Paul Cumbo

Richard Helppie 

Hello. Welcome to The Common Bridge. I’m your host, Rich Helppie, and with us today is Paul Cumbo. We’ve talked a lot about policies and politics on this show, and there’s a sense that maybe things aren’t working as well as they could or should or did. Why is that? We’ve always had business enterprises. We’ve always had local municipal government. We’ve always had state governments and we’ve had a federal government. While you may agree or disagree with the size of the bureaucracy, things got done and served the population pretty well. Something has changed. What is it? Why aren’t we enjoying those same outputs from these institutions? Well, for any of that to work, we need to have a higher purpose, a moral base, good people. Because bad people in a good system can do bad things, and we need good people with a good moral compass. We’ve talked about the dangers of tribalism; if your tribe is the red one or the blue one, just can we at least have good people that are good managers, and we’ve talked about the crisis with young men and young women. Today we’ve got a very special guest to go over a very important issue. Right now, based on over two decades of experience teaching and mentoring, Paul Cumbo is coming out with an essential guide about practical wisdom for manhood, a path to manhood, how to build genuine self-knowledge and emotional intelligence, healthy relationships and true friendship, making smart decisions about education, technology, finance and vocation, understanding those things that make us human – love, marriage, faith, fatherhood – and particularly breaking negative patterns and building positive habits that can last a lifetime. So we welcome to The Common Bridge today Mr. Paul Cumbo. Paul, it is a genuine pleasure to have you with us. How are you today?

Paul Cumbo 

I’m doing very well. Likewise, I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you today.

Richard Helppie 

Well, you’ve picked up some really strong endorsements, and you’re kind of on the front end of this new journey; again, the boy crisis, the path to manhood. Our audience likes to know a little bit about our guests. Where did you spend your early days, and what was your business and professional educational life? What brought you to this point today?

Paul Cumbo 

Well, I’m a proud Buffalonian. So I’ll start with go Bills. I was born here in Buffalo with and my parents, and I’m one of five brothers; so I have four brothers. We were raised in Catholic education, and that went all the way through high school. For me, I started out at the US Coast Guard Academy, but that was a false start for me, and I made a change, and then pursued my education at a Jesuit university to become a teacher. I started teaching in September of 2001 at Georgetown Prep School down in the Bethesda, Maryland area. I’ve been a teacher now this is year 23 for me. For the last almost 20 of those years, I’ve been back at my own alma mater, Canisius High School, another Jesuit High School for young men, right here in Buffalo, New York. I’m up here with my wife, Megan, and our three young kids.

Richard Helppie 

What’s the title of your book?

Paul Cumbo 

It’s called “The Path to Manhood:  Encouragement and Advice for Young Men.”

Richard Helppie 

Why was writing this book necessary?

Paul Cumbo 

I think this book has existed in some form… it’s been coming together in my mind and my heart for probably the entirety of my career, working with young men, working with teenage boys, mentoring them into young adulthood. Throughout those, I suppose, decades, at this point, I’ve observed that so many of them have a remarkable amount of potential that is sometimes unrealized. I think that in today’s day and age, young men, teenage boys, young men, are struggling in some ways that are new and different because of a variety of circumstances, and I found that I have some experience that enables me to do two things for them:  one of them is to encourage, and the other is to advise. The subtitle of the book is pretty intentional. It’s encouragement and advice. I think those two things have to go together. I think they’re a little bit co-dependent, and I think the encouragement has to come first. So my hope with the book is to offer some encouragement and some advice that can help teenage boys, whether they’re doing really well, or maybe struggling a bit, all the way into young adult men; navigate some of the twists and turns that they have to as they mature and become as productive as they can be and the men that they want to be.

Richard Helppie 

Who do you hope will read this book?

Paul Cumbo 

Well, I hope anybody who has a connection to a growing young man, whether that is the guy himself or his parents, his teachers, his coaches, his mentors, anybody that has an interest in what I think is important for our culture, for our society, which is a population of young men who have the security and the authenticity to be their genuine best self, to bring what they’re capable of to our world. Because the world needs good men just as much as it needs good women.

