One God, Three Hermits: Monotheism Reconsidered

Real talk: our beliefs affect our ability to live together.  The creeds we adhere to have real consequences for our ability to see other people’s quests for truth as holy, or even legitimate in the first place.  Placing value judgments on people’s religious outlooks betrays a truly divided consciousness. Listen: to avoid destroying each other outright, humanity’s got to put its money where its mouth is.  Belief in many gods, if it unifies a man with himself and his fellows, is worth a great deal.  Belief in one God, if it divides a individuals from their own psyches and from each other, is worthless.

In 1886, Leo Tolstoy first published a short story called “the three Hermits.”  In the now-famous and nearly-overused tale, A Catholic bishop is forced to pause in his sea voyage at a desert island, and he finds three hermits living there.  When they pray, they lift their hands to heaven and say to God “we are three, you are three, have mercy on us.”

Such flagrant disregard for the unity of God raises the Bishop’s hackles.  He spends a good while catechizing them to the contrary.  “God is three in one not just three.  Get it?”  At the cost of a good bit of effort, he teaches them the Our Father.  After a while, they do, in fact, get it.  They’ve made the adjustments and they’ve memorized the prayer.

After some time, the bishop sails away.  It seems he’s done some salutary upgrading of their belief-set.  It would certainly meet the approval of some of the prime exemplars of pre-Vatican II Evangelization.  I mentioned these in “New thoughts on Evangelization”—they were the ones whose preaching of the gospel happened alongside colonialism, and failed to recognize or correct the violence inherent in that system.   Before I talk more about this, let me address some other stuff. 

"Functional Polytheism"--for lack of a better term is an expression of the dividedness of man against himself and against others.  It happens when different gods are in conflict.  The gods of ancient Babylon were like this.  The ancient Babylonian story of creation held that the world was created from the dead body of one diety, through the blood soaked work of his divine murderer’s hands.   The ancient Greek gods were in similar conflict.  Zeus violently overthrew his titan-father Cronus to become king of the Gods.

To put my finger on the opposite: functional monotheism is an expression of the unity of man, within himself and with others. It happens when different aspects of the deity do a single will.  Seen from the “divine perspective” of the Christian Mystics, the Holy Trinity, in which the Godhead’s expressed in three persons who share the divine nature, is a classical example of this kind of thinking.  Hinduism, according to most broad strokes definitions, is a polytheistic religion.  But this deserves a second look.  All of the gods do Ram’s will.  Hindus with nuanced understanding call their religion the most monotheistic polytheistic religion in existence.

This is a “recycled paradigm”: it first appeared in ancient israel.  It is a recasting of the differences between pre-exilic and post exilic-monotheism.  Let me explain:

Pre-exilic monotheism, what I'll call "religious monotheism," held that Adonai, the God of Israel, was the “God of gods.”  In short, other gods existed, but the God of Israel was the greatest among them.  This is the whole reason that the exodus plagues are what they are: Moses turns the Nile to blood, for instance, to specifically prove that the God of Israel is greater than the god Hapi, the god of the Nile.  It’s also the reason Moses sent plagues of frogs: God was proving that he was more powerful than the goddess Heket, who is depicted as a frog.  

El, the Canaanite God, has been theorized to be the original God of Israel.  Later biblical writers nuanced and qualified this, but the fact remains: before the Exile, Israel did not worship the God they came to revere eventually.  Other Gods existed, and all that was worthy of reverence in other religions, Israel eventually revered.

Post-exilic monotheism  is a different animal. During the exile, Israel was surrounded by a polytheistic culture.  Their culture was under attack.  The Priestly writers, who made their major contributions to the hebrew scriptures at this time, used monotheism to spearhead the preservation of cultural identity.  For that reason, I'll call it "cultural monotheism" from here on out.  They began to say “Other Gods don’t exist.  The only God who exists is the God of israel.”  Let’s understand this correctly: from the exile onwards, cultural monotheism is a sociological self-defense in sacred garb.  That isn’t to say that the things said about divinity are false: it simply means that the atmosphere of cultural threat closed Israel off to the benefits of other traditions.

