by James Kubal-Komoto, Intern Minister

March 14, 1999

Men like fixing things.

When I was growing up, my father was always fixing things. Screen doors off their hinges and garage doors off their tracks. Broken sub-pumps and stuck windows. Clogged sinks and corroded carburetor. My job was always the same. Hold the flashlight and hand tools from the tool box to the hands that reached out from under the sink or from under the car. This was part of my apprenticeship into manhood. I learned about tightening and un-tightening things. "Lefty Lucy, Righty Tighty," my father taught me. I learned the difference between a flathead and a Philips screwdriver. And I learned that there were very few things in this world that can not be fixed at least temporarily with duct tape.

Most of all, I was learning something about being a man in our society. Men see a problem. We get our tools. We tinker. We fiddle. We tinker again, and if all else fails, we go for the duct tape, telling ourselves, "It’ll hold for a while."

Whether this tendency toward looking at life like a screen door off it hinges is hardwired into men or a matter of socialization is something of which I am unsure. I lean toward the latter explanation. I don’t remember my father making my sister hold the flashlight. I also do not want to suggest that men are better at fixing things than women. The tendency of men to always want to fix things, to find solutions to problems, is often totally unrelated to our ability to fix them.

Last year my wife Hiromi and I were in the car, and we suddenly discovered that the passenger-side electric window wouldn’t go back up. We were only about a mile from my father’s house, so I suggested we stop by there.

"Please no!" my wife implored, recommending instead that we drive straight to a repair shop, but I convinced her that it wouldn’t do any harm for my father and me at least to take a look at the problem. At his house, he and I got out his tools, managed to get the inside-passenger-door panel off, and discovered the cause of the problem. We had no idea how to fix it, but we understood what it was. Problem was we also didn’t know how to get the panel back on, so we ended up all driving over to a repair shop after all, the panel held in place with duct tape.

The biggest problems resulting from men’s urge to fix everything is not that men take on problems beyond our expertise - - though this gets us into lots of trouble sometimes too. It’s that we often end up treating other people like we do broken screen doors, as a problem to be fixed.

Being in an international, cross-cultural marriage, each day is a new opportunity for my wife and me to misunderstand each other. Sometimes it has to do with her being Japanese and me being American. Sometimes it has to do with me being a man and her being a woman. And sometimes it has to do with us simply being two different people. And just when I think I have all of these differences and what they mean figured out, something else comes up that completely surprises me.

We are getting better at understanding each another, however, much better than in our first year of marriage. During our first year of marriage, Hiromi would tell me about a problem. I would sit patiently and listen. I would think carefully, and then say, "Well, why don’t you try this?"

She would shake her head and say, "No, you don’t understand."

She would talk more and I would listen more, and I would think carefully again, and then say, "Well, then, why don’t you try this?"

"No, you don’t understand," she would say, getting angry. "You’re not listening to me!"

"I am listening," I would say, also getting angry, "but I don’t understand why you even talk to me if you’re not interested in what I say!"

I talked about these frustrating conversations with another man who had also recently gotten married. "I wonder if this is a cross-cultural communication problem", I said. Brian, an American man married to an American woman, looked at me, slowly shook his head, and said, "No. I can tell you it isn’t."

Men’s unwillingness to stop being Mr. Fix-It not only causes problems in men’s relationship with women, but in men’s relationship with other men. When I was a student at Meadville/Lombard Theological School, some other men and I started a men’s group which consisted of other men preparing for Unitarian Universalist ministry. The original impetus for forming this group was not an overwhelming desire for more emotional intimacy and male bonding among the men of the school, but the women at the school had formed a women’s group, and the fact that they were meeting and talking together every week and we were not made us all extremely nervous. Ironically, the women’s group floundered and disbanded after a few meetings, and the men’s group continues to meet now in its third year. The fact that all the men go out for chocolate milkshakes after each meeting plays a big part in this.

When we first started the group, this was the first time that many of us had been in a men’s group. We were making up the rules as we went along. We quickly saw a pattern emerge. A man in the group would share a problem and immediately the other men in the group offered solutions to fix it.

"Why don’t you try this?"

"No, why don’t you try that?"

"No that won’t work. You should do this."

We quickly made up a rule that after a man shared something, he would say what he needed from the group and the rest of us couldn’t offer advice unless we were asked for it. This was hard for us to do. One evening, one man was sharing a story, and a man named John was sitting in a chair, looking more and more agitated. His fingers were clinched around the arm of the chair, his knuckles turning white. We asked, "What’s the matter John?" John answered, "I have some really good advice but I’m not allowed to say anything!"

Let me add some balance to everything I’ve said so far, because I don’t want to give the impression that men are the only people in the world who become Mr. Fix-it. Women also become Mr. Fix-It. However, women, I believe, are not interested in fixing the same things as men. The women to whom I am closest in life, at least, are not interested in trying to fix my problems in life. They are interested in trying to fix me.

