He Was Made That Way

Shlomo Weisel cautioned his young son Eliezer that he should not study the mystics until he was thirty, He survived the Holocaust and went on to be one of the great minds of our age.

Pablo Picasso's close friend committed suicide and he entered into his "Blue" period which was succeeded by his "cubism" period and he changed the landscape (pun intended) of art to this day.

Then, there is me.

I.

This year, the 34th one of my life, has been one of great upheaval. This tumult has been good and bad. As my birthday approaches it will put one calender year of time between the beginning of my journey to recover what was lost and now. How have I done? Like I said above, there has been good and bad. It's not an easy question to answer.

To save you some time by short-cutting to the end I'll say that I have discovered why I became the man I was. I realized the peril that I, my children, and my marriage were in as a result of this state. I took steps to remedy this area. I found out that the world is not receptive to a man being a man and that there are no short-cuts.

The Industrial Revolution really did a number on Western Civilization. In making great conquests in technology and comfort we gave up culture and pleasure. For the convenience of quantitative production we became specialists in skills that are, for the most part, incapable of sustaining life. The result of 200 years of moving away from a culture whose main attributes were tradition and subsistance is that we now have no tradition and self-indulgence as a collective goal of life.

Nearly everything has became industrialized in our modern lives. As I write this I am sipping on a Dr. Pepper. My workplace? In a "factory" school. The clothes on my back were made in Southeast Asia and my car in Japan. Our culture is based on things and absent of meaningful traditions.

The one corporate activity I am involved in that is scriptural, and, in my opinion, is as close to what the church was intended to be as any church I know of is still plagued on occasion with institutional thinking. How could it be otherwise? Our parents, their parents, and their parents before them have been increasingly lulled into mass institutionalization.

It is who we are now.

So I am sitting here in the middle of the most civilized nation on Earth, a civilized man.

Robert Bly in his book Iron John proposes that in the fairy tales, specifically the little known tale of "Iron John," we see archetypal (universal truths that transcend language and borders. Example: A doorway represents a transition to the unknown) truths about mankind. These archetypal truths are still evident in the "heathen" societies. We have forgotten them.

Paraphrasing Bly, he says that women have something inside of them that is innately feminine. Girls become women by simple maturation and being around other women. Boys, however, do not become men in the company of women or even other males within their age range. They must leave the woman- the mother- and enter into the active presence of older men. He goes to the father. He goes to uncles, grandfathers, tribal elders. Bly writes about societies where the boy goes to work with his father. He learns a trade and those things that, were we mountain lions or armadillos, we would know instinctively, and we have found to exist in the collective knowledge of human experience. The time the boy spends with men builds up to a crescendo of initiation. The boy ceremoniously becomes a man.

In most cultures this happens around the age of thirteen. What happens to our young men at thirteen? No, we can't ask that question yet. We have to look at how our society is working from the cradle onward. Dads-daughters.com cites 36.3% of children live without their biological father in the home. Derek Prince in his study on the issue concluded that the worst problem facing our nation is "renegade males." Not the deficit. Not any war we are engaged in or the economy but, as he put it, "renegade males."

By thirteen years of age a young man is likely to have a poor male role model or maybe not one at all. Even if he has a good father, he most likely doesn't have a father who takes him to work with him each day. Our life's work is often a mystery to our sons. We can't even explain it to them. So what does he do for initiation into manhood? John Eldredge says he turns to women for sex, brute strength for manliness, or checks out altogether into passivity. None of these offers any sort of validation or initiation into manhood. Oh it might feel manly to make love to a woman but she cannot initiate you into manhood. Remember, she can make a young lady into a woman and can identify manly characteristics in males, but her formative abilities stop there. Likewise a brute of a young man my learn to love the taste of blood and the feel of bone against bone, but the ability to fight well is possessed by all manner of beasts. That a man loves violence for the sake of violence is an indictment on the degraded state of manliness.

Bly says these males lack "the ability to shudder means feeling how frail human beings are, and how awful it is to be a Titan [Cronos, who castrated his own father and later ate his own children except for Zeus.]" To shudder is to be able to feel grief associated with the human condition.

The last group of males, those who check out of life and into a prison of multi-faceted atrophy, spend their lives with a growing numbness possessing them. The can't feel, love, or fight. They experience the world through other people's terms. Bly writes:

During the last thirty years men have been asked to learn how to go with the flow, how to follow rather than lead, how to live in a nonheirarchal way, how to be vulnerable, how to adopt consenus decision-making. Some women want a passive man if they want a man at all; the church wants a tamed man-they are called priests; the university wants a domesticated man-they are called tenure-track people; the corporation wants a team- worker, and so on. (Iron John, 61)

Males go to the woman to seek validation, males kill each other sans any emotion, males totally checked out of life. As my mentor said to me the other day, "[t]he man is the Christ figure [in the family] and he is the one who is attacked by the enemy." As military leaders the world over know, a wounded soldier requires more money, time, and manpower to deal with than a dead one. So our demonic adversary knows this as well. Wounded men require a tremendous amount of resources to deal with, heal, or put away.