My contention is that Catholicism passed on to the West not the positive monotheism of pre-exilic israel, but the negative monotheism of the exile.  True to form, Catholicism is transmitting an implied cultural defensiveness along with whatever legitimate divine riches it brings to the table.

The proof is in the pudding:  monotheistic God concepts lead to unitive thinking, and unitive thinking is the important part.  As a Catholic monk, I felt more bonded to buddhists than I did to most Christians.  Monks, after all, routinely eat the humble pie which is their slice of human darkness.  Remember (as I said in “on learning to Luff, with two Eff’s”)  a unitive perspective accepts and includes, it doesn’t judge and reject.  Vaishnava Hindus think Gautama Buddha is an avatar of Vishnu—they have found a way not just to accept, but to worship the man who reformed their entire belief system.

Polytheistic God concepts lead to divisive thinking.  This is the wolf in sheep’s clothing: in reality, it’s the “culturally defensive”  monotheism of the Exile and its aftermath.  Catholicism burned witches as opposed to learning from them for thousands of years.  It excommunicated Luther, the Eastern orthodox patriarch in the split of 1054, and generally anyone, Christian and Non-christian, who differed with its tenets.  This happens over and over in biblical history.  The sins of the parents manifest 10 times worse in the children.  So the Jews, our “parents in faith” got through the exile by eating the apple of culturally defensive monotheism.  We, the church, rebelled against our parents, emitting a centuries-long cry of “CHRIST KILLERS” and using it as a banner under which our persecution might, we thought, legitimately fly.  Sure, the Jews might have been Adam and Eve, eating the apples of their own cageyness. But we were Cain and Abel: we upped the ante to fratricide, and our hands are not clean.

Ultimately, the “good news” is anything that unites.  I’m not talking about unthinking assimilation—we have to take others’ examples with a healthy grain of salt—but I am talking about nurturing the kind of “mutual assumption of integrity” that lies at the heart of the very religious freedom the Church asks from and, these days, increasingly grants to others.

To return to the Bishop and the three Hermits:  After teaching them the Our Father, when the bishop is sailing away, he looks back towards the shore.  In the distance, he sees a light approaching the boat.  It’s the three hermits, miraculously walking toward him on the water.  They confess they’ve forgotten the words of his beautiful prayer, that they need a reminder.  The bishop is downcast: “When you pray,” he says, “say ‘we are three, you are three, have mercy on us.’”

The “one God” in whom the Bishop initially believed seemed to demand that the Bishop convert the three hermits, he comes around, conceding that the hermits themselves know how best to pray.  This kind of openness to other formulations of divinity represents the best of pre-exilic, functional monotheism: that believes in one God without disregarding other belief systems. This is the fruit, as well, of the more modern idea of religious monotheism, in which unity of divine wills reveals more of God than human divisiveness.

However many gods a person believes in, the gods’ unity shows in the placidity of a devotee’s conduct.  However many deities a person prays to, the fruit of the an encounter with the one God is increased comfort with the plurality of legitimate human paths.  The three Hermits, however they prayed, were unified.  Would that all of our beliefs led us to something similar.

New thoughts on Evangelization

I feel icky about how closely wedded effort and egoism are.  Y’all know I have struggled with the neurotic egotism that comes from my dualistic mind.  And “spiritualizing” that egoism doesn’t help matters, either.  Y’all know I’ve been guilty, in the past, of spiritual materialism: of treating the tasks and the experiences of the spiritual life like they are possessions that make me good or bad—and moreover, better or worse than others.  

Maybe I’m seeing my own hang-ups everywhere, just because they’re mine.  But it seems to me that the Church can be just as guilty of spiritual materialism: perhaps there is a corporate, ecclesial egoism that treats spirituality like it’s a merit badge.  Perhaps the church “collects” the virtues of its saints so as to convince itself of its own specialness.  Coupled with its failure to articulate its tradition of “orthomorphosis,” or transformation, the Church has put its capacity for receptivity—the “passive volition past posts have talked about— in serious jeopardy.

