by Brent Gavin Was, Intern Minister

A sermon given April 27, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

This morning, I would like to talk about men. I think we are in trouble. Not just men, all of us. But I think that we, men, are at the center of things, and I am sad and I am scared. Look around the world, around our nation. Our economy is stumbling. Most of the shooting has stopped in Iraq, but now the real repression of civil liberties will start as our sights seem trained on Syria and/or Iran. The Oscar winning film Bowling for Columbine has been in theaters longer than any film I can remember. It is a documentary of fear and alienation and the resulting violence these feelings inspire in young American men. But besides this film, we don’t hear much about men like we did in the past. Robert Bly and the men’s movement from the 80s and 90s is underground. The Promise Keepers have faded. The palpable fear of terrorism, the fervor of patriotism and nationalism, have buried much of the desire to explore the deeper realms of men in the modern world. This can not be.

I am a man. That might be obvious, but I say that with a bit of trepidation. It is so different to say that than for a female proclaiming "I am woman, hear me roar." I am growing more aware of my position of oppressor. Men do oppress women, intentionally or not, we do. Women know this. That explains why so many women are interested in the subject of this sermon. The oppressed want to know about their oppressor. But men, we don’t want to, or don’t think we need to know, about them. Well, Men, we must know about our oppression. We must own this.

But as a progressive male, owning my gender, I sometimes feel like saying "I am a man, sorry." I feel this and it makes me want to cry. I have gone from being unaware of the control and power men hold in the world to having another feeling, shame. And when I talk to other men, when I look at the papers and see the horrible things men are doing to each other, to women, to our world, this shame mutates into despair. I, along with so many of my brothers, just don’t know what is good about being a man, let alone how to be a good man.

In reading feminist literature, we find a heavy critique of men which is often warranted. Unfortunately, there is little constructive criticism from which to learn from. Susan Faludi, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women wrote another wonderful book on gender, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. In looking at the traditional feminist approach to men, she observes that women blaming men for everything is the flip-side of the traditional family values, that notion that men should be in charge. That is what the Promise Keepers did. They accepted all the responsibility then took all the responsibility for fixing things. No. That is not what we need. We need answers.

What is it to be a man? I attended my first positive, intentionally male event a couple of weeks ago. I say positive, because the majority of the men’s stuff I have done has been Marine Corps sponsored binge drinking and surprisingly similar sales conventions. Craig from the office and I led a men’s spirituality retreat. It was so reassuring to see that other men are struggling with being men, and are doing something about it. On our retreat, we listed words describing masculine traits and ideals. "Protect, provide, strong, reasonable, linear, stewardship . . . " These are all good words. Ideas that resonate with my image of proper men. But what stuck me as most peculiar was the fact that for most words we put up, we all had a caveat. Strong . . . Strong is good, but there is a bad side. Protect, isn’t that presumptuous? "Do women want or need protection? And from what, us?" Linear, reasonable? I can’t tell you how many times I have been accused of being a linear, reasonable thinker.

Even in this group of progressive men, from age 30 to 60, with very different professions and educational levels—we were gay and straight; single, married and divorced; we had varying experience in men’s groups—but even here, virtually every aspect of manliness had a "That is manly, and it is good, but . . . " side to it.

There is some fear behind this uneasiness. Susan Faludi writes that since men are mythologized into making things happen how difficult is it for many of us to admit that some things are happening to us? For most men, isn’t that the fear? Being powerless, not having control: of the situation, of our family, of our lives. Isn’t this the thing that led us to war: we were no longer in control of the world, 9/11 told us that. We had to exert control, take the initiative. In our culture, the one thing that every man must always have is control. Self control being the most important and most destructive force we teach our boys.

I remember this so vividly from high school football. We were terrible. Now I was no All-Star, but even I was embarrassed by our performance. I started for two years and I played in only one football game where my team won. One. We tried, but it just didn’t happen, and towards the end of my senior season, a boy who loved the game, who tried very hard, he became very upset, crying, yelling . . . He was not in control of his emotions and our coach pounced. "It is crap like that that will get you killed out there!" he shouted, shaking the boy by the shoulder pads. "Get it together. You’re an embarrassment." And he pushed him out of the door of the locker room, isolating us from him.

This reminds me of the poem by W.S. Merwin we heard before. So many of us know that feeling. We should talk, but sometimes we can’t. Why can’t we talk to our partners, or our dads? What is it that so many of us can’t face? What is so terrifying inside of us that we flee behind the walls we construct around ourselves? Walls that too often turn into barricades from which we can safely lash out at the world. In looking in my own heart and observing all kinds of men around me, I think that we fear admitting a lack of control. He’s your dad. You can’t control him. You can’t control the fact that he is going to die. If I open up too much, I may not be able to control the hurt, the anger, the love, whatever emotions my Dad inspires in me. What if I get too sad? I could be powerless. I could be out of control like that football player, and that is not allowed.

