Christian Living

Searching, and searching, for the perfect match

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Every so often someone writes an article about the plight of singles in America. It seems everyone wants to be married; they just don’t want to be married to anyone they know. It’s interesting to hear the issue discussed in both Christian and secular circles. While the specific diagnoses and proposed solutions differ, there does seem to be general agreement that an unprecedented number of singles in their 20’s and 30’s would like to be getting married but, for one reason or another, aren’t.

Of course, there are many reasons for this phenomenon, but one root cause that’s often mentioned is the never-ending quest to find The One: the perfect match, the one who completes you like two strands of music that run together in a perfect harmony. I’m male, so I picture it in geometrical terms: two equations so perfectly matched that their graphs will run together, no matter how far the line extends. (What did guys do for pickup lines before Euclid?) On the most popular dating websites, eager members fill out batteries of questions that dwarf most psychological tests, all carefully analyzed by computer algorithms to find your perfect match! We’re so committed to finding the right person that we demand no less than Google as our Yenta.

My point here is not to argue that we ought to swing to the other extreme and immediately dive into marriage with the nearest breathing organism that loves Jesus and has human DNA and a complementary pair of X or Y chromosomes. Nor is it to suggest exactly what balance should be struck between being too picky on the one hand, and being discerning and careful in our choice of the person with whom we pledge to spend the rest of our lives, on the other. If we stipulate, however, at least that it seems American culture in general has swung too far in the direction of “overly picky,” I wonder to what extent such a tendency is generated or reinforced by a lack of confidence in our ability to make marriage work.

If I’m buying a vehicle to take with me to a desert island and I have none of the mechanical knowledge necessary to maintain or fix it, it suddenly becomes tremendously important that I buy one that will never break down. If I take marriage seriously, and really mean it when I say “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part,” but simultaneously realize that on a very basic level I truly don’t know how to maintain or fix the life-long relationship I’m embarking upon, I’d better find the girl who’s such a perfect fit that my marriage will never break down. If those two lines on the graph start to diverge; if the tune falls out of harmony, and I don’t know what to do, that’s it. It’s over.

And so we continue our dogged hunt for something that does not exist, unwilling to accept the truth that no human hands can draw two perfect graphs or play a ceaseless harmony without error. Cinematic romances end with the ride off into the sunset because even the most brilliant screenwriter would struggle to maintain the alchemic fiction that promises lifelong happiness to those who can just find the right ingredients.

In reality, of course, the most important moment for securing the health of any marriage is this one, not some past point when the lucky pair each found their soulmate in the other. We must learn to bend the graphs, to blend the parts into harmony; to become soulmates more and more. If that knowledge has slipped from our cultural store, though–if we are no longer confident in our ability to make marriage work–then it’s not hard to understand those young singles who are reluctant to accept what must appear to be a gamble with nearly impossible odds.

Good and bad from the same clay

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Simeon and Levi are brothers;
Their swords are implements of violence.
Let my soul not enter into their council;
Let not my glory be united with their assembly;
Because in their anger they slew men,
And in their self-will they lamed oxen.
Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce;
And their wrath, for it is cruel.
I will disperse them in Jacob,
And scatter them in Israel. (Genesis 49:5-7)

With these words, Jacob cursed his sons for their treacherous assault on the Canaanite city of Shechem in revenge for the rape of their sister Dinah. When the rapist, Shechem, prince of the city, requested her hand in marriage, Levi and Simeon insisted that all inhabitants of Shechem must first be circumcised. Convinced, the citizens of Shechem submitted to the procedure and then, “on the third day, when they were in pain… two of Jacob’s sons, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, each took his sword and came upon the city unawares, and killed every male” (Genesis 34).

And Jacob cursed Simeon and Levi for their wrath, for it was cruel.

It came about, as soon as Moses came near the camp, that he saw the calf and the dancing; and Moses’ anger burned, and he threw the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain. He took the calf which they had made and burned it with fire, and ground it to powder, and scattered it over the surface of the water and made the sons of Israel drink it. […]

Now when Moses saw that the people were out of control—for Aaron had let them get out of control to be a derision among their enemies—then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, “Whoever is for the Lord, come to me!” And all the sons of Levi gathered together to him. He said to them, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Every man of you put his sword upon his thigh, and go back and forth from gate to gate in the camp, and kill every man his brother, and every man his friend, and every man his neighbor.'” So the sons of Levi did as Moses instructed, and about three thousand men of the people fell that day. Then Moses said, “Dedicate yourselves today to the Lord—for every man has been against his son and against his brother—in order that He may bestow a blessing upon you today.” (Exodus 32:19-20, 25-29)

And God blessed Levi for their wrath, for it was righteous.

It appears the Levites were a people prone to wrath. The two major scenes in which Levi (as a man and then as a tribe) plays a starring role both feature massacres in response to evil. In both situations, Levi takes the initiative, stepping forward from the crowd–from among his brothers to avenge their sister, from among the other tribes to avenge their God–to deal violence as punishment for heinous wrongdoing. Not everyone has the courage, the strength, and the fierceness for such a role. In fact, most don’t. Levi did.

In Genesis, Levi earns a curse by responding to evil with an unjust and cruel violence, a violence few others would have dared. In Exodus, Levi’s curse is transformed to blessing by responding to evil with a righteous, obedient violence, a violence few others would have dared. Both the sin and the resulting curse, and the virtue and the resulting blessing, were the fruit of a unique personality trait: a willingness, even an inclination, to respond to evil with violence–a trait which was in itself neither virtuous nor vicious. When driven by sinful human motivations, it turned to sin. When submitted to divine authority, it turned to righteousness.

