from control to communion. Drawing on Jungian depth psychology and alchemical metaphor, it has articulated three interwoven practices for elderhood—imperfection as belonging, brokenness as illumination, and holding opposites without hardening—as a practical spirituality with direct implications for family and relational life (Jung 2003; Bowen 1978).

The stakes are not only intrapsychic. In family and relational systems, elder men often function as emotional regulators; when moral injury and shame remain unprocessed, households can bear the costs in withdrawal, contempt, domination, or spiritual numbness. In a digital age, the same unprocessed pain can be recruited into manosphere scripts that promise belonging through certainty and contempt (Ging 2019; Marwick and Caplan 2018; Rothermel 2023). Tendering masculinities offers a different pathway: to name suffering without outsourcing blame, to practice grief literacy and weaponless speech, and to choose repair over retaliation.

Limitations are inherent to single-author spiritual autoethnography: claims are interpretive and situated rather than generalizable. Pathways for future research include practice-based studies in chaplaincy, pastoral counseling, spiritual direction, men’s groups, and social work—evaluating whether rituals of lament, contemplative listening, and intergenerational mentorship increase differentiation, reduce grievance narratives, and strengthen spiritual resilience across family systems.

What this essay offers is a first-person grammar—the vocabulary and symbolic architecture of tendering—rather than a sample of its prevalence or effect. Future research directions include: (a) pastoral ethnographic studies (Moschella 2018) of men’s groups, chaplaincy settings, and spiritual direction communities; (b) phenomenological inquiry into the lived experience of masculine tenderness across racial, cultural, and generational contexts; (c) practice-based evaluation of rituals of lament and contemplative listening within family systems.

Rilke suggests that growth is to be “deeply defeated by ever greater things” (Rilke 1994): by love that asks us to relinquish control, by grief that teaches us to soften, by truth that complicates our certainties. Elderhood, in this frame, is not a retreat from complexity but a consent to nuanced seeing—the capacity to hold both personal and societal shadows without hardening. The hope of tendered masculinity is modest and therefore durable: steadier speech, kinder presence, and the slow courage to bless what we cannot fix.