Since marrying, my wife, my mother-in-law, and my mother have formed a committee whose goals include fixing the myriad of defects from which they believe I suffer. These include my inability to eat without spilling food on myself, my inability to dress fashionably without assistance, and my tendency to forget details about anything important without regular reminders.

Two months ago I received a phone call from my mother. It was late here in Portland, so it was very late in the Midwest, so when I heard her voice on the other end of the phone, I was slightly worried.

"Is everything okay?" I asked.

"Well, I just wanted to make sure that you knew postage was going up starting tomorrow. I didn’t want you to send any bills out and have them come back."

"Thanks, mom," I said, teeth clenched.

To their chagrin, their efforts to fix me, like my solutions to my wife’s problems, often go un-appreciated. But why is it that our offers to help one another, our offers to fix what is broken in the lives of people we love, well-intentioned and loving as they are, often go un-appreciated? Why is it that these offers of help even cause us to sometimes become frustrated and angry with one another? The answer I want to suggest is that this is not what we need most from one another. But then what is it that we need?

The minister Stephen Doughty tells a story about serving as a student summer minister at a small New England Church.

"I had been in the office at the church," he says. "A knock came on the door. It was one of the summer residents, a jolly woman who, it had turned out, was aunt of a friend of mine in seminary. We had laughed at the discovery and at tales of seminary and at tales she told me of her nephew. Her face was now drawn.

"‘Steve,’ she said in direct and measured tones, ‘we just had a call from your parents. Your grandmother has had a stroke. It’s not good. Your mother and father are driving on from Chicago. They said you would want to know. They thought maybe you would want to be there, too.’

"My grandmother lived in western Massachusetts. We had eaten dinner together every Sunday all four years I was in college. The whole family had gathered for her ninetieth birthday, just six weeks before. When the cake, with ninety candles on it, caught fire, she had laughed harder than any of us.

"Yes. In my parent’s phrase, I ‘wanted to be there, too.’

"I thanked my new friend for telling me. I went outside, got in my car, and drove off to ask the chair of the congregation if I might have some time away. He was a carpenter, year-round resident, and right now he was building an addition on the home of a summer family.

"‘Ed.’ I spoke his name through the open walls of the addition. The sun was bright and shone on his white hair. Normally, he would have turned, smiled, given a few more licks with the hammer, or finished sawing a board.

"‘Ed.’ I am sure I said his name only once and not very loud. He looked directly at me. Then, without hesitation, he put down the hammer, laid aside his tool belt, and walked directly toward me...On hearing the tone of my voice, and after a single look at my face, he laid down his tools so he could be completely there...for me."

This is what we most need from one another, in times of crisis and everyday. To be completely there for one another. We need to be like Ed and once in a while we need to put down our tools for fixing the world and one another.

What my wife needs most from me is not my clever insights or suggested solutions to her problems, but my listening and understanding. What I need most from her is not her help choosing a tie or even her recommendation that a staple gun is not the best the best way to mend that hole that has worn through the pocket of my khaki pants, but her acceptance of who I am despite my many flaws.

In the men’s group at Meadville/Lombard, we sometimes did ask one another for advice. But usually what was most helpful was hearing six other guys say, "Yeah, that’s too bad." (Okay, the words we really used were not "too bad," but that’s beside the point.)

In his book The Active Life, Parker Palmer says that twice in his life he experienced deep depression. "Both times various friends tried to rescue me with well-intended encouragement and advice," he said. "In the midst of my depression I had a friend who took a different tack. Every afternoon around four o’clock he came to me, sat me in a chair, removed my shoes, and massaged me feet. He hardly said a word, but he was there, he was with me. He was a lifeline for me, a link to the human community and thus to my own humanity. He had no need to ‘fix’ me. He knew the meaning of compassion."

We as members of this religious community of memory and hope are called by the religious tradition in which we stand to be compassionately together with one another. When I attended a Unitarian Universalist church in the Chicago suburbs, sometimes I went to church because I wanted to be inspired. I wanted my empty spirit to be filled again. Sometimes I went to church because I wanted an answer. I wanted to be given the solution to a problem I couldn’t figure out myself. But sometimes I went to church just because I wanted to be present with other people who were struggling like me to make it from Monday to Friday. For that one hour of the week, the presence of those other people sitting around me was a powerful witness that I was not the only one experiencing both the joys and sorrows of being human. And often this was enough to get me around to Sunday again.

Yet in all of these kinds of situations, the urge to become Mr. Fix-It is always strong. Simply being there is a lot tougher than it seems. Simply being there requires us to understand that there are some problems that we by ourselves cannot fix. Simply being there requires that we let go of those feelings about what we are supposed to do as a parent, a spouse, a partner, a friend or an adult child.

