Manna For Thought

Madame M:

Lewis’s quote about love between angels: Thank you. Well said and needed! Here’s another quote in the same vein, this one the friendship of the three types you mentioned: “By friendship you mean the greatest love, the greatest usefulness, the most open communication, the noblest sufferings, the severest truth, the heartiest counsel, and the greatest union of minds of which brave men and women are capable.” Jeremy Taylor

Expound even more if you would: Atone to who or what? Atoning also for the future sins that have not yet been committed? Or to the time-transcending deity have those already occurred too? Who (or what force) sends (or did send before the atonement?) the (condemned?) to hell? And what is hell, and what happens there? Is hell eternal? Is Purgatory a concept here? Is reincarnation ruled out as a possibility for even some? Upon shedding of the mortal coil, is spiritual consciousness dormant/suspended or is it immediate?

As for asking questions and putting forth comments on the succeeding paragraph, I will hold while I await your reply.

As you “know,” I DO have a problem with the word “know.” :) And yes, Lewis did say that, but then again, he could be considered a fairly biased source, along with the 80 billion other homo sapiens sapiens who’ve lived here. But I do feel he is correct that there is more to us than clinical and rather cold science has had us believe.

And if the complete mystery is revealed at “the end” (or “beginning,” in Lewis’s better turn), does that mean there is no Rosicrucian fun?

Well said about God welcoming questions. It seems to me that if God were offended by questions, He/She/They/It wouldn’t be God. In fact, if God were offended by much, it wouldn’t seem very God-like to me.

As for the survey of Christian men, without seeing the statistical sampling measures and parameters, it is hard to assess. From what you report, it would seem skewed in the first instance by Christian men and their definition of lust, which appears to be very much similar to Eldredge’s, of which I have already submitted my disagreement. This idea that one should somehow feel deviant for having sexual desire is itself an alien one to me, and I don’t think it does men or women a service. I would say that sexual desire often exists regardless, but that clothing (or the skimpiness thereof) can either prompt or intensify (or both) such desire. Interesting that these Christian men are expressing the same sort of both helplessness to address in themselves, and repressive tendencies toward women’s choices, that the more stringent cultures of another monotheistic faith also express. Sorority or Fraternity: we always seem too tilted toward one or the other. Balance is not the answer in everything, but it is in large measure, and yet we get so little of it!

A Greater Love

Professor J,

Silly, I know. :)

OUCH! However...(buckle your seat belts, girls) I can't help but agree with everything you said about how many women give up making an effort in the areas you mentioned. I was thinking of those questions/answers in terms mainly of single women/men, but you have described what happens all too often in the land of Happily Ever After.

"Heaven-dust"...what a lovely visual! A daily prayer of mine is a personalization of a verse from Psalms: "Lord, satisfy me this morning with your unfailing love." Our natural state is a very needy one, fraught with insecurities.  Unless we deal with them it is nearly impossible to love others with their best interest at heart. And I think this is true regardless of the kind of love it is; romantic, familial, or the love for a friend. Love is not going to pour forth (at least not well) from a gaping hole in our spirits.

C.S. Lewis (who I'm leaning heavily on today) gives a beautiful description in The Four Loves of what this looks like between friends:

"This love, free from instinct, free from all duties but those which love has freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy, and free without qualification from the need to be needed, is eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love one can imagine between angels.” 

Expounding on Jesus' achievement at the cross: Christ's sacrifice was to atone for our sin and reconcile us to God (thus saving us from hell).  I know, I know that is all just so parochial.  In addition, it allows us to live an abundant life in Christ, "knowing"  ;)) that we are loved and significant and that life has meaning.

There is a line of thinking popular now that says that Christ just died to show His great love for us, having been sent by God for the same reason. Put in the context of a parent/ child, this reasoning seems ludicrous. What parent would die for a child to demonstrate love? Or for that matter what soldier would fall on a grenade to show his commitment to his compatriots? What friend would offer himself as a hostage in return for the release of a kindred spirit, just to say "Hey, I really like you"? We do these things when there is imminent harm.  We do these things when the cost of NOT doing them is the suffering, pain, or loss of someone we love. So the cost of Christ NOT sacrificing himself for us must have been a price He was not willing to have us pay.

You seem to have a problem with the word "know". lol
I am assuming that you are speaking in terms of mortals and their connection to/understanding of the metaphysical.  (Although didn't Lewis say there are no "mere mortals" ?) and that you are saying that we can't know for certain about such things in our extremely limited state. Paul tells us:

Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. 1 Cor. 13:12 New Living Translation

So while I'm having a bit of fun with the word "know" Paul makes it clear that what we have in this life no matter how correct will still only be a partial knowledge at best. The complete mystery revealed only at the end (or as Lewis would say...the beginning).

Let me pause here momentarily to say that I don't think God is offended by our questions. I think He welcomes them. They lead us to communicate with Him (even if it is to ask "Why would you do that?") and further a relationship which He so desires with us.

Your issues with the Old Testament we can get to next time if you want otherwise this post will be so long no one will want to read it. But of course I disagree that this is all just some big cosmic adventure without much meaning.

