Real Men!!! Rawr!!!

The fact that you can pose with a chainsaw does not mitigate the fact that you are shaving.

 Yesterday my wife and I were video chatting with my parents to congratulate them on their 31st wedding anniversary. The conversation wandered, as conversations will, to gluten, autism spectrum disorders, the emerging links between ASD and autoimmune disorders, and the prevalence of hand sanitizer parents. We agreed that children probably need more dirt and less hand sanitizer in their lives to give their little immune systems more practice. Big, strong, barrel chested immune systems, that's what we need. This led my wife to tell a true story about her great-grandpa. 

One day, while he was working at the saw mill, a fan blade fell off of a scaffold and hit him in the head. It knocked him over and cut his scalp open. So he climbed down to the ground, picked up some dirt and stuck it in the wound to stop the bleeding, and then climbed back up to finish work. After the job was done they drove him four hours to Seattle, where the doctors opened and cleaned the wound and put in a steel plate to replace the missing piece of skull.

Of course both my wife told the story with gusto, pride and appreciation, and my Mom listened to it with the same feelings. How could you not? That is a Real Man! 

I looked at my Dad and said, "You see how they are both in awe of that? Just watch! What would happen if either you or I ever did anything like that?" 

My Dad laughed at the memories (he actually has things like that a time or two and so speaks from experience). "Oh, we would be dead! The fan wouldn't kill you. The wife would when you got home!"

As a case in point, when my dad got his leg caught in a grain auger, which miraculously broke and did not drag him in and chew him into sausage, he did not bother telling Mom because it was just a scratch. He only lost a few square inches of skin and muscle, and a pint or so of blood. Nothing to worry her about. He let my brother and sister know when he got home, expecting them to let Mom know when she got home. It wasn't his fault that they did not pass on the message, and her first clue was the blood soaked socks on the bathroom floor. Oddly enough, that did not go over so well.

It is part of the paradox of manhood, I suppose. I have written about it before, how women always want a "real man." They are attracted to men with strength, courage, determination, and a certain hardiness or indifference to physical hardship and danger. These virtues can take a lot of different forms, from soldiers, firefighters and rescue workers, to youth ministers, farmers, fishermen, mechanics, outdoorsmen, what have you. These virtues can also be found in men who work white collar jobs, although they may not be quite so obvious.
The point is that while these virtues may be attractive, they can also be inconvenient. Nearly every virtue is at some point. My wife doesn't like me to tell her about my Afghanistan days when I was digging up IED's with my field knife. She is all for having fewer IEDs in the world, but she doesn't want me to be the one doing it (I don't either. It was a pointless mission). A firefighter's wife might agree that someone should be putting out fires and rescuing the people trapped in them. She just doesn't want it to be her husband who has to do it.
That's why I love this picture. That is strength. The strength to be crucified. I have to remember that, but not only when endurance of pain, hardship or risk is required. I also have to remember it when the desire for these things comes. You see, if we are honest, I think we men admire stories like that, and sometimes we take the tough guy thing to an extreme because we want to be tough guys, and we want to be known as tough guys. I am not suggesting that Great Grandpa or my Dad was doing that, but I know that a lot of my crazier adventures, if I am honest about them, have not really been strictly speaking necessary. I did them to prove to myself that I could. A more enlightened manhood, I think, simply does what is necessary. If it is easy, he can live with that. If it is hard he can handle that too.

Occasionally he wrestles bears too. Just because it is fun.

Questions and Questions

I was talking with some guys today about Judges 13, the chapter where Samson's parents get the message from the angel that they are going to have a baby. It was interesting that the general consensus among the guys present was that the angel came to the wife first because she was more willing to trust, rather like Hannah, Elizabeth and Mary (although not like Sarah.) One guy even said that God might find it easier to work through women because they don't question as much.

Now to me, perhaps because I am a natural born questioner, that raises the question of what the purpose of the men is, then. Throughout the Church there seems to be this assumption that women are "more spiritual" and somehow more naturally "religious" than men, and that this somehow accounts for, or even excuses, the fact that most of the Catechism teachers, parish staff and pre-daily-Mass Rosary sayers are women. There seems to be a hidden attitude that the spiritual, naturally religious women are going to put up with the coarser, more cynical, more "questioning" men and coax, nag and all but drag them into heaven.

So what is the point of men? If you grant that men are more likely to ask questions and be pigheaded (which I may or may not grant) then what is the purpose of that? It was not intended to be an obstacle, but rather an aid to doing God's will. No trait that exists in any gender, personality type, or individual was designed by God as an unfortunate byproduct, but rather as a glory and a stairway to heaven, if used correctly.

So for myself, it helps if I remember that there are two kinds of questioning that I typically engage in. I question either rhetorically, "What do you think you are doing?" or I question wonderingly, "What are you doing, Lord?" The first is a challenge. I am expecting God to justify Himself to me, explain His actions so that I may judge and approve or disapprove them. The second is a request for education. I want Him to enlighten my mind so that I understand His ways, so that my thoughts become more like His thoughts and my ways more like His ways.

