W@H: Unintended Consequences

From Crooks and Liars, via PersonalFailure. La Familia, also known as a brutal drug cartel in Mexico, apparently uses Wild at Heart as part of its indoctrination process. That’s kinda-sorta freaky, I’d say… Fortunately for everyone involved, I have a crack team of researchers who are fluent in Spanish to do some real digging. Okay, fine, I have big a. You might remember him from the comments. If you don’t read the comments, shame on you. This is one of those places where I’m almost entirely sure that you can’t actually blame John Eldredge for his message being taken to the extreme. For one thing, the Spanish title of Wild at Heart is Salvaje de Corazon. The translation for this is something close to "Brutal in Heart." The word is close to “savage,” big a assures me, but the meaning is closer to “brutal.” That’s not quite the message Eldredge was going for with the original title. At least, I assume. He’s also helpfully worked through a Spanish-language article for me. Apparently the sales pitch is that they’re creating a society of real men in god’s own intended image. Also, drug trafficking is an act of valor. This is one of those situations where it’s absolutely not the author’s fault that his work is used in unexpected ways. The Crooks and Liars link makes it seem that Eldredge’s work has created the situation in La Familia. My assumption would be that Eldredge simply offers a convenient external ideology. I’m assured by big a that the Spanish source I dug up says the same thing. Either way, this doesn’t take Eldredge off the hook for writing terrible stuff that can be taken the wrong way by misogynistic meatheads. But he didn’t create La Familia. Not by a long shot. What we see with La Familia is a cult crossed with a street gang. It’s a truly horrifying concept. Remember, though, that both types of organizations tend to be able to create themselves without outside help to begin with…

W@H: Hot Man-on-Man Action

Why do lovers choose others To mirror their pain Yeah, slow down stranger You know that you're in danger --Richard Ashcroft, "Why do Lovers?" We here at Accidental Historian like to mix things up every once in a while. As such, we're pleased to present a one act play in one part called "John Eldredge Makes Shit Up." CHARACTERS: John Eldredge Darrell, a man born with only half a brain Ralph, an innocent ficus plant SCENE: JOHN has a great idea. DARRELL, a ward of the state who works in JOHN'S office licking envelopes then stuffing them with live crickets, is the only one nearby for him to bounce it off. JOHN ELDREDGE: Darrell, come in here. DARRELL: (Looking around, confused) Who's Darrell? JE: You are. Come here. D: Okay, Mr. Patterson. JE: It's Eldredge. But whatever. I've got an idea and I want to know what you think of it. D: I only really know envelopes and cickets Mr. Patterson. JE: Yes. And you're doing a great job of...whatever it is you do. But so far you haven't cost me more than that tax write-off, so just keep doin' it. Anyway, here's my idea. You know how I spend a lot of time on the Father Wound, right? D: My father gave me a dollar and dropped me off at the bus stop. JE: Yes. I know. D: The next thing I knew I was here. And the man at the door said I couldn't leave. Ever. JE: Focus, Darrell. Anyway, here's my idea. I'll tell everyone that guys who are gay do it because they didn't get important affirmations from their fathers. And since they didn't get those affirmations from their fathers, they look to get them from other men. More specifically, other mens' penises. Y'know. Inside them. Like those videos my pastor keeps accidentally finding on the internet. D: (Thinks about the idea for about five seconds.) My friend Steve likes having sex with other men. He says it's because they're hot. He also says that he really likes the cock. But I don't know what that means. JE: (Leans forward, excited.) And I'll bet he has a terrible relationship with his father. D: (Shakes his head.) No. His dad's a great guy. He used to take us all for ice cream after our basketball games back in high school. And he calls Steve's boyfriend Adam, "The other son I never had." JE: Well obviously your friend Steve in in deep denial about his Father Wound. D: I don't think so, Mr. Patterson. JE: Get back to work, Darrell. DARRELL leaves. JOHN stares at his desk for a long time, a look of confusion on his face. Finally he looks up and sees RALPH, the ficus plant, in the corner. JE: You think it's a great idea, right? Ralph: (Talking, but JOHN can't hear him.) Oh, god. Why does he always drag me in to this? I knew I should have listened to Carson Daly when he was talking about that Karma thing... END SCENE Unfortunately for everyone involved, any discussion of Christianity and manhood eventually has to work its way around to that thorny issue of hot man-on-man action. I really don't feel like delving in to issues of why this is. Nor do I want to spend a lot of time discussing why so many Christians are freaked out by homosexuality. There are a lot of theories out there about the topic, ranging from an entire religious sect of closeted homosexuals to theories about how a guy who likes to take the traditional role granted women in sexual congress is a threat to their gender stratification scheme. The reason I don't want to spend a lot of time on the theories is simple. I'm almost 100% sure that most of the ones I've seen are wrong. See, they're generally presented by people who are completely outside the tradition and haven't spent a lot of time having honest discussions with people on the inside. So they make up motivations. This is, not surprisingly, very similar to the way people inside evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity have a bad habit of inventing motivations to explain why outsiders think the way they do. For the average believer the issue of homosexuality is a completely teleological argument. The Bible says (they say, since lots of things in fundagelical Christianity are covered by the blanket statement, "The Bible says") that god created man and woman to have sex with each other. You don't even need to go to the verse in Leviticus about men lying with other men or that place in the epistles where Paul puts butt sex on the same level as murdering and stealing to see the problem. Boys have tabs. Girls have slots. Tabs go in slots. It's all crystal clear. Men who like other men completely ruin that image. Women who like other women probably do, too, but let's face it, for as long as men have been able to conceive of the idea of two women in the same room together, they've pictured those two women ripping each others' clothes off and making with the intercourse. So as long as we've had a patriarchy, women who want to diddle other women have had a more or less free pass because it's hot and, quite frankly, men want to believe that a woman who has never once thought of another woman in a sexual light is actually constantly about ten seconds away from going down on every other woman in the room. It's a double standard, but dammit, it's a great double standard... Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Homosexuality is outside of "god's plan." Now, we all know that god's plan was screwed up by the whole eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil thing. Since then sin has been a conscious choice. Therefore, if a guy wants to sin by, um, engaging in sin with another guy, it has to have been his choice. This is what leads us to things like ex-gay ministries, wherein one can "pray the gay away" or whatever. That, by the way, is a part of a much larger misunderstanding of the sexuality of humans. Put a bunch of teenage boys in a room with a bunch of teenage girls and tell them to keep their thoughts pure, avoid masturbating, and not sneak off to feel each other up and try to get to third base. It ain't going to happen. We have libidos and biological clocks for a reason, and it's not so we can learn to have stronger prayer lives by asking god to help us keep our hands out of our pants. There's an associated phenomenon wherein it's apparently the boy's job to push the boundaries and the girl's job to say what is and isn't allowed. Because, you know, girls never actually want to have sex and have to be forced to do it by, um, apparently marrying them and making it part of the pre-nup. Now, I will fully admit that the different genders generally have completely different ideas about what sex is and/or should be. But that doesn't mean that both don't want sex. I, uh, I didn't learn that in church. And so but anyway:

What's fascinating to note is that homosexuals are actually more clear on this point. They know what is missing in their hearts is masculine love. The problem is that they've sexualized it. Joseph Nicolosi says that homosexuality is an attempt to repair the wound by filling it with masculinity, either the masculine love that was missing or the masculine strength many men feel they do not possess. It, too, is a vain search and that is why the overwhelming number of homosexual relationships do not last, why so many gay men move from one man to another and why so many of them suffer from depression and a host of other addictions. What they need can't be found there. --John Eldredge, Wild at Heart (94-95) [emphasis his, bold mine]

Now, leave aside the fact that a man with some sort of graduate level degree in psychology just called depression "an addiction." Actually. don't. Dwell on that for a moment. Let the unintended consequences of that construction of "depression and...other addictions" roll around in your mind for a moment. I'll wait. We're back? Good. Now, then, this is a perfect place for a little game I like to call "Damning Eldredge with his own words." For, you see, this sequence comes three pages after Eldredge uses Bly's imagery of the Golden-Haired Woman to explain why a man will fall in love with a woman across a room, reach her, realize she's normal, then fall in love with another woman in yet a different part of the room. I guess it's perfectly normal for a man to move from one relationship to another if it's always with women and not so much if he's doing the same thing with guys. Also, let's pretend for a moment that he actually has statistics to back up his "overwhelming number" of broken homosexual relationships. First of all, it's fascinating the way he apparently uses "gay men" and "all homosexual people" interchangeably. Either he doesn't realize that gay men and lesbians may well have different relationship dynamics (um, I developed this weird idea that it might actually be way easier to set up homosexual relationships. My theory is that men look for "man things" in relationships while women look for "woman things." So if you've got two women they're both looking for "woman things" whereas if you've got a man and a woman one is looking for "man things" and the other for "woman things." Bear in mind that it was early in the morning when I came up with this, I thought about it for all of 30 seconds, and I never even bothered to suss out the difference between "man things" and "woman things." So, please, take it with a planet-sized grain of salt), or he's conveniently ignoring lesbian relationships in his wild theorizing. Either option works. Second, um, I have no statistics to back this up, save old re-runs of Seinfeld, but I'm pretty sure that an overwhelming number of ALL relationships end badly. That's why on the ninth day god invented gin and tonic and that dive bar down the street from the Garden. But, again, it's not worth mentioning that it happens to heterosexuals, too, if it can ruin your wild accusations and help maintain that general idea that homosexuality is a special variety of bad. Either way, the root of the problem evangelicals have with homosexuality isn't that they're some entirely closeted subculture. It's that they have to call homosexuality a sin. In calling it a sin they have to make it a choice. And in making it a sinful choice, they have to make sure everyone knows that it's fraught with pitfalls and will never bring satisfaction. This, in turn, requires a lot of time spent making shit up. I had a friend tell me once that he thought people went gay because they just really wanted sex and didn't care where it came from. I asked, "So why don't they have it with people of the opposite gender? Or animals?" That pretty much stopped him dead in his tracks. It created one of my many, many theories, too. Basically, if someone makes an argument against homosexuality that can be countered by asking why they don't just stay straight or asking why straight people do exactly the same thing, it's probably not a good argument. But I think I'll leave the final word here to Daniel Radosh, who ran in to a competing theory while at Cornerstone in the process of writing Rapture Ready! The theory in his case was that men turn to other men after they've been disrespected by a lot of women.

