I ve written something for the occasion. I don t have any jokes for you. this evening. What I have to say is serious, and I m confident that you will

Transcription

1 1 "ΑΝΔΡΙΖΕΣΘΕ Quit ye like men (1 Cor. 16:13, King James) Address to the Annual Dinner of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen November 22, 2015 Rev. Charles B. Gordon, C.S.C. The Garaventa Center The University of Portland I ve written something for the occasion. I don t have any jokes for you this evening. What I have to say is serious, and I m confident that you will give me a hearing. Our identity as males begins with an inconsolable grief. In our infancy, at the first moment that it occurs to us that we are male, we are hammered with the psychological consequences of the terrible realization that in becoming male, we must become something that our mother is not. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde writes, All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That s his. I don t presume to say whether Wilde is right about women, but he s right about men. Whether you are straight or, like Wilde, gay, your masculine identity began with a tragedy. It began with a profound feeling of alienation from the one who first loved and nurtured you. This necessary alienation from our mothers is felt psychologically as a rejection, even as a betrayal, and the experience shapes the persons we become. If you ever have the experience of being loved unreservedly by a woman, you will come to realize that her love for you has a different quality than the love you have to offer in return. There is an aweinspiring, almost frightening, depth and richness to a woman s love. Even if you love her whole-heartedly, even if you are eager to pledge your

2 2 future to her, even if you would willingly lay down your life for her, you will come to be aware that your love is a shadow of her love for you. That s why St. Paul urges men to love their wives. (Col. 3:19) Obeying them comes relatively easily to us. As men, we understand obedience. We can do obedience. But to love a woman with a love that is remotely analogous to the love she bears for us that s hard. It s hard because in the depths of our being there is a feeling that we ve been betrayed before. The origin story of our masculinity teaches us that love can t be trusted. It isn t what it purports to be. Anger is perhaps the emotion most associated with masculinity. Male anger is a powerful, terrifying thing. But male anger is a symptom of something deeper. It s caused by a primal grief for intimacy lost and betrayed. In our heart of hearts, we weep. Our deep-seated suspicion of the trustworthiness of intimacy has other consequences for us. We feel in-built reservations toward truth claims of any kind. We tend to hold at arms-length any all-embracing system that purports to invest life with meaning, purpose and value. At some level we shy away from religions and ideologies, even those we profess. However avidly we declare our allegiance to God or country, something in us says, Okay, fine, but remember, we ve been burned before. This ambivalence toward anything that claims our unqualified adherence may undergird our masculine passion for individual freedom. It may be behind the commitment issues so often associated with our gender. It is also reflected in traditional parenting roles. The mother s role has been to teach her children to obey the rules. Their father s role has been to teach them that rules sometimes need to be broken.

3 3 In light of all this, the classic male stance toward the world is ironic. Irony comes easily to us. Perhaps the most striking example of is this is the phenomenon of camp. The camp aesthetic is most associated with gay male culture. Campiness chooses some particularly crass, naive affirmation of traditional values, for instance an old-fashioned romantic song pledging eternal love, and celebrates it, while at the same time subjecting it to withering ironic critique. The pain behind camp is palpable. Concomitant with the ridicule is regret. It s as if the practitioner of camp were saying, If only it were all true, but my aching heart tells me it s not. Suffering has been transmuted into art. (Of course, gay male experience is characterized by layers of alienation in addition to the primal male experience I ve been discussing.) As we have seen, the feeling of betrayal at the taproot of male identity makes it impossible for us to accept affirmations of truth, purpose and meaning at face value. This characteristic of male psychology is encapsulated in Jean Paul Sartre s dictum that being precedes essence. Sartre insists that no already existing set of truth claims can give me identity and purpose. All I really know is that I m alive (for the moment), and that I m free. The only way I am ever going to have meaning in my life is if I create it by my own free choices. Men are meaning-makers. We decide what will have meaning for to us, and make it matter by force of will. This can be seen even in the way we spend our leisure time. Some of us become incredibly invested in hobbies. Grown men develop a depthless passion for electric trains or John Deer tractors. The masculine love of sports provides the quintessential example. Perplexed women ask, How can you possibly care so much about sports? They re only games.

4 4 They just don t matter! The unspoken male response is, And how, exactly, does that make them different from anything else? In light of all of this, how can you be a good man? Let s begin with what you shouldn t do. First, don t pride yourself on noticing that truth claims aren t what they re cracked up to be. If you don t shave for a week, hair will grow on your face. Your in-built reservations about ideologies, and your beard, are of equal value as marks of distinction. They re both simply part of being male. A sense of smug superiority at seeing through pretense is about as admirable as being proud of your sideburns. Your real distinction will be based on what you manage to affirm in the face of your reservations. Second, don t punish others for the ache in your heart. Don t let alienation be an excuse for fecklessness. Don t inflict real world abandonment and betrayal on others as a consequence of a feeling that is a psychological artifact of a necessary pre-rational stage of development. Don t use the suspicion that nothing really matters as a justification to use others to gratify your baser instincts. Don t exploit vulnerability, trust or innocence in others to try to make yourself feel better. In the end, to do so will only make you despise yourself with reason. That s enough don ts. Now what should you do? First, acknowledge that the feeling that the world is meaningless and that love is untrustworthy doesn t mean that either is. Your mother didn t mean to hurt you. She loves you, with a love that has an intensity and richness that you can t begin to understand. Her love for you is the most real, the most dependable, thing in your world. Treasure her, whether in life or in memory. This will not make your pain and feelings of alienation go away.

5 5 They are the inevitable scar tissue of the process that made you male. What matters is what you do with them. Second, employ your innate tendency to question the claims of authority, in the cause of justice. By all means, criticize pompous, selfserving rhetoric and question baseless assertions. But do so not as an expression of fashionable cynicism, but as a means of bringing about real change for the better. Finally, dare to love. Make your pain a wellspring of empathy and a spur to virtue. Suffering has been part of the fabric of your being from the beginning. Choose to suffer for others. In this you may take Christ as your model, or, if you ve been fortunate, your father. My father suffered from a painful, debilitating illness during the last decades of his life. Nevertheless, he had a wife to love and a large family to support. So early every morning, he got out of bed, put on a business suit and trooped downstairs and out the front door to work. All of us children remember lying in bed, listening to the distinctive rhythmic clatter of the heels of his dress shoes on the stairs as he left home each day. We all marveled at the change that came over him when he took a business call at home. However sick and weak he was, by the time he got to the phone he managed to speak into it with a crisp business-like assertiveness that could bring tears to our eyes. He was a man a meaning-maker. He had decided what mattered to him, and he accomplished it by force of will. He suffered manfully, and in the process created a space for us in which we could be safe and grow and learn what love is. I pray that you, and I will do the same for those entrusted to us. Perhaps you are not convinced by my argument about the ultimate source of masculine suffering. I can only tell you what I believe to be

6 6 true. But even if I m wrong about its origins, the pain and alienation are unquestionably real. What will you do with yours?