Richard Helppie 

In this world of controversy that we’ve got today, if your book was given to President Trump and maybe given to some leaders from the Democratic National Committee, do you think they’d find places to agree in the book, or do you think it would become another partisan fight?

Paul Cumbo 

I would like to think that the book is more or less intentionally political. Myself, as you and I have discussed a little bit, I’m an empirically observable centrist. I don’t vote by party. I don’t belong to a party. And so my intention with this was to go deeper than the sometimes shallow waters of politics. I think that the reality is that regardless of partisan extremes, most people, most of the time, can find some some common ground – pun intended – on most issues. I think when it gets down to the things that are essential for a young person growing up to navigate some of the challenges that are universal, regardless of political beliefs, I think there’s something here for both. I would like to think that the endorsements that the book has gotten – which really do come from, I would say, both ends of the political spectrum – speak to that centrality and that universal appeal. I suppose I would aspire to be able to speak to anybody who’s got that common human experience, regardless of political inclinations.

Richard Helppie 

In your studies was there ever a time in history when it was generally accepted about the definition of what a good man should be? I mean, there were, of course, more strict gender roles and such but was there ever a time when we said, yeah, that’s a good man?

Paul Cumbo 

I think we still do, to be honest with you. I think I’d pushed back a little bit on the premise of the question, because I think there are two different things going on. There are activist political interests that want to serve an ideological purpose and use questioning the fundamental nature of what it means to be good in their own service. But I think… again, I would hope that this would speak to the centrism of the book. I think at the end of the day, if you were to ask people, what would you like your son to be like? What would you like your father to be like? What would you like your future husband to be like or your brother, I think those answers would tend to have a lot of common ground. And so I think if you can escape the noise and you can sit down on a personal level with people, we all are looking for that balance of traits and qualities and characteristics that we associate quietly with the men we admire most. I think of my own grandfather, for example. He died some years ago, but here was a man who had military background, was tough as nails in all the ways that we associate with that World War II generation, and in many ways, could have the voice of a drill sergeant, but at the same time, he was among the most gentle and gentile man I can think of, who was able to speak with a quiet voice, was able to listen, was able to exercise that. Had innate emotional intelligence and had emotional fluency that I don’t think is mutually exclusive from toughness. At the end of the day, I think that’s what people want from today’s men. They want both of those things in balance. I think young men and boys can be reminded of that. That’s part of what I’m hoping to do with the book.

Richard Helppie 

That would be certainly unifying. I recall… I was raised by a World War II vet. We had things like Boy Scouts, and I don’t remember all of it, but we were told to be thrifty, brave, clean, reverent. We knew how to change a flat on a car. We knew how to handle basic tools and the like and to be protectors. Some of that role, you wonder if that’s what it’s about. Clearly we had some pretty bad behavior too, which we all appreciate the statute of limitations on, and that type of thing. But in looking over history, do we have a crisis for boys and how do we get here?

Paul Cumbo 

It’s a fantastic line of inquiry, something to reflect upon. I was just discussing plot structure. I teach English now, so I was working with some sophomores and talking about the definition of crisis; crisis in a literary context means it’s the situation in which action can no longer be put off. It demands action. It demands decisive action, and it centers on an acute point of climax where that action, really, reaches its consequential peak. Are we at a boy crisis? I don’t know. I really don’t know. There’s a part of me that says, well, I’ve been working with teenage boys for quite a while now, and most of the time, most of them are pretty solid guys, and they mess up. But for the most part, things are pretty calm, pretty quiet. On the other hand, if you start to look into some of the statistics about mental health, male pattern, depression, suicide dynamics, even in the labor market and in education, some of the things that are written about in more detail and from more of a research perspective, from some other writers in the space – I think of Richard Reeves, for example – there certainly are some things to be attempted to that seem to be disproportionately presenting in the population of boys and young men. So I don’t know if it’s a crisis, Richard, honestly, I think that sometimes calling something a crisis makes it one.

I do think, however, that there is an important need to be attentive to the needs of boys and young men.