"A man's greatest need is to feel respected, and if a man doesn't feel respected he'll go anywhere." [said John Smid, the ex-gay speaker] My jaw dropped. This is what turns people gay? Because before I met my wife, I often felt disrespected by women, and it never occurred to me to remedy that by sucking cock. --Daniel Radosh, Rapture Ready! (181) [emphasis his]

Ah, hell, I can't resist getting in the last word... If it's an issue of disrespect from women, someone needs to call those guys who are looking for dominatrixes* and tell them they're doing it wrong. And someone needs to call all the guys who are being disrespected by their boyfriends and tell them they'd better just give up. I mean, where do you go when neither gender respects you and that's the only reason that you could possibly have for being in a relationship? --------------------------- *And, yes, I know that should probably be "dominatrices." It looks weird, though.

W@H: Solitude

Once you've got the taste Oh just a little taste of freedom You can't go back To living in your head --The Lovehammers, "Say You're Sorry" I rarely doodle. Okay, I take that back. I doodle a lot. But it's usually random loops and squiggles and things to move my pen and pass the time. I was sitting in class once. This was out at Western. It was either Judaism or Modern Religious Thought. Probably the latter. I'd been reading a lot of Joseph Campbell at the time and was suddenly taken by the nature of Jesus Christ as a reflection of Campbell's Monomyth. I started drawing on the page. In the upper left corner I drew the Tree of Life from Genesis and in the lower right I drew the Cross. These were the twin World Navels of the Christian myth. In between I attempted to cover the space between the World Navels. It wasn't sin and death that I put between them, at least as far as I can recall. I think I still have that notebook somewhere, but that somewhere is my parents' house and it's 10:45 on a Wednesday as I write these words. Still, I remember being struck not by the idea of the sacrifice of the Christ as a necessary step in the Bridge Diagram, but as the completion of a cycle of broken and rebuilt connection. I was also reading Buber's I and Thou at the time. Somehow connecting Buber, Campbell, and the Gospels in that moment taught me more about Christianity than anything I'd ever learned. And I promptly forgot pretty much everything I'd learned. Funny, that. It's weird. I was reading Paul Tillich for that class. I hated Tillich at the time and for the life of me I can't figure out why. Tillich and Campbell go together astoundingly well. As I recall, Tillich wrote of the Christ story as a broken myth. It wasn't that pieces had fallen off and it wasn't useful any longer. It's that the myth had broken through in to reality and in being able to place god in history the universe had changed. But there's a problem with broken myth. It's one that both Eldredge and Bly have to account for, Eldredge far more than the poet. The placement of Jesus as the Christ and the Christ as an actual historical figure puts god on our plane of existence. We, in effect, pin god in to a historical place, point back to that place where god was and put up a sign like those "George Washington Slept Here" plaques that hang on the walls of sufficiently old inns. We also pin ourselves in to that same place in history. It's something we see in modern American politics. The current generation has basically deified the Founding Fathers. We've mythologized them to a point where there is no reality to be found in many of the stories. We look at their sacred texts and attempt to divine our world from theirs without any real sense that Thomas Jefferson had no concept of an internet-based world, Jon Adams couldn't have conceived of the motor car, and no one from a primarily agrarian society dominated by white, landowning males could have fathomed the problems that we face in our disconnected, urban, heterocultural world. It strikes me that there may well be a reason why Judaism has done a better job of making it in to the modern world than its offshoot. The Jewish Messiah hasn't come yet. They're still looking forward to the day god steps in to history, while Christianity is looking back to the day when god apparently made the world stop. There was this sense in the Christianity that I grew up in that the conversation stopped two thousand years ago. I know this isn't true, as we've had the Catholic/Orthodox split, the Reformation, the Counter Reformation, the rise of Pentacostalism, Evangelicalism, Christian Postmodernism, and a thousand tiny and huge splits in between. It was kind of funny when I finally got around to learning about the history of Christian dialog and realized that all of those great "new" Christian Postmodern ideas that are swirling around right now with Rob Bell, Brian McLaren, and others were debated and discussed by Tillich, Hans Frei, Calvin, Luther, Augustine, Origen, and a million others between. There is, truly, nothing new under the sun. All of those endless debates leading to schism and strife, however, seem to stem from an attempt to better figure out how things were back when god touched ground and made history stop in place. Just as the United States has moved far beyond the ken of the Founding Fathers, the world has moved past the Church Fathers. We're forced to imagine that men who are long dead had a sort of supernatural ability to see the future and fathom the challenges we are facing right now and give us all the answers we need. The problem is that we can look to the past for wisdom and insight. We can look to the past as a sort of laboratory to ask what did and didn't work in times of change and crisis. But we cannot actually divine the answers we need now from what happened long ago. I see the study of history as a form of science. But it's a social science because of a simple limitation that historians always have. I describe this limitation with the phrase, "We can't re-create Napoleon in a lab." But this doesn't mean that history is, as Ford said, bunk. Like I said, we can still get a great deal of wisdom and insight from the study of history. At the very least, we can use it to tell us what didn't work in the past and try to figure out why. We can also look to history to tell us what ideas turned out to be dangerous and which ones turned out to be pretty good. Which is how I can say that Bly's hypothesis of The Sacred King and his beneficial patriarchy is dangerous. I've already spent a lot of time on the unacknowledged misogyny of the mythological manhood movement (say that three times fast), so I'll leave it at that for the moment. Instead I'll move on to the idea of god as Heavenly Daddy in Eldredge's conception as massively misguided. Jesus taught his disciples to pray using these words: "Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, they will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not in to temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen." Oddly enough, the Lord's Prayer isn't something that comes particularly naturally to me, as it wasn't really taught in the church that I grew up in. Evangelicals aren't really big on the ol' Pater Noster. It reeks of not being a personal appeal to god, which is really what everyone tried to go for. We prayed a lot in the churches I attended. It was always the pastors praying pretty much off the cuff or someone saying, "Okay, pray now," and then being quiet so everyone could pray in whatever way they wanted. "Our Father" took a back seat to "My Father." It encouraged the navel-gazing faith that I've often gone out of my way to rip apart in the times since I left that place. That "My Father" sort of prayer life also has absolutely no precedence in Christian history. The liturgical nature of Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, Orthodox, Lutheran, and whatever other churches that existed before the Evangelical and Pentecostal movements took hold preserve the idea of religion as a communal event. This is the sanctuary. This is the Garden. The Christian world where you come together, sing a few songs, then break off to pray on your own or listen to the pastor pray whatever is on his heart breaks the spirit of the Garden. It's not Adam and Eve walking with Elohim in the cool of the morning. It's Adam walking with god and Eve walking with god. They may physically be in the same space, but they're not in the same place. Turning "Our Father" in to "My Father" reaches its logical conclusion in Eldredge's conception of manhood as a hyper-solitary endeavor. It's just the manly man and god out in the wilderness, fighting evil. He'll concede that most stories actually have two men fighting side by side (erm, not like Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhal in Brokeback Mountain. More like Enkidu and Gilgamesh. Y'know, totally not gay. It's funny, too, since in these situations David and Jonathan tend to get pulled out as the perfect example. But it's a little tough to read some of those stories and David's reaction to Jonathan's death and completely buy that fighting was the only thing those two were doing with their swords, if you know what I mean...), but to Eldredge the journey is ultimately a solitary one. Or whatever the term would be for one plus god. Religion was never a solitary venture. Sure, there were the occasional ascetics and hermits, but they were usually the oddballs. Religion started as a societal venture designed to keep people together and moving towards a single goal. Christianity started with that flavor and retained it for most of its history. Hell, as long as you avoid the types of churches I spent time in you'll still find it all over the place. I think I discovered a much deeper truth than I realized that day I combined Christ with Campbell and Buber. If the I and Thou is limited only to me and god, then my religion has failed. If you're writing books telling people that the only relationship in the universe that matters is that singular god/self relationship, then you are completely missing the point. And if you believe that history stopped just so that god could wait two thousand years, and then develop a personal relationship with you and everyone who doesn't see that simple truth be damned, well you're pretty much an idiot. That's not loving. That's not gracious. That's just dumb.

W@H: Perspective

Father of mine Tell me where have you been You know I just closed my eyes My whole world disappeared Father of mine Take me back to the day Yeah when I was still your golden boy Back before you went away --Everclear, "Father of Mine" Where did we leave off? Ah, yes, absent fathers. The not-so-subtle misogyny of John Eldredge's god-as-father complex leads pretty easily in to a bigger problem. If fathers are failing, it's because they're not turning to a Heavenly Father. Without the Heavenly Father, we're all a bunch of blithering automatons whose only goal in life is to kill, rape, steal, watch porn, lie, and illegally download stuff. Oh, and we don't want to go to church and we want to beat our own children or withdraw from them or, um, whatever the one size fits all Father Wound is for that kid next door and the one down the block. Now, I've said that this is the place where Eldredge and Bly are pretty much in agreement. As much as I'd like to let Bly off the hook, as I rather like Bly, I have a hard time getting past the last page of his chapter on the father wound.

As we close this chapter on the King and the father, we recognize that we have hit something hard here. The sons and daughters in the United States still feel "too little father," and that is probably not going to get better. Fathers themselves have not changed so much; it is, rather, that they seem to us smaller, because we do not see behind or through them the Blessed or the Destructive King. The fathers seem opaque; the Sacred King seems farther away, and our eyesight is not too good. --Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men (121-122)

Bly spends a lot of time working around this concept of the Sacred King. It forms the basis of his concept of masculinity. We all worship the father as the Sacred King, you see. As boys grow up they have to stop worshiping the Sacred King and be initiated to become men themselves. If they don't do this, they remain forever trapped in the state of adolescence. Or something. It's not really entirely clear to me. The thing is, Bly's reasoning goes to exactly the same place as Eldredge's. In fact, it goes there in the very next paragraph.

When the mythological layer collapses, and the political kings fall, then the patriarchy, as a positive force, is over. The sun and moon energies can no longer get down to earth. Ancient Celtic mythology has an image for the end of the patriarchy, and it is this: Eagles sit on the top branches of the sacred tree, with dead animals underneath their claws. Rotting bits of flesh fall down through the branches to the ground below, where the swine eat them. We are the swine. When all the meat that comes down from above is rotten, then neither the sons nor daughters receive the true meat. --Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men (122)

If you can get past the aggravating comma splices in the first sentence (seriously, I'm guilty as hell of bad comma splices, but that's just too damn much), think about the nature of these two and a half paragraphs. The patriarchy disappears as a positive force and we all become swine. This isn't a misogynist statement as whatever Eldredge's equivalent statement would be. This is an anti-democratic statement. This is an indictment of the Enlightenment. "We got rid of the kings," Bly says. "We took away the power of the patriarchy. Now look at us, we're a bunch of swine rooting around for rotten meat." The follow-up thought is strangely amusing to me.