I understand your many criticisms of the book, in this post and the first one and even agree with some of them; blanket statements and seeing everything as Satan-tainted, for instance.  One interesting side note on the subject of accountability: I recently read online a survey of Christian men asking them what kind of women's clothing caused them to lust. They named every item of clothing you can imagine except a burqa!  The general feeling among them seemed to be that those women were at fault for dressing attractively. Now I'm all for modesty at church and good taste everywhere, but their opinions seemed a bit extreme. Many of the things they mentioned weren't even immodest, which nearly made it sound as if they wanted someone else (in this case the woman) to rescue them from their own natural tendencies.

You may be right that a man of another culture or faith would get little out of this book. He is a man writing from a Judeo-Christian viewpoint and is clearly writing for his "very Western, and very Christian" audience though, so some of the things that you disputed may not be a problem at all for his target reader.  I am very glad you found it worthwhile however many issues you had with it.

Persnickety? You? LOL

WAH Criticisms, Part Deux

Madame M,

Run out of things to say? Funny!

A bit of retro from a previous post concerning the male “answers” to the three questions females nonverbally ask. In fairness to my fellow males who well deserve, as I said, the brunt of the blame, there are some things they would probably want me to say: “When you no longer tried to impress me, care about your appearance for me, uplift me, desire me, listen to me, or think I was great, but instead took me for granted, having got the commitment that you wanted, well, you got my reduced valuing in return!”

Expound more, if you would: What did Jesus sacrifice (or God sacrifice his Son) to achieve? Why? What would be the result if this had not been?

Permit me to enjoy well your words: “Love without insecurity.” What you have related there is more valuable than heaven-dust!

Yes, some of the greatest offenses and noblest sacrifices have been in the name of love. But I think you are right: the flaws come from our flawed carrying out and imperfect (and occasional twisted) understanding of the Divine’s flawless example.

Ah, where were we? Oh yes, Criticisms Part Two:

Another critique about Eldredge: In my view, he projects things onto God that seem to me to be human aspirations, desires, emotions, limitations, risk. And his description of the Bible’s depiction of God and men--“No question about it; there is something fierce,”--well, it was written by middle eastern men with certain views and certain proclivities.

And his assertion that God doesn’t do things the same way twice, because of his readings in the Bible showing that not very much was repeated: Fallacious reasoning. More probably little methodology was recorded as repeated because authors did not repeat things. Written histories derived from oral histories are like that. Before modern copiers, and certainly before the printing press, each page had to be valuable and stand apart from others. Very few “dittoes.”

Eldredge comes from a Judeo-Christian centric focus. Every passage of the Bible (even disregarding its many varieties) is interpreted to have meaning, and especially a certain meaning. And nothing beneficial is assumed even possible without Jesus Christ, which is presumptive, exclusionary, and co-dependent. Eldredge presumes a weird sort of psychic co-dependence of God, sort of “They won’t make it without me.” How is that free will? That would be like saying, “Take the car, have your independence,” but then controlling all the gasoline.

“God fought for Moses and for Israel.” Eldredge is understandably trying to make sense of every accepted passage from the Christian Old Testament, a pretty hard thing to do. Yet I have a hard time with even a William James God smiting down humans over other humans. Unless perhaps if it doesn’t really matter, and mortal life is just an adventure solely, and potentially a not very meaningful blip in our eternal existence. In that case, maybe they sit around with the Big Guy over heavenly beers and He says, “You were such a dimwit, and on the wrong side (chuckle); had to put the smackdown on you.” “Yeah Pops, I didn’t last long on that go around, did I? (wink).”

I found his “We know
Know
Know
Know,” tedious. Whenever mortals assert that they KNOW something, it is both an exercise in absurdity to me, and a rage and pleading about their mortality. We think, we believe, we even have faith, but our senses, our intelligence, our awareness, our powers, are so ridiculously limited and primitive, we can know very little, maybe nothing, for sure. Our perceptions, thoughts, and emotions are so malleable, so psycho-chemical-stimulus driven from such a wide array of possibilities, that we can only think or believe or have faith we know. Your whole will or psyche or emotional makeup can be changed by chemicals or deprivation of one sort or another; only God can know you, whatever real you, there is (that’s what I think anyway, lol).

Eldredge in his book is presumptive in general. Everything is to be accepted face value at his interpretation, when it is a very Western, and very Christian, interpretation. If I was a man of another culture, and especially of another faith, I would be turned off, and probably unable to relate to much.

Eldredge likes this quote from Oswald Chambers (one of whose books I possess): “Never make a principle of your experience; let God be as original with other people as he is with you.” Eldredge does not seem to take the advice from the quote he highlights.

The standard response of many Christian writers, when they are criticized, is to say to their critics:
“I will pray for you.” While prayers are welcome (at least by me), one has to be careful that that statement does not have a dismissive ring to it, a la, “I will pray for you because you are a poor, misguided soul, lost in the land of confusion sown by the devil, and incapable of seeing truth when it is laid out for you by God.” I am uncertain where Eldredge would stand on this one, so he gets the benefit of the doubt there from me!