Spiritual Materialism is a thing, both for me and the church.  This makes evangelization an egotistical objective.  In the hands of a church that hasn’t yet faced the dangers of spiritual materialism, such proclamation can be lethal.  The council of Jerusalem, the meeting that declared gentiles needn’t first become Jews to accept Jesus, failed to articulate what transformation in Christ looks like.  And when St. Paul decided to camp out in the center of the Roman Empire, he failed to notice that, in spreading the gospel, he was also spreading imperialism.  In Rome, you were a good citizen if you sacrificed to their gods.  By and by, you were seen as a good disciple of Jesus if you accepted the homogenizing influence of a christianized Pax Romana.  In later years, for instance, exploration of the Americas permitted us to use Christianity to legitimize slavery and cultural genocide.  The whole, dysfunctional union of church and state was transmitted, undiagnosed and uncorrected, until Pope John XXIII’s 1962 opening of the second Vatican Council.

The errors of pre-Vatican II models of Church were obvious.  The Church triumphal relied unquestionably on modern nation states, failing to diagnose and challenge their oppressive tendencies.  In El Salvador, at the time Rutilio Grande’s 1977 death radicalized Oscar Romero, he surprised heads of state who expected him to play governmental lap-dog.  The Church militant, bent as it was on the spread of the Gospel, disregarded religious freedom, the primacy of conscience and enculturation.  Mary appeared at Tepeyac as an indigenous woman in 1531, but it wasn’t till 350 years later, in October of 2002, that the church canonized Juan Diego, the indigenous man to whom she appeared.  

Vatican II’s calls for religious freedom and enculturation seemed novel, and that is the first indicator that something was amiss with evangelization.  When the Vatican said, in 2015, that the Church should not evangelize Jews, the cries of heresy were loud enough to be disconcerting.  Meanwhile Jesus, our Lord and Messiah, never intended Catholicism to be a separate entity from the Jewish faith.  It was only subsequent egotistical clinging to theological truths that gave enmity between Jews and Christians a divine mask.

Admittedly, the way I approach theology is my own.  I would hazard to guess, (cue egomaniacal laughter,) that it has a message for the wider Church.  The point here’s that if the church preaches what it lives, verbal preaching is unnecessary.  A few sources support this view: while studying, I was attracted to Ignatius of antioch, a bishop who wrote a famous letter from prison, right before being fed to lions in the Roman coliseum.  “If Christ’s suffering was pointless” he asked “then why am I in chains?”  When I was working as a youth minister, I remember the conference presenter and colleague who said “we tell our children  to love Jesus, but we don’t teach them to make Jesus’ journey.”  When I was first attracted to monasticism, it was because I saw in them people who shut up and lived.  They say they’ll pray  seven times a day, and they generally do.  They say they’ll be silent, and generally they’re silent.

In proper Evangelization, life preaches.   In the transformative journey, teachers fail, disciples fail, and teachings fail.   (I first addressed some of this in Kairos Koans and Conversion 6.) At the time of his death, Christ accomplished none of what he was expected to accomplish.   Afterward, Peter’s resolve failed: he returned to his boats.  Judas, ultimately dissolusioned with Jesus’ shortcomings, hung himself.   The prevailing expectations for a messiah failed utterly before switching, in christ, from a “judges model”—in which messiahs save their people from their political enemies—to a “prophetic model” in which jesus saves his people from their sins.  There’s a “mystical corollary” here too.  When a person prays vocally, the words at some point give way to devotion in the mind (what Catholics call meditation).  Thought yields, by and by, to what Catholics call contemplation.  So words yield to thought, and thought yields to presence.  While those stages aren’t hard and fast, it is important to note that often, one form of prayer has to die, or be surrendered, before another can live.  Both ego and desire perish before we die physically.

If I am right about this (again, I would hazard to guess that I am—cue egomaniacal laughter a second time) then the relationship between the church and evangelization needs to change.  In short, evangelization should be a consequence of conversion, not an end in itself.  If we Catholics conveyed the particulars of transformation, then the acceptance of Christ would happen on its own.

