The "Five Promises" of Richard Rohr: Lessons from Genesis
The book ADAM'S RETURN: The Five Promises of Male Initiation by Richard Rohr (2004) presents a view of the modern male experience, the need for initiation, and a ritual process for initiation, and relates these things to five key distinctions that are found in the Garden of Eden story in Genesis.
The five "promises" are lessons that relate to the human condition as distinguished from the animals. These lessons address certain pitfalls and consequences of self-awareness, consciousness and sentience, and the effects that these have on an individual's behaviour.
With sentience comes the ability to make informed and intelligent decisions. The individual acquires the power to choose. This leads to a feeling of greater control, that can cause an illusion that complete control is possible. The ability to manipulate the environment with tools, and to influence others with manipulation, leads to the idea of a perfect, easy "good life". With self-awareness and the knowledge that the self has special powers, an individual can end up believing he is more important than the rest of the world around him. He can even lose sight of the fact that death will bring an end to him and to any selfishly directed benefits.
Life is Hard
In Genesis, this is symbolized by the expulsion from Eden and the promise that life will no longer be easy: men will have to work hard to extract food from the ground, and in general staying alive will be a struggle.
Taken at face value, the statement "life is hard" is an overgeneralization. Certainly parts of life are hard — but with wisdom many things become almost effortless, particularly when one accepts that he can not be in control of everything.
You Are Not That Important
In Genesis, the temptation is accomplished partly by telling the humans into thinking they are important in the eyes of God (and therefore "deserve" to be able to eat the fruit of knowledge). They then assume they have a right to the fruit, assert this "right", and then are punished for it. The punishment establishes that their assertion was wrong: they are not so important that they can do anything they please.
The qualifier "that" is significant, because without it ("you are not important") it would follow that no person is important.
Your Life is Not About You
Grammatically, this is a self-evident statement (a tautology) because a life is not "about" anything in particular. A life includes elements of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual existence — and of these, only the mental aspect can be "about" something. A plan or a story can be "about" something, but a life is neither a plan nor a story.
However, the statement is meant to be about purpose: Your Life's Purpose is Unrelated To You. More simply put, "your life does not exist to make you happy".
In the context of Genesis and its original audience, it was a common accepted belief that we are put in the world for a purpose that is selected or defined (or at least known) by God, and which might not by known by any human.
You Are Not In Control
Another over-generalization: clearly if no-one were in control of anything, then they could not be blamed for any choice, deed, or action.
What it really means is that each person must accept certain things as they are and make the best of it.
You Are Going To Die
With the expulsion from Eden comes the promise that humans will die — they are no longer immortal.
Acknowledging mortality is another way of acknowledging that "Your Life's Purpose is Unrelated To You". In order to have lasting value, deeds must have an impact that lasts beyond the lifetime of the person who did them.
The Redemption of the Ego
In childhood, pain causes a wound (the Fisher king) and the ego is misunderstood and improperly used (selfish behaviour).
Through middle age the man learns that ego motivation is misplaced, and (hopefully) finds a life purpose.
Serving that life purpose is a form of ego-gratification (gaining immortality through a legacy) but it is also a gift to others who experienced a similar wound. Hopefully during this time the man accepts that his legacy is beyond his control — it is what others make of him that will live on. If he can accept this and surrender to it, then the ego is serving the greater good.
But it is still an ego-motivated legacy because it is still at least partly his legacy. So the ego is redeemed by serving the greater good while still acting as an ego. This makes purpose driven by redeemed ego similar to Ikigai (as interpreted in the west).
The Redemption of Adam
When humans became self-aware, they realized they could use the power of Reason to create a better world.
Concurrently with self-awareness came ingenuity, and this caused humans to become successful and grow in numbers. This made it necessary to accept that life will be complex, needing much ingenuity, thought and active decision-making just to survive. (Agriculture is much more complex than gathering — but it is a necessary activity because of the great increase in human population, an increase that was a direct result of human ingenuity.)
When man reclaims his role as the enactor of Reason, he recreates the ideal world, as closely as possible. The Age of Reason is the closest one can come to paradise in the mortal world.
This page was written in the "embarrassingly readable" markup language RHTF, and was last updated on 2025 Jul 15.
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