Besides providing extra opportunities for us to misunderstand each other, an international marriage is also sometimes difficult because my wife is far away from family and close friends. In the busyness of our daily lives, the awareness of this is less, but sometimes she gets homesick. This usually lasts for a few days or maybe a week and then passes. Having also lived outside of the U.S. for four years, I know this is normal, but it’s still a difficult time for both of us.

The first time Hiromi was homesick, I thought my job was to fix the problem. I said, "I’ll buy you a fax machine so you can write letters to your parents everyday." Another time, I said, "I’ll install a Japanese e-mail program on our computer so you can write e-mail and read Japanese newspapers on the Internet." Well, we now have a fax machine and a Japanese e-mail program, but buying these haven’t fixed the problem. The truth is that I can’t fix the problem, but accepting that and accepting that not being able to fix the problem does not make me a lousy husband has been difficult.

When I was a hospital chaplain in Chicago, I often encountered the parents of chronically sick children who ask themselves similar questions. "How can I be a good mother or a good father if I can’t do anything for my sick child?" Simply being there requires us to let go of what we think we are supposed to be doing.

Simply being there also requires us to resist the urge to run away that stems from our own anxiety in witnessing another person’s pain. When we are completely there for another person, when we are not trying to fix the other person, we are being compassionate, and to be compassionate or to have compassion, literally means "to feel with" or "to suffer with" so when we are completely there for another person we are also opening ourselves up to that person’s pain. This does not mean we take on the other person’s pain as our very own, but that we witness to it. We do not do even this easily. If we cannot fix the problem, our urge is then to deny the problem or run away. Simply being there in that middle ground is hard.

Simply being there also requires us to realize how a compassionate presence by itself is valuable. In a society that places so much emphasis on the fix, the solution, the answer, we often forget this. Rachel Naomi Remen, who is both a medical doctor and a therapist, tells a story about Dieter, a man suffering from cancer, and his doctor.

"Every week he would go to the doctor’s office for his injection," Remens says. Afterwards he and his doctor would sit together and talk quietly for a while. Fifteen minutes, no more. Until he came to [a patient support group] his doctor was the only person to whom he could talk honestly, who understood the experiences that he was going through.

Cancer had changed his life. He now lived so far beyond the usual, the normal, the ordinary in life, that he often felt alone. Many people did not want to hear about how it was with him, or couldn’t understand things that had never happened to them. Some were so upset by the pain of it all that he felt the need to protect them from it through his silence. But his doctor understood. For fifteen minutes every week he was able to talk to somebody who listened, who didn’t need him to explain, who was not afraid...

[But] for some time now Dieter had suspected that the chemotherapy was no longer helping him. Convinced at last of this, he spoke to his doctor and suggested that the treatments be stopped. He asked if he could come every week just to talk. His doctor responded abruptly, "If you refuse chemotherapy, there is nothing more I can do for you," he said....

Dieter later said to a group of fellow patients..."My doctor’s love is as important to me as his chemotherapy, but he does not know."

The doctor did not know, Remen tells us. The doctor also happened to be Remen’s patient in therapy. Week after week, from the depths of chronic depression, he would tell his therapist that "no one cared about him, he didn’t matter to anyone, he was just another white coat in the hospital, a mortgage payment to his wife, a tuition payment to his son. No one would notice if he vanished as long as someone was there to make rounds or take out the garbage."

That poor man. No, not the patient. The patient eventually found the support he needed. The poor man was the doctor. The poor man was the doctor because he did not realize how much his being there meant to his patient. He did not realize that the most valuable thing he could offer to his patient was not his skill or expertise. He did not realize that the most valuable thing he could offer to his wife and his son was not his paycheck. He never realized that the most valuable thing he had to offer was his presence and his compassion, so when he faced a problem he could not fix, as we all do, as we all must, he felt worthless as a human being. He never realized that just being there and being compassionate was not only what others needed most from him, but was the way he could find the greatest worth and meaning in his own life. He never realized that it is by simply being there with one another that the Spirit of Love is most likely to flow through us and to one another, that this is how we can invite the Divine into our lives.

Each of us has such a gift within us. It is a gift more valuable than the ability to fix any problem. It is ability to make at least one other person feel that he or she is not alone, is important, is accepted, and ultimately, is loved. More often than not, all we have to do to use this precious gift is be there. So may it be.

Prayer

Will you pray with me?

Spirit of Life,

Deep within each of us, amidst us all,

Grant us the wisdom to know

When to offer a helping hand,

When to offer a kind word,

Or when to offer nothing more than an open heart.

May we each learn to be good companions to one another as we journey together through life.

Amen.

Benediction

As you leave this place, may you know your greatest gift is the compassion you offer to one another. Amen

Copyright 1999, James Kubal-Komoto. All rights reserved.