Richard Helppie 

Are there things in this current generation that we could or should be doing to help shape young men and their role in the world because things have changed dramatically in every aspect. I’d liken it back a generation before me, women were not only not in the workforce, they were barred from the workforce during my professional career. That did change, thankfully, and now that role of I’ll be the breadwinner, the homemaker, those types of what we would call traditional roles at that time have been changed. Women are certainly empowered, more doctors, more attorneys and those professional type jobs well handled by women. Is the issue with boys that they need to find their way similar to the way women have or is it something different?

Paul Cumbo 

Well, I think you’ve hit on something there. Certainly the upward mobility, the professional emergence of a higher proportion of girls and women in the workforce… I mean, I don’t think you can divorce that from some of the things that we see going on with men and boys. I do think it’s really important to not develop a reductive kind of fatalism or binary mentality about this that says a gain for women is a loss for boys and men. Unfortunately, there are voices out there in the online manosphere, in particular, that really are hammering that line of thinking home. There could be some veracity to something there, but I don’t think that’s the healthy or helpful message. I do think, though, we look at the conscious efforts that have been made in government, in culture and society and education. There has been a very conscious push to try to establish a little bit more equilibrium in over the past however many decades for girls, women, and it’s worked. There is a possibility of, in some places perhaps, an over-correction. I mentioned Reeves. Reeves did some interesting research -and has repeated it multiple times now in many channels – about what we’ve seen with Title IX, which since Title IX has emerged, we now have a considerable imbalance of men and women in higher education, which is greater than the original imbalance that it sought to address. We now have upwards of 62:38 ratio of females to males enrolling in college, and the ratio is even starker when you’re looking at the alumni who graduate in four years. So yeah, there’s something going on with men and boys in the workforce. There’s a disengagement. There’s a, I think the word I would use is a fragmentation, and that fragmentation, I think, is something that you can observe in young boys and teenagers when you look at how distracted they are all the time by electronic distractions of all kinds, all sorts of inputs. I said recently to a colleague that we’ve always had to separate the signal from the noise, but now, in addition to young people having a signal that needs to be separated from the noise they also have to separate the signal from about 87 million other signals – and they’re not all bad. So I’ve gone on a little bit of a tangent from your original question.

Richard Helppie 

Look, I think this is germane; I think there is a general sense that we have a different culture, that we do see the things like the despair and the suicides and the who am I. What defines a man when I was growing up, a lot of it was who could throw a ball better, hit a ball further, that type of thing. And now looking back, it’s like I felt bad about those non-athletic kids playing dodge ball, where the object of the game was to… being somebody with the ball, they didn’t have a clue. And frankly, it was cruel, and it was, well, that’s boys will be boys, you know, man up, be tough. We probably shouldn’t have done that. I think this leads to a lot of serious problems and I’m going to personally apologize to anybody I beamed in junior high, if you still remember it. In my defense, that’s what we were encouraged to do. So we’ve got societal changes that I think are opening pathways. I always thought that what the freedom for women would create [was] more freedom for men. Where are we today with those societal challenges and what are some of those course corrections?

