I could settle for being a man, or I could struggle to become a human being. Robert Jensen
If they could just get over themselves, then everything might be a whole lot simpler. Izumi Suzuki
It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness, and chivalry ‘masculine’ when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them to describe a man’s sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as ‘feminine.’ C.S. Lewis
We do not need to redefine masculinity. We need to reclaim it. We need to affirm the masculinity, the rough and tumble, the competition, and the discipline needed to teach boys right from wrong. We need to be able to give them safe avenues to express themselves, and to model for them what it means to accept and love people. We need to teach them things like honor, perseverance, integrity, adventure, justice, tenderness, determination, hope, love, peace, and freedom are all masculine virtues, and they are a part of what it means to be a man. Josh Hatcher
The stronger a man is, the more gentle he can afford to be. Elbert Hubbard
This Father’s Day is replete with images which call into question whether we are up to the “struggle to become a human being.”
While trying to be decent parents, decent mentors, decent neighbors, decent citizens we are now bombarded with images that seem to render anything we do, anything we try to teach, to the proverbial dustbin of history. Tough guys with masks and badges threatening civilians with death or tossing older veterans to the ground as though our essential freedoms did not in some measure depend on their prior sacrifices? Politicians male and otherwise bending the knee to lawless colleagues or to foreign governments for funding their own grip on power? Active- duty military being deployed on often angry and frustrated civilian turf asked to practice restraint that they were not trained to perform. Weak men masquerading as strong men by getting loyalists to do the bidding they could never “bid” on their own.
Where is the honor, you might ask? The perseverance? The tenderness? The hope? On and on, virtues which good parents, good fathers, attempt to instill in children find less and less expression in our governance structures and public institutions. We have been lied to so often now, and lied to ourselves a fair amount as well, that the ties that bind a country, ties of trust and tolerance, barely extend beyond our own dining rooms, if at all.
What are parents, what are fathers to do? How do we cultivate a virtuous life in our children, in our boys, when there is so little external to those relationships which reinforce those virtues? When our erstwhile leadership is willing to say anything, do anything, to enhance their own riches and power, how do we convince children that a life of virtue remains worthy of their best efforts or even a reasonable facsimile of such?
I don’t have any answer to this question that doesn’t lapse into cliches and/or political fantasies.
Some fathers I know have merely moved the goal posts, hoping to raise decent children but not necessarily honorable ones. Others have tried to maintain family values and spaces as a bulwark against what are increasingly predatory and violent influences, real and imagined. Still others have chosen to focus less on the world and more on themselves and the path we all need to walk if “becoming a human being” in the best sense, a parent in the best sense, a father in the best sense, is to be realized.
Many other, of course, have chosen to filter out as many of the implications as possible from these ideological and testosterone driven times, trying to convince themselves that it will be possible for their children to graduate from a good school and land a well-paying job amidst a world compromised by the unfathomable stupidity of officials who refuse to “get over themselves” and the wars, climate impacts and other unleashed demons such officials fail to address, in some instances, even to acknowledge. For those willing enough to make it, this choice, sad to say, is more of a risk than it seems, a choice driven by a stubborn love than by a rational assessment of circumstance, a cross-your-fingers moment that answers only some of the responsibilities of parents to lives poised at the starting gate, lives ready to run what might well turn out to be a rigged race full of metaphorical landmines and other impediments out of immediate view.
And, especially for fathers seeking to mentor the boys in their lives, there is another potential confusion. In searching out quotations for this piece (which is my habit), what I found is that a majority of the quotations I found under the “masculine” rubric were actually much about women, much about the “feminine” characteristics that men should cultivate and should want to cultivate. Needless to say, I support claims of “arrogance” by C.S. Lewis in casting judgment on erstwhile masculine and feminine characteristics embraced by the “other sex,” or even other manifestations of gender. But this is another complicating factor for parents, for fathers, trying to exercise soft influence over lives trying to adjust over and over to turmoil both internal and external.
Given all this, allow me to honor fathers who directly engage the current caldrons of affect and policy, who try their best to enable conditions for hope which is more than performative, who understand that their ability to ease the path for their children in this dangerous, difficult world means their own involvement in that dangerous, difficult world without making more of the same. It means thinking through all that it means to be strong in ways that allow us also to be gentle, to be kind, to be hopeful, to be engaged, to listen and show compassion, to apologize and make amends.
To all the fathers out there who embrace all or some of these tasks, you have my great admiration. Regardless of the hostile noises you might hear from others, it is not so easy now to be what you strive to be. In my own small and inadequate way, I and others pledge to “have your back.”
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