Christ himself says as much.  In Luke’s Gospel, when Jesus’ disciples enter Jerusalem, hollering about Jesus being the foretold messianic king, the powers-that-be tell him to order his disciples to stop.  He refuses. “I tell you,” he says “if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”  In the context of the narrative, Jesus’ triumphal entrance into Jerusalem, verbal proclamation is important.  

But under normal circumstances, it’s different.  The danger of under-proclaiming the gospel needn’t be a concern here.  Preaching the gospel should be like making love.  It’s great when consent has been obtained, gross and criminal when it’s not.  Rightly, Pope Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi lays out 5 steps: 1) change your life. 2) people will see it and be curious 3) they’ll ask you why you change your life 4) only then do you rightly bring up Jesus 5) they change their life prompted by the grace your example has transmitted.

Even though I need trusted others to unpack my spiritual search, I don't like talking about faith.  I refuse to proselytize.  If there's any sort of verbal statement of intent that I can honestly make it’s this: be honest with yourself and rigorous in self examination.  If people convert to Christianity, that's a party bonus and it's God’s work.  Meanwhile I have an obligation to change, to learn about other traditions and assimilate what wisdom they have to teach me.

I don't particularly think the church needs to preach the gospel either. Remember the words: If these were silent the stones would shout—it’s at the very least permission to be about our own transformative journey and to have the whys and the wherefores of that journey be a consequence, not an objective of my journey.  I believe that the Joy of the gospel will take care of itself, and that humans have no problem experiencing joy.  We have more of a problem in spaces of unwillingness, suffering, diminishment or death.  It would behoove the human family to concentrate on allowing itself to be transformed

We find both the proof of all this and the way we’re to achieve it in the example of Blessed Charles De Foucault.  Nowadays he’s been declared an almost-saint: someone who’s blessed is, to sainthood, what a cub scout is to boycotts.  Charles de Foucault wanted to start a religious community but was murdered by thieves before a single person joined him.  His ideas caught on sometime later: his writings were found and two people founded the community he had hope to establish in the first place. These days His community claims among its members such figures as PhD's who sell ice cream in pushcarts on the street and sisters with masters degrees who work for the circus.

The point is, they, too, refuse to preach the Gospel.  Their lives do the proclaiming.  People see highly educated men and women working menial jobs and caring for others.  Foucault’s spiritual children, when focusing on their own authentic transformation,  inspire others’ curiosity.  

If I don’t change my life, my verbal evangelization smacks of hypocrisy.  If my proclamation happens without someone asking for it first, I risk coming across as pushy. But if I keep my focus on my own transformation, the body of Christ will proclaim itself.

Christ, in the gospel of Mark, teaches something that is useful here.  After he does a miracle, when his disciples are amazed at his power, he often tells them to remain quiet about the event.  This is called the “messianic secret.”  His purpose was obvious: don’t proclaim me the messiah based on half of the messiah’s work.  What I mean is, what miracles showed (the power of God in Jesus) were only part of the story.  Jesus overtly asked his disciples to wait on their proclamation.  Wait, he asked, till I rise: wait till you yourself have failed, till your own desire and zeal and resolve have risen again.  And then, allow your own transformation to speak for itself.  

Peter is a good example here: early on, he proclaims Jesus the messiah, and Jesus calls him Satan.  Ultimately he will betray Jesus three times.  Ultimately Christ will show up as a stranger, ask if Peter loves him, and put the wind of the spirit back in Peter’s sails.   Ultimately the spirit will come, and how Peter is to speak will not be in doubt.

If the whole church were able to await the power of God in the same way, it might find there’s less work to do.  On the seventh day, God rested.  If the church’s proclamation is yet marked by anxiety—about whether Christ is accepted or not—then the Church’s spiritualized ego has further dying to do.  If we’re doing our job right, our work is much more a matter of healthy grief than first thought.  But if we can allow our egotistical sense of Spirituality’s demands to die alongside us, then our proclamation will be what God wishes.

