About.
Where this work comes from, and what it stands on.
Where this comes from
In 2025 we asked men across the Caribbean about their lives, and two hundred and seventy of them answered. Seven in ten were over forty-five. More than half said they often feel the pressure to hold everything together. Nearly a third said they rarely or never have a safe place to talk. On almost every page, work and money sat beside the deeper questions. On Being Man was shaped by what those men said.
Experience before explanation
Most men have been explained to all their lives. Few have been met. So the whole work rests on three words: experience before explanation. A man has the experience first. The understanding comes after, sometimes weeks later, often when he is not looking for it.
Christian in root, open at the threshold
The roots of this work are Christian, and they run through a contemplative stream of stillness and inward attention. At its centre is the story of Nicodemus, the man who came to Jesus by night, and the word he was given about being born of water and of Spirit.
Yet the room is open. Each man brings his own faith, or his own searching, and the circle honours both. The practices of the tradition are offered to any man who wants them and pressed on no one. There is no quiet effort to convert anyone. When words about God come, they are there to throw light on a man’s own experience and leave it free.
Along the way the work keeps company with writers who have thought long about the inner life and the second half of life, among them Richard Rohr, Bill Plotkin, Matthew Fox and Bert Hellinger.
Michael
The path is walked by Michael A. Clarke, a retired priest. For more than forty years he has accompanied people in their inner lives as companion, teacher and guide, and many will know his voice from Food for the Soul on CBC 100.7FM. He is himself a man in the second half of life, and he walks this path beside the men, not ahead of them.
HIER Life
On Being Man is the men’s pathway within HIER Life, contemplation-based work that tends wellness and healing at the level of the spirit. A companion pathway for women is still to come. The hope is that it will be shaped together with a woman, so that it speaks in a voice that has lived it.
What it is, and what it is not
It is a serious and unhurried company for a man in the second half of life. It is rooted in the Caribbean, shaped by what Caribbean men have said they carry, and honest about what it can and cannot promise.
It is not a doctrine of the one right way to be a man. It is not group therapy under another name. It is not an attack on achievement, provision or strength, and it is not religious recruitment. It is not a programme whose hidden aim is to get men talking about their feelings. And it is not an imported idea with a Caribbean coat of paint.
The task is not to make a man less capable. It is to make sure his capability is no longer the only place from which he knows who he is.