Paul Cumbo 

Well, I go back to the concept of over-correction. You had mentioned that in previous generations the measure of a man was how hard can you hit; essentially, how stoic can you be in the face of adversity. Any slippage into the realm of emotional expression was equated with weakness. Certainly that, I think, has done a disservice to any number of generations of men who are certainly very emotional people. I think you and I can both attest to that it but there’s been, it seems to me, a bit of an over-correction in the past decade where there is such a desire to shift the nature of what it means to be a healthy masculine man so far away from those old traditions of brute force is as the measure of all things; strength at its most simplistic definition, as a measure of all things. And so what’s happened is now, if to the extent that you do try to demonstrate those things – which I’d like to think are intrinsic and valuable – those are seen as potentially problematic and the net result of that. But boys being told, well, you’ve got to be more emotionally fluent, great. You’ve got to be more willing to show your feelings. You’ve got to explore things on a level that goes beyond the traditional stoic image of the Marlboro Man or John Wayne, right? All well and good, but that doesn’t mean that those other qualities and characteristics have no value. I think the net result is that you’ve got a confused generation of boys and young men who aren’t exactly sure – I think you alluded to this before – quite how to be. How do I present in a culture where, for example, the labor market is not as dependent on – pun intended – manual labor. Technology is far more of a force, of an equalizing force, I suppose, and those are all good things, but it does leave boys, I think, in a little bit of a of a rut in terms of how they’re supposed to present. Solutions, well, we need to talk with them. We need to communicate with them. And I’ve seen that work well in my career as an educator. I have experienced over over a couple decades of teaching, Richard, enough evidence that suggests to me that on their deepest level, boys, absolutely, first of all, are emotionally complex, and B, seek to engage that complexity in their relationships. They really do, and to the extent that a society tells them to toughen up and stop acting like a girl on one hand, but then on the other hand, it’s stop acting like such an old school guy. That’s tricky. So we’ve got to talk to them. We’ve got to have those conversations, give them spaces to articulate those frustrations. But I think modeling emotional fluency alongside traditional virtuous qualities of men like my grandfather, is the best thing that we can do. We need to be able to – and this goes for boys and girls, so many people, right? We have to be able to model both thinking and understandings of the world. Your podcast is called The Common Bridge and I think it speaks to that. People have a lot more in common than they do different; men and women have a lot more in common than they do different. Differences matter, the differences matter!

Richard Helppie 

Differences matter if we talk to each other, and there is spectrum. And to your point about men being rewarded for physical strength, a lot of times that was manifested in stopping a man that was misbehaving and being strong enough and resolute enough to step in where anybody, smaller, weaker, whatever, that was being bullied that you wanted to be strong enough to handle that. So Paul, again, before we move on again, the name of your book and where can people get it today?

Paul Cumbo 

Thank you. It’s called “A Path to Manhood.” It’s not THE path to manhood, that would be pretty prescriptive, but it’s “A Path to Manhood:  Encouragement and Advice for Young Men.” You can get it pretty much anywhere books are sold. It’s being published by a national publisher, international reach, all the major distributors, all the online platforms, your local bookstore, if they don’t have it in stock, they can certainly order it.

Richard Helppie 

That’s Paul Cumbo. So one of the things that you talk about also- and I want to get into your Camino Institute – is healthy relationships and true friendships. Now look, I want to tell you this is a fascinating topic for me. I have lifelong friends, and one of the many reasons I think we’re lifelong friends is because we always had each other’s back in every way, and now, as we’re hitting this stage of life we’re getting ill and other things are happening, but we, I think we have really true friendships, that they’re going to be there when you need them. What is it that you’re discovering about true friendships with young men, and what are some of the experiences you’ve had in your teaching, your book and with Camino?

Paul Cumbo 

Camino Institute is a company that I’ve co-founded with another educator, and we do immersive, service-oriented travel and retreats out of a campus that we’ve built in the rural Dominican Republic. The Camino Institute is something that emerged out of a desire to provide a space for exactly the kind of deep human connection that you’re describing, not just for boys and young men – although that is a population that has gravitated to it, which is telling – but really for anybody. It goes back to my vocation of education; there’s a very healthy and robust experience of tradition of retreats that the Jesuit spiritual tradition is really invested in and on those retreats – of which I’ve led probably over 100 at this point over the past 23 years – I have seen, as I said before, very sophisticated evidence of the real complexity of the inner lives of boys, the emotional landscape. I’ve often referred to this using the metaphor of the Grand Canyon. If you’ve ever had an opportunity to visit the Grand Canyon, it’s one of those things that does not disappoint, it is below the surface and it’s an incredibly complex landscape. There’s a lot going on. Complexity is there, the vastness is there, but it’s below the surface. And what a fitting metaphor for the interior lives of boys and young men. You have to make an effort to descend a little bit to navigate the paths, to really look up close and see what’s there and sometimes it’s difficult terrain. But over the years, through conversation and through establishing a time and a place and an openness, boys and young men respond to that, they need to respond to that. They realize how much they’re craving the opportunity to talk about the things that are the deepest level of their authentic desires, they want to talk about pain that has been suppressed, they want to talk about joy that’s bubbling forth. It’s a very different landscape than what’s up on the surface, which for many of today’s younger people is 80% online and therefore curated, and therefore has a veneer of a lot of things that disguise themselves as happiness, but they’re far from joy.

