On Being a Man

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 16^th of June, 2002

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
as spring gives way to summer
to lift up our lives, loves, losses and lessons
with music, word and silence.
Come, Truth, show us the luminous places
in our lives, where we fear less and love more.
Bestow us to both memory and hope,
that we may find transforming power
even when we feel powerless at times. And so

(all) may our reason and our passion
keep us true to ourselves, true to each other
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become….

Preface to the Silence [Next] [back to top]

On this day,
a tangle of memories in this room,
a skein of images from the past.
Fathers both present and absent,
Fathers alive and fathers long part of the earth
on which we walk.
Fathers angry or controlling
and fathers' tender and warm.
Fathers with babes in crook of arm,
and fathers on battlefields.
Father's afraid of fatherhood,
and men who wanted to be a father to children,
but could not.
Godfathers and grandfathers,
images of God as father,
both claimed and rejected.
Fathers weeping and fathers stunned
by the behavior of their children.
Father's frustrated and fathers forlorn,
fathers laughing at table
and fathers in law coming to love sons
who are not their own.
Fathers with and without mothers.
Fathers loved and father's scorned.
A thousand images, a thousand memories,
and before each of them,
the silence that is appropriate before
every thing on earth that astonishes us.

Let the silence now flow through us
like warm summer breezes,
and astonish us not just with our memories
but with the wonder that we are here at all,
alive on the earth, a surprising jewel
hanging on the vast abyss of space.

(silence)

Astonished by our lives, and knowing that every day of our life is here with us in some form or another, we set aside a moment when we can call to mind all those men and women, fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, friends and foes who have helped to make us who we are today, with our particular joys and particular sorrows.

These we name aloud in an expression of solidarity or hold quietly in the arms of our heart.

(naming)

Blest is this astonishing moment when singers sing, and vibrations fill the air, when harmonies and beauties and the cooperation of musicians each with each remind us all of what the world could be like if we but got out of our own ways.

First Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from Mark Gerzon's 1982 book A Choice of Heroes: The Changing Face of American Manhood. This was written long before Iron John and all the other books that have been touted as harbingers of the men's movement.

I had a friend in college named Rick. He was never without a tidbit of advice gleaned from his readings of Zen or Sufi masters. He usually arrived at dinnertime at the ramshackle farmhouse that I shared with several friends. Each time he would have a different book under his arm. But never food. He never cooked, never cleaned up, never expressed his thanks to those of us who had done the cooking. It was as if he thought his radiant presence repaid our repeated hospitality.

At the time, Rick irritated me simply because he was a hypocritical freeloader. But now I must admit that his arrogance bothered me so because it exposed my own. The truth is that neither Rick nor I, nor most men, are raised to serve. We are raised to achieve. If anything, our goal is to be served by mothers or wives or secretaries or assistants, by waitresses and stewardesses. We want to be leaders, not servants, heroes, not helpers.

As a boy I attended a Presbyterian church in which service was deemed a Christian virtue. Everywhere else, the preeminent masculine virtues were achievement, toughness, intelligence, and success. In church, I heard the opposite: the meek would inherit the earth. However, the ministers were always men. So was the treasurer. The secretary was a woman. So were the Sunday school teachers.

My friends and I grew up thinking that religion was rather sissy. It wasn't manly to be interested in spiritual matters. A man could say he believed in God, but he shouldn't feel it too deeply. If he did anything to indicate that he was seeking a spiritual path in life, we thought him odd.

After we young men reached puberty, we distanced ourselves from the church. We did not want to be seen in choir robes. Not any more.

The church was lost to me and my male friends because it seemed too tame. We wanted to prove our manhood, and the church offered us no opportunity. It asked only for reverence, compassion and patience, sugar and spice piety. No wonder the church lost us; …it was too soft. We went off to prove our hardness on the baseball diamond, at boot camp or on the job.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] is an excerpt from the late Denise Levertov's amazing poem dating from the early sixties, A Psalm Praising the Hair of Man's Body. This is an unusually sensual poem for a church service, I suppose, by some reckonings, but it's perfect for what I am speaking about this morning.