The story of Levi reminded me of Dr. Wendy Mogel’s observation in The Blessing of a Skinned Knee,

I begin by telling these audiences, “Think of your child’s worst trait. The little habit or attitude that really gets on your nerves. Or bring the medium-sized habit that your child’s teacher keeps bringing up at parent conferences. Or the really big one that wakes you up at three in the morning with frightening visions of your little guy all grown up and living alone in an apartment in West Hollywood, plotting a shooting spree at the post office…

Good. Now you’re one step of ahead of where you were a moment ago, because now you know your child’s greatest strength. It’s hidden in his worst quality, just waiting to be let out.”

Dr. Mogel’s point is that a child’s strongest traits provide the raw material for his or her greatest virtues–if properly tended. The parent’s job is to patiently work to transform bossiness into leadership, recklessness into courage, nosiness into concern for others, hyperactivity into creativity, talkativeness into eloquence, quietness into a listening ear. Of course, the talkative child also needs to learn to be quiet when appropriate, the quiet child needs encouragement to speak up at the right time, and so on, but wise parents learn the shape of their child’s soul and work with the grain, not against it. The answer to a Levi’s strength is not to hope for atrophy, but to teach him to put on the full armor of God before going to war.

So it is for each of us. No matter our condition, all we can do at any given moment is take our whole selves and lay them before the Father, ready at that moment to be used in whatever way He sees fit. Like Levi, our only concern is that, when the call is raised “Whoever is for the Lord, come to me,” we come, yielding whatever may be in us to be used by the One who does all things well. Whatever past sin might have flowed from a particular facet of our personality, only one question matters now: Whose is it? So long as it is utterly submitted to God, to be used, cultivated, changed, or even destroyed, as He sees fit, no evil can result; and perhaps great good, unexpected good, a blessing bestowed in place of a curse.

On love of self

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I recently had an interesting conversation with a friend on Facebook who posted a quote which said that self-protection ought to be avoided because it was a form of self-love, the assumption being that self-love is itself wrong. Of course, the point of the quote was simply to argue against a selfish fixation on our own wellbeing above that of others, but I disagreed with the premise that self-love is morally wrong. The discussion that followed made me decide to post something on the topic here as well.

We can certainly begin by acknowledging that self-love is at the root of a deadly collection of sins. Ever since the time of the Fall, when Adam sinned by desiring to raise himself to equality with God, no idol has been worshiped with greater fervor than man has lavished upon himself.

This leads rather naturally to the assumption that self-love is itself sinful. However, such an assumption is unjustified. The mere fact that a thing may be corrupted does not prove that it is bad. (Before the Fall, all of creation was corruptible but good.) The question, then, is whether self-love is inherently bad or becomes bad under certain circumstances.

One starting point for considering this question can be found in the fact that God loves himself, thus proving that not all self-love is wrong. Furthermore, God loves human beings, which means that humans ought to be loved. (Note that this is not the same as saying human beings deserve to be loved.) Jesus makes this explicit when he commands, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (John 13).

Now, it would be logically possible for a human to be obliged to love all human beings except himself. However, if self-love is not inherently evil, as is proven by God’s self-love, and if humans qua humans are to be loved as a general principle, such a position would be hard to justify without explicit scriptural backing, which is lacking. In fact, when we turn to Scripture we find Christ suggesting the opposite when he commands, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (emphasis added). At first glance one might conclude this was merely a concession to the unavoidable fact of human self-love, but can anyone seriously argue that the One who commanded “Be ye perfect” would have shied away from declaring “You shall love your neighbor and not yourself,” if that were in fact the right course?

How, then, does self-love become sin? When we begin to love ourselves above our God or our neighbor. Returning to Mark 12, Jesus declares, “The foremost [commandment] is, ‘Hear O Israel! The Lord your God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” God first, God most, always; our fellow man next, for he is created in God’s image. When this order is disrupted, and only then, self-love becomes sin.

Of course, leaving the theoretical for the practical, in our daily walk self-love does require constant control because it is so insistent on pride of place in our lives. Why not treat it as actually bad, since it is so inclined in that direction? Two reasons: First, because if in fact human beings ought to be loved, and if there is no scriptural exception for the particular human whom one happens to be, then failure to love oneself properly would actually be sin! Virtuous self-love dictates that we ought to always seek what is truly best for ourselves, provided always that it does not interfere with our duty to love God first and neighbor next.

Secondly, treating self-love as inherently sinful often leads to a dangerous misdirection of effort as we strive for virtue. When we believe that the existence of self-love stands between ourselves and God, we will naturally attempt to eradicate it. This leads to a difficult and ultimately harmful struggle to uproot a thing which is not actually bad; while at the same time, every ounce of effort devoted to this attack on self-love will not be devoted to our proper goal of seeking God’s grace to learn to love him and his human creation better.

Manliness, initiation, and Twisted Sister

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Apologies in advance for what is likely to be a somewhat rambling post. I came across this music video for Twisted Sister’s 1984 hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It” somewhat randomly on a political blog and watched the first bit out of curiosity, then found myself engrossed and rewatching the whole five minute video. The imagery has stuck with me for the last couple days, tying in with a lot of the themes of maleness that I’ve been thinking about recently.

To start off, watch the video. (The whole thing. Seriously.)

What is so striking about this video is the way it echoes, in a dim and rather unwell way, the model of a male initiation. All the requisite players are there: father and family, son, and initiators in the form of the band; but it’s all off somehow, like a portrait done in Silly Putty and mashed almost past recognition.