That doesn't imply that we need to build up the patriarchy again, but that we need to understand that we are starving. The more difficult it is to visit the King, the more hungry everyone is. The perceived absence of the father is actually the absence of the King. --Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men (122)

It's actually hard to figure out here where Eldredge would end and Bly would begin. Replace "Sacred King" with "god" and you've got yourself a (somewhat more vivid and sensical) passage from Wild at Heart. We need more of the Sacred Father Figure. We can't see the Sacred Father Figure because our own fathers get in the way. We were much better off when fathers didn't get in the way and the Sacred Father Figure shone through. I would love for once to actually have it explained to me when, exactly, that was. I might be beating a dead horse to a red smear in the pavement here, but this period when there was a Sacred Father Figure and men perfectly capable of ushering their sons in to adulthood never happened. Bly acknowledges it when he says, "Fathers themselves have not changed much." In borrowing from Bly, Eldredge borrowed, whole cloth, Bly's misunderstanding of the nature of the relationship between fathers and sons.

Masculinity is an essence that is hard to articulate but that a boy naturallly craves as he craves food and water. It is something passed between men. "The traditional way of raising sons," notes Robert Bly, "which lasted for thousands and thousands of years, amounted to fathers and sons living in close -- murderously close -- proximity, while the father taught the son a trade, perhaps farming or carpentry or blacksmithing or tailoring." My father taught me to fish. We would spend long days together, out in a boat on a lake, trying to catch fish. I will never, ever forget his delight in me when I'd hook one. --John Eldredge, Wild at Heart (66) [emphasis his, also I don't understand what the deal is with Eldredge and his randomly emphasized words]

My father never taught me a trade. He's in banking and financial services. He always has been. I realized when I was pretty young that I didn't want to be like my father, at least not from an employment perspective. At a couple points in my life I have had to take jobs doing financial services. I hated it, got out as quickly as possible. My dad taught me how to play basketball. For my birthday one year he had a basketball hoop put up next to the driveway. My friends had hoops, too. They were adjustable and most of them had the net at nine or eight feet and maybe even had a youth-sized ball or smaller so they could learn to shoot better or, later, dunk. From the beginning my hoop was set to ten feet and I had a full size ball. My dad insisted that I learn how to play properly. He taught me how to shoot and dribble with my left hand and drilled it in to my brain that if I was on the left side of the hoop I needed to dribble and put in layups with that hand. I got my first real basketball when I got my basketball hoop. It was a Wilson leather ball. I know because it's still in my parents' garage. The little goosepimple nubs have completely worn off, the cover has frayed and it's more gray than any other color, but as I sit here I can still feel that old Wilson ball against my hands. I know what it feels like to pick it up, spin it against the palm of my hand, dribble it, put up a jump shot. I remember being out in the driveway when my dad would come home from work and even dressed like he just came from the office he'd take the ball and put up a hook shot. My dad always tried to teach me the hook shot. To this day I can't do it. I don't know why. My dad taught me how to play chess. He had an old wooden chessboard and a set of wood pieces his grandfather made. It didn't take me very long to beat him every time. I guess I just took to the game naturally. He encouraged me to join the chess team, later on he would take me to lessons with a chess master every week. On weekends when there were tournaments he would be at every one, whether it was in the next town over or the next state. He didn't have to do that, but he did. I can guarantee you that I didn't appreciate it at the time. I wanted to hang out with my friends, goof off, be away from my parents. And I didn't know then how valuable a weekend could be in the grind of life. I simply didn't know. This is not at all the point I was intending to make when I started this post, but its something that's central to the argument against both Eldredge and Bly. It's something that they just don't get, probably because they're too busy blaming their fathers for shit that they probably never intended to do. Children are horrible, selfish little creatures. They take without appreciation. They go running off to do things that are more important and leave their parents behind. I can think of dozens of times my father wanted to do something with me and I managed to turn it in to something selfish. I didn't know it then. I didn't know the sacrifice. I didn't know that all he wanted was to spend time with his son. I just didn't know. And, yeah, my father screwed up. He did some things I thought I'd be mad at him about forever. But in the end my dad is just a man. He did his absolute best to get by with what he had. He taught me how to shoot a basketball. He taught me how to play chess and was immensely proud of me when I got 10th in the state in 3rd grade, 13th in the state in 8th grade, won all four games at my junior high home tournament one year, and at all points in between, whether I won or just took home a participant ribbon. He also taught me how to balance a checkbook, the importance of voting, and to keep trying, even if it seems like the whole world is against me. So, no, my father never took me to the edge of the wilderness, set me loose, and said, "Kill a lion and come back a man." But he didn't need to. I don't need to know how to do that to survive in the society I live in. I wonder, in all their ceaseless blather about how their fathers hurt them, if Eldredge and Bly ever once sat down and thought about something else. I wonder if they realize how much their fathers did give them. More importantly, I wonder if they ever stopped to realize how much they hurt their own fathers in rejecting them. Maybe we don't need better fathers. Maybe we need better sons.

W@H: Appendix C

So I took another walk Around my neighborhood To get you off of my mind Like I knew that I ought to But when I saw a big black van Run down a bird I had to think about you Well no I'm not a quarterback I'm not a fireman Still I can have any girl in Japan 'Cuz I'm a healthy, Hundred and fifty-nine pound American boy --The Refreshments, "Broken Record" We come to one of my favorite aspects of evangelical Christianity: bad analogies and metaphors. Mau de Katt linked to this other blog entry, um, somewhere in the comments. It might take a minute to load. It's various excerpts from a Rick Warren speech. Mau de Katt's problem was with Warren's attempt to claim that Christians should be like the Hitler Youth. Ironically enough, my bigger problem is with the thing about claiming that the Communist Revolution came about in China simply because a bunch of people memorized Mao's Little Red Book. So I've got my buddy who left the church with me sitting next to me. He knows all the stuff I do. We're having the bad analogies talk. It's an important talk. The thing about the Hitler Youth is this: Hitler was tangible. Tell ten people you believe in god, he points out, and you'll get ten opinions. Tell ten people you believe in Hitler and they might disagree, but they'll agree that he existed. As time went on in the Third Reich, too, rejected Hitler there were real, palpable consequences. But, of course, the issue is that there had to be fervency before that point came. And here we get, once again, in to the history behind the movement. See, both the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the rise of the Communists in China addressed specific social issues. They were also addressed by their leaders in specific ways. The differences between, say, Rick Warren and Hitler/Mao are quite instructive. Hitler rose to power in Germany atop a wave of social discontent. After the First World War the infrastructure and society of Germany fell apart. The winners called for impossible levels of reparations from an impoverished German nation. Everyone wanted a reason why things were going to shit. Hitler gave them a convenient answer. And, for the record, it goes far beyond the Jews. The big thing Hitler claimed was that it was the fault of the people who took them in to the Great War and would not let them win (sound familiar?). Since it isn't convenient to constantly blame the previous generation (also sound familiar?), the Jews in specific and the non-Aryans in general came in to play. They were traitors to the state, non-Germans walking among the true people with all of their connections to an outside culture who didn't understand and didn't want to understand being a true German. The Communist Revolution in China, meanwhile, was a process that took decades. Mao was fighting Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-Shek for those who haven't taken history in a few years) for years before World War II. The celebrated Long March, which followed a period of failures that almost destroyed the Communist movement, took place in the 1930s. The Communists and Nationalists joined forces to combat the Japanese in World War II, but then split apart again once it was over. 1949 marked the official Communist overthrow of the Nationalists, meaning that the Communist Revolution took place over the course of approximately 20 years, with a nice six-year intermission in between. And yet Rick Warren would have you believe that the reason the Communists won was because a bunch of people memorized Mao's book. Something seems off here. You have to be able to understand how someone like Warren thinks in order to work through this logic. There is a great deal of belief that if people simply read the Bible enough, they'll understand, believe, and move accordingly. There is a reason that the Communists managed to keep their fervency and that the Christians can't, no matter what Warren wants to say. Communist fervency came at the end of the barrel of a gun. The Nationalists were going to drive them to the ends of the Earth and kill them. But the reason this situation came to be was that the Communists started from the position that the status quo was intolerable. Mao's manifesto was a concrete attack against this intolerable situation and an answer to the intolerable situation. The options for Mao and his followers were to force change or die trying. If they hadn't tried for force change, they believed, they would have died anyway, just more slowly and without any hope. There is no Christian Revolution, at least not for the sort of people who go to Saddleback or listen to Warren's masturbatory messages on YouTube. This is the reason that the church does well under persecution, too. Beliefs have a tendency to solidify when they're put to the test under the influence of the barrel of a gun. Moreover, the very nature of persecution has a tendency to, in a weird, inverse way, support the beliefs of the persecuted. "If this person cares enough to want to kill me for my beliefs," the reasoning goes, "My beliefs must be strong and worthwhile." This is not a good thing for Warren to admit. It's much easier to draw analogies using poorly-conceived metaphors in order to draw attention to the failures that each individual Christian feels within themself than to admit the inherent contradictions of the system. Out of one side of his mouth the fundamentalist pastor preaches Christ triumphant while out of the other side he preaches the ever-encroaching dominion of Satan. These two messages cannot be sustained in a single system, so the individual Christian must be told that he or she is the point of failure in the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth. Bad analogies don't alway just involve inventing history whole cloth, however. Eldredge peppers Wild at Heart with terrible analogies and metaphors.