Oh, well, that’s enough persnickety critique from me. I found much valuable in his book, and it is worth the read, despite the multiple points outlined above and before.

Of Love and Lifeboats: Expounding on "Sacrificial"

Professor J,

When we run out of things to discuss :) I think we should produce a dictionary where we each give our own definition of every word (in our spare time, of course). We love to parse them so! LOL

The sacrificial love I was referring to in my previous post is the love that God has for us and has proven to us by his willingness to sacrifice his Son, and the love that Jesus has for us and has proven by willingly being that sacrifice.  It is a love beyond human comprehension. Unconditional. Pure. A love in which His concern is always for OUR good.  Why do we (both genders) waste time looking for someone else to meet such a great need in us? Clearly, too much to ask of another mere mortal. Having this spiritual hunger satisfied by One who is completely trustworthy, and will remain so through the ages allows us to love a bit more freely...to loosen the grip. And speaking of loosening the grip, though HE is capable of complete control his sacrifice of it and allowing us to reject him if we want (free will) is perhaps the very first example of "sacrificial love." Perhaps all of His attributes are examples of what love without insecurity looks like. Part of our insecurity comes from imagining that if another person knew us...REALLY knew us, they would find us unlovable. We are loved by a Creator who knows our every thought, flaw, weakness...our darkest secrets and who, knowing all of that thinks that we are worth pursuing, delighting in, and fighting for.

My daughter and I stood shivering on the deck of our cruise ship during the lifeboat drill.  While they were announcing what the procedure would be for manning and filling the lifeboats in the event of an emergency, they said the priority would be "women and children first." I choked up. Why? I don't really know except in that moment, the reality of men in the past having behaved so valiantly struck home. It caused something deep in me to catch like a rusty gear suddenly jerked forward to understanding. We may not be able to fully and continuously love perfectly and sacrificially, but even in our flawed and selfish state we do have our moments, don't we?

WAH Criticisms Part 1

Ah, Madame M! No implication was implied as to overall qualifications to answer anything, only that my gender put me at a disadvantage in critiquing that part of Eldredge’s book. While I can frequently be arrogant and in need of the humble stick, in this case, it was only my lack of care in phrasing!

Interesting insights and views into the female psyche/emotions! And a rather scathing indictment of men’s selfish or thoughtless attitudes about matters of central importance to women; I offer no meaningful disagreement here, as it seems far too often the case just as you have laid it out!

Please expound just a bit, if you would, on what you mean by sacrificially.

Ah, think of the progress of the human condition if more people of both genders would love others and be loved for who they are! Those questions women ask verbally and nonverbally might decrease significantly in frequency too. If more of the human race can become spiritually sophisticated as you have well described, we will have taken a colossal step forward in the human condition!

Now for the Eldredge criticisms:

John Eldredge and I are not going to agree on a fair number of things. :)

To see nearly everything in this world, as he does, as Satan-tainted—well, I disagree strongly, for a lot of reasons, one of them rejecting this Biblical passage inference (an inference itself loaded with questionables) that God abdicates the world to the whims of an evil being. And what would be the point anyway?

Eldredge needlessly overreaches with blanket statements:
Blanket statement 1A: “Masturbation IS sabotage.” Leaving aside for the moment many other considerations of this statement, the needless overreach comes from not using "CAN BE."

Or Blanket statement 1B: “He could be a lustful man, but he’s not.” Inferring that biological desire MAKES a man something terrible, and that not being this way doesn’t. Just the categorization invites tremendous disagreement.

His fixation with this interpretation of sexuality is more indicative of his own personal wrestling WITHIN the twin channeling poles of religious interpretation and American historical cultural legacies. Good heavens, we Americans have done enough sexual damage to our psyche by making evil too many natural things. We demonize biological sexuality and the desire to non-conform to social-religious constructs. So Eldredge gets no agreement on this from me. Seems to me he sometimes has his own issues he is projecting to all.

Or Blanket statement 2, that women ONLY desire men strongly because they are missing a father’s affection: This is a rather narrow view of female sexuality. Almost sounds like something one of the more female-repressive societies of the world might say! This view--that all women who have no father-substitute issues have thence somehow escaped strong biological desire--is demonstrably false.

His assertion about being accountable: While accountable to another man is a good concept that can be useful in many things, the underlying premise can backfire and perpetuate an already dismissive view of the American male found in, as you have stated, too many TV programs and other things. The idea that all men are supremely foolish sinners who have to have someone guard them from their foolishness, is more self-defeating perpetuation. The same presumption that men are so “bad” and so lustful they must guard each other, also is prevalent throughout our society. It’s a sick and self-defeating way to think. For instance, in the military, the sexual assault prevention and response program, while laudable on the surface, goes beyond basic awareness and prevention and makes this premise of “bad men” an underlying message to our men (and women) in uniform. Not only are most men not like what this generated fear is creating, but it is emasculating them in the process by insinuating this message that they can’t be trusted, that they are animals, that they have to watch each other. When it doesn’t emasculate, this sentiment a little too often further isolates, angers, and creates self-loathing in the already tetherless, mentor-less, American male, so that when all that does burst through on some individuals, it helps create the very sexual violence the program is supposedly trying to prevent!

