Man to men

One of the most painful identity crisis of my generation is that we’ve forgotten how to be men. Perhaps we never knew to begin with. The traditional role of men has suffered so much deconstruction in contemporary society that we spend the rest of our adult lives looking for clues to give meaning and dignity to our existence.

We search everywhere for answers. We invent manly pursuits, make fashionable statements, enjoy risky friendships and risqué entertainment, and forever seek the holy grail of admiration so worshipped by popular culture. Unfortunately, some of us succeed only too well. And little by little, we lose ourselves even more in the lies and delusions that we create.

What does it mean to be a man today? We look into the mirror and see so much of what society has crafted, and behold so little of true dignity in our lifestyles and choices. How many of us have destroyed ourselves and the lives of those we love, because we were too lazy or cowardly to abandon the false idols we serve?

Society tells us we’re made in the image of GQ, Hollywood, Wall Street and stylish success. Scripture tells us we’re made in the image of God. If we are to save ourselves and our manhood from spiraling into hell, some things need to change. But where do we start?

Let’s begin with a basic truth – no man is an island. We're not an army of one. Women often don’t realize how much men need the company of other men to grow. It’s a natural instinct for us to be around our own, to bond and relax and be ourselves in a language that is entirely unique to us.

If you walk down any street from Greece to Hanoi, you’ll find pockets of men sitting around a café drinking, laughing and talking about everything and nothing. From teenagers to octogenarians, many will take time to be around their buddies for a good laugh, a game of football, coffee and cigars or just some easy entertainment. This is good but it is not enough.

As men, we desperately need to invite Christ into our company if we want to save ourselves from the onslaught of darkness. We must redeem our gatherings from a purely social setting and restore Christian dignity to our conversations, activities and entertainment. Above all, we need compatriots to help us, brothers to support and encourage us, friends to pray with us and for us, buddies to watch our backs and keep us honest. For our own sanity, we need to belong to a band of Christian brothers. It’s not easy, but the alternative is to live lives of deception. We cannot compartmentalize our personalities into neat little boxes of behavior; where we are different people to different communities, where we hide dark secrets beneath the light of our respectable facades.

Do we live double lives? Do we lie and scheme without conscience at work while playing the role of a responsible parent at home? Do we feed the lust of pornography in the shadows of our marriages and relationships? Do we flirt dangerously with affairs that threaten our families, or gamble away our lives and our souls in habitual sins?

These inner “demons” and struggles must be exposed to the light of Christian fellowship and prayer, so that stripped of their scandals, they can be cast out with brotherly love and support.

If like me, you’ve found the way to heaven burdened with more failures than success, take heart and realize that you are not alone. Instead, there are countless others like us, and we need to rally around each other under the leadership of Christ our Lord, in whom we find our true dignity and humanity as men. There is no room for judgment or shame among brothers, since we all bear the scars of Adam upon our souls. A leper has no derision to offer another leper, but only the strength and consolation that come from being one in our common weaknesses and struggles.

Hence, if you don’t already belong to a community of Christian men who can journey with you in your struggles, it would be helpful to find one. If none are available in your area, you can organize a group of three to four Christian friends who are committed to living the gospel difference together. As you meet regularly to pray and study the word of God, enquire about each other’s lives with brotherly concern.

Allow me to share a few suggestions from Mario Cappello, the international director for ICPE; a Catholic mission committed to training lay people for world evangelization.

1. Tackle the hard subjects - ask about each other’s prayer life and relationships with families and friends. Discuss our work ethics and commitment to chastity. Affirm each other in our fidelity to Christ, and raise the question of how we view and treat women. Do all this with great charity, but also with a firm determination to keep each other accountable.

(Again, let no man judge his brother or be scandalized by what he hears in sacred trust. Rather, let him love his brother in support and encouragement, and repay that trust with his own confidence.)

2. Be truly committed to share your burdens and struggles, holding nothing back. Realise that if you’re not serious about keeping each other honest and free, you’re just wasting everyone’s time.

3. Bring into the light every dark corner of our lives. Be transparent and honest; hold nothing back intentionally. If you do not attend to that small chink in your otherwise perfect armor, the enemy of your soul will use that to destroy you. You might confidently say that ninety-five percent of the time you are righteous and true, but it’s that five percent of darkness that can easily dominate you and ruin everything.

4. Don’t be a spiritual schizophrenic. Don’t compartmentalize your life like you would your wardrobe. Grace and righteousness are not jackets you put on and take off depending on the occasion. By virtue of your baptism, you have put on Christ twenty-four-seven. Be integrated in your spiritual character, allowing no occasions to deprive you of your Christian vocation.

5. Lastly, always look to Christ and his Church for your moral reference, and do not seek the oracles of wisdom that the world offers you. Society will tell you there are no moral absolutes, that everything is relative to a man. But in order for us to choose one set of values over another, there has to be an absolute benchmark to measure our decisions upon, some kind of natural law upon which the drama of human life can depend on for moral certitude.

After all, if darkness is the absence of light and evil the absence of good, then some definitions about the nature of light and goodness must remain firmly established in order for those contrasts to continue existing. Remember that morality can be likened to a compass that shows us where we are, where we've been and more importantly, where we should be going. Otherwise, we should get hopelessly lost.

But like a compass, its usefulness is dependent on an immutable principal. For a compass to work, it needs to have for its reference an unchangeable feature, (in this case, the north pole). If the polar regions of the earth kept switching around, it would be impossible to find your way around since there is no fixed point of reference.

Morality is much the same. Truth is immutable and unchangeable. We are not the benchmarks of morality in our own lives. Christ is! And more than ever, he is calling us to a new manhood and a new dawn in him.

There are good men and there are bad men, and there are men who are so lukewarm that they are neither good nor bad. We know what kind of rewards await the first two groups, but where do men who are lukewarm end up? Revelation 3:16 quotes the Lord as saying, "So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth."

Ouch! Surely such indifference can only rob us of a life of grace.

May God liberate us from every false desire and illusion, and free us to live the truth of our sonship in him, so that through the Son of Man, we may truly regain our dignity and freedom as Sons of God.