Richard Helppie 

That is so profound. I had some teenage boys that we worked with, and quiet, during the time of COVID where they weren’t allowed to go to school. On the surface, you’d think they were fine. They were online. They were used to being online, in many cases. When they got back to school you should have seen… actually, what I actually witnessed, what you said, the real joy. I couldn’t have articulated it the way you just did, but I did witness it, like, oh, they really did miss being around other people that are in 3-D and making sounds and motion that people do. When you have your retreats at Camino, how much screen time is there?

Paul Cumbo 

Well, for most people… we don’t take their phones away or anything like that, but we offer the option to put them in the safe with their passports and most of our clients do. It’s very difficult to have a tech detox in most circumstances. Well, to be fair, most people usually can’t do that, but we afford that opportunity and I’ll tell you, it’s like the scales falling from the eyes. There’s such a freedom that emerges over time. And the irony Rich, the paradox is, by removing those means of technological connection, you set the stage for genuine connection. To harken back to our previous topics just a bit, one of the things that I think can be very helpful for boys and young men, for anybody, but girls and women are already, in my experience, they’re already better at this. They’re more naturally pointed to set that stage and show them and tell them and engage them and prove to them that both of these things can exist; strength is not mutually exclusive of vulnerability. The full landscape of your emotional being is not a liability. It is, in fact, intrinsic to your strength and just conveying the idea that that’s okay, you can be a deeply feeling, fully engaged human person and be tough as nails. Those two things don’t work against each other. I think giving them the freedom, boys and young men – this is part of what I try to do in the book – is say that these two things, not only are they not mutually exclusive, they may, in fact be co-dependent. That’s how you experience the fullness. That’s how you discover the full complexity of the landscape and plumb that landscape and explore it. Because if you do anything less you’re not allowing yourself to be fully human. That’s my three second elevator pitch for the Camino Institute. By the way, the Camino Institute experience is about becoming more fully human.

Richard Helppie 

How can people find the Camino Institute?

Paul Cumbo 

CaminoInstitute.com, that’s where you can find it. We’re on all the socials as well, and what an amazing place, I’ll tell you. We took a leap of faith, we raised some money from some friendly investors, and we started a travel company right when COVID broke out. But a few years later, we have a beautiful two acre campus that is designed to be comfortable, but not luxurious. It’s designed to enable simplicity and focus and we have these. I just love being there because we have a balance of you work hard with your hands and your back, and you bring your muscle and your financial muscle to bear to help a family or a community in need and you emerge exhausted in all the right ways. Then you come back to our campus. We have fans, but no AC. We have plumbing but no hot water, and you take a cold shower and you eat a healthy dinner. Then at night, we sit down in a circle and we talk. If it’s a faith inclined group, we pray, and if it’s a secular group, we don’t but we talk and we reflect, and we get to the heart of what it means to be human and seeing people, inviting people into that space. I mean, you can hear my voice, how much it animates me, and I’ve seen it happen. That being said, not everybody can do something like that, that’s part of – to get back to your first question – why I wrote “A Path to Manhood.” I would like to invite any young man who’s willing to read a book – I was told boys don’t read books but there’s evidence to the contrary – to pick this thing up and to go on a journey right there in his chair, into some of the landscape of his mind and heart, ask himself some tough questions, and hopefully emerge a little bit more tolerant of his iniquities, a little bit more in love with the joy that’s within him and a little bit more excited about the possibility of what lies ahead, because my resounding theme refrain throughout the book is you matter. You matter, and a lot of guys need to hear that.

Richard Helppie 

You talk about making smart decisions, which is very difficult at every age, but particularly in that emergence into manhood. A typical 17 year old reading the book, maybe going to a session at Camino, what kind of decisions would they get better at?

