Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Be A Man
Dan at Cerulean Sanctum is "
So, when a woman sticks her head up and acts "all liberated," I for one am going to go away with my toys. I am not going to challenge her. I am supposed to defer to her.
Rites of passage have largely gone away because women found them "barbaric." "Well, sure honey, whatever you say."
My point is this - I don't think men CAN reassert themselves until women are willing to lay down, just a little. Men don't do conflict with women - to do so denies the biggest part of us that is a man.
So, I don't think the church needs to reassert rites of passage. I think the church need to reassert God's designed order for men and women. Women need to learn how to be women, not try and act like men.
Now, I can hear my PCA brethren ask me how I can be PC(USA) if I feel this way. Well, just because I think women should be able to be elders, does not mean I think very many of them will take up the offer. I think a female perspective is valuable and should be heard. But I also think that if women were raised to be genuine women, not many of them would want to play in that arena.
Anyway, back to the point. If men and women are properly balanced, I think the rest of it will take care of itself.
Still Looking for a Few Good Men"When I was growing up, there was a sense among all the men that they had a responsibility to boys, even those who were not their own sons. Call it that “tribal” feeling—that men, all men, were charged with ensuring the next generation grew up straight and true, into better men than the generation that spawned them.I think Dan is on to something here. Rites of Passage matter, but they are not the whole story. Later in his post he says:
God help us—what happened to that ideal?
Back when I was at Wheaton, I wrote a paper on a thesis of my own devising concerning the implications of the loss of rites of passage within the Church.
[...]
That rite meant something. When you successfully navigated it, the world changed. Adults expected more of you. You could sit on church boards and make decisi0ns along with the rest of the adults. And the men in the church treated you like one of their own.
I’d like to think that I was one of those old school guys, like the kind I used to know. But I’m not really. I realize that the ideal started fraying with my generation, that we were the first boys that had an uncertain manhood awaiting us. Feminism was on the march, the drug culture was firing up, and so was the culture of privilege and entitlement. Somewhere along the way, manhood did a nosedive and has not recovered. [emphasis added]I don't think men have gone away, they have just gone into hiding. You see, part of being a man is not to strike a woman - physically or emotionally, or spiritually. Real men defer to women, they always have and they always will. It is ingrained in us, it has to be. It is so easy for any of us to overpower a woman that it is near instinctive not to.
So, when a woman sticks her head up and acts "all liberated," I for one am going to go away with my toys. I am not going to challenge her. I am supposed to defer to her.
Rites of passage have largely gone away because women found them "barbaric." "Well, sure honey, whatever you say."
My point is this - I don't think men CAN reassert themselves until women are willing to lay down, just a little. Men don't do conflict with women - to do so denies the biggest part of us that is a man.
So, I don't think the church needs to reassert rites of passage. I think the church need to reassert God's designed order for men and women. Women need to learn how to be women, not try and act like men.
Now, I can hear my PCA brethren ask me how I can be PC(USA) if I feel this way. Well, just because I think women should be able to be elders, does not mean I think very many of them will take up the offer. I think a female perspective is valuable and should be heard. But I also think that if women were raised to be genuine women, not many of them would want to play in that arena.
Anyway, back to the point. If men and women are properly balanced, I think the rest of it will take care of itself.
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