Dynamic US Priest Restoring Young Men to Authentic Masculinity (Fr. Hans Jacobse)

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Finally, a man of God, reminding men how to be men



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One of Fr. Hans' greatest contributions to the church and to the world involves his phenominal work with young men, especially his leading of the St. Paisios Brotherhood movement, where hundreds of young men come together to learn the path to godly masculinity and manhood.

With over 30 years experience in the priesthood, Fr. Hans Jacobse is a man of many accomplishments. He is a contributing author for Global Orthodox, a senior contributor and spiritual advisor for Patristic Faith, and founder of both Orthodoxy Today and the American Orthodox Institute. He is also a senior contributor to the podcast, As Iron Sharpens Iron - Recovering Authentic Manhood Through Orthodox Christianity. A native of Holland, he serves as a priest in Fort Meyers, Florida.

Through his years of experience counseling young men, Fr. Hans has uncovered some important keys towards helping men achieve healing and maturity, learning to be truly masculine in a positive and productive way. His central insight builds upon a principle he gleaned from St. Maximos the Confessor:

"All desire, even inordinate desire, is ultimately grounded in the soul's desire for God."

While traditional therapies often focus on "bad desires", and teaching men how to suppress these desires, Fr. Hans takes a different approach. He recognizes that every desire starts out as something good, but then leads to undesirable results whenever an attempt is made to fulfill the desire in a distorted or disorderly way. Thus, it is not enough merely to suppress undesired activity. To experience real healing and transformation, it is necessary to find the good in the underlying desire, and to identify appropriate, godly ways of bringing that desire to an orderly fulfillment. As a part of the St. Paisios Brotherhood movement, Fr. Hans helps numerous young men reach this goal, bringing order, stability, and true masculinity to their lives.

Fr. Hans actively speaks against the dangers of feminism, particularly noting how this ideology tends to attack men and denigrate masculinity. He explains how Patriarchy Defends Us from Homosexualism, Feminism, & Cultural Marxism. His videos on the topic are quite poignant, as can be seen in the following samples:



In the following interview excerpt (start listening around the 12:00 minute mark), Fr. Hans describes his approach with helping young men to reorder their lives in a more godly, masculine way:

I draw that from St. Maximos the Confessor. "All desire, even inordinate desire, is ultimately grounded in the soul's desire for God." So the desire itself, even the inordinate desire, we define that by its object — food, pornography, alcohol, whatever that might be — and if we take a strictly behavioralist approach to it, a juridical approach . . . "Thou shalt not" is very good for telling us what is ordinate and what is not ordinate.

I use the word "ordinate" and "inordinate" instead of "right" and "wrong". We can say certain behaviors are "wrong". Well, wrong according to what? According to the commandment. So the commandment is really essential and necessary for showing us what is ordered and what is disordered. But if a desire is common to both, we can't negate that desirous dimension, especially if desire, as St. Maximus says, is grounded in the desire for God. So the commandment itself really has an ontological character. It has a juridical character, the "Thou shalt not", the negative, which is really to teach us, again, what is ordered and what is disordered.

But merely suppressing the disorder is not really transformation or victory, because that desirous element is really what is not properly channeled, let's put it that way. And I really saw this in terms of dealing with these guys — I just started with one or two guys — and I started praying about this a lot because they were really struggling with it, and I knew the typical therapies: "watch the trigger points", and so on and so forth. Those are very helpful, and accountability is very helpful, we can talk about that down the road. But it doesn't reorder the disordered soul. It can't properly rechannel the desire into its proper channel.

And I began to think about it a lot. What was the result of the addiction? The result is self-abuse. What happens with self-abuse is the dissipation of masculine creative energy. And it occurred to me, maybe the desire here is that they are trying to get in touch with their masculinity more. But it's in the wrong way, because sexuality is related to creativity. And that's both true of male and female. It's a tremendously creative and potent drive. So it's creativity misapplied, is really what it is. So I began to look and say, what's missing here? What's missing here is, they don't know where to direct it, ultimately. 

And so as we began talking and praying, and all that, what I learned was that when we apply the Orthodox ascetic disciplines, how we need to manage our body, what we do is we create a space between the impulse and the act. And in that space, what opens up, is the pathology — what they are really struggling with deeply — and it's usually questions of identity. Something was not wholly formed.

I'm a little reluctant to apply this universally, because I basically deal with this, although I think it applies to all addictions. The etiology of this can apply to all addictions. And it's usually some kind of trauma. And it's in the trauma that the thinking gets distorted as a defensive reaction to the pain, especially when you're young. And when you're young, you have to protect yourself from the pain, because usually the trauma comes from those you love. And so the love still continues, but the thinking changes to protect yourself from being hurt again.

I want to apply a caveat here. This is the tragedy of human brokenness. So there's no blame here. These things happen. And it's because of Christ becoming the God-man that they can be healed. But a necessary compontent of that is forgiveness. It really is. 

So what happens, this is brought into adulthood, but the desires, the power of the soul, is misdirected as well because of the faulty thinking. Or you could say that the pain that generates the faulty thinking, that makes the faulty thinking a necessity, is really in the soul. The soul is bruised. It's really bruised. And as a result, the whole person cannot emerge. Wholeness cannot emerge.

Now the beautiful thing about this is the very fact that the desire there is still there, even though it is expressed in an inordinate way, that the potential for the fulfillment of that desire is still there. So its really an occasion for hope. So as you deal in this space, and you start praying into it, and this is what the healer does, the healer seeks wisdom from God, and God gives the healer wisdom, the counsellor wisdom, because no one desires the healing of the person more than God. That's what Christ came into the world to do, to redeem the fallen Adam. So He sacrifices Himself to destroy the power of the devil. It makes the wholeness, the healing, possible. Salvation is healing, to redeem the broken person, to restore him to what Adam was before the fall. And that's where the power of the Holy Spirit comes in. It's really quite remarkable.

The pain has to be released, and then at that point the reordering of the energy of the soul, it can be restored. And in my case, what it is, is directing that into areas where they grow into their given manhood, in their personally particularity. So I have seen guys really turn around. I mean, the marijuana, the porn, the defeatism, I have seen them turn around. And the progress especially is very rapid, because all boys desire to become strong men. It's really remarkable. That's how it works.




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