Paul Cumbo 

Well, I’d like to think that the big things are predicated on the small things. I quote Will Durant in the book, who offered a very concise encapsulation of Aristotelian and virtue ethics and basically said, we are what we repeatedly do. And one of the things I point out in the book is that Aristotle, via Durant, did not say we are what we repeatedly did, and that leaves room for being able to move on from the past when it comes to any screw up, big or small. Okay, that’s the first thing, is understanding that the past is the past. You can’t do anything about it. You get that lesson from The Lion King or just about any fable or classical work of literature you want. So that’s part one is you’ve got to be able to move on from the past. There’s more to you than your past. You recreate the past. You recreate yourself each day. But to get to your question, it’s going to challenge them to look at the most minute and mundane things, everything from the way that they take care of their teeth, to how frequently they change their sheets to the way that they approach some of the daily responsibilities of just growing up. Again, pretty, pretty… how do I put it? There’s pretty blunt talk about some of the online habits that are issues for a lot of young men, whether it’s in the dangerous terrain of social media, the addictive terrain of gaming and gambling. It has a whole chapter – which was actually rather difficult to write – about pornography and its addictive tendencies and the way that it’s worked its talons into so many teenage boys and young men. So in the book, I look at very mundane things that are very relatable, whether you’re, I’d say 14 or  24 or maybe still growing up, 34, but then from there, there’s the ability to extrapolate those little lessons and realize that the big things, the relationships, the work ethic, the vocational path, all of those things stem from an ability to know where you want to go. And so that’s why I have a chapter on telos, long term vision, a lot of boys and young men and girls in our education system, there’s a lot of focus on plans without enough focus on vision first. That’s like we’re making a lot of plans, but we don’t know what the plans are for and then when the plans go wrong, then I’m lost and I’m despairing and I’m desolate. So little things and big things, because little things lead to the big things.

Richard Helppie 

That sounds like a great framework, because I know in your book, you talk about smart decisions around education, about how to budget time for technology, how to make smart decisions around finance and the vocation. Then I know that you spend time talking about marriage. And look, this is a hard one, because go back to your grandfather’s generation, same as my father’s generation. World War II was over, come home to a unique period in history where there was employment for everyone. The only modern factories on the planet were in the United States. The rest of the world was in ruin, and it was get married, be a bread winner, raise a family. That was like, find somebody, make a partnership, commit to it and then build a life. And I see a lot of young men, they’re just kind of imbued with this notion that commitment is bad. I’m not getting married. That’s too much work, that’s too much trouble. I don’t know that you see it that way, but I’d like to know what your experience has been with these young men as they look at marriage and family.

Paul Cumbo 

I’ve seen… I’m at the age now where a critical mass of my students are old enough now to have entered their adult years, and their marriage years, their fatherhood years. I mean, everybody’s different. Not everybody’s going to get married, right? That’s not the path for everybody. But I have observed something akin to what you’ve said, and I think that it comes down to really, maybe it’s some confusion about what genuine freedom is. I think when we’re young – and I’m sympathetic to this, by the way – but I think when we’re young we look at freedom, we define freedom as the absence of obligation, as the absence of restriction. And of course, as we get older, we realize that freedom and restriction and responsibility and obligation to things that are bigger than us not only are they not mutually exclusive, but in fact, there’s a pattern here. They’re kind of co-dependent. They reinforce themselves. But it takes a certain degree of maturity to realize that, it also takes a willingness to try commitment to do that. There are so many signals, and there are so many messages that are telling young people, men and women, that you don’t need to lock in, you can maintain maximum liberty, and that’s going to be the key to lasting happiness and freedom and joy. I disagree with that myself. On one hand, I certainly believe that not everybody is… their vocation is not to be a married person, and I respect that. On the other hand, I think that most people are wired to want to engage in permanent connection, whether or not they want to acknowledge that or not. It’s a deep craving. It’s a human craving. And what an incredible cascade of joy emerges from the moment where you realize that your wife is not just about you, you’ve tapped into something that’s much, much bigger. Yet, I think about Victor Frankl, who I quote in the book, talking about the fact that happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue, and it ensues as the byproduct of commitment to somebody else or a higher purpose. I’m certainly not the first person to say that. It’s been said by any number of thinkers and philosophers over the years. But, yeah, there are a lot of messages that seem to be advertising the glossy sheen of maximum liberty, but I’m not so sure if that’s the real depth of real freedom. And as I see my students getting older and engaging and locking in, they’re discovering that. I think we need more marriage, not less.