The portrayal of the father immediately sets things off on a wrong note. He rants and spews incoherent spittle and disdain, but there’s no hint of real strength as he’s harried through his house and repeatedly defenestrated by the menacing band members. Bullying and loud, yet ultimately impotent, he exemplifies our cultural perception of unreconstructed maleness. As such, he is interesting, but the main question at the moment is how this father will affect his son’s initiation into manhood.

A common theme of male initiation is violence on the part of the initiators. They kidnap the boy, take him to a strange place, wound him. The initiation is a thing to be desired, yet feared; entering the fellowship of men is a dangerous thing because a man is a dangerous thing.

Consciously or not, in the video Twisted Sister clearly echoes the image of male initiators. They appear at a critical juncture to pull the boy from his home and family and offer him a new life, represented by the later shot of him at a Twisted Sister concert as they roar, “We’re not gonna take it, no we ain’t gonna take it, we’re not gonna take it anymore.” The band’s stylized, disguised appearance and menacing behavior complete the picture of a band of initiators. Yet the initiators in this story do not kidnap the boy – they rescue him.

As the boy faces his threatening, angry father, the band rushes in to confront the man. Their challenge is for the father, and he becomes an object of mockery as they reveal his true weakness. Rather than a danger, these initiators represent safety and excitement, away from the unpleasantness of dealing with challenging maleness. Saved, the boy joins the ranks of their headbanging fans, cheering enthusiastically while the band cries, “Oh you’re so condescending / your gall is never ending / we don’t want nothin’, not a thing from you / your life is trite and jaded / boring and confiscated / if that’s your best, your best won’t do.”

While it’s certainly possible to read too much into an 80’s glam rock production, I would argue that the video offers a vivid picture of the state of male initiation in America. Today, the cultural energy that might go toward ushering boys into manhood is instead directed at rescuing those boys from a manliness that is seen as brutal and loutish, or at best merely outdated and unnecessary.

In a culture where child custody cases end with sole custody for the mother 70-80 percent of the time, manliness is not seen as beneficial, but as an inconvenient or offensive obstacle to teaching a boy to be gracious, orderly, studious, sensitive, open, patient, and civilized. Because of this, boys must be saved from masculine tendencies and influences by schools, family, and media. As Harvey Mansfield writes in Manliness, “Even when ‘man’ means only male, ‘manly’ still seems pretentious in our new society, and threatening to it as well. The manly man is making a point of the bad attitude he ought to be playing down.” Like the band in the video, these would-be saviors rush in to separate the boy from masculinity and set out to shape him according to their ideal in a sort of soft, amoeba-like initiation.

Such pressure creates several different types of young men. Some simply absorb the message, give up, and cease to be manly in any meaningful sense. Fight Club and Wanted are anthems to the awakening and late initiation of such men. They are usually very nice and very civilized; women often like them because women tend to be fond of children. Though these men sometimes become more manly as they age, even then there is always a hint about them of someone who is trying to remember where he left something important.

Other men absorb the message but do not quite cease to be manly, so they respond as a man does when confronted with badness: they fight. Of course, the badness they confront and fight is maleness itself. They become Twisted Sister: “This is our life, this is our song / we’ll fight the powers that be, just / don’t pick our destiny ’cause / you don’t know us, you don’t belong.” They stand up in manly disdain to disdain manliness. Much of the American intelligentsia – among them, perhaps, President Barrack Obama – falls into this category.

And finally, some men reject the devaluation of manliness and, in the absence of mentors, initiators, or instruction, try to make themselves manly. Sadly, they usually become some variation of the father in the video, desperately aping the most obvious characteristics of masculinity without the solid inner core that only comes by absorption through long contact with true manliness, and without which the superficial attributes of manliness easily cave into wrongness. The hip-hop culture, with its loud rebellion, glorification of meaningless violence, and hypersexualization of women, is the result of boys trying to create their own masculinity. Less dramatically, our society is full of fathers who respond with everything from withdrawal to violence as they come to the choking realization that they have no idea, on a level deeper than mere intellect, of how to actually be the man their wife and children need.

“If that’s your best, your best won’t do,” declares the song, and it’s hard to disagree. Yet, as the father asks, “What kind of a man are you?” “What do you want to do with your life?” there’s a thinness to his son’s defiant response, “I wanna rock.” He is looking for identity and meaning, but there is no one to guide him; only well-meaning rescuers who pluck him away from the danger, challenge, and responsibility of becoming a man.

Christian decision-making

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I just finished reading Just Do Something by Kevin DeYoung, an argument against the semi-mystical attempts to discern God’s specific “will for your life” that are popular today in Christian circles. DeYoung lays out a clear case against the idea that God has some hidden plan that we have to ferret out before it’s safe to make any significant decisions. Yes, God has a sovereign plan, but it’s not our job to know each step before we take it.

As James reminds us, “You do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.  Instead, you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.'” Our lack of foreknowledge creates room for faith. Imagine Joseph’s story, or Daniel’s, if they had been granted the sort of detailed plan for the future that it is so tempting to demand from God.

Instead, DeYoung says God’s revealed will for us is very simple: “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.”

He doesn’t call on us to seek a divine word before scheduling another semester of classes or deciding between bowling or putt-putt golf. He calls us to run hard after Him, His commands, and His glory. The decision to be in God’s will is not the choice between Memphis or Fargo or engineering or art; it’s the daily decision we face to seek God’s kingdom or ours, submit to His lordship or not, live according to His rules or our own. The question God cares about most is not “Where should I live?” but “Do I love the Lord will all my heart, soul, strength, and mind, and do I love my neighbor as myself?”…

So go marry someone, provided you’re equally yoked and actually like being with each other. Go get a job, providing it’s not wicked. Go live somewhere in something with somebody or nobody. But put aside the passivity and the quest for complete fulfillment and the perfectionism and the preoccupation with the future, and for God’s sake start making some decisions in your life. Don’t wait for the liver-shiver. If you are seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, you will be in God’s will, so just go out and do something.