Men either overcompensate for their wound and become driven (violent men), or they shrink back and go passive (retreating men). Often it's an odd mixture of both. Witness the twin messages sported by young college-age men especially: a goatee, which says, "I'm kind of dangerous," and a baseball hat turned backward, which says, "But really I'm a little boy, don't require anything of me." Which is it? Are you strong, or are you weak?" --John Eldredge, Wild at Heart (74)

This is what I like to call John Eldredge making shit up when he doesn't have a clue. He makes an observation about the nature of facial hair and headgear and decides that his observation is useful and authoritative. For the record, I have a beard. There is a reason I have a beard. I think it defines my chin line. No, seriously. I don't want to be a lumberjack. I don't want anyone to think I'm a big, burly man. I think that my chin is better defined with a bit of hair marking the space. I also tend, when I'm wearing my White Sox hat I tend to wear it backwards. Back in May I got mocked at a Local H show by Scott Lucas, who seemed to think I was sending a message that I like Limp Bizket, so I was trying to look like Fred Durst. Scott Lucas was about as on point as John Eldredge is about my reasons for wearing my hat backwards. I, uh, I don't like having the brim up at the top of my field of vision. Side note: back when I was dismantling my religion I was talking to a certain member of the female gender. I told her I was thinking of going atheist. She claimed that I was just doing that to avoid taking responsibility (for what, I don't recall. I don't think she had anything, either). Um, never claim that I'm trying to avoid taking responsibility, whether you're John Eldredge or someone I'm trying to convince myself I'm in love with. Also, I hated this thought from the beginning. Of course, sometimes he stops being an asshole and just gets downright asinine.

A woman is a captivating thing. More captivating than anything else in all creation. "The naked woman's body is a portion of eternity too great for the eye of man." [He said without bothering to explain why his words are in quote] Femininity can arouse masculinity. Boy oh boy can it. My wife flashes me a little breast, a little thigh, and I'm ready for action. All systems alert. She tells me in a soft voice that I'm a man and I'll leap tall buildings for her. But femininity can never bestow masculinity. It's like asking a pearl to give you a buffalo. It's like asking a field of flowers to give you a '57 Chevy. They are different substances entirely. --John Eldredge, Wild at Heart (93) [emphasis his]

Um, I really don't know what to do with this. The similes are astoundingly bad. But the introduction seems to make a point that Eldredge doesn't actually know what the fuck he's talking about. My friend points out something I've never noticed. Eldredge makes sexual arousal a metaphor for masculinity. That's, um, that's a pretty lousy parallel to draw and a guy writing a book about masculinity should know better. I guess it's a good thing he makes lousy analogies. They tell us way more about what he actually thinks than he really wants to let on. So we've got that going for us.

W@H: An Initiation to Where?

What man? Which man? Who's the man? When's a man a man? What makes a man a man? Am I a man? Yes. Technically I am. --Flight of the Conchords, "Think About It" The whole Father Wound thing inevitably creates a vacuum of masculinity in a society. Both Bly and Eldredge speak about it and lay the blame squarely on the heads of the men of the previous generation. So I'm going to play a little game I call Identify the Author. 1. As I've participated in men's gatherings since the early 1980s, I've heard one statement over and over from American males, which has been phrased in a hundred different ways: "There is not enough father." 2. Some fathers give a wound merely by their silence; they are present, yet absent to their sons. The silence is deafening. 3. Initiation, then, for young men amounts to helping them remember the wound, and by that we mean the soul wounds, or injuries to the emotional body. Sometimes the outward scars exist to remind us of the inward scars. 4. A man needs to know his name. He needs to know he's got what it takes. And I don't mean "know" in a modernistic, rationalistic sense. I don't mean that the thought has passed through your cerebral cortex and you've given it intellectual assent, the way you know about the Battle of Waterloo or the ozone layer... The progression is Bly, Eldredge, Bly, Eldredge. And I think it's kind of neat the way I basically picked the first three quotes at random, yet they can be seen as building on one another and leading to the grand conclusion that both Bly and Eldredge make: we need initiation rituals in our societies. Our boys have lost something and don't know how to be men, so the solution has to involve finding people to tell them that they're men. Now, let's leave aside for a moment the fact that it doesn't make any sense to suddenly have a bunch of lost, clueless "men" initiate boys in to manhood, so I'm not entirely sure where they're going to go to get these rituals started. It's like asking directions from someone who's holding their map upside-down. There's a much larger problem inherent in the structure of both Bly's and Eldredge's system. The set-up of manhood in both systems is a teleological question. They say, "Men should be like this," then point out all of the ways that they aren't. Bly will say something like, "It is interesting that we find very few examples of close or chummy father-son relationships in mythological literature," in the process of explaining how myth tells us how men should be without stopping to evaluate the irony of such a statement. If there aren't too many examples, maybe our myths record an existential angst that has existed throughout time and Bly is simply cherry-picking to sell us an answer to a question he's also trying to sell us. It's not exactly without precedence, as we see Columbine, NIU, and Virginia Tech as points on a graph of failed malehood and end up with a flurry of punditry and books built around specious evidence. Every time boys or men do something spectacularly stupid we get sociologists and psychologists coming out of the woodwork to ask the question, "What's wrong with men?" and promise the answers for $15.95 at your local Barnes & Noble. To that I've got two things to say. First, we're asking the wrong question. I think a much better question, if we're going to phrase any question in a, "What's wrong with [insert people group here]?" format is, "What's wrong with us?" Now, for those who are wondering, when I say "us," I mean, "people in modern societies." It strikes me that it's really easy to look at Columbine, NIU, and Virginia Tech, plot them on a line and say, "Aha! There's something wrong with boys!" because when a guy does something insane, a guy tends to do it in a spectacular, violent, and outwardly focused way. We notice those things. We put them on the evening news. We invite kooks to come out with their charts and graphs to explain what, exactly, went wrong. I would posit that whatever problems the male gender is having, the female gender is having it, too. However, girls act out in ways that are more inwardly violent and less likely to get on the evening news. It's one of those things that's as basic as suicide rates. Men are more likely to be reported as suicides while women are more likely to be reported as attempted suicides. It's not because men are better at it, it's because men have a tendency to put a gun in their mouth and pull the trigger while women have a tendency to OD on pills. Things are more likely to go wrong in the latter scenario (erm, from the perspective that not ending up dead is a bad outcome). Since there is no female version of Columbine/NIU/Virginia Tech, we tend to not plot points on a graph and ask, "What's wrong with girls?" However, I would posit that the large number of girls with anorexia/bulimia constitute a point on that graph. I would posit that the woman who is trying to slip cyanide in to her husband's morning coffee constitutes a point on that graph. I would posit that the woman who drives her car in to a lake and gets out, leaving her three children trapped and drowning in the backseat constitutes a point on that graph. Second, the reason we don't ask the question, "What's wrong with girls?" is because of a double-standard. We're not supposed to believe that girls are capable of doing violence. We're not supposed to believe that girls are not capable of ruining society. More importantly, we're not supposed to see that violence against the self is violence in exactly the same way that violence against the other is. It doesn't matter that an anorexic girl isn't bursting in to a room behind a hail of semi-automatic gunfire. She's still perpetrating violence and the fact that her only victim is herself doesn't make it any better. Much like I don't give a crap about the origins of the supposed Father Wound, I really don't care who's at fault for this societal double-standard. Is it men for ignoring and enslaving women throughout history? Is it the feminists for creating this unassailable image of women as omnicapable go-getters who really do have the strength and power to have it all? Is it all the pollutants in the groundwater? Is it TV? Is it Cosmopolitan and Seventeen and YM? The fact is, it doesn't matter. However, the myriad possible targets of blame on the merry-go-round of pointless accusation actually does point to what I think is the simplest answer to the question of what is wrong with us. We weren't meant to live this way. Seriously. That's an overly melodramatic and teleological sounding response. It also sounds a hell of a lot like something Eldredge or Bly would say. So I guess I need to explain. I'm 27, single, childless, work forty hours a week and have a round trip commute that lasts between forty minutes and an hour, so I have roughly 123 hours of free time in any given week. If I need food I make a five minute drive to the Jewel or Trader Joe's and buy whatever I need. If my pants rip or my socks get holes in them I can go to Kohl's and buy new ones. If I want a book I stop by Borders on the way home. All things being equal, I can expect to spend about another five decades on this planet. And I don't know exactly where I am on the continuum of quality of life for people living in modern societies, but I do know that I'm far from unique. Meanwhile, the human body reaches its peak somewhere around thirty, then begins to break down. This is, I would guess, an evolutionary feature in a species that generally didn't live much past thirty. Societal advancements in hygiene, quality of life and medicine prolong our lives to largely absurd points. I have no idea why I would want to live to ninety if I spent the last five years suffering from dementia and the ten before that barely able to walk. Yet our capabilities as a society have evolved at a far greater pace than our biologies as individuals. I also know that there is no possible way that I would be living the life I do if I were born at any other point in human history. Hell, I've already exceeded the life expectancy of people from several points of history and probably just about all pre-history. But more than that, chances are good that I would already have been married for ten years by now if I lived in, say, Medieval Europe, assuming I wasn't on a second or third wife already after the previous one(s) died during childbirth. Assuming I wasn't out fighting in wars for the king or duke or baron to whomever I owed fealty, I'd probably be working in a field somewhere from sun up to sundown six days a week and returning home to a wife who had to spend the entire day making clothing for the entire family and preparing any and all food from scratch without the benefit of a counter top food processor or a self-cleaning convection oven. Chances are, too, that I and all my family would be illiterate. Most people didn't have the time for such frivolous pursuits as learning to read. And they sure as shit didn't have time to sit around and ask questions like, "Am I a real man?" and, "Why doesn't my dad ever say he loves me?" You want to hear from Father Wounds? Ancient Roman children had a tendency to get names that basically translate in to "One" and "Two" because nobody bothered to give the kids real names. It's not because they didn't care, it's because they were pragmatic enough to realize that ol' One and Two there probably wouldn't live to be four. This, too, is why traditional societies tend to have initiation rights in to adulthood that contain naming ceremonies. So when John Eldredge says something like, "[t]he history of a man's relationship with God is the story of how God calls him out, takes him on a journey, and gives him his true name," (103) as part of his overall concept of initiation is completely out of context. It's also why I've found it so necessary to set a baseline of history v. Eldredge's fantasy history and beat that difference like a dead horse. See, an Eldredge or a Bly looks at the rituals and myths of the past and sees something like a naming ritual and thinks, "Ah, these ancient people had a wonderful way of making sure boys knew they were men," like they were all sitting around in a planning meeting one day and said, "You know why we're starving to death, none of our children are surviving until puberty, and we're constantly harassed by the jackasses in the next tribe over? It's because our dads never said, 'I love you,' and told us when we were real men." No. Just...no. Ancient myths are origin stories. They're designed to allow illiterate societies to pass on the information that's important to that society by word of mouth. The stuff that's important to ancient societies was pattern recognition, superstition, and the qualities the individual should espouse to help the tribe survive. Rituals were created as a way of preserving and passing down those necessary bits of information and marking the passage of time. Don't get me wrong, I love myth. I think the stories we tell ourselves have great power. However, I think that Bly and Eldredge's approach to informing modern societies through ancient myths are about as useful as a pilot getting on the PA before a trip from San Francisco to Miami and informing everyone he's just made his ritual pre-flight sacrifice to the four winds and that his co-pilot has cast the bones and the portents show they'll make it just fine.