Richard Helppie 

I know that, in my own experience, that commitment is the cornerstone that we’re going to make this work. We’re going to have good times, bad times. My experience in life is in the absence of abuse of any type; could be physical, emotional, mental, substance, unresolved abuse – I should say, that you can usually go further. Just tell you a quick side note. In recent years, we were at a wedding. You know how they do that like, if you’ve been married five years leave the floor [and so on]. At the end of it – first time, only time it’s happened – my wife and I were the last two people on the floor. And so they said, well, what’s the key? She said forgiveness and I said commitment. After I sat down, I said, what I wish I would have said was – after she said, forgiveness – try to avoid doing things you have to be forgiven for, because that’s really what it’s about. [Laughter.] But you alluded to a couple of other things that I think are very deep topics about a commitment to something bigger; a faith life and fatherhood. Perhaps you’re dealing with young men that weren’t raised in a faith-based household, or perhaps didn’t experience their own father for whatever reason that might be. Tell us a little bit about where your work has taken you in the area of faith and fatherhood.

Paul Cumbo 

Yeah, sure. Well, institutional religion has had a rugged path over the past quarter century and longer. And I think – I’m starting with the devil’s advocate here, pun intended – I think it’s important to give credence to the fact that for a number of people my age or younger, I would say especially, there is a healthy skepticism of institutional religion. There’s a little bit of a look at it. I can respect it, but I’ve seen some things and I’ve heard some things, and I live in a very scientifically advanced, technologically enabled, secularized society wherein my questions about the rational logic of religion might be too big of a stumbling block for me to begin to get the whisperings of faith and my message. I have a chapter on this, and it’s a very sympathetic chapter to people who don’t have religious background. It’s a gentle invitation to consider the idea that if you believe in anything resembling a soul, that that’s the biggest idea there is. And so it begs some time and some thought and some consideration into what are the implications for how we live our lives in service to that soul, and that leaves a lot of room. That leaves a big tent for particular religious traditions and teaching and questions. But I think stopping young people and saying, hey, listen. Now, a lot of young people say, well, I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious. Part of my message in the book is, well, hold on, if you’re spiritual, you just said a really big thing, because you just acknowledge that spiritual things exist. So let’s spend a little time thinking about what that might mean, and what does that compel us to do and consider. I think extending a question, an invitation to think about some of the things that faith is predicated on, while acknowledging that faith does not involve certainty and it can’t because to do so would preclude the need for faith, I think that gives young people some space, to just stop and think about it for a moment and realize that it’s actually a quite rational response to the world. And even if it’s wrong, it’s hard to find a better framework for how to live than a lot of the best traditions of our Western religious traditions.

Richard Helppie 

I would be in strong agreement with you and my counseling or mentoring of young people. It’s, let’s start with the undeniable. We’re only here on the earth for a short time, right? What is it you want to do with that time and your faith life? If you’re starting to think about a bigger picture, what comes afterward? And then you can kind of step back. Paul, as we’re nearing the end of our time, I know you’ve got things in your book about top ten tips for parents, and you talk about a sacred ordinary, and we’ve talked about the Camino Institute. We’ve talked about your book “A Path to Manhood.” Are there any case studies or an anecdote? Tell me how something worked, somebody came to Camino, or read the book… I don’t know if you’ve had time to get that feedback yet, this is pretty new. What do we know?