That typically masculine curiosity, and the desire simply to know things for their own sake, to understand ways and means, is not a bad thing. It is a good thing, if the attitude is one of humility, acknowledging that there are limits to what we can understand. If the fundamental attitude is one of trust that God has a reason and that His ways are good, then all the questioning in the world can never harm us or prevent us from doing His will. It can only draw us closer to Him, make us better students, better friends, and better sons (and daughters) of Him who delights to teach. I believe that God will eventually answer all such questions, and I certainly believe He means us to ask them, and to keep asking and asking, so long as we leave room our minds for His answers, not for what we expect His answers to be.

In this sense, that questioning attitude is a means of emptying the mind to make it more capable of holding the Word that made the Universe. Never give up your questions, or the fundamental trust that leads you to ask them in the first place.

Thoughts for the Men

"It’s been more than ten years since I first noticed something odd about the generally pleasant—and generally Catholic—students at the college where I teach. The boys and girls don’t hold hands.

 

Let that serve as shorthand for the absence of all those rites of attraction and conversation, flirting and courting, that used to be passed along from one youthful generation to the next, just as childhood games were once passed along, but are so no longer. The boys and girls don’t hold hands.

 

I am aware of the many attempts by responsible Catholic priests and laymen to win the souls of young people, to keep them in the Church, and indeed to make some of them into attractive ambassadors for the Church. I approve of them heartily. Yes, we need those frank discussions about contraception. We need theological lectures to counter the regnant nihilism of the schools and the mass media. But we need something else too, something more human and more fundamental. We need desperately to reintroduce young men and young women to the delightfulness of the opposite sex. Just as boys after fifteen years of being hustled from institutional pillar to institutional post no longer know how to make up their own games outdoors, just as girls after fifteen years of the same no longer know how to organize a dance or a social, so now our young people not only refrain from dating and courting—they do not know how to do it. It isn’t happening. Look at the hands."

I saw this link in my blogroll today at Seraphic Singles. I must say I find it fascinating, and a bit incriminating. While I cannot agree that being single is necessarily bad, as long as it is purposeful and not simply due to laziness or fear, there is no denying that this article does point out a real problem. Young Catholics are not getting married young, they are waiting until they get older and desperate. (Not to put it too unkindly for those of my readers who may find themselves in the older-than-they-hoped-they-would-be-and-still-unmarried crowd.)

As a member of the generation that the article speaks about I can say that the causes are many and varied. On one end of the spectrum there are the homeschoolers who were forbidden to date ever!!!! until they were ready to get married, in the hope that this would forestall the problems their parents ran into in regards to dating and the threats to chastity. "Dating was nothing but temptation for me and everyone is doing it wrong, so we'll just cut it all out entirely and that will solve the problem." Done out of love and a sincere desire to protect the youth, but often misguided in the application. On the other end of the spectrum are the Catholic young people who have gotten so sucked into the dating game that they either cannot conceive of a permanent relationship, or got so well and truly burned that they cannot trust anyone. And these are just the three options that come to mind off the top of my head, to say nothing of the effects of social media, pornography, entertainment addiction, perpertual boy/men and a whole host of other possible factors.

Whatever the causes may be, (and well worthy of pondering), the immediate fact is clear, that there is a problem and it needs to be fixed. I would go further and say that the initial impetus for solving that problem must come from the men, the side that it is least likely to come from. Pointing fingers is all very well, you know, but why point out a problem if you don't have a solution? Or aren't at least willing to work towards finding one? So my point in this post is purely practical. I am interested in answering one question and one question only: what am I (me, Ryan Kraeger) going to do about it?

I don't speak about my love-life (as it is called) on this blog. It isn't really a concern to my readers, except the few who know me in real life, and it's a bit personal. Suffice it to say that the vast majority of my history has been the result of deliberate and intentional choices. Whether those choices were wise or foolish is another question entirely, one I ask myself every day, but I have (thus far) done what I thought was right. On the other hand reading this article reinforces a feeling that I might well be part of the problem, or at least not a part of the solution.

So it is a quandrary, something I must think about, and sooner or later do something about as well. This is the first thing I am doing.

I am well aware that most of my readers (at least the commenting ones) are women, and this blog is really not addressed to you. I don't much care if you read it, but it is really for the men. You see, when I read the article above my biggest reaction was a feeling of responsibility. There is a problem, and we men are the ones who need to start the process of fixing it. I ask that you single men think about it and pray about it. I plan on sharing it with the men in my Bible Study group and discussing it with any of them who want to talk about it.

I don't think a movement is called for. I certainly don't think that what we need is a bunch of Catholic guys making a pact to go out and find steady, marriage-able girlfriends by this time next week. We don't need a club, we don't need a pledge or any nonsense like that. I think what each man needs to do is think about it and examine himself. If I am single I should be thinking about why I am single. Is it because I have a purpose best served by singleness? Is that purpose worthy of the sacrifice? Is it a sacrifice at all? Or is that purpose merely an excuse? Am I simply afraid? And if afraid, afraid of what? Or whom? Or am I simply lazy, just drifting along, not willing to put in the work, not willing to fight for a relationship?

Think and pray. But thinking and praying are not enough. If we think long enough and honestly enough, and if our prayer is listening and not merely talking incessantly, I think most of will find a call to action.


Oh, and I just thought of something to say to any women who might still be reading this:
It takes two to tango.