Husband, thy fleece of silk is black,
a black adornment;
lies so close to the turns of the flesh,
burns my palm-stroke.

Strong legs of our son are dusted
dark with hair.
Told of long roads,
we know his stride.

Hair of man, hair of
breast and groin, marking contour as
silver-point marks in cross-
hatching, as river-
grass on the woven current
indicates ripple,
praise!

Sermon: The Living Tradition [Next][back to top]

Like the young Lakota boy in our childrens' story this morning, I learned a lot about what it means for me to be man from the context of my family and clan, both male and female, both by word and example. And that's where I need to begin this morning.

Now in my family, story time was not at the beginning of the Sunday service, or at the traditional bedtime, but rather, at supper-time. My father, loosened a bit by a Manhattan or two, would regale my mother, sister, brother and me with a hundred stories from his own life. Some of these stories were so funny that my brother Robert and I would make it to the silent shaking stage of laughter, and my sister would rock back and forth, red as a beet with the hilarity.

My father would tell stories from many eras of his life. He would tell tales of his days in the army, for example, like when he and his whole outfit decided to bury a whole tank in a pit because it was not found in their paperwork and the inspection team was arriving the next day.

But then, once we had laughed till we cried, he sometimes would change his tactics and tell us serious, even scary stories. One of the stories he told us more than once was about his work at the great Ford Rouge Plant. His boss publicly ridiculed him for being Catholic and wearing a brown felt scapular around his neck. My father took the abuse daily for a long time, then finally struck out in rage, losing his job at once in those pre-Union days. My father would steam as he told this story, his anger still accessible to him after decades.

And of course, after the laughter and the terror, he would tell wistful stories about his upbringing in urban Detroit, just north of Hamtramack.

Talk about multicultural neighborhoods! The whole immigrant world lived around him, newly arrived Czechs, Serbians, Croats, Slovenians, Poles, and Russians. There were African Americans from the deep South who had come to Detroit to work in the great plants, and there were second generation Irish and Italian kids all around. It was a rough and tumble neighborhood, too. There were plenty of old fashioned bullies to go around, and plenty of fights among the kids who lived on Maine St. near my father's house.

My father one night told of getting a severe licking from a neighborhood bully. He came home with his tail between his legs, crying. My grandfather, (he said as if this was the most ordinary thing in the world), gave him another smack, telling my father to stop sniveling and to grow up like a man and stop crying.

My father laughed about this story. Laughing at the sheer irony of getting a good smack from my grandfather for losing to the bully. I supposed I must have laughed too, although I also remember registering private surprise that my grandpa (whom I thought was the sweetest man on earth) had ever once had such an attitude.

Of course today if such a story is told, no one laughs. They usually speak quietly in the next room about the inappropriateness of such behavior. Others ring their hands in shock, or think about calling some office to make a report. Things have changed a lot in 70 years.

But I cried when I was a kid too. Bullies, after all, never seem to go away, do they? But you know, never once did my father give me a smack when bullies beat me up…for crying about it, losing, or for anything else, for that matter. I made him fume like Mt. Vesuvius plenty, but he never once struck me for any reason.

Which means that deep down my father must not have really thought that what my grandpa did was all that funny or appropriate…he never repeated that behavior, or emulated it.

I think I made him uncomfortable when I cried, but he never belittled me for it, as I remember. I also remember him telling me constantly to "be aggressive." He did not mean that I should go out and hurt people, or some modern version of "go out and hunt mastodons." But, to use a dated phrase, I was to be a go-getter. I was to do whatever I intended to do with intensity and purpose and commitment. In this I think I have fulfilled his charge.

Things have changed since those days. Well, for some people at least. Men's groups of various kinds have gathered to actually talk about what it means to be a man in today's society, to actually go beyond family experiences to see if some fresh understanding of manhood might help throw some light on the confusing age in which we live. Some men gather to talk about how they relate to women and to other men, and to loss and defeat, and to commitment. Others have drummed in the woods with Robert Bly, or official men's support organizations. Some men have taken in, and wrestled with, some of the assertions of feminist philosophy, others have leveled careful critique at those who have distorted feminist insights to poke fun at men, or even dismiss all men as violent or venal by nature in contrast to all women.

