Oh So Wild

Brace yourselves for a very long post...the first thing that I have for you tonight is another installment on the continuing saga of Me and My Wallet. So, I returned the call to the good folks at Chipotle and asked that my wallet be sent to my school address because I figured whatever shipping mode they employed would be too slow to get it back to me by the time I left for school. But my mom really didn't want to go to the DMV to secure a new driver's license for me to use to get on the plane back to school, so she called them, asked if the wallet still had my driver's license (it did) and asked that they ship it to Houston when she found that they were planning to overnight it. So all that Saturday, we sat about the house, waiting for the wallet to show up, which it never did. So I had to go through the complex process of using alternate forms of ID at the airport, and I still have no wallet, since we had to wait until it got to Houston and then have my mom ship it to me at school! I will be glad as a turnip to have that thing back though, come to find it comes in mighty handy.

So, at long, long last, this post is the first in a series of reflections I am writing about Wild at Heart. The series thing is simply because I have too gosh darn much to say, so I thought I would make it a little easier by breaking it down. And hence, installment one:

“Every man was once a boy. And every little boy has dreams, big dreams: dreams of being the hero, of beating the bad guys, of doing daring feats and rescuing the damsel in distress.” Or so sayeth John Eldredge, recently acclaimed for his book Wild at Heart. For those of you who don’t run with the evangelical crowd, this book is a runaway bestseller in Christian bookstores across the nation; a book which attempts to address the deepest desires of a man’s heart, the very core of masculinity. I think those of you who read this blog know that I was attempting to delve into this book simply because it is such a phenomenon in evangelicalism, and if everybody is talking about something, I have a yen to know what it is and why. Furthermore, my friends and I argue about or at least jokingly reference this book pretty consistently, and as someone has astutely pointed out to me, it’s not such a good idea to do this with a book you haven’t read. Fair enough. Furthermore, I have a personal interest in this whole idea of gender roles and what they are and what they mean and how we live them out. So, for all of these reasons, I set myself to the task of digging into this most excellent book to try to discern what this kooky guy is trying to say.

Now, right away I came up against an interesting problem: I am not a man. Shocking, I know, but definitely kind of sticky when I am reading a book by a man, for a man, about men’s issues. Again and again I come up against my own ignorance: these are my perceptions, these are things that I’ve observed as I look at and talk to men. So many times I find myself looking at one of Eldredge’s observations and thinking, “Well, this is what I think about it, but I don’t really know” or “This is also true for me, but perhaps for a man they feel this or think this in some elevated or intense way?” So I guess I just want to state from the beginning that I acknowledge my own ignorance and the limitedness of my experience. And I welcome feedback, especially from guys, as to whether or not the things I am saying, or the things that Eldredge says are true. Because, at least I like to idealistically think, I really want to know what is “true” here, not just hear myself talk.

Okay, with all of the preliminaries out of the way, here we go…

This may sound ridiculously basic, but I think E. really has his finger on something just by pointing out that there seems to be a problem with American men. What kind of problem? I could point out the incredible statistics about absentee fathers and husbands or violent crime, or I could just point out about four gazillion couch potatoes, workaholics, road ragers, or weekend fishermen that seem to characterize the American male. I do not in any way agree with E’s allegation that the women’s movement has in some way demanded the feminization of men, but I think that it has introduced an extremely strong element of confusion into what it means to be a man today. If the message to girls is “You can be anything you want to be,” I think the message to guys has, through silence, turned into “We don’t know what the heck you’re going to be.” In the light of the old elephant in the room syndrome, just to stand up and say, “Hey, this isn’t right!” is the first step that must be taken before anything can be done. And I guess you could say that there’s no problem with anomie, that this allows everyone the freedom to choose whatever they want to be, but I think that anyone, in light of this lack of clear leadership, would just slump passively into…whatever. People don’t have freedom to choose when there are no clear options.

Another of the elements of E’s argument is the idea that all men desire an adventure to participate in, something to challenge them. But at the same time, they resist entering into this adventure because their deepest fear is that they will be proved inadequate, that they will be shown to not be enough for their calling. This is an interesting argument because I think I would say that there are many people, both men and women, who desire to do something larger, particularly in the domestic suburban setting, in a dead-end job that they hate, with a home life that is tense and too busy. And I think that this whole idea of impostership is really endemic to most Westerners, that they have a fear that they will someday be unmasked, that their achievements will be proved fraudulent. So I guess this would be one area where I felt really inadequate to evaluate whether this is simply a human desire, since it seems obvious to me that anyone would want to ride bareback on a beach rather than stare at the gray walls of their cubicle for one more day. But I said to myself, maybe this is something that men want particularly strongly, stronger than women could possibly dream, not being men themselves. So I guess I will leave you to arbitrate whether or not E. was right on this point.

I think that E. may have his finger on something with this whole idea of adventure, but I also think he seems to have presented adventure as an alternative to responsibility, or more particularly duty. He seems to have an idea that duty or moral responsibility is something that men are saddled with, or that the church treats these things as the chief end of man, to borrow from the catechism when really it is to follow these deep desires in their hearts to run off and be William Wallace. I am personally of the opinion that fulfilling his duty, living according to his obligations and sticking to his word are some of the most important things that a man can do. A word that I found conspicuously absent from E’s book is the word “honor,” an omission I found puzzling, since I would rank it extremely high in a list of “things a man ought to be.” Maybe the word is too obscure to be of much use to contemporary men, but to me it seems to be a fairly essential idea to me, one that is eschewed in favor of the pursuit of one’s adventures and dreams. To me this seems like it could easily be used as license, not to become men, but to remain as boys, preoccupied with doing what makes them excited or happy rather than what they see around them that needs to be done, that needs to be taken care of.

But, in my continuing effort to be fair and balanced, I think the other thing in E’s book that is really useful is his urging that men be able to acknowledge their own woundedness. I think it has been a great injustice to men that they have been taught that in order to be men they need to just “suck it up,” deny or forget or ignore whatever has bothered or truly hurt them in favor of being seen as a tough or macho man. I feel that this is not good for anyone, that to suppress feeling of pain turns them into anger or withdrawal. Why is it that uncontrolled rage is not condemned as unmanly when so many other displays of emotion are? This is important too because I think that in order to overcome woundedness, the wound must be acknowledged and dealt with or no growth will come of it; it will become not just a scar, but a burden. I think it takes infinitely more courage to acknowledge one’s wounds and deal with them than to just stuff them and move on, so I do applaud E. for encouraging men to move forward in this area.

Okay, okay, enough all ready! Until next time, my wild little friends...

S.