I strongly agree with DeYoung’s overall point, but I wish he had been less dismissive toward what he calls “nonmoral decisions” (i.e. decisions between two or more options, neither of which are sinful). He writes, “God doesn’t care where you go to school or where you live or what job you take,” and though he acknowledges that he’s using hyperbole to make a point, one still gets the sense that DeYoung wouldn’t much mind if we made most of our “nonmoral decisions” on the basis of a coin toss. On the one hand, that might actually be a better option than a frantic, paralyzing search for a specific, hidden Plan, but on the other it seems to reduce the importance of wisdom in the Christian’s life.

Some nonmoral options are better than others. As a teacher, I have to choose the cities where I’ll offer classes. It wouldn’t be sinful for me to teach in Wilmington while living near Charlotte, but it certainly would be foolish, because it would be a huge drive that would significantly reduce my time for other, more productive work. It wouldn’t be sinful for me to marry a godly girl who hated reading or the outdoors, or who I didn’t find attractive, but it would be pretty foolish.

Of course, one could say both of those are moral decisions, the first because it would affect my ability to serve God in other ways and the second because it would decrease the likelihood of a happy marriage. I would actually agree. However, if we adopt this view of decision-making we’ve essentially defined “nonmoral decisions” out of existence. If I have to choose between eating out at Taco Bell or Chick-fil-a, the decision has implications for my financial wellbeing, my personal pleasure, and my likelihood of becoming violently ill from food poisoning – each of which is a moral issue. It’s hard to imagine any decision which is utterly lacking in moral significance, if traced back far enough.

At this point, one can feel a hint of panic at the prospect of dozens and dozens of decisions to be made daily, each of which matters in one way or another. But frankly, that’s silly. We all know that even small decisions matter. Every morning, I choose to brush my teeth. The decision matters: My body is the temple of God, so I have a responsibility to maintain it. I don’t agonize over the decision though, or even think about it very much. I just brush my teeth.

Some decisions are easier than others, but either way we are commanded to be wise in our decision-making. Jesus instructed his disciples to “be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves.” Proverbs declares, “Take my instruction and not silver, and knowledge rather than choicest gold. For wisdom is better than jewels; and all desirable things cannot compare with her.” And, having given the command, God also offers the means: “But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him.”

Wisdom is certainly needed for momentous decisions, but it is also a very everyday, practical thing. The Book of Proverbs promises instruction in wisdom, then offers such observations as, “He who gathers in summer is a son who acts wisely,” “In abundance of counselors there is victory,” “He who is guarantor for a stranger will surely suffer for it,” and “Where no oxen are, the manger is clean, but much revenue comes by the strength of the ox.” One gets the sense that only an accident of chronology prevents Solomon from reminding us to change our oil every 3,000 miles.

So how should we make decisions, whether large or small? First, ask for wisdom. Not merely for a specific decision, but in general. We ought not merely desire to make this or that decision wisely, but to be wise. Second, we must seek to be in right relationship with God, as DeYoung emphasizes. Peter warns his male readers to honor their wives, “so that your prayers will not be hindered.” The Christian who is rebelling against God in some area of his life is setting himself up to make foolish decisions. Third, know the Scriptures and seek wise counsel. And finally, consider the options and make a decision, confidently and in faith.

Sometimes we will make decisions based on the counsel of others. Sometimes we will ignore advice because we are sure some other course is better. Sometimes our decisions will be coldly rational, and sometimes we will “go with our gut.” Sometimes we’ll make mistakes, and that’s okay, because our sovereign God can alchemize even our mistakes into good. To quote from a faintly cheesy but wise Keith Green song, heard years ago, “Just keep doing your best, and pray that it’s blessed, and Jesus takes care of the rest.”

There is no secret, hidden plan for us to find, but we are called to be wise. So let us seek wisdom and incline our hearts to understanding, then just do something, trusting God to take care of the rest.

To love the true, the good, and the beautiful

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The great classical thinkers assumed that true virtue lay in loving the true, the good, and the beautiful; that the virtuous man would center his affection on this triumvirate of excellence, and that such attention would itself foster growth in virtue. During this morning’s sermon Pastor Phillips explained how love of what is true, good, and beautiful is also central to the Christian walk, and, this being a topic dear to my own heart, I was inspired to write something of my own on the subject.

As Christians, we have many compelling reasons to intentionally cultivate a love for all that is true and good and beautiful. To begin with, all such excellences ultimately originate with God. Some directly, such as a rainbow, the song of a thrush, or the sweep of constellations in a night sky, and some indirectly, like good music, a well-made meal, pleasant comradeship, or a thought-provoking book. Whether God created the good or created the creator of the good, ultimately all goods are His gifts. “Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.”

No one who considers the impractically extravagant beauty of a butterfly, or the utterly unnecessary pleasure produced by certain combinations of sound, can doubt that God takes pleasure in His creativity. And what creator does not delight in the delight of others? God did not invent flame so that it could be put under a basket, but so that it might dance upon the lampstand and give light to all who are in the house, that they might see it and glorify their Father who is in heaven.

When we delight in what is true, and good, and beautiful, we worship God. “The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.” Furthermore, such appreciation actually shapes us to love Him more and better.

Our every choice, our every affection, shapes us in some way. We become what we do; we become what we love. This is why Paul tells us, “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.” As our love of God shapes us to love what is good, so also our love of what is good shapes us to love God, the author of these goods, more and more fully.