W@H: On Wounds

It's seven o'clock in the morning I'm riding the overnight train I got ten tons of luggage But I left it behind when I came I look at my watch Says September seventeenth We're riding far Someplace that I've never been And I'm waving through the window as we go Somebody says, "Well, hey, what are you waving at?" But what do I have to lose? Somebody might wave back --The Waterboys, "Somebody Might Wave Back We come now to the most baffling aspect of Wild at Heart. At least, it's the most baffling aspect now that I look at it with fresh eyes. If we take Eldredge's accounts of his time raising three rambunctious boys in the book at face value, one thing constantly comes through. He's a good father. Really, a damn good father. Obviously he'd be presenting himself in a light to bring that out, but at no point does he fall back on the convention of someone trying to prove something they don't believe to be true. He doesn't say, "Ha, I'm a good father." He tells stories of himself and his sons that are rich and varied and told with a tenderness that says, "This guy gets it." Someday if I have sons of my own I would hope to have half the adventures and experiences with them that Eldredge relates from his times with his sons. And yet, while Eldredge seems to be an excellent father, while he speaks of the importance of fathers in a boy's life, he seems to think that fatherhood is ultimately a failed venture. He appreciates the position, but doesn't have much good to say about fathers in general.

Every boy, in his journey to become a man, takes an arrow in the center of his heart, in the place of his strength. Because the wound is rarely discussed and even more rarely healed, every man carries a wound. And the wound is most often given by his father. --John Eldredge, Wild at Heart (60)

As is customary in the book, Eldredge then follows this with lessons drawn out of context from the Bible and anecdotes about men he knows who suffer from various father-related problems. He then gets to the crux of the problem as he sees it.

Every man carries a wound. I have never met a man without one. No matter how good your life may have seemed to you, you live in a broken world full of broken people. Your mother and father, no matter how wonderful, couldn't have been perfect...And every wound, no matter whether it's assaultive [sic?] or passive, delivers with it a message. The message feels final and true, absolutely true, because it is delivered with such force. Our reaction to it shapes our personality in very significant ways. From that flows the false self. Most of the men you meet are living out a false self, a pose, which is directly related to this wound. --John Eldredge, Wild at Heart (72), emphasis his

He then goes on to explain how he got his own wound from an absent father and that it caused him to become a heartless, driven man aiming for success at all costs. It is impossible to properly understand Wild at Heart without understanding the sophistry at the core of this explanation of the nature of the Father Wound. It's also helpful to see how he begs the question in order to understand the power of the argument to people who buy in to the core set of claims. This is the basic progression: Man falls > man has child > man wounds child > child becomes man > start over. This, meanwhile, is one of those things that's hard to argue against. It's not because he's right, but it's because everything he says uses words that are correct but out of context. Most everyone would agree that their parents weren't perfect. Most, further, would agree that even the best parents make mistakes. Finally, I doubt anyone would disagree that the way parents raise (or don't raise) their children has an effect on how those children age and, in turn, raise their own children. We tend to, for better or worse, become our parents. (As an aside, this would be a good time to plug Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed. I'm still not entirely sure what it's about and I haven't gotten too far in to it yet, but the book basically starts with the death of the main character's most formative influence and he spends a lot of time reflecting on the various people who raised him and how they made him what he is and which things he'd rather not have become.) There's a causal breakdown in Eldredge's formulation, however. I've already gone over the three inherent problems of the Christian self-help genre and that's a good start for the evaluation, but we need to go a step further. Fortunately, in the process of disparaging his earthly father, Eldredge tells us exactly where to look.

Even after God's dramatic rescue of me at the age of ninteen, when I became a Christian, the wound remained. --John Eldredge, Wild at Heart (72)

This sentence can be broken in to three distinct parts, helpfully delimited by commas. If you're having a problem parsing this sentence, might I suggest you look in to those splits? The second part simply does not follow from the first, unless Eldredge happens to have slipped overboard in a storm, been drowning in an angry sea, and it was god's day as the ready five helicopter pilot for the nearest Coast Guard facility. Once again we hit that snag that's all too common in Wild at Heart. The Christian walk is given this air of danger and adventure that I -- as a participant of roughly two decades -- can say it doesn't really deserve. But Eldredge, you see, was grievously wounded by his father, only to be dramatically rescued by his Heavenly Father and set on the proper path towards Biblical adventure and excitement. He brings poor, abused Robert Bly in to support his statement, too. However, this is one of the places where Eldredge borrows from Bly and they are basically in agreement of effect and cause if not interpretation. I'll have to leave the Bly/Freud/myth and Eldredge/Bible comparisons for the next entry, however, as it deserves a greater deal of reflection than I'm willing to give right now and it represents the strongest point of disagreement I have with both writers. Instead, we need to set a baseline on the nature of wounds in the real world before we can really approach Eldredge or Bly. There's an episode of The Simpsons where we find out why Ned Flanders bottles up all of his anger. His parents, you see, were beatniks who weren't in to discipline and he was a little terror ("You've gotta help us, doc. We've tried nothin' and we're all out of ideas!"). So a psychologist spanked him for a year straight and Flanders began bottling up everything he felt and only letting it out as a string of gibberish until the point where he snapped and told off all of Springfield. He then checked himself in to therapy and finally said he blamed his parents ("Lousy beatniks."), at which time he was declared healed. To the people out there who have seen that episode, I'll bet you didn't know you were acutally seeing that it was a deep theological discussion of the Christian masculinity movement. Mostly because it wasn't. It is, however, perfectly illustrative of Eldredge's theology of Christian masculinity. Now, it seems to me that any time you can use something that's basically straight-up satire to offer a serious illustration of your own views, you're doing something wrong. I mean, this isn't quite the same thing as reading Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and saying, "Finally, somebody gets it!" while tying on a bib, but the principle holds. It's quick, cheap, and convenient to say, "I'm this way, it's my parents' fault. Screw 'em." Moreover, figuring out who to blame in a situation like this isn't really all that helpful. Eldredge makes several assumptions that he has no business making. First, he assumes that there is one perfect place where we can be wounded. Second, he assumes that there is always a wound delivered to that place. Third, he assumes that the wound can be dealt effectively exactly once and there is then no need for follow-up. This is a causality issue. It also offers a teleological explanation (read the annotation, at least the first part where David Morgan-Mar explains how science as we know it starts from questioning basic assumptions about the universe) of the human psyche. This, again, makes perfect sense in the question begging cycle of a divine plan and all men being at the center of their particular universe. But for people who need real help and real solutions to problems, it's dangerously pedantic. I met a girl not so long ago (and all of my regulars groan. Not another navel-gazing Geds story 'bout a girl). It was a few months after the end of another relationship. It was the first time I'd genuinely met someone I liked since the end of said previous relationship. But after the initial rush of introductions gave way to having to make conversation, I decided she was uninteresting and resolved to go find someone else who would remain interesting. I chalked her up as a Golden-Haired Woman and assumed it would be left at that. Then one day I was talking to her for the first time in a long while and realized, "Holy shit, she's really cool." Being me, I asked the simple question, "What changed?" This led to a powerful revelation. I have a fundamentally flawed approach to women and the whole, um, guy-girl thing. In broad strokes, it works like this: I meet someone new. I instantly become self-conscious and worried that I'm being too creepy and too forward and try to catch every possible nuance of spoken and body language in order to determine if she's interested or not. So whenever I'm talking to the person in question I'm tight. I'm not having any fun, I'm not getting anywhere and in the end I decide that she's not as interesting as I'd hoped, so I should go find someone else. There's also the crazy girls corollary. One of the things I've wondered is how I manage to end up with so many crazy girls. I've realized that, at least as it applies to me, crazy = needy. You don't have to worry with a needy person, they're going to basically put me at ease right off the bat because they're going to be the ones trying desperately to make and keep the connection. So I end up on that part of the spectrum basically because it's easier, all the while wondering why the hell nothing works out. So you take a perfectly cool, not needy girl who might actually be interested in me. Chances are she's going to think, "What the hell was I thinking?" shortly after any conversation begins. Then I'm going to pull my disappearing act while blaming her for it. And at no point is happiness achieved for anyone involved. This is a problem. Do I know when or where it started? No. Moreover, I really, really don't care. I mean, I've traced the problem back to the earliest point I can discern and I found that deeply helpful, but as an exercise in pattern recognition, not blame-laying. Besides, what good would it do to discover that the roots of my inability to actually start a satisfying, stable, long-term relationship came when I was eight years old and my dad didn't take me out for ice cream? And, really, that might as well be what the problem came from. We can blame our parents for any number of things. Hereditary diseases, for instance. But there's also the patterns like children of alcoholics becoming alcoholics (or raging teetotalers) or children of abuse becoming abusers. But for the majority of people, there's nothing horrible that their parents did to them and to pretend otherwise is to imagine that the altar-call response at that tent revival when you were nineteen was a "dramatic rescue" from god. It's a fantasy. And it's a dangerous, unhealthy fantasy at that. No one gets anywhere focusing on origin and blame-laying. We can't find happiness putting on sackcloth and sitting in the ashes of the mistakes of the past. Not only that, but we risk carrying that blame forward and placing it where it doesn't belong. Say I had asked that girl out. Say she had said yes and one date turned in to two, then a relationship. There's a good chance I would have dropped all of my baggage from past relationships or missed chances on her. She doesn't deserve that. The only way I know to get rid of that problem is to lose the baggage. If you're leaving something behind it doesn't really matter where it came from in the first place.

