When we encounter the family from the point of view of the soul, accepting its shadows and its failure to meet our idealistic expectations, we are faced with mysteries that resist our moralism and sentimentality.

~ Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

“... people believe the images of normality and maintain the secret of their family’s corruption, wishing they had been born elsewhere...But recovery of soul begins when we can take to heart our own family fate and find in it the raw material, the alchemical prima materia...”

... “family therapy” might take the form of simply telling stories of family life, free of any concern for cause and effect or sociological influence. These stories generate a grand local, personal mythology. ...

~ T. Moore

“What the Greek, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, and African mythologies are to the society—its formative mythology—stories of the family, good and bad, are to the individual.”

~ T. Moore

“We are so affected by the scientific tone in education and in the media that... Instead of stories, one hears analysis... ‘My father drank, and as a child of an alcoholic I am prone to...’ The soul of the family evaporates in the thin air of this kind of reduction.”

~ T. Moore

“A renewed entry into the family, embracing what has previously been denied, often leads to an unexpected alchemy...[but] heroic efforts to make families work according to some norm get in the way of this alchemy.”

~ T. Moore

“This imagination can deepen and change over a period of time and unleash some of the soul that has been bound up in resentment and rigidity.”

~ Thomas Moore

“For each individual, the myth will be different, and yet certain characteristics are constant. Every family member evokes the archetypal family, the myth in everyday life.”

~ T. Moore

“One of the most extraordinary mythic stories from our own collective past... is about a man trying to reclaim his fatherhood, a wife longing for her husband, and a son out in search of his lost father... Homer’s Odyssey...”

Without the father there is chaos, conflict, and sadness. On the other hand,by starting with the unhappiness of Telemachus,the story teaches us that the experience of father includes his absence and the longing for his return...As we wonder where he is,he is finding his way back.

“During this time of separation...Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, is at home weaving a shroud for Odysseus’ father, and every night she unravels what she has woven. This is the great mystery of the soul: whenever something is being accomplished, it is also in some way being undone.”

“What possible value is there in this father taking ten years on the sea, telling his stories and surviving his risky adventures, before he can finally return home and restore peace?... this long, dangerous, adventure-filled journey is the making of the father.”

~ Thomas Moore

“The Odyssey...if we don’t visit the land of the dead with reverence and in a spirit of initiation,we will not have a sustaining fatherhood in our collective soul...we are left with father substitutes—people...offering superficial tokens of fatherhood, but not the father’s soul.”

“... modern therapies... aim at goals and fantasies of normality or unquestioned values... people need to be empowered... But there are also times when we may need to be weak and powerless, vulnerable and open to experience...

...people need to be capable of intimacy—relationship is the ultimate goal. But soul also requires solitude and individuality. The goals stated by these therapists are monolithic and monarchical. By focusing on a single value,we close ourselves off to many other possibilities...”

“... odyssey serves the many-faceted soul...to discovery and a trust in movements that are not intended or even expected. The sea is fate, the world one is born into. It is unique and individual, always uncharted, teeming with its own dangers, pleasures, and opportunities.”

“Some teachers don’t seem to understand the need in their students to be on an odyssey and to be discovering their own fatherhood. They expect their students to be a copy of themselves and to profess the same values and information...”

Without soulful fathers, our society is left with mere reason and ideology as guides. Then we suffer collective fatherlessness: not having a clear national direction; giving the spoils of a wealthy economy to a few; finding only rare examples of deep morality, law, and community;

“... not seeking out odyssey because we prefer the solid ground of opinion and ideology.”

“Culturally we are also suffering from the breakdown of patriarchy... Patri-archy means absolute, profound, archetypal fatherhood. We need a return of patriarchy in this deepest sense...

...because to vacillate between embracing...oppressive fathering on one side and criticizing it on the other gets us nowhere. In that divisiveness we will never find the spirit of fatherhood that we need both as a society and in our individual lives as men and women.”

~ T. Moore

“... we sustain the experiences of absence, wandering, longing, melancholy, separation, chaos, and deep adventure. There is no shortcut to the father. In soul time it takes ten symbolic years to establish a solid sense of father—that is to say, odyssey takes place eternally...”

“The Odyssey...is a challenge to evoke the deep father and not to be satisfied with substitutes and empty roles. There is no easy route to soul and no simple way of establishing fatherhood... without the mythic father’s guidance... we are left disoriented and out of control.”