Sometimes the best place to talk to Catholic baby boomer men about spirituality is far removed from the quiet of a church sanctuary.

Kevin Bartels of Queens, New York, 48, is talking about God while some of his fellow baby boomers play weekend basketball at a city playground, a weekly ritual he partakes in with as much diligence as he attends to his Sunday Mass obligation.

This group has been together for more than 15 years. These guys used to be spry, energetic, going quickly to the basket. Now they run just as hard, but the end result at times can look lethargic. The joke among them is that their game is being filmed in slow motion. The before-game banter about the Knicks, Yankees, and Mets is now accompanied by details of diagnoses on aging knees and tendons falling apart.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Their very generational name speaks of youth and vitality. But some baby boomer men like Bartels—what demographers have dubbed those born between 1946 and 1964—are taking this more slowed-down time in their lives to smell the roses of a spirituality they may have missed out on in their young adult years.

Bartels had a son at 22. “Then the most important thing was going to work and making money,” he recalls. The money—Bartels works in the mental health field as a job counselor—never really came. His first marriage broke up and he says he spent some time after his divorce looking for love in all the wrong places. He is now married to a woman he considers his best friend. They have three children, 8-year-old twins and a 3-year-old.

A renewed interest in things spiritual came to him around his 40th birthday. He made a practice of reading self-help books, including evangelical pastor Rick Warren’s A Purpose Driven Life (Zondervan), and began returning to regular Mass attendance.

Bartels has progressed spiritually largely through his own efforts, tapping into the Catholic school and parish tradition in which he was raised. But for those men who want to join the men’s movement, Catholic style, there also are group opportunities that grew out of the wider men’s movement that took off in the 1990s and was the subject of much media interest and, in some circles, ridicule.

One such approach is led by Franciscan Father Richard Rohr, director of the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico, who has built his priestly ministry around bringing men to a deeper awareness of spirituality in their lives. For modern American men, he says, it is not an easy task.

“In our culture there are so many aborted attempts to opening up the soul,” he says, particularly for men, who are geared to developing careers and climbing the corporate ladder. Even the language of Christian spirituality, with its emphasis on concepts such as vulnerability and opening oneself to God, speaks of a language that women are more likely to embrace.

Men are different from women and seek spirituality in unique ways. That’s true, says Rohr, even if church structures rarely recognize this. It’s no accident that most pews in traditional churches are filled by women.

“The male psyche pays attention to different things,” he says, something obvious to anyone who has hung around a sports bar for any length of time. If something is too pretty or too nice—such as much liturgical worship as it has evolved over the centuries—men will often be quick to avoid it.

Men, Rohr says, are used to competing and need, at times, to be pulled down. He looks to Jesus in the gospels for inspiration: Jesus is often chiding the male apostles for not getting his message, while he treats women, such as the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, far more gently.

There are signs that baby boomer men, many of whom have achieved financial success and are married to women who have pursued their own careers, are finding less solace in job achievement and are willing to look elsewhere. Rohr’s group, for example, sponsors rites of passage weekends for men, during which participants are urged to embrace their spiritual selves. They are filled up months in advance and are held in locations in the West, Midwest, and Northeast.

Like more secular men’s approaches, Rohr emphasizes that men suffer from distant fathers and need to reconnect with a loving and supportive male presence in their lives. Participants in the rites of passages are expected to bond with nature as well as their fellow man.

A recent New York Times article chronicled the emergence of a kind of fashionably unemployed group of middle-aged men. The article noted that 13 percent of American men between the ages of 30 and 55—usually considered the prime income-producing years—are out of work, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s. The Times attributed the phenomenon to a convergence of factors: men who were laid off and unable to find similar work, those who were successfully able to put away money and can live off savings, those who find other things to do while their wives bring home the bacon, and the growth of government disability benefits and other programs.

Rohr taps baby boomer men, both employed and unemployed, as mentors in his rites of passage system. Such older men, he says, have two alternatives: They can become what he calls “generative,” sharing what they have with younger people; or they can become selfish and turned inward. Those who connect with a spiritual path, says Rohr, find themselves more concerned about issues such as social justice. They stretch their worldview and grow in concern for others whom they may have ignored in their working lives.

William Buckley of Manhattan—not the late conservative pundit—has lived that “generativity” that Rohr talks about. At 59, Buckley is retired from a high-powered New York brokerage firm, the kind that dominates the finance pages. While still in his early 50s, Buckley left the firm, secure in his financial future yet unsure of what he might do with the years he expected to have left.

“I was too young to just go to the beach,” he says about his retirement.

For a year and a half Buckley took college courses, read a book a week, played golf, and reconnected with old friends. “It was a lot of fun,” says Buckley, who is married with two adult children. “But it became clear that there was something missing.” Like many men needing a quest, Buckley discovered that the leisure lifestyle offered no objective or mission.

Now he’s found his mission, teaching math to girls at St. Aloysius School in Harlem through the Ignatian Volunteer Corps, a Jesuit-run group that provides ministry opportunities and spiritual counseling and support for older adults willing to volunteer in some kind of social service work.

Jesuit-educated and an active lay Catholic much of his life, Buckley had the means and inclination to donate money to good causes. But the stories of his students in Harlem make for a different view from that on Wall Street.

“You hear the stories of these kids. Some are living in cars, some are visiting a parent in the prison system, some need medicine [and are uninsured].These kids are dealt such a bad hand. It’s not right and it’s not fair,” he says. With the help of a spiritual adviser, Buckley regularly reflects upon the lessons he learns from his Harlem students about social injustice and how they can be applied to his spiritual life.

Edmund Stankiewicz, 60, of Mountainside, New Jersey says that a cancer scare turned his life around six years ago. He was determined “to do something I wanted to do, not what I have to do” with his second chance at life.

He sold his investment counseling business and put his business skills to work at a homeless shelter. “I had made it to the top of my profession,” he says. “But it was no longer fun. It became a grind to stay there. All the toys in the world weren’t doing it.”

While he waxes enthusiastically about how his business efforts have contributed positively to the work of the shelter, he credits the lessons learned from regular spiritual counseling and retreats as a member of the Ignatian Volunteer Corps.

“The goal is to see God in all things,” he says. It is a broad principle with daily applications. Every night before he goes to bed, Stankiewicz reviews the events of the day, putting them into perspective. “You reflect upon your whole day, where you saw God and where you didn’t.”