W@H: The Passing of the Armies

Walked around my good intentions And found that there were none I blamed my father for the wasted years We hardly talked Never thought I would forget this hate Then a phone call made me realize I'm wrong --Our Lady Peace, "4 A.M." We move out of the Garden -- the world where silly little women tread -- and in to the Wilderness, the world of real men. Please, provide your own soundtrack. I'd suggest the theme song from Two and a Half Men. Failing that, go with the "Men in Tights" song from Robin Hood: Men in Tights I introduced this entire project with the Father Wound. For that matter, I introduced the Father Wound before I knew I was going to do anything beyond it. There's a lot of talk of absent fathers these days. There are more single mothers and absent fathers than ever before. There are more sons growing up without a male influence in their lives. There are more men leaving the house before the sun rises to sit in an office and come back long after the sun sets, then going and sitting in front of the television and ignoring their children. This is ruining the male gender faster than anything in history, leaving boys with questions they never have answered and wounded deep down in their souls. Things were better back in the olden days when men were allowed to be men and knew how to raise their sons to be men, too. Things were better before the race of men failed in their sacred duty. We're a society of wusses now, boys who stay boys even when trapped in the bodies of men. Eldredge says this. Bly says this. The nightly news says this. It makes complete sense. It is, of course, utter and complete bullshit. Men throughout history have had a bad habit of not being in the home. During the days when the only way crops could be grown or buildings raised was with back breaking labor men were gone from before the sun rose until after the sun set. They also had this horrible habit of being conscripted in to armies at the behest of some royal with a bone to pick with some other royal. They'd be gone for months or years at a time, assuming they ever returned at all. The American Civil War was one of the worst examples of warfare in the history of the human race. I've been studying the Civil War since I was in the third or fourth grade and it's why I stand before you today as a pretend internet historian with a real degree and a real membership in the Phi Alpha Theta National History Honors Society. I know the Civil War. One of the most interesting things about the Civil War is the issue of the reputation of its two greatest generals: Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was a colorful figure in American history. He was part of a West Point class that sent some of the most brilliant military minds in history to Mexico as Captains and Majors, then split between North and South and lead the next generation of American boys to their deaths by the thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands. We remember Grant as a victorious general and a failure of a President, but we don't remember that Grant was a failure at basically everything. He barely made it to the Civil War, you see. He was mustered out of the Army after the war with Mexico and tried his hand at farming. He married in to a family that had pretensions of gentility and tried to start his own farm. Gentlemen farmers throughout history have named their farms. Remember Tara, the plantation from Gone with the Wind? That was the name of the ancient home of the Irish high kings. We remember Jefferson's Monticello and Washington's Mount Vernon, farms that call forward a sense of place, of power, of substance. Grant called his farm Hardscrabble. The war, to him, was a relief. He'd failed as a farmer and as a shopkeeper. He almost didn't make it in to the volunteer Army due to his reputation for alcoholism and less than spit and polish style. But he pulled in some favors and got a command. He then took Forts Henry and Donelson, marched down the Mississippi, fought at Shiloh in the then most bloody day of the war. As Grant fought and won in the west, a series of generals in the far more visible east did nothing for the Union cause. George McClellan mostly sat on the banks of the Potomac and drilled his army, listening to reports from the Pinkertons that the Confederates had massed impossibly huge armies in Virginia. When McClellan finally moved to launch the disasterous Penninsula Campaign, he was driven back by the newly installed commander of the Army of Northern Virginia: Robert E. Lee, widely regarded as one of the finest commanders in military history. After that a succession of Union generals failed to take the fight to Lee. Finally, July of 1863 began with the four most auspicious days for the Union in the war. July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd marked the battle of Gettysburg. On July 4th Vicksburg surrendered to Grant's forces. When George Meade, the Union commander at Gettysburg, failed to pursue Lee for several days, allowing his battered army to slip back in to Virginia, Lincoln put Grant in charge of the entire Union Army over the protestations of, well, everyone pretty much. "I cannot spare this man," Lincoln famously said of Grant, "He fights." And fight Grant did. He took the Army of the Potomac south, engaged Lee and stuck with the fight. The cost to the Union from then on was horrific and to a war-weary populace accustomed to fairly placid reports from a front commanded by timid generals, Grant was widely regarded as a butcher. His opponent, meanwhile, is seen as a proper gentleman, beloved by his troops. Lee, in fact, came out of the Civil War with a reputation second only to Abraham Lincoln himself, no mean feat considering that he fought for the losing side. Lee's reputation as a gentleman and Grant's reputation as a slovenly butcher obscure one of the most interesting facts of the war: in terms of percentage, more of men died under Lee's command than Grant's. And all of this, surprisingly enough, brings us back to Wild at Heart.

I'm struck by the poignancy of the scene at the end of the Civil War, just after Appomattox, where General Robert E. Lee has just surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant. For five years Lee has lead the Army of Northern Virginia through some of the most terrible trials men have ever known. You would think they'd be glad to have it over. But Lee's men hang upon the reins of his horse and beg him not to go, plead for one more chance to "whip those Yankees." Lee had become their father, had given those men what most of them had never had before -- an identity and a place in a larger story. --John Eldredge, Wild at Heart (102)

Leave aside for the moment that the Civil War lasted four years and a month. Leave aside the fact that Lee was commanding a desk in Richmond for most of that first year. This scene never happened. It does not appear in James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. It does not appear in Bruce Catton's This Hallowed Ground. Most damning, it does not appear in The Passing of the Armies, the personal memoir of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the Union Major General put in charge of accepting the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. In fact, I'll let Chamberlain speak for himself about that day, watching the battle standards of an army he had fought for three years.

Ah, is this Pickett's Division?--this little group left of those who on the lurid last day of Gettysburg breasted level cross-fire and thunderbolts of storm, to be strewn back drifting wrecks, where after that awful, futile, pitiful charge we buried them in graves a furlong wide, with names unknown! Met again in the terrible cyclone-sweep over the breastworks at Five Forks; met again now, so thin, so pale, purged of the mortal,--as if knowing pain or joy no more. How could we help falling on our knees, all of us together, and praying God to pity and forgive us all! --Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, The Passing of the Armies

It surprises me that this never occurred to me until now, but the only place I've heard that anecdote is in Wild at Heart. Chamberlain, far from an angry, defiant, unbroken force, paints a portrait of an army that is no longer capable of putting up a fight. Gordon, the general at its head, marched with his head down until the Union troops paid the respect due an honored, fallen foe. One soldier, according to Bruce Catton, turned in his rifle and said he'd been trying to get rid of it for two years. If Robert E. Lee at Appomattox is Eldredge's example of what a good father should be, we should all be afraid of the generation of men he wants to raise. Lee gave the Army of Northern Virginia a story, all right. Sadly, most of the men in the story didn't get to hear the end. Now, in the interests of providing what charity is available, I suppose it's possible that he's channeling the scene before Pickett's Charge from the movie Gettysburg. In that scene, which may or may not be a flight of cinematic fancy (I find the movie Gettysburg fascinating. On one level it is highly historically accurate but on another it ties itself to the worst of film making conventions. For instance, after Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain led the 20th Maine in to history with its charge down Little Round Top his regiment spent the final day of the battle atop Big Round Top. In the movie he's given orders to move to the center of the Union line and arrives just in time for us to see a series of shots of Jeff Daniels hiding from the Confederate bombardment behind a wagon. Given that we've already been presented with a movie of epic scale and the emotional onus of the moment has shifted from the tiny 20th Maine's heroic and successful charge to Longstreet's massed infantry preparing for a futile assault and that we've been presented with Lewis Armistead's tragic charge against a wall held by men under the command of his dear friend Winfield Scott Hancock as the personal touch point to the whole affair, we don't need Jeff Daniels' face anywhere in that scene. But I digress), the Confederate soldiers who are about to die convince Lee to let them charge up the hill and take Cemetery Ridge. Given that no one knew what Pickett's Charge would become in the annals of history, that Lee ordered the assault as part of a larger move, and that it was not Lee but Longstreet who was reluctant to issue the orders, that scene is not completely believable. Still, it's more believable than Eldredge's scene at Appomattox. There's something disturbing about the irresponsibility Eldredge consistently displays in his attempts to portray an authentic manhood. He constantly goes to movies like Braveheart and Gladiator to make his point without acknowledging the simple fact that the events in Gladiator never happened and that Mel Gibson's depiction of William Wallace wasn't completely historical in nature. John Eldrege peddles the image of true manhood through a Hollywood filter without any apparent self-awareness of the consequences of his actions. In the movies the "good guys" wear white hats, the "bad guys" wear black hats, the hero triumphs and gets the girl in the end, and the day is always saved. When that doesn't happen the hero is depicted as nobly sacrificing himself for the higher good. Really, one of the places where Gettysburg gets it well and truly right is with the death of Lewis Armistead. He was ably portrayed by Richard Jordan (who died shortly thereafter of an inoperable brain tumor, making his final appearance on screen a portrayal of the tragic death of his character, and we can be assured that Jordan knew it) as a man conflicted, called by duty and horrified by the fact that his friends were dying and that the next one who fell might be at his own hand. In the end, Armistead marches to his death at the head of his men in to the guns commanded by his dear friend. There's a nobility in it, but there's a futility, too. Armistead is no William Wallace, whose death ultimately lead to something greater for his cause. He's no (fabricated) Maximus, getting his revenge in the arena against the vile and cowardly Commodus (who, was nothing in real life like he was in Gladiator). Armistead was a man who did what he felt he had to in spite of his misgivings and doubts and died at the center of what has passed in to history as one of the greatest examples of military futility. Meanwhile, for those three years under Robert E. Lee's leadership the gentlemen and scoundrels who made up the Army of Northern Virginia were apparently becoming Real Men, raised by a Real Father, those gallant men of his army were away from home. In Eldredge's own system they were providing irreparable wounds to their sons. The ones that did return home were probably broken and haunted. Some of them would undoubtedly go on to fill the early ranks of the Ku Klux Klan, or spend the post Reconstruction years running for public office in their Confederate gray uniforms. So what, really, can be said of the legacy of Robert E. Lee if we allow Eldredge to speak for him? I cannot blame Robert E. Lee for the behavior of his men after the Civil War. However, we cannot credit him for being a great father-figure either. And we should worry about anyone who paints carnage and death as a somehow heroic and fitting result of men being what men are supposed to be. We should be worried about anyone who claims that a great father is one who is willing to send his sons to their death. It only works if we take a Hollywood depiction of the world, divorced from context and consequence and modified so the actors with the most star power are put center-stage so the camera can focus on them instead of the thousands of milling extras. And we have to remember: in Eldredge's world, every man is the star actor whose face the camera loves.