Christ is manifesting himself in us—whenever and however he wishes.  For my part, anything more active is egotism.  I hope I can get out of my own way: it’s my only identifiable part allowing the whole world to proclaim Christ.  I’ve quoted John’s words before: Christ must increase, I must decrease.  May the words do their work in me, and God willing, in us all.

Meditations of a Simple Man

I’ve just spent a week leading 17 high school young people on a retreat.  It was a great time for them, full of getting real..  Generally I’ll spare you the details, but I will say at least this: more than one young man was articulate enough to express discontent with how they’re taught to be men.  I came home exhausted, and full of a desire to address the topic.

I suppose this post has been percolating since I was in high school myself, and I listened to the music my Father was raised on.  Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were my favorite quartet.  Particularly I liked Neil Young's “A Man needs a Maid.”  Eventually the song struck me as emblematic of the masculine crisis.  The first verse says “I was thinking that maybe I’d get a maid, find a place nearby for her to stay: Someone to keep my house clean, cook my meals and go away.”  Women, says this verse, just exist to satisfy our desires.

And indeed, at the center of masculinity itself is a crisis in feeling and desire.  Men aren’t taught the worth of unsatisfied desires.  We’re taught to fulfill them so that they’ll go away.    That’s a lost opportunity.  A bit of further preface is needed, however, so allow me not to get ahead of myself.

The culturally prevalent masculinity is exclusive, and negative.  By that I mean: men don’t know who they are, they simply know who they’re not.  They’re everything that isn’t feminine.  Femininity, by extension, is bad and weak.

Emotional literacy isn’t a skill men transmit to one another. In a striking similarity to the “Don’t Talk, Don’t Trust, Don’t Feel” messages passed down in dysfunctional families, culturally prevalent masculinity eschews emotions, and the vulnerability to which they point. When we men experience an emotion, they act on it to purge the obsession.  We are taught to throw sex and drugs and violence at our emotions until we no longer feel them.  When no amount of those things is sufficient to get the job done, we resort to repression.    

The culturally prevalent masculinity values sex, power and money.  In this unhealthy masculinity, the value of sex can manifest as anything from promiscuity to sexual manipulation to sexual violence.  The value of power can manifest in the Board room, on the athletic field, in the gym and in the family structure.  The value of money can apply to cash, possessions, but also non monetary commodities: even desirable qualities like six pack abs, social aplomb, and stoicism.

In this system, strength is anything that defends a desire’s fulfillment. Femininity, similarly, is simply a thing that suffices these needs.  Women are only worth it if they’re beautiful.  Women working as meteorologists hit youtube because they’re gorgeous, not because they were right about last week’s downpours. Ani Difranco’s lyrics are apropos here: “God help you if you are an ugly girl, ‘cause too pretty is also your doom. ‘Cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room.”  Pretty or ugly, competent or failure: women are judged by how they fit in to mens’ system of needs.

Women then turn around and enforce that with each other.  Unhealthy femininity has helped popular teenaged girls persecute their awkward classmates since time immemorial.  Beautiful women have been attracted to men who reproduce their fathers’ dysfunction since before there were words to describe it.  

The “fault” here lies unhealthy patriarchy, but the old saying about “inherited negative messages” applies.  Unhealthy femininity is not women’s fault, but it is their problem.  For certain, even well-meaning men take advantage of masculine privilege.  And Unhealthy Masculinity isn’t their fault, but it is their problem.

The real crown of laurels goes to those groups whose members don’t fit neatly into the masculine paradigm.  As a disabled man who passes as “normal” I know only a little about how disabled men threaten the importance of Sex and Power.  Gay men similarly threaten the norm.  While they’re maligned in the mainstream, they create masculine self-identities based on the conscious choice to be, to be loving, to be mentally healthy.  This is more than we can say for their counterparts subscribing to the prevailing sense of manliness.  

Crowned with glory, too, are men of color who see too clearly how “white” the prevailing masculinity is.  They are confined in boxes: portrayed as violent or ignorant or poor.  Meanwhile the business world balks at dreadlocks.  Meanwhile young latinos are placed in positions of incredibly high responsibility in their families because they can function in English speaking worlds.