Not having control. That is the root fear. And it runs so deeply that on our men’s retreat we didn’t identify control as a male trait because I think control is so assumed. It is baseline. What is so frustrating about this is that we have to remember that in the end we have little or no control. The world will do what it will, God acts in mysterious ways that we have little influence over, let alone control. This is true, but up until the past 50 years or so, men in this country have lost even the small semblance of the control we thought we had had over basic aspects of our lives.

On the retreat, one of the most important defining traits of masculinity was to provide. Being a provider. Women bring the children into the world and men provide for them. It is not a bad system, one that has been in place for a long time. I am not convinced it is all destructive patriarchy. It ensures that men stay relevant other than providing genetic material once in a while. We are relevant.

Some think that is what we are programmed for. So, what happens to us when we can’t do that anymore? Not just individually, I mean as a group. Faludi’s book gets deep into steel workers, young high school grads, men in the Promise Keepers, Rambo, and across the board sees the issue at hand is that men are no longer able to fulfill our most basic function: to provide. The past generation has seen a profound, a revolutionary shift in the structure of the American family, the two worker household. We don’t know what this means yet. This generation is the first to grow-up on TV and day care. It will take time to figure out the consequences for everyone, but it is for certain that men are feeling it deeply now. There is no longer the expectation that a man entering the workforce will be able to support a family. This is not a judgement on women in the workforce. Women need the right to work, we are all better for it and the lack of pay parity between men and women is disgraceful. However, these changes are a profound change over a very short time. How do we deal with this as a society? And many men are having trouble even supporting themselves. Remember the decline of good paying industrial jobs and the rise in unskilled service sector jobs over the same generation. But it gets deeper than paychecks, deeper than jobs. Much deeper.

How useful do we feel when we do something that is just not important? Not very. Wendell Berry links the decline in our environment to our decline in character as a people. Our culture so focuses on specialization that we have ceased to do useful things, tangible things. We have substituted "energy for knowledge, methodology for care and technology for morality." How many of us have anything real to show for our work at the end of the day? Berry writes "He has not the power to provide himself with anything but money, and his money is inflating like a balloon and drifting away, subject to historical circumstances and the power of other people." How many of us seek a workshop, or a garden, or a building project to give our hands something to do, or more importantly, give our souls something to create? Most of us don’t get this at work even though work is supposed to be defining for us. Add to this that most of us can’t even provide properly for a family in this system, we can begin to feel the depths of the loss. We can feel the spiraling downward of our sense of control, our self worth.

We have been told time and time again, we must be in control. And how do men try to stay in control? We do. We do so much. Work. Play. Talk. Read. Build. Plan. Learn. We do so much it is almost dizzying. In ministerial preparation, we are screened psychologically and I interviewed with a psychiatrist last year. I told him about Steve, the farmer I work with. "We don’t talk much," I said, "but he teaches me. He shows me, he is handing down his life to me. I know he loves me, but we don’t talk about it." The psychiatrist replied, "Of course you don’t talk about it, that’s what women do. Men do."

And what we do defines us in our culture. "What do you do?" is a question often asked when meeting someone. Does anyone have a single doubt what that question is asking? Do we mean "How do you enjoy spending your time?" No, in our culture, what you do, career, job, is what, is who, you are. Men don’t say, usually, "I’m a dad, but I work, too." "I’m married." "I have a partner." No, in our culture, women are allowed to identify themselves with external forces, forces that they know they have no control over. Men are allowed to only identify with external forces they do have control over, or appear to, like our work. How devastating it is when systemically useful work; productive, creative, empowering work sufficient to fulfill your basic responsibility as a man becomes unavailable, or at least unlikely. Now obviously this doesn’t excuse the horrible behavior of many men. No injustice against a man justifies domestic violence, ever. No reading of the bleak futures men face excuse the boys in Columbine, or the eighth grader on Thursday who shot his principal and himself to death in Pennsylvania. No looming sense of inadequacy or lack of control excuses our government from decimating the nation of a third rate dictator, but it does explain some things, doesn’t it? Because it is the same thing that led some really, really angry young men to charge a police line on the Steel Bridge on March 20. It is the same thing that led a bunch of 19-year-olds to drive their tanks into Baghdad. It is what led me there.