Paul Cumbo 

Yeah, sure. Well, I can think of a conversation that I had recently in the Dominican Republic with a young man who was on our young men seminar. It was a fascinating conversation. We really talked through the early hours of dawn. Without getting into the weeds about it, we were talking about the fact that this young man had decided to close the door on possibilities. He had decided that having tried something and failed at it, that precluded an entire zone of possibility for him. And that had two effects. On the most practical level, it had some job implications for him. But on an even deeper level, on an existential level, he really had narrowed the bandwidth. He narrowed the depth of field, if you will, for his own future possibilities. It came down to a simple question for him, which was, why are you so sure, and are you afraid to try again? The answer to the question was, I suppose I’m not really that sure, and I am afraid to try again. Then the third question was, but are you willing? And the answer was a resounding,you know what? Yes, I am. And since that time, the young man has tried again, so to speak –  I’m trying to keep things fairly anonymous here – and it worked. The reason I share that case study is because it’s an example of how being in the right time and space and framework and then having a mentor who’s capable of extending an invitation, not in any kind of fancy, complicated way, but sometimes simply with a well-timed, pointed, genuine question that gets to the heart of things, can have a really remarkable tail end impact. You can apply a lot of leverage by asking one question. If you’ve got the fulcrum advantage of the right time in the right place, people can respond. People can change. And that’s that was a really rewarding thing for me. I would also say, we at Camino, we had a trip last year. It was three empty nest couples, 50s, 60s, the kids out of college. They were all close friends. They got to work with a young couple, late teens, early 20s, young couple who had just got married in the Dominican Republic and were building their first home. So you had all these older folks who had had a lifetime of experience behind them and raised their own kids, helping a young couple just getting started. Even though these people had known each other forever, they discovered new terrain. They discovered new interior terrain, of their friendship, of their connections, by being in a different place, by breaking their regular patterns. The rationale I share for that case study is there’s incredible power and there’s incredible potential. We think we know ourselves, whether we’re 14 or 64 or 84 but there are always more paths in the canyon. What a joyful prospect to be told that there’s something else around the bend if you just keep going. That’s really what I’ve been trying to carry forth in my book.

Richard Helppie 

Paul, I can’t help but thinking as we wrap up today where we started, that we’ve always had institutions of government, we’ve always had agencies, we’ve always had businesses and there have been charlatans, and there have been honest people, but if we can all encourage everyone to do better. As you were talking with your examples, I’m thinking there are people that are dragging their children out to hate somebody in the other political party/tribe, and trying to make them out as evil people. Instead of saying, is there a place that we can reason together, is there something about them that you can find to like, which I think we just need more of. What you’re doing, I hope that what you’ve written will change lives and perhaps start a groundswell. So as we wrap up, is there anything that we didn’t cover today that you’d like the listeners, readers and viewers of The Common Bridge to hear and perhaps any closing comments for our audience today?

Paul Cumbo 

I think we’ve covered a lot of ground. I suppose something that I would share is that, I think I would re-emphasize the fact that affirmation and challenge, they have to go together. And if you want to reach – at least my experience tells me, in particular – if we want to reach teenage boys and young men and help them realize the fullness of their human potential, we need to approach them with that balance. I’ll channel a little Parker Palmer, who said, not just balance, but blend. We need to blend affirmation with challenge. I do some mountain climbing, not technical climbing, but climb, hike up hills, and when I look at a mountain, I see, okay, a great affirmation, like, I’m gonna do this and when I’m on top, I did it. But I also see challenge, and it’s humbling. So it’s simultaneously affirming and encouraging and humbling, and it checks my ego. If one of those things or the other were missing, it wouldn’t be a complete experience. That’s what I think we need to do. That’s what I’m trying to do in my book. I think there’s so much common ground politics. It’s important, but it can be a lot of noise, and in the quiet places, we’ve got a lot more in common than we do different.

Richard Helppie 

Heartily agree. We’ve been talking today with teacher, author, entrepreneur, Paul Cumbo. I encourage everyone, please look at his book, “A Path to Manhood.” If you’re in a school system, maybe buy some for the library. We’ve got a great future ahead of us if we come together. With our guest, Paul Cumbo, this is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.