And once again, denying basic biological reality, or worse, twisting it into something “evil,” does more unnecessary damage. Too often, our social-religious human constructs try to make human nature something it isn’t. Such efforts, because they deny reality, usually fail destructively.

So, like many Christian moralizers of one sort or another, Eldredge has a fixation on sexual “wrong.” Like many, he cannot come to grips with the fact that sometimes there is no desire beneath the desire. Sometimes desire is all there is, and, is in fact, perfectly natural (now, whether the consummation of that desire is one of weal is a bit more variable!).

Eldredge makes a supposition that all men are explorer personalities in large measure. Not so. While I may be, and many are, some are more social intensive, others more reserved, others more stay around home, others more quietly analytical, etc. As for his probable counter-assertion that all really WANT to be explorers, I am going to ponder that one a bit!

One More Thing...

While I'm anxiously awaiting your criticisms I thought I'd elaborate on the one little thing you thought I might be the authority on. Eldredge nails those 3 little questions that he says all women are asking...I think he is absolutely correct even if women aren't consciously aware of it.  As he points out the stories we are drawn to reveal our true desires.  So if the questions we are asking are:

Will you pursue me?
Do you delight in me?
Will you fight for me?

The answers a lot of women feel they are getting from men are:

Sure, until I get what I want.
I guess. Momentarily anyway...oh, you meant as a PERSON.
If it's not too difficult. I'm really busy with work and all...

Men are frustrated and irritated by the ongoing questions: Am I pretty? Do I look fat? Do you love me?  Much of that comes from a spiritual root cause. A woman acting out of a place of feeling loved unconditionally and sacrificially as well as accepted and chosen, by The Lover of her soul is free to let the man in her life off the hook for meeting every need, many of which he will never fully understand.  In much the same way Christianity offers freedom from the grasping and greediness of materialism it offers the ability to love someone for WHO THEY ARE and not out of a place of some deep need the person is trying desperately to meet.

Sometimes the men in our lives (please note I did not say OUR men:)) can/do answer those questions in the way we so desperately need, but knowing there is One who not only will answer those questions with a resounding "YES!" but HAS is a much surer foundation for self worth than another fallible human being, no matter how sincere their effort or true their love.

Socialization and Education of Males

The answer to the question about college testing is both simple and complex.

The complex:

The cramming of the pre-college curriculum with everything BUT physical outlets for the energies of boys has done them no favors, not the least from which they have fewer times allotted for it in a typical day. The combination of escapist, disengaged, electronic entertainment with the near-entire replacement of unorganized sports with organized sports, has socially retarded many of them and atrophied both their attention and critical thinking skills and their desires to achieve in the “outside world.” Their innate masculinity has been too much emasculated from them at nearly every opportunity, and even intimated that they are inherently deviant, violent, or criminal, by an educational system and adult social network now dominated by overly feminized elements. Their physical environment has been full of endocrine disruptors, and the males in their lives have been too often absent or consumed with work and other activities that swallow vital mentoring time. At exactly the period that they need to know boundaries from a strong male figure and strong male clan or social group, this is too often missing (male teacher-role models, for instance, are increasingly rare), or, what is sometimes worse, they are merely “befriended” by the male figure(s) instead of getting the mentoring they crave and need. They thus perceive either no boundaries or artificial ones, both of which are volatile to teenage boys. Excessive female influence (and/or attempts at control) at home, school, and society in general at this critical time too often either produces listless docility or anti-social behavior, and this is only reinforced by media and electronic programming that projects few academic male figures that boys can relate or aspire to. The boys don’t feel really listened to, nor understood when they are, and in any case, endless lectures and admonishments cause them to develop deaf ears of “understanding,” to instead play the game of delivering what the parent/teacher/”authority” figure wants to hear without consideration of what is meaningful. This is reinforced intensely by the endless second, third, and fourth chances that the overly feminized educational and social system give them, and so they know they will be “rescued” from whatever they do. “Consequences” and “follow-through” become near-meaningless. Instead of forming discipline in the forge of mistakes, the boys know they will be propelled along in a system that will 1) shove them in directions they have little desire for or influence over, and 2) process them successfully regardless of results of efforts, and sometimes even with little or no effort required. Parents that intercede in the system on their boys’ behalf often only worsen the problem by removing responsibility and initiative from where it belongs—the boy who needs to begin the transition to a man. Organizing and providing everything for the boys stunt them as well, as does too often only complimenting them for false “achievements” like tenth place. Boys that are intelligent and adept at school subjects often hide it because the culture (and even their own social network) silently tells them they are either not really good enough or that boys shouldn’t be that way or even that you shouldn’t show up your buddies. Boys that bother to look into the future often do not see one all that exciting to them, whether by constricted or even stifling choices for the adult male, or even just the perceived narrow paths of “career.” For all these reasons and more, boys are functionally maturing later and later, and feminine-inspired attempts to either indulge this or correct this largely fail miserably.