W@H: Appendix B

Molly Worthen asks the question Who Would Jesus Smack Down? in the New York Times. It's an article about Mark Driscoll, a macho Neo-Calvinist who basically combines the worst of Wild at Heart with the worst of Calvinism. And Christians are eating it up. Beyond the fact that I graduated from high school with Molly, and it's always cool to see a familiar name in the paper of record, it's a fascinating article. Some of the people I least want to have anything to do with from my old fundagelical days are the self-same people who are passing Driscoll's videos around on Facebook. The article also has a special guest appearance by Brett and Alex Harris, who I talked smack about over a year ago. Anyway, for those who are wondering, Calvinism represented one of my first breaks with the evangelical culture I grew up in. I spent a lot of time hearing about how America was supposed to be a "Christian nation" and how we were supposed to fervently desire that divine transformation. But as much as I was a Christian, I was fledgling historian. I knew of John Calvin's Geneva. I knew of Oliver Cromwell's England. I knew of the real story of why the Pilgrims traveled to the New World. I knew that cultures under religious domination are less, not more free. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about radical Islam or radical Christianity, a theocracy restricts freedom and the only people who thrive are the ones on top or the ones who find restricted freedom a good thing. I gradually began to side with the Enlightenment, which according to the descendants of Calvin is the root of all modern evil. My historian ways gave me the words and the platform to speak against the ideas I kept hearing of the great godly America. "I don't know about that," my replies would go, "I wouldn't have wanted to live in Calvin's Geneva." And people listened, even if it was simply to take it as a cautionary tale of theocracy gone too far. Moreover, Calvinism takes a glitch in the religious story and turns it in to a feature. The question that has best been able to stop theologians in their tracks is that of theodicy: namely if there is an omnipotent, omnipresent, omni[insert third part of the O-O-O trilogy here] god who cares and is good, how is there evil and suffering in the world. Theologians best respond with the free will answer, namely we bring it on ourselves. Calvinists negate the free will answer by saying god preordains everything. Therefore, both good and evil come from god. Happiness and suffering come from god. And god chooses who to save, thereby also choosing who to damn. The Calvinist god created humans only to direct their lives minute by minute and then send the majority to Hell because they displeased him. And we're supposed to say this is good and want to go to Driscoll's church and watch his YouTube videos. Anyway, read the article. It's good. And Molly makes some of the points I made above but with a different focus. I think, too, that the reason I'm attaching this to the Wild at Heart project will be readily apparent. And when you're done, please join me in the lobby for in a hearty chorus of, "Fuck you, Mark Driscoll." There will be coffee and cake afterwards.

W@H: Idlewild, Part 2

I entered the sanctuary I heard a voice of a girl Sending out a circle of light Clear across the world I shuddered in the power Like a ceiling in a storm I've been looking for this place Since the moment I was born I flew back to New York City Singin' the big city blues With the sand of Findhorn Bay Still clinigin' to my shoes I tried to restart my life But the life I knew was gone I had to let go everything But that's another song --The Waterboys, "Long Way to the Light" We enter, once again, the Garden, armed with nothing but our wits, The Waterboys, and milk and cookies. Well, I have milk and cookies. I don't know what anybody else is eating or drinking. Before I went off on several tangents last time, I briefly explained Eldredge's assertion that Adam didn't belong in the Garden. This requires an extremely skewed reading of mythological construct. It also, I've come to realize, requires an extremely skewed reading of the book of Genesis. I'll let Bly start out in the explanation of the first problem. What I want to look in to breaks in to two parts.

We could say that in the walled garden, as in the alchemical vessel, new materials get formed as the old ones melt. The lead of depression melts and becomes grief. The drive for success, an insistent tin, melts with Aphrodite's copper and makes bronze, which is good to make both shields and images of the gods. The enclosed garden then suggests cultivation instead of rawness, boundaries as opposed to unbounded sociability, soul concerns as opposed to outer obsessions, passion as opposed to raw sexuality, growth of soul desire as opposed to generalized greed for things. --Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men (130)

So in the first the Garden is the place we seek to seal ourselves off from sorrows. It is the place we go to find healing.

In the garden the soul and nature marry. When we love cultivation more than excitement, we are ready to start a garden. In the garden we cultivate yearning and longing--those strangely un-American feelings--and notice tiny desires. Paying attention to tiny, hardly noticeable feelings is the garden way. That's the way lovers behave. --Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men (132)

The Garden is a place of rest, but it's also the place we go when we're ready for the joys it offers. That is, in fact, what the Garden of Eden is supposed to be. In the book of Genesis's second creation account, Yahweh makes Adam. Yahweh then places Adam in the Garden and after that creates Eve. This, with slight modification, is simply a repeat of any number of mythological constructs that pop up all over the place. The hero finds the Garden. In the Garden the hero meets the Goddess, in this place played by Eve. The hero and the goddess recline for a time until it becomes necessary to make the return journey, carrying with him the knowledge he'd gained. So Adam left the Garden cultivated by Yahweh, carrying with him both the knowledge of Good and Evil, but the knowledge of how to cultivate and bring fruit from the Earth. In this Adam takes on the role of Prometheus. What Eldredge misses in his own version of the Eden myth is that Adam and his descendents have spent millennia trying to re-find or re-create the Garden. If Genesis is truly the "record of our beginnings" and if Adam truly does not belong or want to be in the Garden, why do Gardens pop up everywhere? Why is there such a longing for Paradise? I would posit that in his attempt to take Adam out of the Garden and leave him there, Eldredge is creating a terrible image of manhood. Outside the Garden is a solitary existence. It is, as Bly has pointed out, the place of sorrows and a place bereft of self-reflection. The work to cultivate the ground takes up all of the available time and there can be no time to focus on growth and precious little time to focus on another. It's probably why Eldredge's system requires the man to pull away from the woman. He sees the Garden as unnecessary, the help-mate created by Yahweh as an accessory that takes away from the real journey. The Japanese samurai culture fascinates me. Japan, in general, is (or at least was) enamored with the idea of the garden. The samurai were the knights of their world and the samurai code was equivalent, in its own way, to the medieval codes of chivalry. One of the aspects of the samurai code, however, was the idea that samurai engaged in the cultivation of gardens and the writing of poetry. The ones who did not were generally looked down upon. It's been a long time since I really looked in to it, but it would seem that the Japanese culture of the samurai had an intrinsic understanding that the Garden was a place to be desired. The warrior leaves the Garden to fight, but then returns to cultivate beauty and write poetry. The warrior, in short, belongs in the Garden just as much as he belongs on the field of blood. But what of the Goddess, or her reflection, the Golden-Haired Woman? Why is she so often in the Garden? I find Bly's introduction to the Garden and the Goddess fascinating. He tells a story from John Cheever's "The Chaste Clarissa." I'll be paraphrasing. It tells of a boy who works in a castle's garden. One day while he's working, the boy takes his hat off. The sun falls on his golden hair, which reflects against the wall in the king's daughter's room. She calls to him and asks him to bring her flowers. He takes her wild flowers, over the protestations of the gardener. When he arrives the king's daughter gives him gold coins for the flowers and yanks his hat off to see his hair. He turns and runs away, then gives the coins to the gardener's children. The next day he is again called to the king's daughter's chamber with flowers and this time holds on to his hat. The coins again go to the gardener's children. This happens, as is customary in myth and fairy tale, a third time. I get ever-so-slightly ahead of Bly here, though. I'm also quite far behind. He offers the origins of the golden hair a long way before he gets to the Garden. The boy in Cheever's story has touched the deepest parts of the soul. The king's daughter, in wanting to see and touch the boy's golden hair, wants to touch the deepest parts of the soul. So what of the Golden-Haired Woman? She, too, is a reflection of something greater. Bly tells of an old story passed down to us through the Celtic myth The Mabinogoin. It tells of Culhwch, a hero whose mother birthed him in the pen of a swineherd, and his quest to marry Olwen, who's name means "Path the Moon Takes on Water" (erm, according to Bly. I did a little research and got that it means "white footprint," but that was that particular author's own combination of the roots "white" and "track." I am, therefore, willing to take Bly's interpretation). Beyond the archetypes, Bly says very little, so I will take over the telling. Culhwch's mother is the earthly feminism of the birth mother. She is Demeter, the corn goddess who is responsible for the crops and the livestock. Olwen is the Golden-Haired Woman, the moon reflecting the sun and tracking its way across the water. The hero can stand at the shore and watch the moon make its way across the water. He can even jump in and attempt to grasp it, but he never will. Eventually the track of the moon either disappears off in the distance or makes its way to the shore and disappears. If it is the latter, it becomes the earth mother. One is the infinite longing, the other is the capture of the Golden-Haired Woman only to discover that she is not the moon, but the earth. They say that men have a tendency to marry women who remind them of their mothers. Perhaps it's the other way around and men marry women, then they become mothers. What, then, does Cheever's story tell us of the Golden-Haired Beloved? What does the story of Culhwch and Olwen tell us? There is something in the golden, the numinous, that we always chase after, bid come near, but can never make in to our own. It has nothing to do with hair color, but everything to do with the ethereal reflecting off of a person. We cannot look directly in to the sun, but we can look to the moon -- or to the head of the boy in the Garden -- and see the glow of the sun reflected in that. It's almost what Eldredge says, but not quite. Eldredge would have men abandon all and, like Icarus, seek the sun. We're better off seeking to understand that what we seek is a reflection of something we can't quite see, can't quite understand. And, for the men who have been taught that the adventure and the battle is the only goal, we're better off learning of the value of the Garden It's not to be abhorred. It's to be sought. And we don't have to wait for the next life to find it.

W@H: Appendix A

Allow myself to quote…myself…

It's still not something I talk about so much as I talk around: I spent about six months teetering on the verge of insanity because I knew one thing to be true but believed that god had told me another thing was true. I don't blame this on religion or myself, particularly. I honestly believe that if I had grown up as, say, a liberal Presbyterian I would still be religious. The Christian environment in which I found myself, however, was toxic and filled with ideas about human nature, inter-human interaction and, frankly, god itsownself, that are insane and illogical. The thing is, it's like a disease that directly attacks the immune system. Once you're exposed to it you're permanently weakened to its influence.