The prevailing masculinity’s white, heteronormative privilege is toxic.  Men who are addicted to sex and rage and violence raise sons who can’t feel.  They raise daughters who are only attracted to men who reproduce paternal dysfunction, only to have children and become raging mothers.  Those mothers raise men who hate themselves, and cycle compounds.  

And I’m wary of any voice that, under the guise of “empowerment” carries a message of “my way or the highway” and turns legitimate pain into the tyranny of entitlement.  Anger is legitimate: rage and entitlement are not.  Raging mothers run households in which men can fit only if they make themselves small.  Phrases such as “men are pigs” or “down with the patriarchy” seem often too general, too undergirded with rage represent end-stage healthy femininity, or effectively address the problems with masculinity.  If the women of the world want men to be different, it would be worth asking us “how can we help you have the conversations y’all need to have?”  It’s similarly unhelpful to claim, too loudly, than male privilege is a reason to discount what men say about themselves in the name of giving women a voice. 

If women manipulate men into conforming to an unhealthy standard, not only will nothing change, it will breed resentment that will derail recovery in the long term.  Very often, this comes with the implicit and explicit threat that sex will become the subject of a transaction, and its withholding a tool of manipulation.  Men advise each other to admit they’re “wrong and sorry” as a routine way of handling conflict with women.  Phrases such as “If Mama ain’t happy, nobody’s happy” and “happy wife, happy life” point to the routine abdication of self required of the healthiest of men.  Additionally, dependence is much more socially acceptable in unhealthy femininity than in the culturally prevalent, unhealthy masculinity.  I know women who grew to 28 years old before ever doing so much as move a single piece of furniture.  The masculine equivalent is unheard of. 

Paradoxical as it may seem, feminine choosiness rules reproductive interactions. (And here I’m borrowing from Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 rules for Living.)  What every man knows is anthropologically confirmed: women reject twice as many men as they accept, and the “not tonight dears” outweigh the “come hithers.”  Masculine overwork shoots through not just “getting laid” but the best of romantic intentions.  A single red rose, kept on the table constantly, is as apt to be ignored as the absence of a dozen of them on February 14th is apt to be noted.  At first, it may appear romantic or loving that a man shoulder more than two thirds of a couple’s bills.  Eventually the same gesture registers as normal.  Keeping things spontaneous requires an energy that humdrum existence is constantly rendering mundane.  A healthy woman, conscious of this, will make as much effort to avoid ruts as she asks of her man, even as the mindfulness prevailing between them begets mutual exoneration. 

Meanwhile, men have too few conversations about what healthy masculinity would look like.  Their healthiest impulses are given only scant air time.  Boys everywhere are justified in being consistently, constructively angry at what masculine culture, and its dysfunctional feminine counterpart, routinely deny them.    

A healthy masculinity would be positive.   That is to say, it would spend more time clarifying what masculinity is, rather than defining masculinity by everything femininity isn’t.  There are a few truths around which such a masculinity would have to center.

For one thing, it would have to admit that neither real pain nor legitimate needs justify coercion.  So for instance, men who have been abused don’t get to become abusers.  For another, it would have to admit that true desires are different than egotistical needs.  Sexualized needs are a primary example of this: they’re not helpful  Additionally, we’ve been taught that being sated is the only valid expression for our needs  That’s a tyranny.   

In short, healthy masculinity is necessarily contemplative.  To be clear: I use contemplative here to mean “a mode of desiring, (grounded in eschewing the ego) in which desire is actively and consciously accepted and fulfilled, instead of reactively purged through immediate satiation.” This is (and should be seen more consistently as) real strength.  In the end, men need to be taught that unfulfilled desire can clarify thoughts and emotions.  Being vulnerable and having needs, without running from them or using the world to conceal them, is part of a healthy spiritual journey and a healthy masculinity. It is the only way to encounter the differences between male longings and feminine choosiness that avoids resentment, entitlement, and blame.