And these things are in play even if the boys are fortunate to avoid being overprescribed/overmedicated by a system that sees malady in every teenage transition, not to mention the even worse travesties of drug and alcohol perpetual abuse, actual clinical depression, or criminal activities. And these are on top of the usual teenage boy risk factors of impregnating, STDs, wrong crowd, and other risky behaviors (not just cars), plus the usual stress factors of relationships and attempted relationships, hormonal changes, difficulty organizing thoughts, etc.

So yes, the issue is complex and the system is skewed in favor of girls, which is one of the reasons why the ratios in higher education are beginning to lopside. The system is creating the problem long before standardized tests come into play, however. Standardized testing is a symptom, and not even the most powerful one. The causes lay largely in what has been described above.

Community colleges are doing more to attempt to level the playing field than are other institutions of higher learning, largely because the issue has become more acute there. But it still isn’t all that much, in my opinion.

The simple:

While the above issues need addressing, the brass tacks of the matter is that boys need to not be force-channeled in a certain direction, but be actively engaged in the process of their own life formation, preferably by balanced male mentors. We have stove-pipe processed them in certain directions too much instead of engaging their energy and creativity to get them excited to be adult males who direct their own life paths.

As for standardized testing, if immediate college is the path they want, we don’t need any more alterations or allowances. Tell them that it is going to be harder for them than females, and let them get on with being motivated and energized to respond to the challenge, including the challenge of school itself. Just realize that, as many have found, the instigating and certainly the learning does not really commence until the student is ready. That could be years beyond the often false “standard” of 18-22.

Some other societies know a little better than ours to not force feed advanced education too much, which is why often mandatory service of some kind is present, as well as options only tangentially related to college. Aside from its communal benefits, this avenue may also be a better way for both society and individuals to use the talents and energies of much of this age group.

And one historical point to remember: this nation achieved among men its highest functional literacy in the 50s and early 60s. While we can’t just replicate, and there were certainly many problems, maybe we should go back and pick the best things from then that worked so well, hmmm?

Wild at Heart: The Agreement

Madame M:

Well said!

“Coercion associated with love” is something you say you don’t get. Would that more of both genders would not get it either, but the human desire for control is sometimes almost maniacally overwhelming. Interesting that we are, if the stories are correct, fashioned by a deity who is into free will, not control, yet too many of the creations spend their lives trying to impose control and subjugate free will! Human history, both grand and social, is a never-ending pattern of insecure and selfish control dramas.

If some women are perhaps waking up to the negative effects of controlling “their” men (a possessive term I dislike, but will use for lazy shorthand), maybe the old adage “be careful what you wish for,” applies here.

You are right that men should be free to use all their wildness and fierceness for good. We must remember too that their idea of “good” may be different from what the sorority defines it as. [Unavoidable cliché phrase alert!] That does not make it wrong, only different.

His assertion that many males choose females that don’t challenge them much as males seems correct in many instances. They are responding to the conditioning of the socially dominant sorority, and that response means to either settle or to withdraw into apparent safety. It often either emasculates the man, or sets him up for future relationship explosion.

His words about the world are all too true in too many instances: a carnival of posers and counterfeits—counterfeit achievements, counterfeit adventures, counterfeit beauties.

And then there is the reality that we live in a broken world full of broken people.

I like his humble and reflective prayers, like this one: “Jesus, you know the pain and disappointment in my heart. What would you have me do?”

I think his formulations of the questions women are subconsciously asking are correct, but you are more the authority source there:
Will you pursue me?
Do you delight in me?
Will you fight for me?

I agree with him that some mystery is essential to adventure, and maybe God made the universe with that in mind.

I like his idea that we men should not make the woman the adventure, as we often do, but make her part of it. That will set things apart from the norm.

I think his ideas of the stages of males are probably correct: Boyhood, Cowboy, Warrior, Lover, King, Sage.

That sums up for the moment the things I agree on. Next time up: the criticisms! :)

Wild at Heart: Notes from the Other Side

Professor J,

And an indulgence well deserved I'm sure. Since you say that it's rare, my copy of Fast Food Nation and I will stand down. :)

Margaret Mead once said “Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.” and society (and the women's movement in particular) has been treating, not just fathers, but all men like that ever since. How rapidly we went from Father Knows Best to Dad is Incompetent, Goofy and Can't be Trusted With Anything Important as a sitcom staple. Who can blame men for  alternately being angry, and doing the easy thing which is to play to the low expectations of society? Deep inside, a man knowing he is meant for so much more than what we tell him we want from him now, is going to die a little.  The lack of respect he is getting from the culture and from the woman in his life (because she is being sent a whole bag of mixed messages and no longer knows what she wants) is killing him a little more day by day and hoping perhaps he won't notice. 

Now personally, I've always maintained that if I had a man I could control I wouldn't want him. Early in my marriage I made the odd attempt (generally encouraged by other females) but soon found that it expended heaps of emotional and mental energy and when it worked, well...it didn't make either of us very happy. Coercion associated with love is something I don't get, especially if it is liable to have long term negative effects.  Twenty-seven years on I think we would both say that allowing the other person to be their authentic self is one of the greatest demonstrations of love and respect.

