Where did we fail you? Many places, I am certain. Did our failings provide negative role models that repulsed you? Was it our emotional absence, a black hole that could never be understood? Was it our wrongly placed priorities? Did our own brokenness come spilling out over our work, our relationships, our religion in such a way that you could do nothing other than run the opposite way?
Of course, rebelling against the father is nothing new for young men. From Oedipus on, those of us who had fathers and are fathers know the eternal competition, the way the conquest for individuality seemed to require some wrenching free from father to acquire the necessary sunlight to grow. We know this old story. We have lived it.
Intimacy between a father and son, from both sides, is not especially easy to achieve. The pathway begins with the openness of the father. If the portal is closed from the side of the parent, then children have no choice but to bounce away to other sources, and they do. When we fathers have been insensitive, gruff, and even cruel, we have forced you away, forced you toward your inferior selves. It is there, in those great absences and places of uncertain love, that you sought out the crudest substitutes for real love. Without that connection, you have floundered. You have fallen, and twisted, and hurt others. That has included your friends, women, and your own children. It is a repeating story, cascading down the generations, not inevitable, but propelled by the gravity of repetition.
No wonder you have been susceptible to destructive influences and false male models that have twisted your sense of identity and self. In our culture, a culture full of male identity shaped by the thirst for power, unending demand for control and conquest, and the elevation of violence, you have often fallen for it. It is like a great whirlpool around which you circle, looking for something substantial, something to hold onto. When it doesn’t appear, you fall in, whirling round and round, never finding your peace. Many of us have taken that ride, by different degrees. And many of us have found a way out, an exit requiring the abandonment of the false idols that have claimed us.
Today our social world is filled with the signs of male cruelty. We are cruel to women. We are cruel to other men. We are cruel to our children. We are cruel to the helpless. We are cruel to the vulnerable. We are cruel to those who are different than us. This cruelty provides a temporary illusion of power, something that is intoxicating for those who feel powerless. If we are secure, if we do love ourselves, if we do have a sense of purpose in the world, if we have come to terms with our strength and weakness, then we reject this lust for cruelty that seems to animate so much of the male world.
When you see a man with a centered and mature personality, it stands out. He is not always striving to prove himself. He is not attempting to dominate those around him. He is not putting people down to make himself feel superior. None of that is necessary. Rather, strength takes another form altogether. Strength is manifested in kindness, gentle confidence, helping others achieve, lifting up the hopeless, and pursuing a path that is not defined by self-centeredness. Real strength is experienced by enabling others to shine and taking joy in it. This is the mark of true manhood.
This applies to spiritual life as well. Once a centered male spiritual identity forms life is identified not by domination, but by its opposite, by losing the ego in order to find the self. Religion that reflects broken male identity is always attempting to control the world and everything within it. In our own time that list of what broken male religion attempts to control and dominate is long – women, those with different sexual orientations, people with black or brown skin, other religions. These quasi-religious men confuse this attempt at domination with a demonstration of faith. It is rather an ironic confirmation of its absence.
Where did we fail you, my younger male friends? So many places, I am sorry to say. But I know one thing for certain: You will not find the answers to the deepest questions of your life in the cruelty of the false idols that surround you today. You need to swim away from these like rats swimming from a sinking ship. There is no peace to be found there. Maybe together we can find the path and walk it together, men of many ages who long for and desperately need a different way in the world. I am hoping so.
vitalwholeness 