Radical Grace
January – March 2008

THE WILD MAN'S NOVEL Men's Rites of Passage Ignites the Imagination of a Young Writer

by John J. McLaughlin

In the late summer of 1999, I returned to the US from the Dominican Republic where I had spent the past two years living and working with the poor. During that time, my mentor, Paul Burson, had introduced me to some of Richard Rohr’s teachings—most saliently, The Wild Man’s Journey—which significantly shaped my experiences in the DR. As I prepared to make a new journey back home, Paul suggested that I register for a program at the CAC upon my return to help smooth the transition.
 It was sound advice. My transition was anything but smooth, and I arrived at CAC’s Internship feeling rather lost, with wounds of depression and dissonance that needed healing. While there, I met Richard and told him how I struggled to connect my Holy Grail experience as a Latin American missionary to the Styrofoam Cup experience of an ordinary middle-class American. He invited me to consider the Men’s Rites of Passage (MROP), in addition to the Internship. At the time, I had just created an initiation program of sorts, called the Pentecost Project, to take high school and college students to the DR for a service-learning experience. We agreed that the MROP would probably help me enrich that program, as well as heal personally. During our conversation, I shared that I was a writer but it didn’t occur to me that either the Internship or the MROP could be of much influence. After all, I’d heard Richard quote a spiritual teacher who claimed that the best things in life can’t be talked about, so I didn’t believe that this spiritual work would have much impact upon what I wrote.
As those who have completed the MROP at Ghost Ranch know, the experience indeed transcends words. It can take a long time (to paraphrase Hafiz’s poem “So Many Gifts”) for some of the divine gifts to be discovered, much less opened. Even now, seven years later, I have a clear sense that the experience has not yet been fully unpacked.
Some of the gifts came quickly, however, and I put them to immediate good use. The power and artistry of the rituals during the rites inspired me to completely redesign the Pentecost Project into a program that was more rooted in ritual, more intentionally an initiation rite, and as a result, much more transformative. . . .

John J. McLaughlin lives in Seattle, where he directs Education Across Borders, a nonprofit organization that serves indigent communities in the Dominican Republic.  His novel, Run in the Fam’ly (Univ. Tennessee Press, Nov 2007), won the 2006 Peter Taylor Prize, and is available in bookstores and online. A portion of the book’s royalties will de donated to MALEs, the CAC program that sponsors the MROP. John is at work on a memoir about his experiences in Latin America. For more information, visit www.johnjmclaughlin.net and www.educationacrossborders.org.

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