 I thought Eldredge did an excellent job of laying out some of the struggles of women in all of this, which he and his wife later more fully address in the book, Captivating which caused no end of controversy among some in the Christian community. While there are exceptions to all the generalizations he lays out in both books, I do think he's on to something.

The anger many men feel and which you so eloquently describe is often matched in women by an unspoken, unnamed, longing for the intimacy and adventure from the quote in my previous post. We have tamed and domesticated our boys/men and when we have what we think we want (what modern society has told us we SHOULD want, namely a man we can control) we see a James Bond film and leave the theater wondering where THAT kind of man is (apparently Bond is the standard of desirable masculinity for both sides lol).

And why is it that if a real man is what a woman wants, that we spend so much time trying to manage him and make him over into something less than that? It's because we need that dangerousness and wildness to be good the way it is in a man who is fighting for something he believes in, defending the weak, or dispensing justice. Modern women are used to things being sanitized, safe, predictable. We've so removed ourselves from any sort of danger or risk that we often fail to see the beauty in the uncontrollable. We fear that wild, dangerous, and uncontrollable are synonymous with bad. It is a lack of trust.  We do not trust that males in our lives, given the freedom to be who they need to be, are capable of using that strength and power for good. Isn't that what the book is really about -- giving men the freedom to go about the business of being who they were created to be and using all that wildness and fierceness for good?

What did you think of his assertion that many males choose females who don't challenge them much as men?

On a semi related note: A reader has asked if colleges are doing enough to even the playing field (in testing for instance) for males. It seems like the entire framework of education is suited more to girls who can sit quietly for long periods of time, a quality which educators value.  Are our boys losing out at the college level and is the system (based so strongly on standardized testing) skewed in the favor of girls?

Wild At Heart, Part Dos

Madame M,

Well, the salsa dog was an extremely rare indulgence, if you were readying the nutritional flail. :)

This culture is indeed increasingly hostile to men’s manhood, and Eldredge does deserve credit for laying out his struggles in plain sight.

It is welcome to hear/read a female freely admit a feminine tendency to control, manage, and manipulate, for too many men think that, yet such is their apprehension (and maybe fear) of the females in their lives, that they rarely say it themselves (and certainly not where females can hear). And Eldredge probably gets (or would get, if they knew) a shout out from a lot of men for his attempt to unleash chained and often belittled manhood.

American males particularly, in our individualistic culture (and one socially dominated in large part by females), can often feel isolated and true friendless all too easily. What both Eldredge and the book The Friendless American Male describe is a feeling all too common: “I do not belong, I am wanted by no one, I am alone.” I understand that there are nowhere near enough men around with time to show other men, especially younger men, how to be men. We really are a nation of Unfinished Men. Little masculine initiation. Little father instruction. I think he’s spot-right in that regard.

Eldredge does do a nice summary of the Return to Masculinity movement. Quoting Robert Bly is particularly instructive. And no doubt about it: Although I wouldn’t say it is absolutely universal across the board (as he does), the father wound is cross-cultural. Ever read The Kite Runner?

In trying to evaluate my own situation, I don’t think I’ve ever doubted my masculinity or my gender orientation. I’ve never been afraid of embracing the yin in me either, however. So maybe I’m not a good appraiser of the battles many males fight. If my father wounded me, which he did a bit I suppose, I forgave him. For some reason (perhaps it was gift from Providence), I always had an innate sense of transcending my father’s limitations and failings. Sure, I got mad when I was younger, but by my twenties, I felt sorry for the hard life he had and what it made him, and I held no grudges and only a few disappointments about him. He did the best he could with the half-crappy hand he found himself dealt.

Now, some of me is my father, I certainly agree, and for the most part I am glad about those parts. But other parts of me have no seeming source. I have learned in this life that there are exceptions to many rules of thumb, including the rule of thumb that you learn all of what it is to be male from the males around you. I have always felt different enough from those around me to know I would in more than small measure be charting my own way (or maybe I have been assisted by unseen or unfelt guides). When my dad and I disagreed intensely, or I saw his hurtful failings, I did not hate him for it; I instead saw his own humanity, his own hard childhood and adulthood, the things that shaped him to be that way. It would be falsely modest to deny I was fortunate to have received a gift of discernment at an early age. (Or maybe I only thought I did, and have been living in self-delusion ever since, lol).

I understand Eldredge’s writings about anger. That we men are not valiant and dangerous like we want to be, but often only filled with anger, lust, and fear. I have some issues with his interpretations about lust that I will maybe discuss later, but as for the anger, for a part of my life I was angry like that much of the time and didn’t know why. Yes, like “hurt by someone we loved or lost something very dear,” but there was more too. Some missing piece, something deeply unfulfilled. Like when I would walk out of a James Bond movie and feel like I should be doing something adventurous too, should be BEING more, but then just head back to a “normal” life, and it would feel not quite right to do that, to live just that way. It would unleash a lot of feelings about how maybe the world was jamming me painfully into a box, or I was living a page from some book that wasn’t mine, or something like that, and it would make me so angry. It was an anger I couldn’t really articulate either, and that only made me angrier because I couldn’t fully make sense of it. The females around me only made it worse by saying, “You aren’t being realistic, you are a father, what’s wrong with you, maybe you need anger management counseling,” and on and on. The few times I tried to talk to males about it, I got only silence, or a repeat of the same things the females said. I tried to tell myself that my discomfort was maybe only wistfulness at not fully self-actualizing, but I knew that wasn’t the full story. It was a lot like Eldredge describes.