This is a point that is perhaps most easily seen in the negative. Most would agree that a man who shuts himself up in a dank apartment, reading twisted novels and listening to dark music, is cultivating a spirit that is less open to the Father of lights. If our loves can draw us away from God, surely they can also draw us nearer, when we love those created goods through which “His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature” are revealed.

It is important to add a caveat here. Whenever one speaks of loving created things, there is a natural shrinking away on the part of the Christian: “Idolatry!” In fact, Augustine famously defined sin as nothing other than loving what is less above what is greater. Clearly, disordered affection – love of creation over Creator – is a deadly error. Yet, Augustine himself notes that the sin lies “in deserting what [is] better,” rather than in the love of created things themselves.

The error here lies in deficiency rather than excess of love. If a woman buys her husband a new car, then complains a few months later, “You love that car more than you love me!” it is unlikely that promising to love the car less will really address the heart of the problem. We want our gifts to be loved, and to be loved for themselves. In a healthy relationship, there is no fear that even the most wonderful gift will overwhelm the recipient’s love for the giver – on the contrary, such gifts illustrate and reinforce that love.

If we find that our love of created things, whether food, nature, or family, has come to exceed our love of God, trying to tamp down those loves is approaching the problem from the wrong direction. One cannot treat the disease by attacking symptoms. Instead, we must choose to love God first, to restore Him to His proper place in our lives. When we call upon Him, the God who once taught us to love Him is always ready to go over the lesson again. And once He is restored to pride of place, all our other lesser loves fall naturally into their appropriate positions as well. So long as we do not allow love of God’s gifts to distract us from love of the Giver, there is no reason to fear that they will separate us from Him. In fact, a proper love of what is true and good and beautiful may help us avoid those things which threaten our relationship with God.

There is much that is bad and unhealthy without being outright evil. Many books, movies, conversations, images, and thoughts sit just outside the boundaries of objective, clear “wrongness,” just far enough away that we feel justified in partaking. We don’t have to touch what is unclean, but we get used to the smell.

It’s hard to draw clear boundary lines in such cases. When we try, too often we swerve too far in the other direction and become legalists. Like the Pharisees, we “weigh men down with burdens hard to bear,” taking it upon ourselves to remedy the deficiencies in God’s commands. Some movies are bad, so we don’t watch movies. Drinking may lead to drunkenness, so drinking is banned. Dress may be provocative, so women should be unkempt for Christ.

Torn between two negative extremes, how much better to have something excellent for which to aim. I observed earlier that we become what we love; it is worth noting that we also love what we love. And the more we love what is good, the more we hate what is not. When God commands us in Amos, “Hate evil, love good,” He’s actually just repeating Himself. This is why a God of love can also hate, and hate passionately; in fact, a God of love must hate if He truly loves.

Better one love than a hundred laws. A man can try to avoid being drawn into pornography by carefully deciding exactly how many square inches of exposed skin and how provocative a pose it takes to make an image unacceptable – or he can teach himself to love purity and beauty. A woman can draw a flowchart to determine when conversation turns to gossip – or she can cultivate a fierce love for her neighbor. A parent can diagram exactly which words and chords makes music out-of-bounds for his teen – or he can teach him to love music that is good and beautiful. (This is not to suggest that rules are unnecessary. Objective boundaries are often valuable and helpful as we seek to grow in virtue, but without an organic foundation of love we will always end up spilling over into either corruption or legalism.)

It may seem odd to suggest that cultivating a love of botany or astronomy would help a man resist pornography, but that is in fact exactly what I am suggesting. Beauty is beauty and goodness is goodness, whatever form it takes. The more our very soul embraces what is truly beautiful, the more naturally we will respond with revulsion to what is filthy and perverted. Love of one good translates to all others. Show me a man who has cultivated a love of true womanhood, of purity, and of beauty, and I’ll show you a man who will find it far easier to resist the lure of pornography or other sexual impurity.

As Christians, we have every reason to cultivate a love of all that is true, all that is good, and all that is beautiful, for our good God gave us these gifts for our delight and to teach of His nature. This is the world which the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Hidden fathers and the need for competent maleness

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Throughout the ancient hunter societies… and throughout the hunter-gatherer societies that followed them, and the subsequent agricultural and craft societies, fathers and sons worked and lived together. As late as 1900 in the United States about ninety percent of fathers were engaged in agriculture. In all these societies the son characteristically saw his father working at all times of the day and all seasons of the year.

When the son no longer sees that, what happens? After thirty years of working with young German men, as fatherless in their industrial society as young American men today, Alexander Mitscherlich… developed a metaphor: a hole appears in the son’s psyche…

We know of rare cases in which the father takes sons or daughters into his factory, judge’s chambers, used-car lot, or insurance building, and those efforts at teaching do reap some of the rewards of teaching in craft cultures. But in most families today, the sons and daughters receive, when the father returns home at six, only his disposition, or his temperament, which is usually irritable and remote… Fathers in earlier times could often break through their own humanly inadequate temperaments by teaching rope-making, fishing, posthole digging, grain cutting, drumming, harness making, animal care, even singing and storytelling. That teaching sweetened the effect of the temperament…

[T]he father as a living force in the home disappeared when those forces demanding industry sent him on various railroads out of his various villages… When a father now sits down at the table, he seems weak and insignificant and we all sense that fathers no longer fill as large a space in the room as nineteenth-century fathers did.

Robert Bly argues in Iron John that the diminishment of the father’s role in family life is destructive to both daughters and sons, but particularly to the son. With his principal image of manliness reduced to a half-stranger whose regular appearances every evening do little to impact the real life of the family, the son is left with terrible deficiency: “How does he imagine his own life as a man?”