I feel like I just threw this out in my last post and didn’t bother to adequately explain it. In order to understand this and, really, certain parts of Wild at Heart and this bizarre little subset of Christianity as a whole, the idea of god speaking needs to be explained. On the far extreme end you have the charismatics. They’re a fairly rowdy bunch who believe in speaking in tongues and prophecy and slayings in the spirit and any number of wacky things. As with everything, there’s a spectrum. The Assemblies of God are the main charismatic denomination and they have rules and regulations in place that are somewhat helpful in eliminating the excesses of an entire congregation made up of people that could, at any moment, up and start giving a prophecy that’s “straight from god” and, therefore, way more important than whatever anyone else is doing. Then there’s the Vineyard churches, which are pretty much unregulated and, from what I can understand, tend more towards an anything goes style. Beyond that you’ve got your snake handlers and other such bizarre religious oddities. Much hay was made during the last election about Sarah Palin and her assertion that she didn’t blink when offered the Veep post. People continually expressed surprise that someone would not stop to think, “Gee, is this something I can or should do?” It never once surprised me, since Palin was a charismatic and a true believer. Charismatics, as a whole, are not prone to a great deal of self-reflection, especially if the “will of god” imposes itself on their life. The people I know who are prone to self-reflection and tried being charismatic didn’t last long. (Also, please, don’t get me started on Roland Burris’s assertion that god told Blagojevich what to do. I have no language.) There is a lot of bleed through from the charismatics to the more mainstream fundamentalist/evangelical strains of Christianity, even if the latter doesn’t want to admit it. The speaking in tongues/prophecy/snake handling parts may not be present, but the idea that god is able and willing to speak to each and every believer personally most definitely is. There’s your basic signs and portents from god idea. This is simple human cognition and pattern recognition wherein we’re thinking about Subject A and Thing B shows up randomly. Thing B has something in common with Subject A, so we think, “Hey, that’s a sign that I should take Action C in response to Subject A.” It’s a basic human conceit and not that big of a deal. However, if you start taking those random occurrences as deliberate, patterned messages from god, sent specifically to give you insight in to the deeper mysteries of life, bad things will happen. It’s also the sort of thing that creates a deeply self-centered attitude about the universe. Say you walk outside and see a delivery truck completely destroy a Honda Civic that just ran a red light. Chances are somebody got seriously hurt or even killed. Now, as a simple human response you might decide to be more careful when approaching intersections for a while. However, say that you’ve just been contemplating purchasing a new car and you couldn’t decide between a Honda Civic and a Chevy Cobalt. You see the accident and your response is, “Thank you, god. I’m not going to buy the Civic.” Now, this is a deliberately exaggerated example, but the truth is that I couldn’t begin to tell you how many times I heard someone decide that something absolutely horrible was a personal message from god. I’ve made a lot of references to the selfishness of the variety of Christianity I came from in the past. Everything boils down to a simple fact: belief that there is a personal relationship between the individual and god and that god is creating certain aspects of the world for that individual’s own good devalues every other human being. I’ve already explored how the man/god dichotomy devalues the woman, but it goes much beyond that. The signs and portents, though, are only the second best way for “god” to speak. I couldn’t begin to tell you when I first ran across this. I’m guessing junior high. I only have my own experience to speak from, but I’ve run in to people from many places who believe in it. Jim Cymbala, the pastor of the Brooklyn Tabernacle, has written several books about the amazing things that happen as a result. It also comes up at several points during Wild at Heart, so it’s best to get this out of the way now. I am talking about god speaking. For those who don’t know, god will speak to people who know how to properly get the old bugger to do it. In my own personal experience it starts at a retreat or worship service of some sort. After you’ve gotten in some singing and some preaching and some praying and everyone has been bathed in the spirit, the pastor or worship leader or guest speaker or someone has everyone pray. Over the course of the prayer the leader instructs everyone to ask god to speak to them, then be very quiet. When god speaks it’s a little voice in the back of the head (total side note: I’m writing this on Microsoft Word. When I use the grammatically correct “it’s” in this sentence it gives me the little green squiggly and tells me to change to “its,” even though I’m not sure what’s being possessed in that case. As soon as I do, though, it puts the little green squiggle under the whole sentence and calls it a fragment, since removing the apostrophe takes away the “is” and there is no verb. This is why it’s not a good idea to trust Microsoft’s auto correct function too much). If I had to localize it, I’d put it right where the spine and the brain join up. If you’ve done it right, and get real quiet and spirity, that voice will show up and tell you stuff. It’s usually some innocuous message of love or acceptance. Sometimes it’s the name of a person you’re supposed to evangelize. In more extreme cases it might be something about what college to go to, or an admonition to stop some sin or another or a message about a career path. I would assume it even can go so far as to tell you to lead the French against an encroaching British army. If you think this sounds insane, um, it is. However, it seems perfectly normal in context and when you’re high on the god juice and being lead through it by someone you respect and trust as a higher authority on such things, it’s an amazing experience. Afterwards, too, people will generally get together and share the message they received from god and have a good cry or a good pray together and mutually reinforce their faith in this form of spellcasting. If you’ve done it enough and are a good enough Christian (for whatever value of good Christian you’re going for. It usually means you’re doing devotions and not having sex with someone you aren’t married to and feel really, really bad whenever you cuss or beat off and promise to never do it again. No, really. Evangelical Christianity is stupid), you can play the home edition of the god speaking game. This is where I got myself in trouble. A lot of trouble, really. Not to go in to any more detail than is absolutely necessary, I hit a point where the idea of god speaking to me was fairly normal. I’m amazed that it happened on some level, since a lot of this rests on a lack of understanding about human cognitive function and language centers. I’ve taken enough psychology over the years and had enough common sense to understand that your brain generates random crap all the time. I’ve got an ongoing thing with one of my friends where we’ll text each other our completely random questions of the day. Like, the last one he sent me was, “Why is it that your old man is your father, but your old lady is your wife?” Dumb, pointless, and hilarious. Now, then, imagine that you’ve got yourself worked in to some religious fervor. You then quiet your mind, pray and ask god to speak to you. Lo and behold, god speaks. Chances are it will start out with something to the effect of, “I love you,” then move on to instructions and helpful advice. If you do this for, say, ten years, you’ll eventually get to the point where this, combined with a priori belief and the human tendency towards pattern creation, leads to wackier and wackier messages from god. And this is an accepted thing. One of the quotes I used to run across fairly often went, “Why is it that when you talk to god its called prayer, but when god talks to you it’s called insanity?” The short answer: because it is. But that question is a neat little way to reject the Occam’s Razor approach to this bizarre idea. Anyway, I was long since comfortable with being spoken to by god. One day god told me something. It was the sort of thing that I wanted to be true, but wasn’t. This, for a normal human being in a normal state of affairs, is the place where logic kicks in. For the person under the influence of Evangelical Christian spellcasting, it’s a sign that you’re about to go do something incredibly stupid and probably end up in a nut house. This is where the sorts of people who aren’t particularly self-reflective end up looking totally crazy and the sorts of people who are end up driving themselves nuts. I’m in the latter category. For the next several months I knew something was not true, but kept being told by god that it was. This creates the next big problem, because I’m now supposed to have the faith to say, “I don’t see it, but I trust you, god.” So the fact that it wasn’t happening was, basically, my own damn fault because I wasn’t willing to go to the necessary lengths to carry out my faith. As I recall, that’s basically the premise behind Catch-22. If you’re crazy enough to notice it, you’re not crazy. My faith and my psyche basically went to war with each other. I eventually hit the point where I knew either my brain or my faith would be shattered by the experience. Eventually the problem went away and I began trying to figure out what god could have actually been trying to teach me by that experience (no, seriously) and re-building my faith. Or, at least, spackling over the holes and putting on a fresh coat of paint. Nine months later the same damn thing happened. I had started working with my church’s junior high youth group and was helping lead a retreat. God spoke and said something I knew not to be true. Later on the guest speaker lead the group on exactly the sort of worship service culminating on a god speaking event and god told me the same thing. I was devastated. I spoke to the pastor, who I’d only recently met but was a good guy, and told him as much as I dared about my previous experience and basically begged him to tell me that the thing I’d just experienced wasn’t true. He didn’t. He couldn’t. I don’t hold it against him, since he didn’t understand and I wasn’t able or willing to give him the full story. I like to imagine that if the me who’s writing this was in that room that night I would have stood up and said, “No. You can’t do this. Do you have any idea the potential damage you’re doing with this load of horse shit?” Since I walked away from religion I’ve been asked how I feel about the knowledge that I’m possibly damaging the faith of the junior highers once worked with. I never give the honest answer. I feel far, far worse about the possibility that I helped the kids I worked with choose a path that leads to limitation and possible insanity. I feel far worse about the fact that I didn’t have the strength of character to stand up that night and say, “Stop this.” I tell myself that it doesn’t matter, that it wouldn’t have changed anything. But even the knowledge that I’m probably right doesn’t absolve me of my sins. I stuck around until the end of the school year but basically went through the motions. I don’t remember when I stopped going to my old church, but I do know that I held on to that longer than I should have because what happened that night I re-dipped my toe in to the well of insanity was that I told myself what I wanted to hear, but put it in god’s voice. The truth is, just as we don’t need the Devil to tell us to do evil, we don’t need god to tell us the future. We call it prophecy, but what it really is in the end is wishful thinking. When it comes true it’s simply because we have the force of will to carry on and the luck to get it right. Still, to this day I cannot pray. It’s not because I don’t believe, not because I left religion behind, not because I no longer trust god. I hear that siren’s call. It a tiny, quiet voice in the back of my head. It’s the movement of goose bumps up and down my spine that I was taught to understand was the presence of the spirit. Even though I haven’t been to one of those god speaking services in two years, even though it’s been a year and a half since I quit that church in body and longer since I quit in spirit, even though the only church I’ve done since then involved occasional visits to a nice, liberal Presbyterian church that doesn’t cotton to that kind of crap at all, I can’t pray without hearing the voice. The Christianity I knew was an immune-deficiency virus of the mind. And that, in the end, is the answer to all those questions of how otherwise intelligent people can believe such things. It’s actually much, much harder to stop. You arrive when you’re weak or when you’re young and don’t know any better. Then they promise you the cosmos and encourage faith over logic. The thing is, though, I can’t blame anybody for what happened to me. We were all equally victimized by an inhumane system. And I carry with me the burden of knowing that I spent four and a half years helping do to junior highers what was done to me. The fact that I didn’t know any better and thought I was doing the right thing is cold comfort. I take it as a good sign, though, that I’m no longer angry at the religion I once knew and try my best to offer charity. In doing so I am learning to forgive myself for what I did. This, too, is why I try in my own small way to create a dialogue. Forgive them, they know not what they do. Forgive me, I knew not what I did.