I also agree with him about the excessive fear of risk. The constant “what if? what if?,” with all of the hyperventilating and sweating, doesn’t serve us well. But the fear of it all falling apart, of the world piercing our constructed semi-illusion? That applies to far too many of us males.

Re: Wild at Heart

 Professor J,

Goodness! It only took you a year and a half to get to the book, why would I have thought you were too busy? Your dietary choices (salsa dog?) may be a topic of discussion in the future, but on to the topic at hand.

I'm a lover and collector of quotes. I also like that Eldredge uses so many of them to illustrate his points and that he uses movies in the same way.  We are drawn to particular stories over and over again for reasons. I'll add a favorite quote of mine from an earlier work of his:

"We are made in the image of God; we carry within us the desire for our true life of intimacy and adventure. To say we want less than that is to lie." ~John Eldredge (The Journey of Desire) 

Given that definition a lot of people have succumbed to living a lie.

The thing that impressed me about the book most from the beginning was his willingness to expose himself and his specific struggles.  There's a certain bravery and willing honesty there that seems born out of a sincere desire to help men navigate their way in a culture which is increasingly hostile to their manhood.

I'd certainly agree with him that our ideas of masculinity and femininity both have been so watered down in many of our churches that the people in them have become, for the most part, a boring dispassionate lot. 

I have to give Eldredge a great deal of credit for making the lives of the men in my life easier (since I first read this book nearly a decade ago) and saving them from the modern female tendency to, if not control, at least manage and manipulate (settle down, girls, it's not like it's a secret). My son has especially benefited from this, unbeknownst to him.  During the last few years while he's been "coming of age" I was able to accept his pulling away as a natural occurrence, a necessary stepping stone on the path from dependent child to independent adult/man. It allowed me to forgo some of the painful feelings mothers often experience when sons do the natural thing, and start to distance themselves from mom.  Our relationship has been strengthened and not weakened (which women fear) by my determination to give him plenty of freedom and his sensing my ever increasing respect of the man he is becoming.

I'm glad to see someone finally write a book wherein men are given permission to be masculine without having to apologize for it all the time. I appreciated his pointing out that our current overly feminized culture has been selling us the idea for years that masculine strength has something inherently bad or wrong in it. I was reminded of some of the discussions among female news anchors immediately following 9/11 during which manliness, courage, and bravery of firefighters and other first responders were praised. I remember thinking at the time that it was strange because they'd all (with the rest of society) been singing a different song (the "oh if we could only get our boys to act more like our girls tune) for years prior.  Eldredge is absolutely correct that we don't want to tame all the fierceness out of our boys...we may need them to defend us (or rescue us) some day.

Wild At Heart

Madame M:

Here you were thinking, “this guy is so busy he doesn’t have any time for that book I recommended.” Nay, fair blogqueen! I have read it with relish (and not just the stuff that was on the salsa dog I shouldn’t have eaten!). As you said, a lively discussion would follow (after the book, not the hotdog), and so it begins!

Here are my thoughts on John Eldredge’s book “Wild at Heart,” in not enough order:

Like Eldredge, I moved from LA too (an Air Force assignment). Too much asphalt, smog, strip malls, and crime for me.

His writings on the warrior brought to mind the book, “Once a Warrior, Always Wired,” that was recommended to us after we got back from deployment. It is definitely too true that one is never quite the same… And there are few male bonds like a band of “brothers” who’ve gone through something. We don’t need more of that kind of trauma, but we do need more of the adventuristic, to form those bonds. Men want them all their life. Ever observed how men, especially older men, talk about their medical travails like battle wounds?

Eldredge risks being simplistic in a fair number of places. He does bring a lot of imagery to his writing, and I do like much of it, although by no means all of it. He has lively and interesting interpretation in many places.

I do like a lot of the quotes he mentions:
“All men die; few ever really live.” From Braveheart. That’s a good one.

“Forgiveness is setting a prisoner free. And then discovering the prisoner was you.” Anon

“Don’t wait until you feel like forgiving; you will never get there.” Neil Anderson

“Whatever is denied cannot be healed” Brennan Manning

“The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.” Albert Schweitzer

“He begins to die, that quits his desires.” George Herbert

“Say a prayer for the Pretender
Who started out so young and strong
Only to surrender”
Jackson Browne, The Pretender

“The place where God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Frederick Buechner

And some of Eldredge’s own (some are paraphrased):

“Life is not a problem to be solved, it is an adventure to be lived.”

“Life lived in fear is no life at all. Every last one of you will die some day.”

