One of my favorite authors wrote this:
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THE LION OF JUDAH??
A man is fierce... passionate... wild at heart? You wouldn’t know it from what normally walks around in a pair of trousers. If a man is the image of the Lion of Judah, how come there are so many lonely women, so many fatherless children, so few men around? Why is it that the world seems filled with “caricatures” of masculinity? There’s the guy who lives behind us. He spends his entire weekend in front of the tube watching sports while his sons play outside—without him. We’ve lived here nine years and I think I’ve seen him play with his boys maybe twice. What’s with that? Why won’t he engage? And the guy the next street over, who races motorcycles and drives a huge truck and wears a leather jacket and sort of swaggers when he walks. I thought James Dean died years ago. What’s with him? It looks manly, but it seems cartoonish, overdone.
How come when men look in their hearts they don’t discover something valiant and dangerous, but instead find anger, lust, and fear? Most of the time, I feel more fearful than I do fierce. Why is that? It was one hundred and fifty years ago that Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and it seems nothing has changed. As the line from Braveheart has it, “All men die; few men ever really live.” And so most women lead lives of quiet resignation, having given up on their hope for a true man.
The real life of the average man seems a universe away from the desires of his heart. There is no battle to fight, unless it’s traffic and meetings and hassles and bills. The guys who meet for coffee every Thursday morning down at the local coffee shop and share a few Bible verses with each other—where is their great battle? And the guys who hang out down at the bowling alley, smoking and having a few too many—they’re in the exact same place. The swords and castles of their boyhood have long been replaced with pencils and cubicles; the six-shooters and cowboy hats laid aside for minivans and mortgages. The poet Edwin Robinson captured the quiet desperation this way:
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.
Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking. (“Miniver Cheevy”)
Without a great battle in which a man can live and die, the fierce part of his nature goes underground and sort of simmers there in a sullen anger that seems to have no reason. A few weeks ago I was on a flight to the West Coast. It was dinnertime, and right in the middle of the meal the guy in front of me drops his seat back as far as it can go, with a couple of hard shoves back at me to make sure. I wanted to knock him into First Class. A friend of mine is having trouble with his toy shop, because the kids who come in “tick him off” and he’s snapping at them. Not exactly good for business. So many men, good men, confess to losing it at their own children regularly.
Then there’s the guy in front of me at a stoplight yesterday. It turned green, but he didn’t move; I guess he wasn’t paying attention. I gave a little toot on my horn to draw his attention to the fact that now there were twenty-plus cars piling up behind us. The guy was out of his car in a flash, yelling threats, ready for a fight. Truth be told, I wanted desperately to meet him there. Men are angry, and we really don’t know why.
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There's a whole book more but I just thought some of you might like this little teaser.
*******************************
THE LION OF JUDAH??
A man is fierce... passionate... wild at heart? You wouldn’t know it from what normally walks around in a pair of trousers. If a man is the image of the Lion of Judah, how come there are so many lonely women, so many fatherless children, so few men around? Why is it that the world seems filled with “caricatures” of masculinity? There’s the guy who lives behind us. He spends his entire weekend in front of the tube watching sports while his sons play outside—without him. We’ve lived here nine years and I think I’ve seen him play with his boys maybe twice. What’s with that? Why won’t he engage? And the guy the next street over, who races motorcycles and drives a huge truck and wears a leather jacket and sort of swaggers when he walks. I thought James Dean died years ago. What’s with him? It looks manly, but it seems cartoonish, overdone.
How come when men look in their hearts they don’t discover something valiant and dangerous, but instead find anger, lust, and fear? Most of the time, I feel more fearful than I do fierce. Why is that? It was one hundred and fifty years ago that Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and it seems nothing has changed. As the line from Braveheart has it, “All men die; few men ever really live.” And so most women lead lives of quiet resignation, having given up on their hope for a true man.
The real life of the average man seems a universe away from the desires of his heart. There is no battle to fight, unless it’s traffic and meetings and hassles and bills. The guys who meet for coffee every Thursday morning down at the local coffee shop and share a few Bible verses with each other—where is their great battle? And the guys who hang out down at the bowling alley, smoking and having a few too many—they’re in the exact same place. The swords and castles of their boyhood have long been replaced with pencils and cubicles; the six-shooters and cowboy hats laid aside for minivans and mortgages. The poet Edwin Robinson captured the quiet desperation this way:
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.
Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking. (“Miniver Cheevy”)
Without a great battle in which a man can live and die, the fierce part of his nature goes underground and sort of simmers there in a sullen anger that seems to have no reason. A few weeks ago I was on a flight to the West Coast. It was dinnertime, and right in the middle of the meal the guy in front of me drops his seat back as far as it can go, with a couple of hard shoves back at me to make sure. I wanted to knock him into First Class. A friend of mine is having trouble with his toy shop, because the kids who come in “tick him off” and he’s snapping at them. Not exactly good for business. So many men, good men, confess to losing it at their own children regularly.
Then there’s the guy in front of me at a stoplight yesterday. It turned green, but he didn’t move; I guess he wasn’t paying attention. I gave a little toot on my horn to draw his attention to the fact that now there were twenty-plus cars piling up behind us. The guy was out of his car in a flash, yelling threats, ready for a fight. Truth be told, I wanted desperately to meet him there. Men are angry, and we really don’t know why.
******************
There's a whole book more but I just thought some of you might like this little teaser.