I will be giving a talk at a retreat for college-aged men this evening. I would ask for your prayers that I am simply a mouthpiece for the Holy Spirit.
It is not easy being or becoming a man today, mostly because we have no idea what it's supposed to look like. Weak community bonds mean rites of passage are an artifact of a bygone era. Men are given conflicting messages from our culture and women in general: Don't be toxic. Don't hold the door. You're expendable. And there is a gaping father wound to deal with as well.
24 million children (34%) live absent their biological father. Nearly 20 million children (27%) live in single-parent homes. 43% of first marriages dissolve within fifteen years; about 60% of divorcing couples have children; and approximately one million children each year experience the divorce of their parents. This has a huge effect on young men today, because as St. Paul said "be imitators of me, as I am of Christ" (1 Cor 11:1). Figures like Jordan Peterson (okay) and Andrew Tate (best to be avoided) are trying to step in to plug this hole and provide guidance and an archetype in the online space, but this is a poor substitute for the real-life modeling of fathers, priests, and tribes of men to learn from and emulate in real time.
There's also the leaching of feminism into the culture at large that affects both men and women. If there is an innate and biological desire to protect, provide, and be needed, feminism undermines all of these things. Men are nearly twice as likely to have mental health problems due to being unemployed than women. Young, single, idle men in developing countries are prime candidates for radical extremist groups to recruit. Men simply languish when they feel they are not contributing to anything, when they have no purpose or are unnecessary.
Even young Catholic women often have unrealistic expectations of a Catholic man to marry. They come with their lists of qualities and attributes and if they are not all checked in their entirety, they take a pass. Young men, as well, have imbibed the passivity and docility that feminism inadvertently encourages, and so struggle to approach or initiate any kind of courting. It's a recipe for frustration.
There's two sides to this pendulum: in a post-modern society, there are no archetypes, no models, no established and time-tested norms for anything, let alone what makes a man. In a pre-modern society, however, there was no room for deviation. If a man showed the least sign of gentleness or perceived effeminacy, he was cast out. This would include men who struggle with SSA, or are simply wired differently with less masculine traits.
I look to Christ as the model of the perfect, quintessential man. He synthesized the best of both male and female, as God made us. He endured suffering and faced hardship like a man. He had no guile, and was a model of integrity. He did not shy away from speaking the truth. He mobilized a band of brothers as disciples. He flipped over the tables of injustice in righteous anger. He laid down his life for his friends. But he also wept, had a tenderness to towards sinners and the oppressed, spoke as easily to women as he did to men. Jesus' masculinity was not "toxic," but nor was it haughty or warped. He knew who he was. He was the model of confidence--and that confidence rested in his standing with the Father and the Father's love for him.
Nature abhors a vacuum. The internet is a good place to learn how to fix a finicky furnace or how to skin a deer, but it's a poor substitute for how to live like a man among men. The Catholic world is replete with men in their mid-twenties pecking away in comboxes with avatars of knights and warriors, but deep down there is an insecurity that belies their online bravado. This is because online communities are not real communities partly, but also because there is no real accountability or apprentice model of taking a young man under one's wings and being a father-figure to him in real-time. At the root of that insecurity is not wanting to admit that they do not know what it means to be a man, how to be a man, or even if there is such a thing in the wake of postmodernity. Porn, video games, social media--this is the white sugar of men's diets today.
The fact is, however, that these are not unhealable wounds. God the Father through the incarnation of His son shows us the quintessential archetype of manhood in the person of Christ. A good husband does not sit back in his recliner expecting to be waited on hand and foot by his wife. A good father does not shy away from disciplining his children and modeling love by how he treats his wife. A good man of faith does not shirk away from the hard work of prayer and penance. A good man of God does not project confidence in his own righteousness, but knows his dependence on Christ and his grace for all that is good.
Like learning what it means to be a Catholic, or how to live as a Catholic family, there is a place for a diversity of living out one's manhood. There is a place for men who (like me) think with a "female brain;" there is a place for men with SSA who strive to live chaste lives and follow Christ; men who don't happen to like sports or beer or cigars or whatever; men who are short in stature or who have soft voices. Because these aren't the things that make a man anymore than going to Mass or praying the rosary makes you a Catholic.
It's human nature to over-swing the pendulum to correct the errors of the past. The Church is too modern? Tradition is the answer. Feminism has run amuck? So-called "toxic" masculinity will step in to take it's place. Liberalism has taken hold of everything? Conservativism will be our savior. Etc. As always, the truth is in the mean, because this is where virtue lives. And this applies to archetype of manhood as well, Catholic or otherwise.
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