Of course, there are others who try hard to maintain the ancient distinctions between men and women, dressing them up in the language of Mars and Venus or other clever but all too simplistic systems. Our office jokes support these simplistic definitions, too. One goes, "Women need to have a reason to have sex. All men need is a place."

But any statement that all men are like this or that is simply false. For example, many things people routinely say about how all men tend to behave simply do not apply to me. Men, heterosexual men, supposedly like to drink beer and watch football on Sundays. I do neither. But I know plenty of gay men who do. Other "truisms," however do seem to apply to me. I really do hate to ask for directions. I really do tough it out medically, and go to the doctor only when the bone is broken in two, no three, places. I really do run from certain forms of housework like some sort of radioactive peril.

However, let me be fair here. I have many male friends and acquaintances, both straight and gay who 1. go to the doctor regularly without having to be nagged or tricked into it; 2. stop and ask for directions the minute they feel lost; and, 3. actually enjoy doing the dishes. My father, for example.

So, to say old clichés actually reflect male behavior is foolish… unless you have actually interviewed and studied hundreds of thousands of men, and no one to my knowledge has done that.

And please don't offer me easy theories about the effects of culture either. You know, Italians cry a lot, and the English don't. This is baloney. I only saw my grandfather cry once, and that was when his brother died. I have seen my father cry more often, but hardly frequently. I, on the other hand, cry as easy as dropping a hat. I even had wet eyes as I watched the film Spiderman this week, a film based on a comic book, for goodness sake. I, my father, and my grandfather were all raised in the same Italian American culture. But we are all at right angles to each other as to how we express ourselves emotionally. So there is no easy out in cultural generalities either.

And does anyone really think reluctance to cry is a true sign of manhood? If so, think again. Jackie Kennedy was clearly a woman, but she was praised lavishly for her tearless "brave" and "dignified" response to her husband's death. Robert Kennedy's widow was accounted weak and undignified because she grieved wildly when her husband died. Were these idiotic commentaries a way of holding women up to some supposed male standard of coolness? Or, might it be, rather, that most of the louder expressions of grief are culturally suspect in our United States blended culture, regardless of sex? I suspect the latter is far more the case.

As I said at the beginning of my sermon, most men learn something of what it means to be a man in their family of origin, as well as in their relationship to the larger culture.

But they also turn from what they learned and observed, just as my father turned from using the same techniques as my grandfather.

And, as Wendy suggested last week in her sermon on being a woman, generalities about gender issues are almost always foolish. I agree. Though I admit that certain studies suggest hormonal underpinnings to some forms of violence, especially in men, I am certainly not convinced that bigotry and violence are "essentially" male. In 1971, actor John Wayne opined that the European settlers needed the land more than those "selfish" Indians (his word) and that our assaults on their way of life were just a matter of, as he put it, "our survival." Will you tell me John Wayne was exemplifying testosterone? Or was his swagger only a form of garden-variety ignorance and human insensitivity, something not one whit different from the ignorant statements which routinely froth out of the mouths of Laura Schlessinger or Phyllis Schlafly?

Oh, of course, there are differences between men and women that are quantifiable. I'm talking biology here, hormones and genitals and secondary sexual characteristics. For example, when my family was doing the requisite visit to Washington D.C. to see the monuments and government centers, my sister had her first period. She didn't even know it was happening, but my younger brother noticed that she had ample blood on her pink pant suit as we entered the Washington monument. My mother whisked her off faster than I thought either of them could move, and they spent the day talking about what this meant. And every month thereafter, my sister, as a female, experienced something in her body for which there really is no comparable male experience.

There are hundreds, no thousands of poems and books about the biology of women, the mysteries of pregnancy and the rhythms of the moon as reflected in the female body.

There are no comparable poems about what boys experience as they grow up into men. The only poem I could find that celebrated a secondary sexual characteristic of men was one written by a woman, Denise Levertov, a portion of which you heard this morning. I have found few writings except among peripheralized radicals, which speak gladly of male coming-of-age experiences in the body. There is no monthly calling-within for me, no starting and stopping of my ability to give birth. As a male, I can only give birth metaphorically, to an idea, or a concept. My mind is my womb.