Images of such a vulnerability-friendly masculinity abound.  The “tank man” of Tienamen square, facing a column of tanks unarmed, is the quintessential image of a man who can face his vulnerability non-defensively.   And Bapu Gandhi, fasting well nigh to death for peace, is a similar image of willingness to desire without being sated.  The masters of Tantric Buddhism, long caricatured as purveyors of the eight hour orgasm, are actually attempting to transmute sexuality’s oppositional emotional energy, turning it entirely into grounds for connection.

Healthy men work to ensure that the Ego (on the one hand) draws proper boundaries and (on the other) ceases its spiritual obstructionism.  Healthy men know the value of unfulfilled desire in clarifying thoughts and emotions.  But the benefits don’t end there.

This actually echoes the life of God: philosophers have been working themselves into hysterics, attempting to figure out why God would permit evil.  The question is framed a bit strangely.  The answer is simple: repressing difference comes from lack of self knowledge.  God knows himself, and doesn’t have to stifle his opposite.  

Real intimacy is about mutual freedom: force has no part in it.  Men who know who they are needn’t foist their own paradigm on women, or men with differing masculinities.  

Somewhat counter-intuitively, healthy grief lies at the core of masculinity.  It is unrealistic for either partner to find ultimate fulfillment in even the best of spouses.  On the face of it, this arises out of any difference in desires, but set in the context of the Genesis myth, it has much to say about masculine spirituality.  

The fruit of Eve’s gift of self will forever be appreciation of good and evil.  Such a yield gets an unnecessarily bad rap.  In the aftermath of that gift, God tells Eve “your desire shall be for your husband.”  It only in light of the initial confusion (“your eyes will be opened, and you shall be like God”) that Eve’s gift of self can be a bid to take God’s place.  Men, too, can eclipse God in women’s emotional lives.  But there’s cause for rejoicing: Eve, on behalf of all women, accepts the title “the mother of all the living.”  Adam, on behalf of all men, will forever see his desire for God laid bare (it’s purposeful, that I don’t say ‘fulfilled’) on the Tree of Life that is the Cross.  Long experience in these roles teases out the positive effects of “knowledge of Good and Evil.”  

Let me give you a rather routine example.  When I was a monk, having it out with my own darkness in the cloister’s communal solitude, there were days when I was so depressed I couldn’t taste my food.  Numbness literally interposed itself between me and my sense of taste.  These days, in the midst of life with my Jackie, I can tell the difference between Reduced Fat Extra Sharp Cheddar and the real thing.  Here we have “knowledge of good” finding its most positive manifestation: Jackie has refined my palate.  

My increased ability to appreciate cheddar cheese is a drinking of the wine of life to its dregs—and all because I’ve grieved, because I’ve stopped giving my special lady God’s special place in my life.  All because the inevitable differences between jackie and I have served to clarify my desire.

Let’s hear Neil Young on the subject again “A while ago somewhere, I don't know when, I was watching a movie with a friend,” Neil says, “I fell in love with the actress.  She was playing a part that I could understand.”  The need for intimacy persists, whether we act on it well, or unhealthily or not at all.  It turns out, in the end, that consciousness of our own incompletion is part of being whole.

The image here, is Christ.  On the Cross, like Christ, we thirst.  That thirst isn’t quenched, we just feel it in its entirety.  Made visible, that desire is a hole in every side, even when we bear our strongest resemblance to the risen Christ.  Eventually, coming to know that deficiency for what it is is only half of the work.  The rest is a reaching out, a laughter, the epiphany that is the goofy curve of another’s smile.  “This alone” said Adam, “is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh.”

Because it all comes back to folk music, the final word on healthy masculinity goes to Neil's bandmate Graham Nash.  His song "Simple Man" (written for the musician Joni Mitchell,) says "I just want to hold you, I don't want to hold you down."  That is the best that one who is "simply a man" can do.

Morning by morning, the best part of awaking sleeps next to me.  When I know who I am, she’ll be welcome as she is.  But the one who awoke me is waiting within, and as the book of Isaiah says, I’ll “listen as one who is taught.”  I don’t know how to be a man, in the end.  But every day, I’m learning.