Bly suggests this absence leads to two different types of men. The first “fall into a fearful hopelessness, having fully accepted the generic, diminished idea of father. ‘I am the son of defective male material, and I’ll probably be the same as he is.'” The second type become what Bly calls “ascenders,” striving with a hint of mania to redeem a maleness they do not really know. “The ascensionist son is flying away from the father, not towards him. The son, by ascending into the light, rising higher on the corporate ladder and achieving enlightenment, to some extent redeems the father’s name… Society without the father produces these birdlike men, so intense, so charming, so open to addiction, so sincere, as those great bays of the Hellespont produced the cranes Homer noticed that flew in millions toward the sun.”

What can be done to try to cure this father-deficiency? Well, first we must understand the problem, which goes well beyond mere lack of time spent with the father. After all, throughout history fathers have been busy, off hunting, or farming, or in the shop. So while the quantity of time spent with the father is certainly important, more important are the qualities of the father which are on display during that time.

In the modern family, the competencies of the father are almost entirely centered in a workplace that remains utterly opaque to his children. His experiences, his skills, his struggles, failures, and victories, and the respect of his associates are all hidden from his family.

A few weeks ago, while spending the night at my father’s house I could not help overhearing him leading a conference call in the next room. As I half-listened to him confidently directing colleagues on the other side of the globe, I was struck by the fact that my father is, in fact, quite good at what he does. It’s not that I hadn’t known that before, but the intensity with which I realized it while actually listening to him conduct business – something I’d never done before – was actually quite startling.

Instead of observing their father’s competencies, children are usually treated to a view of him at his most limited, treading more-or-less awkwardly in a realm in which the mother is the expert. (Generalizing to the family structure which remains most common in America, of course.) She knows where things are, what must be done, and how to do it, and, through no fault of her own, quite outshines the father in her command of most domestic situations. The man who might be capable of programming supercomputers, commanding battalions of soldiers, or performing lifesaving operations is reduced to hollering, “Honey, do I need to cover this dish when I put it in the microwave?”

A part of the solution to this deficiency can be found in introducing children to their father’s work, taking them, in Bly’s words, “into his factory, judge’s chambers, used-car lot, or insurance building.” The difficulty, of course, is that many jobs just don’t lend themselves to observation, particularly by children with limited attention spans. Today, I could appreciate my father’s teleconference, but try to sit me down to listen to a lengthy meeting or analyze a spreadsheet back when I was ten, and I probably would have called Social Services. With the exception of a fortunate few, the average worker today faces a similar dilemma. What child would be excited to learn about C++ functions or the intricacies of actuarial calculation?

That being said, the typical office worker should not assume his children would not benefit from some exposure to his work. Seeing where Daddy works and observing the respect of coworkers is not insignificant for a young boy or girl. However, today’s worker usually needs to do more than simply exposing his children to his working environment. This is one of the reasons why I believe it is so valuable for men to cultivate handyman or outdoor skills.

The man who can change his car’s oil, fix a leaky faucet, put up a shed, skin a deer, or gentle a horse has a precious opportunity to display the competence and confidence that his children, and particularly his sons, have such a deep need to experience. There are other venues for displaying ability, of course: through the arts, or community leadership, or technological prowess for example. However, few things can beat simple manual skill to interest and impress children of all ages. (I still chuckle at the memory of two small children standing wide-eyed and on tip-toes next to the bathtub in a friend’s house while I simply changed a showerhead.) Anyone who has observed a little boy trailing along after his father, plastic tools in hand and ready to “help,” knows that herein lies a powerful avenue to a child’s psyche.

Whatever avenue one chooses – and it should be unique to each man and his interests, family, and work – the structure of the modern world means that today’s “hidden” fathers must put extra thought and extra effort into allowing their children to experience a maleness they can respect, appreciate, and, in the case of sons, emulate.

It’s never just self-defense

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I recently had an interesting conversation with my mother in which she commented that she would intervene to defend someone else who was in danger, but wouldn’t feel comfortable using violence to defend herself. She knows I disagree (the exchange was prompted by a weapon on my Christmas wish list…), and with her usual graciousness she agreed that self-defense is morally justifiable. She said she simply felt uncomfortable with it as a personal matter, because the idea of harming another human being solely for your own benefit bothered her.

It is a reasonable argument, but the problem with such a position is that it assumes an act of self-defense only impacts the attacker and the victim, when in reality, like any social interchange, its effects ripple out far beyond those immediately affected.

With the exception of the extremely rare, truly psychotic individual, every criminal makes a cost-benefits analysis before acting, asking himself if the risks of the proposed action outweigh whatever gain he anticipates. It may be nothing more than a subconscious observation that the victim is smaller or alone, but every criminal wonders, “Is this worth the risk?”

The benefit from any one individual’s self-defense accrues to every member of society when it slightly decreases the likelihood that a future attacker answers the question, “Is it worth it?” in the affirmative.

One of the benefits of judicial punishments such as imprisonment or capital punishment is deterrence: the fact that anyone considering a similar crime is given an additional reason to decide it isn’t worth the risk. Deterrence works. It’s why murder rates went up when capital punishment was shelved in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, then declined as the death penalty was again employed. However, the criminal justice system isn’t the first line of deterrence.

Any time an intended victim fights back, they act as a deterrent to future crime. When John Stossel interviewed imprisoned criminals several years ago, they told him their greatest fear was running afoul of armed victims. Study after study has shown that criminals prey on the weak. They don’t want a fight; they want a quick and painless victory. That’s why many would-be attackers flee at the first sign of resistance, or don’t attack at all if the intended target appears alert and prepared. The more doubt a predator feels about the ease of victory, the more likely he is to decide it’s just not worth it.