When I went off to college, I went on a full ROTC scholarship with the Marines. Why? I was scared. "You were scared, so you joined the Marines?" I am often asked. The Marines have two main types that join, the bullies who are tough and want more toughness, and those who have something to prove. Often these were the bullied. Now, I didn’t get bullied as a kid, my wit always kept me safe enough. I was not violent, I was privileged enough that I didn’t need to be to survive, but I knew that I probably wouldn’t be like the typical man that I had been taught was acceptable. I wasn’t a braggart, most of my friends were girls. I didn’t excel at or even enjoy sports. I lacked much of the bravado and aggression of my peers. I was uncomfortable. Looking back on it, I see that I doubted my masculinity. So, what better way to get "street cred," I mean real masculine credibility, than by being a tank officer in the Marine Corps. Doing that, doing the Marine Corps gave me some sense of control over other people’s perception of me as a man.

Doing is having a sense of control. Doing is focused outwards; it is acting in the world. Everything outside of ourselves is inherently out of our control. Other people’s perceptions, other people’s behavior, the ebb and flow of life, are out of our control. So I don’t know what is more important or soothing for us to realize: that we don’t have control, so quit fooling ourselves, or we can’t have control, so don’t worry about it.

Letting go of our attachments to the world around us is the first step to relinquishing control. An example is if we really don’t care what other people think about us, their power over us disappears. Like if you really don’t care if you lose a job, your boss ceases to have any power in the relationship. If you realize that driving an expensive sports car or giant SUV truly doesn’t reflect on the character of your core being, you won’t feel embarrassed by your 10-year-old Honda Civic, because, why would you be, it’s a car?

Gandhi said that you can shred my skin and crush my bones, but you can never enter my soul, you can never reach my mind. Our lives are not that dramatic, but this is the source of the power of this heroic man. Does he fit the stereotype of modern American heroes? Or classical heroes, for that matter? He’s no John Wayne, or Daniel Boone, or Achilles. But then are Jesus or the Buddha? Though, would anyone deny that they are some of the most powerful men that have walked among us? They had no control over other people. Two of them had no control over their own demise; Jesus and Gandhi died painfully, violently in a time of intimidation and harassment. But external forces did not diminish their power. That was their power. The world had little to do with it. They had the power to do exactly what they had to do, to be the man they needed to be, to stand up for what they knew was right. Their power was accessed from within, and though we here will not impact the world as these men did, we have access to this same power.

This power reveals itself to us in our hearts and souls. It is a relationship with the Holy. It is a relationship with God. This relationship always awaits our attention. God, like love, is patient and kind. If we can surrender to this relationship, we will be powerful men. Power is our ability to sustain ourselves and to express what we know to be right. We can, therefore be powerful in our vulnerability, because needing something we can not provide for ourselves won’t cripple us with fear. And none of us are self sufficient. Powerful in our love and devotion, because we will know we have the depth of character to give freely. Powerful in our ability to provide all that we have to those we love, because we know that our inner resources are not finite. This is the power that men need, and it is waiting for us.

Our relationship to the holy within ourselves is the inexhaustible source of power we have been looking for. Our relationship with the infinite is what makes the difference between doing and being. What we do is inconsequential; it is what we are that matters. Embracing God, embracing the holy is all that matters. When we feel that our life is in conjunction with that which we can not understand, the infinite, God, we are surrendering. Give it up. Give up. Surrender. God is the force that gives us meaning, because God speaks in our hearts to us alone, if we are willing to listen. If we can hear that voice calling to us our attachments to the outside world, our need of approval, of recognition, of status among men slips away. Our power manifests itself in our presence as a mindful person conscious of the quality of content, not results.

If we can focus on what God needs us to do we will be led to the right way. Pay attention. Prayer, meditation, intentional spiritual practice is a tried and true path towards a relationship with God. But there are other ways. Love without reciprocation. Provide what you can for others with no reward. Be a steward to some land, or a community because that is the right thing to do. Care for something. In the poem "The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer," Wendell Berry writes, "What I know of spirit is astir in the world. The god I have expected to appear at the wood’s edge, beckoning, I have always expected to be a great relisher of the world, its good grown immortal in his mind."

Relish the world but don’t attach to it. When we feel that nothing is more powerful than the spirit of life in our own souls, we will be freed from our attachments in the world and our need to control it. When we see that the key to power in our lives is not depending on that which is transient; the opinion of others, approval, cultural norms of success and wealth; we will be find a benevolent power within ourselves. When we realize that our own well being and our relationship with God are linked, and when we sense that our own well being is linked to the well being of the other children of God we share life with, we will be free and powerful. Powerful enough to not be fazed by failure. Powerful enough to appreciate what we have in life. Powerful enough to not have all the answers, not have all the solutions and powerful enough to not know how things are going to work out. With the holy present in our soul, we will be powerful enough to be the wonderful flawed people that we are. Amen.

PRAYER

Precious God, give us the courage to listen to your voice in our hearts. Steer us, guide us, with your grace to surrender to that which we can not know. May fear, grasping and that need to control dissipate in your presence. Stand by our side and we will be brave. Amen.

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Copyright 2003, Brent Gavin Was, Intern Minister.  All rights reserved.