“The world is screwed up. Let people feel the weight of who you are and let them deal with it.” (I think he got this one from someone else though; my notes are jumbled)

I can see how many American males, especially church-going ones, are not very appealing to females, even church-attending ones themselves. Eldredge’s questions for females about them--“Make you bored? Scare you with doctrinal Nazism? Scream because he’s so nice?”--seem spot on to me.

I agree with him nearly completely on how wonky the male condition has become. We do get, in their lost inadequacy and blank frustration, a lot of violent men or passive men, two extremes. And I do agree that much of that violence is a cover for fear.

I also agree that men become posers too much. We pretend to know more, be more, have it together more, far more than we really do. Remember when I said that at some level, we are all still 10 years old inside and wanting/needing our parents [including perhaps our celestial one(s)]? While that applies I believe to both males and females, it is particularly taxing on males, because we aren’t SUPPOSED TO want/need our parents very much once we become “adults.” After all, we’re supposed to be total men at that stage.

The Not Last Word

Madame M:

We must always be careful not to conflate capitalism and democracy. One is an economic system, and one is a political system. Although they often go together, they are not synonymous.

We have rarely seen totalitarian systems, although we have often seen authoritarian systems. Right now, China is a (fairly heavy) authoritarian political system with a (mostly) capitalist economic system. It used to be totalitarian though.

But even “merely” authoritarian systems rarely invent and innovate very well. Those things flourish when there is a free and open exchange of ideas and information, and when the individuals can reap and keep the fruits of their labors. Agreement between us there!

Yes, a great deal of the problem of our government is it is far too big, far too much a choking drag on the economy. But part of it is that the real owners of the country have refused to pay for it, ironically often when they have campaigned hard for its increase in size (Defense or one of the big three entitlements that they benefit from in some way or another, or even just some subsidy of some sort). Those owners have evaded the taxes, and so the money has not flowed in to pay for the government, leading to massive borrowing that has led us to becoming dramatically weaker—and dramatically more vulnerable to the desires of foreign creditors.

So, those who are anti-tax are not really starving the monster all that well, because it is borrowing our life blood by the back door to keep going. And those it keeps going are often directly or indirectly those who refused to pay for it in the first place. They have their corrupt cake, and we say we won’t pay for it, but then they borrow the money with all our names on the promissory notes (and many of those notes are now held by those who don’t necessarily hold America in highest regard). Either way this mess gets served up, we fund our own destruction. It’s just that with deficit spending, it can be hidden (and delayed) for a bit.

We have sewn too often unneeded complexity into our systems, seeking to cover every eventuality of the pitifully flawed human condition. Instead we have only created a dizzying miasma of nearly unworkable laws, rules, regulations, directives, etc. If we merely had GUIDELINES instead for most of that, our system would be far less untenable—and human creativity and ingenuity would be unleashed, not to mention a great deal more satisfaction and accomplishment. When things seem needlessly complex and maddening to comply with, we breed not only discontent and disrespect for law, but we breed disconnection. More on that in a new post!

You tossing the babies out with the bathwaters: does this mean you think human endeavor so flawed that any attempt to remedy the shortcomings in the capitalist system are doomed to create untenable side effects? Addressing Social Security, one of those three you would do away with entirely: Social Security has certainly transmogrified out of its original intent. It was meant to be one of the three legs of the retirement years stool (and not even the most important leg!). Through a combination of misperception among the public, short-sightedness and immediate gratification focus among workers (propelled along by their increasing wage stagnation), and greed and excessive competition-mania from employers, it morphed. The other two stools became deficient, often in the extreme. Add in greatly increased life expectancy, and we then have a painfully “unmanageable” problem on our hands because we can’t stay focused. For all three of the big entitlements, we might say they were noble attempts to correct challenges, especially given the wealth of the society at the time, but have gone awry.

And we lose sight of what keeps us sustainable. Spending exhaustive resources on the elderly, who have the highest demand and least productivity, while we spend next to nothing on the young, who have the greatest future potential, only starves the productive to our deep detriment. That is only all too apparent to too many of the young. And breeds more disconnection (despair and apathy) in them at a time when this society desperately needs the young to be all connected and all invested. Instead we get a runaway trainwreck-in-waiting where all we get done about it is lay more track.

Department of Education? Yes, probably another noble idea gone awry and needing discarding. Abolishing the IRS? Explain more what you mean. The government, of whatever size, is always going to need revenue collectors—that is as old as civilization. So expound if you would!

As for the Federal Reserve, I assume you mean rein in its extended powers (beyond that of a national bank). Or do you mean abolishment completely? And if so, does that mean no financial monitoring or regulating of the sort it does? Or are you merely aghast at its ability to create phantom money and exercise other powers without the people’s representatives having much weigh in?

Permit me to pause here in admiration at your paragraph on the donkey and elephant masks. Brilliant!

There is much more that can be said on these topics, but as perhaps we should set this pot on the backburner for now, I will suspend for the interim further meandering in this vein. A new post in a few days on a new topic or topics!

Must Be the Flux Capacitor...

So you've shown up only to find that our discourse is still in a
state of suspended animation. Not to worry, though things are currently in a state of flux all will settle soon and our discussion will resume. If you are in Professor J withdrawal you can always visit his blog and read his brief but thought provoking posts.