The homeowner who kills an armed robber, the jogger who stabs a rapist, or the tourist who attacks a mugger have one thing in common: Each one is making it a little less likely that some future innocent will suffer a similar attack, because they’ve just altered the criminal’s cost-benefit analysis in favor of the victim. The individual who chooses to fight back defends not only himself, but also the shadowy ranks of future victims who now look just a bit more menacing to would-be attackers, and are therefore just a bit less likely to be victims afterall.

On marriage as a ‘cure’ for lust

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My earlier post on sexual purity resulted in a suggestion that I read Douglas Wilson’s Fidelity, which I have found rather thought-provoking. I damn with faint praise when I say it is on the whole one of the more sensible books I’ve read on the subject. There are, however, a number of things which I find troubling about the way Wilson approaches and addresses the issue. One particular disagreement is with Wilson’s view – common to most Christian books on purity – of the sexual component of marriage as a “cure” for sexual sin.

Speaking of lust, Wilson calls “a satisfying sexual relationship” the “specific help offered to married men in Scripture… A man who does not have the gift of celibacy, and who is struggling to maintain his purity should get married at the first opportunity.” Later he writes, “Suffice to say for now that masturbation should not be considered as a ‘cure’ for lust in the same way that a good marriage is” (emphasis mine).

In fairness to Wilson, I should note that he clarifies that “getting married is no automatic solution to the problem of lust” and warns husbands against thinking that “marriage simply means free sex.” However, despite these caveats, Wilson and most Christian writers offer a view of sexual satisfaction within marriage that seems most analogous to a fellow with a desperately full bladder racing against time to find an acceptable spot in which to relieve himself.

My objection to this perspective stems mostly from its tone and emphasis, but I believe it is a significant distinction nonetheless. To begin with, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that such an attitude demeans the wife, both on the abstract and the individual level, by directing such a single-minded focus toward her role as a means of sexual satisfaction. More broadly, one’s view of marriage is similarly distorted and diminished when it is viewed primarily as the holy way to have sex.

Now, the counter-objection could be raised that it is true that a man should derive sexual satisfaction from his wife, and that marriage is the proper framework for such a relationship. Yes, but. A piece of the truth taken in isolation can be treacherous. (It is absolutely true that belief in Christ is necessary to escape spiritual death, but an understanding of faith as nothing more than eternal insurance is vitiated to the point of falsehood.) A blinkered view of marriage and the wife which puts primary importance on sexual fulfillment (a primacy that is affirmed implicitly through emphasis, even if never explicitly) offers a similar danger of magnifying a part to the severe detriment of the whole.

A final problem with this view of marriage as a “cure” for lust is its defeatism. In essence, the unmarried man is exhorted merely to fight a delaying action, taking as few losses as he can, until he is able to duck out of battle by way of the church aisle. “Just try not to fall” is the mantra, and the loftiest goal, of the pre-marriage years. Whether or not this is the view of those Christians who proclaim that marriage is a cure for lust (and I suspect that Wilson, for one, would strongly object to such an interpretation of his comments), I believe it is the understanding of the vast majority of the young Christian men who hear them.

The outcome of such a view is twofold. First, and most obvious, is the young man who either stops trying or doesn’t try at all. Faced with such a daunting challenge, he acquiesces to the apparently inevitable. The second result is less clear cut. This is the young man who is more open to compromise, willing to toss little tidbits to his lust to keep it from devouring him before he can escape into marriage. A quick glance where he shouldn’t, a little soft-core pornography, going a little too far with his girlfriend: the sort of “realistic” accommodations one makes to ease a fight that will soon be over. If you know the enemy is pulling out tomorrow, why spend overmuch effort preventing a minor advance today?

Beyond the obvious results of pain and corruption, the tragedy of such a view of sexual purity is what it leaves out: the possibility of real victory and true growth of character borne of the battle for purity before marriage. Like all of creation, our sexual dimension is a corrupted good. Good as originally created, corrupted by our fallenness. Our task on earth is to restore, by the grace of God and as far as we can, our entire beings (sexuality included) to the Rightness – right orientation to God, man, and all creation – that was our original birthright.

In the sphere of human sexuality, the basic outline of the Right is clearly defined. As I wrote in my previous post, “The divine rule as regards sex is fairly simple: It is a good which is to be enjoyed within the bounds of a marriage between a man and a woman. In other words, when humans were invented as sexual beings, that was how sex was supposed to work; what it is designed to be. For a properly-functioning human creature – either male or female – this is what is best. What is natural. What offers highest joy and highest pleasure, in the fullest sense of the words. Anything else can only be corruption and diminution, because that is all that evil can offer.”

Of course, the human creature can be taught to love anything, in sex as in anything else, a fact to which the astonishing variety of fetishism bears ample testimony. And in sex as in anything else, if one wants to learn to love the good, one must choose it. Consistently. Of course, the corruption of our sexuality means that such choices will be difficult – more so for some than for others. Yet, there is hope in the fact that each choice against what is not good is correspondingly a choice for what is good, reducing the draw of that which is corrupt while increasing our capacity for joy in what is truly good.

The consequences of this understanding of sexual purity are significant. First, the battle is transformed from a holding action into one of annihilation. One is not trying to hold lust back, but to destroy it, and in destroying it to raise a new and better love in its place. It is a battle in which real victories can and must be won, though the final victory, in the sense of lust’s total annihilation, will not come in this life.

