Confessions and Virtuous Ambitions: Navigating the Path of Masculinity
Introduction
No podcasts were listened to this week, and another week was spent in the office grinding and trying to create a training program for all the new hires that my company is planning to bring on board here in the next couple of months. So due to this, I am once again going to share some personal musings and thoughts. Today’s post will be a little more on the personal side and sharing of my own personal story.
I have written about how my childhood was rather unconventional. I started working full-time when I was fourteen years old due to family hardships. And so, school wasn’t really an option as we needed money to feed the family, I being the oldest of six children. As I reflect on my childhood, it’s incredible to me how much our childhood experience can affect how we interact with the world and how we mature and grow up. My previous post really leaned into Masculinity and how it is viewed online and within mainstream culture. I will continue this line of thinking today.
A Piece of the Personal Puzzle
When I was sixteen years old, and I had already been working full-time for a couple of years, there was an event that would shift and affect my perception of many things in my life. I don’t remember the exact events that led to this moment, but one day while I was at home, my Dad pulled me aside and informed me that he wanted to share something with me. Unsure what to make of the moment, he informed me that he unceremoniously informed me that he was gay. I honestly didn’t know how to react or respond, and he didn’t elaborate beyond that. He just wanted to inform me of this, and from there, I went about my day. Again this was an odd moment and one that I don’t truly recall the exact details of. I don’t remember being surprised I encountered things that had informed me of this. It was simply at this moment that he chose to confess this to me.
My Dad had always been an interesting person in my life, there were moments in my life when he was someone I could look up to, but for most of my life, he was always more the antithesis of what I wanted to be as a Man. After I learned this about my Dad, it created new questions in my life and opened a door for intrusive thoughts that I had not previously entertained. One of the first things I remember was a new creeping question, “Am I gay?” I didn’t really know how someone knew if they were gay, but I knew I didn’t want to be gay, but how did I know if I was or wasn’t? It became a mental war. I was never in a place where I was attracted to men, but at sixteen, I didn’t know what it meant to be gay.
During this time in my life, I was also a practicing Christian, and as I was learning about being a Christian, there was this idea of loving Jesus. Again being a nieve teenager who didn’t know and who didn’t really know who I could talk to or ask about these questions, I now had there was a new idea that began to formulate in my mind, Christianity was about me loving Jesus and Jesus was a man. In my teenage mind, this suddenly seemed gay to me. I was supposed to love Jesus more than any woman. Again I want to be clear in presenting this as the ideas of a young teenager. But I also want to present the fact of how a simple confession from a parental figure in my life began to shape and introduce ideas into my mind. Fortunately, by the grace of God, I learned and was able to grow from having these questions presented to me.
For many years I continued to find myself with these nagging questions, and the one that always and always stuck around was, “What does it mean to be a man?” What does it look like to be a “good man?” this and many other questions drove me to ask more and more questions. And I often even found myself questioning if I knew for sure that I wasn’t gay. I wasn’t what was considered a typical macho guy. I wasn’t into trucks and cars like my brothers, and I never really cared about guns or going hunting. I didn’t dislike any of these things; I just wasn’t attracted to them as my brothers were. I was just more interested in books and computers than I was in cars and guns. And this was an oddity amongst the rest of my family and uncles, who were all gun guys. It left me with insecurities that always haunted me: I didn’t feel smart, and I didn’t feel like a real man.
For many years I thought I was the only man wrestling with these questions. But the older I get, the more I realize this is a question that many young men wrestle with. “What does it mean to be a man?” Again our common culture and online message tells men that we need to be “more in touch with our feminine side” or that all men are bad. Online culture says that men are by nature “toxic” because we are naturally more aggressive and more prone to take risks or a myriad of other reasons.
Online everything that is said about men is how bad they are, and if you are unfortunate enough to get caught up in the modern feminist propaganda, if you didn’t feel bad about being a man, you will after they are done with you. This has created a generation of young men who are lost and confused. Young men are told they need to be more like the girls, and then the girls are told they need to be more like the boys. And we wonder why we have a generation of young people so confused and depressed.
As I consider my own journey in seeking to become a man according to the Biblical standard. In this journey, I learned that I should be like Christ, yet to me, Christ was unappealing. Most often, when I heard the story of Christ told, I saw a docile, in many ways, effeminate man. And I didn’t want to be like that; I wanted to be more like the old testament warriors Joshua, David, and Samson, flawed but valiant. Yet as I matured and I learned to understand the story of Christ better, I saw that Christ was far from docile. He was and is the perfect example of what a man should be, a valiant self-sacrificial defender of the weak. Christ defended the woman caught in adultery from the self-righteous judges who could not see the log in their own eyes. Christ was anything but weak. He defended and protected the hurting yet was fiercely unapologetic in His condemnation of unrepentant sin. He was offensive to the point that He was ultimately crucified for it what He had to say. I think that this is something that often challenges many young men with Christianity. Most Sunday mornings, Christ is presented only as the lamb, and rarely do we hear of Him as the lion. We present Him only as the suffering savior; only in passing do we mention Him as the victorious warrior.
I see more and more young men who wrestle with these questions “What does it mean and look like to be a good man.” So many young men today have no good strong public role models. All the men on TV today are hapless, helpless idiots who don’t know up from down if a woman doesn’t tell them first. Many young men today grow up in fatherless homes, and so they turn to the internet and movies, where they are told that all men are bad or helpless. I am unsurprised at the current predicament of young men. Young men today are told to embrace vice over virtue and then are called villains for those vices.
I am reminded of a piece written by CS Lewis in the Abolition of Man, commonly known as “Men without Chests.”
It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.
In battle it is not syllogisms (logical arguments) that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.
The crudest sentimentalism … about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.
It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. The operation of The Green Book (a book promoting relativism) and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. … A persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment... It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.
And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.1
CS Lewis wrote prophetically of the situation we see today; though he did not write it as an address to men alone, the point is made clear that without a guiding principle, man is incapable of virtue.
I see a generation of young men who are earnestly seeking to recover their chest. They are seeking to find that moral virtue that led many millions of young men to give their lives voluntarily in opposition to the tyranny of Hitler or in the efforts to abolish slavery. It is this same moral virtue that has led men to consider their life forfeit for the sake of rescuing a child from the burning building.
A favorite online intellectual of mine is Dr. Jordan B Peterson, who does an incredible job of verbalizing what I believe is much of the core sentiment of many young men who desire to become something greater than what they are told to be by the modern feminist narratives as seen in sitcoms and modern films such as the recent Barbie movie.
This is my ambition, to be physically dangerous, not for the sake of hurting others but rather to be literally capable of defending those who are precious to me. To be mentally dangerous, capable of knowing the lie from the truth. Not just believing everything that I am told to be true. My aim is to be the very best man I can be. To be a provider and protector to those who are precious to me. I don’t expect I will do this perfectly; in fact, I know that I won’t, but I intend to do it stumbling forward one day at a time.
“A good man is not a harmless man. A good man is a very dangerous man who has it voluntarily under control” - Dr. Jordan B Peterson
“It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.” - miyamoto musashi