My goal in writing this is not to come off as a misogynistic neanderthal- quite the opposite rather. Our society has been bent from its archetypal intent by a great scheme and a great number of us have been influenced by this scheme unawares. The extent of the damage is, to borrow Elie Weisel's statement, "on the level of creation." There is a reason that God made us distinguished by our sex and those differences are our strengths. A man is the leader of the house not by his will or that he is physically stronger than the woman, but because it is God's plan that he be the leader. He was designed that way.

John Eldredge proposes that he was designed to first be the Beloved Son, a cherished boy in whom his father takes great delight . He next grows into the Cowboy-an adventurer learning how the world works. As he enters manhood he becomes the Warrior. Literally he is the age of the soldier, all spit and vinegar and ready to take off on a grand adventure at a moments notice. At some point around thirty, he begins to settle down, to focus on the woman-winning the woman-the Lover it is called. As children come and his influence increases he becomes the King of his domain. As the kids grow up and leave and he approaches retirement he enters the stage of his greatest influence, the stage of the Sage.

The man is designed to be complete. He is designed to take risk, to lead men, to teach children, to fight for his family. He is not designed to be a servant to his base desires, nor to be a career pugilist, nor a doormat for the world to wipe its feet on. As I wrote in another post, he is a figure, who like God and state troopers, doesn't have to earn your respect. It is due him.

A Flexible Reading List

If you have noticed a common thread in the stack of books in the above illustration, you have got my drift. About five years and one month ago I picked up a copy of Edmond Morris's The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt in the lobby of a Houston, Texas Hotel. I knew virtually nothing of the 26th president. Morris opened my eyes. Roosevelt was a sickly rich kid who grew up to be a man of the world, a man's man, a man that was truly exceptional. I read the first book, hanging on every word, followed in short succession to Theodore Rex, chronicling Roosevelt's Presidential years. By this point I was enamored with Roosevelt and anxiously awaiting the release of third volume which I now have in my possession, Colonel Roosevelt.

Also in this stack is John Eldredge's The Way of the Wild Heart. I've read and been greatly influenced by his book Wild at Heart. This particular volume deals with the six stages of the masculine journey. It is fascinating to see these stages of men's lives carved out and explained. A boy needs to be the Beloved Son. He grows into the Cowboy and from there into the Warrior. As an adult, he becomes the Lover and progresses from there to the King. The last stage in the masculine journey is the Sage. Why is it important to know these things? Because as a father it is good to recognize where your son is at a given time. Becoming a man is not something that one can buy, not something that one can pass time and receive. Manhood is earned and it is bestowed by the company of other men. As an adult it is good to see where you may have been wounded on this journey. And best of all, it provides a way to restore what was lost, no matter what stage you are "supposed" to be in.

One of the books Eldredge cites with high frequency is Iron John, by Robert Bly. Bly is a scholar who is well versed in the genres of fairy tales and poetry. He analyzes the tale of "Iron John", a story where a "wild man" is found at the bottom of a pond, is captured, imprisoned, and released with the aid of a young man. He has researched the traditions of cultures throughout the world in the raising of boys into men. Western society has razed young men while the "primitive" cultures have young men who earn their manhood. It is a riveting account from a secular point of view that faults Western society and the Christian Church in the destruction of manliness as a virtue.

Also on the topic of gender roles are the two books on the bottom of the pile, The Daring Book for Girls and The Dangerous Book for Boys. These two books are full of history, activities, experiments, and advice- all geared for young men and women in the vein of cultural literacy and adventure. My impression of them so far is that they are a survival guide, in both a social and natural sense and a reference manual of great import for the elementary and middle school age child. I am anxious to see my kids explore these books.

I have made a pledge to read daily this year from Oswald Chambers' My Utmost for His Highest. This work is a daily devotional compiled from the devotionals Mr. Chambers delivered at the University where he worked. The devotionals are laden with meaning and well seasoned, if sometimes hard to swallow, bits of Biblical counsel. It is teaching me much in its daily application.

The only works of literature in the stack is the Elie Weisel Trilogy of Night, Dawn, and Day.

Night, the autobiographical account of Weisel, is his sickening tale his family being marched from the ghetto in Sighet, Romania, the separation of the men from the women (and the implied nearly immediate deaths of his mother and baby sister), the work and experiences of life in the camps, and his long road to liberation. I read this account to my sophomores to satisfy their non-fiction requirement. I hope they are as moved by it as I am. The two other works, Dawn and Day are works of fiction. Weisel says that to write about the philosophical and ethical issues brought up by the Holocaust lead one to write about the camps and he has already written Night... In Dawn he examines the role of the executioner. The executioner, who is a Holocaust survivor, is a part of a resistance movement in Israel who must execute a British soldier. It is a tale told in an abstract fashion and uses name allegory to make certain points. Clever, thought provoking, and sincere. Day takes the Holocaust survivor to post-war America and pits him once again in a struggle between life and death and uncertain future without the ability to trust people.

Not in the picture, but it should be is Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Sabbath. I've read the introduction (by Susannah Heshal) and the preface so far and can only describe the book in the terms that Heschel uses to describe the Sabbath, a sanctuary in time. Each sentence is pregnant with meaning and the hand of God. I've decided to read this book when I'm free of distraction so that it's counsel can be better absorbed.

I've got a lot of reading ahead of me. I feel sort of like I've enrolled in a 4000 level non-fiction course at the University- sans the pressure, plus the excitement of growth. Check out your local bookstore or Amazon if any of these intrigue you!