Second, “minor accommodations” take on a whole new light. If the goal is to teach oneself to love the right, rather than the more typical focus on simply avoiding actual intercourse until marriage, the idea of compromise becomes absurd. One cannot willingly allow small accommodations in order to focus on the most important battle, because to allow those small accommodations is to lose the most important battle. (One might observe further, in light of the effect that our choices have on our soul, that such small compromises are the most effective way to undermine a commitment to avoiding premarital intercourse, but an understanding of the corrupting influence of the compromises themselves renders that point almost irrelevant. The fact that slitting one’s wrists leaves them open to dangerous infection is not the best argument against such a course of action.)

In which I eventually get around to discussing sex and purity

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As I glanced through one of evangelical Christianity’s best-selling books on male sexual purity this afternoon, I was struck anew by the fact that there is something deeply wrong with the way that this most-important of topics is usually addressed. The book’s central message (illustrated with creepily-gratuitous anecdotes of sexual sin), could be summarized, “To be male is to be inevitably drawn to sexual perversity and misconduct by the almost-irresistible force of your masculine sexual energy. Your job as a Christian is to spend the rest of your life holding back the force of this tide, while using your wife to funnel off as much sexual energy as possible to ease the arduous task of maintaining sexual purity.”

Faced with so overwhelming a task, and one so apparently at odds with one’s most basic nature, it is small wonder so many young men don’t bother to try at all; or, if they do try, end up struggling and exhausted by a task made impossibly strenuous by their misunderstanding.

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Any discussion of sexual purity ought to begin, not with sex, but with morality generally. And any discussion of morality must begin with the self, and the effects of our choices and behavior on our self.

By “the self,” I mean that part of me which I most truly and deeply am; that part which is immortal, who I am now and ever will be, eternity without end. It’s a rather sobering thought, this realization that I cannot escape my self. If you mess up your first car, or your first marriage, it is at least possible to get a new one; not so one’s self.

And “mess up” we can, for the self is in a continual state of transition. In fact, the self changes its own nature, by its own choices, like a block of granite come alive to sculpt itself. Every choice I make shapes my self just a little bit, making me not quite what I was before: piling on something new, stripping off something old, changing the shape of what I am by perhaps imperceptible degrees.

Both good and evil become easier with practice, not merely through habituation, but because the doer is making himself more and more the sort of person for whom such acts come naturally. (And “naturally” is exactly the right word, for it is his very nature which is being shaped by his choices.) The man who beats his children, the boy who pulls the wings off butterflies, and the girl who passes along cruel gossip are all following the same blueprint in their self-transformation; the difference is merely one of degree, rather than kind. We cannot help but be shaped by what we do.

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The tragedy of fallen mankind is the downward spiral in which corrupt choices shape corrupted selves whose further choices can only continue the hopeless pattern. Christian morality offers escape from this pattern, holding out the blueprint for right choices – for the choices that will lead to true joy and meaning in right relationship with God and with our fellow humans – while divine grace makes possible those right choices which would otherwise be impossible for our broken selves.

And because right choices, like evil, shape the self, this divinely-enabled right conduct will inevitably result in selves for whom goodness is increasingly pleasant. The man who loves his neighbor because he ought soon finds himself loving his neighbor merely because he does!

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And this brings us back to where we started, on the topic of sexual purity. The divine rule as regards sex is fairly simple: It is a good which is to be enjoyed within the bounds of a marriage between a man and a woman.

In other words, when humans were invented as sexual beings, that was how sex was supposed to work; what it is designed to be. For a properly-functioning human creature – either male or female – this is what is best. What is natural. What offers highest joy and highest pleasure, in the fullest sense of the words. Anything else can only be corruption and diminution, because that is all that evil can offer.

Of course, this means that sexual purity would be terribly easy, if only we were properly-functioning human creatures. Unfortunately, even after turning towards Christ, the process by which we are straightened and restored is a slow and at-times-painful one. In the meantime, in sex as in the rest of our lives, we find ourselves in love with what is lesser, meaner, and lower. The desire is no less real for being unnatural and deathly. Like a falcon that has been taught to seek only rotting carrion, our own corrupted desires betray us.

This is where so many Christians, with the best intentions, fail to make a crucial distinction. When a man views pornography, for example, he is not acting out of a natural masculinity that must be suppressed for the sake of righteousness. Rather, he is dining on rotten, maggoty carrion unawares. And so long as he gluts on what is lower, he is ingraining ever deeper in himself a distaste for what is truly good and an appetite for what is death to him. This is why the excuse, “I’ll stop viewing pornography once I’m married” would be laughable if it were not so tragic. Oh no, he won’t stop, not for long, for he has just spent years making himself exactly the sort of person who needs pornography. Marriage will not – can not – make him a different person than what he has himself created.

However, there is a flip side that offers tremendous hope to those who struggle with sexual sin. For just as choosing what is corrupt cannot help but cultivate one’s appetite for what is lower, so also, choosing – by the grace of God – what is higher will create a love for what is higher and better. (A love which grows more naturally and swiftly because of the goodness of its object.) The man who chooses not to view pornography, or have extramarital sex, or sin sexually in some other way, is not only not sinning at the moment of his choice, but is inexorably making himself the sort of man who loves what is actually good and so will make the right choice tomorrow as well.

None of this is to say that it is easy to be sexually virtuous. Far from it. The choices to which I just so casually referred are agonizingly difficult, particularly in a culture in which most young men are exposed to sexual perversion so early that they have developed a taste for it before they really even understand what it is. “Oh, but God will help me.” Yes, He will. That doesn’t mean the choice will be easy – it means what would otherwise be impossible will be possible. Barely.

It’s a choice that must be made daily, again and again, and one which is particularly difficult initially, as the grooves and pits worn in the self by unnatural appetites are destroyed. However, those who try can know two things: The change is possible, by the grace of God, if we will only choose it. And when the choice is made, it will result in the sort of man who loves what is good; what is natural; what is real.

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