I think it would be remarkable if men could begin to change that, begin to speak of the changes in their bodies that begin to mark them man, not boy, even if these things seem at first more subtle than the changes in a woman. Certainly part of what it means to be a man is clearly and concretely biological, and this needs far more work.

Is there anything innately masculine? Is there a masculine spirit, essence? Some would say so. But I am not so sure.

I do not think there are any innate sensitivities or insensitivities in all men. But I do think that many men were raised with certain sensitivities and insensitivities. Men are not usually raised "to serve others," says Mark Gerzon in the first reading, reflecting on his friend Rick's reluctance to help cook and clean their shared house. Instead, Gerzon affirms, men are most often raised to achieve. I think there is some truth in that. (Exceptions noted.)

Gerzon's reflections on his Presbyterian Church childhood moved me the most. "Toughness, achievement, intelligence and success,"…these are "manly" goals, he says. The church proclaimed a softer message:… humility, gentility, and service, values often culturally associated with women or with passivity. And spiritual or emotional relationship to divinity or humanity left many men kind of skittish and embarrassed. So, many left the church, turning it into the bailiwick of women. "The church" was just "too tame" for these men.

Gerzon wrote later, "When I showed my friend Jim, who is a minister, an early draft of this chapter, he was struck by my self-evasion." 'There is a lot of information in here, Mark; but where are you? It seems to me you are still stuck in your rebellion against Sunday school. When you couldn't believe in the grandpa-type God they showed you, you decided you weren't interested in religion. But religion is not just what happens in church. It is whatever moves you deeply, whatever your deepest loyalties are."

"Jim's words," concludes Gerzon, "revealed to me why I had been stuck for so long. The church taught me to divide the world into those who believe in God and those who don't. In fact, every man has his gods, his deepest loyalties. Whether we call them God is not as important as whether we truly know what our deepest loyalties are. They are the ultimate image of manhood, the essence of heroism."

These are illumination words, I think, deeply insightful. My loyalties define my manhood. What John Wayne valued is not what I value, for the most part. He is not my hero. But I am just as much a man as he was. Grandfather gods, grandfather heroes, as well as untarnished images of real grandpas like my own, will always fade. Always. Such change is inevitable. But I do not have to claim faded heroes. I can choose new heroes. I can chose fresher, more honest loyalties.

Thus, there are no reasons to be ashamed to be a man.

I do think that modern men have decisions they can make, and that manhood does not, and cannot, have a future form entirely bound by tradition, inertia, or inherited culture. The world is too precious, too valuable, to leave in the hands of the John Wayne type of hero, who experiences his own entitlement as his deepest loyalty, his highest god.

Crying is neither particularly masculine or feminine. Stoicism is neither masculine or feminine either. There are no simple Mars/ Venus answers to any of the questions raised by our struggles to understand our respective, or even various, genders. I say this last thing because there are many trans-gendered people in this world as well as women or men from birth.

What I am saying is that men do not have to stop at a gas station as soon as they are lost to prove that they have embraced a more enlightened form of manhood. Frankly, I enjoy figuring things out for myself, and that is not likely going to change.

The young Lakota boy in our story this morning learned what it meant to be a man in one way. I learned in other ways. And women learn about what it means to be a woman in a thousand unique ways. In the end, what is important to me is that each of us, whatever our gender, find ways to develop loyalties that will renew our humanity, lessen our resentments and prejudices, and deepen our lives so that the earth itself might be renewed by the way we chose to live our lives.

Aestival Prayer [back to top]

Now the northern forehead of the earth
tilts toward our star, and there is more light
now than in winter.

More light.

What was it that Camus said?
"In the midst of winter I feel within me
an invincible summer."

Wasn't summer therefore,
for Camus, more than a season for berries and lakeside?

Wasn't it an internal tilting toward all that is good,
gracious and true?

So be it. May we also turn toward
what light there is that bids us grow and ripen.

Let our loyalties be to you, O Love Unknown
and Unbegun, that together we might
bring a summer invincible to our spirits,
and come to fruition in good season.

Come, summer, come.

[back to top]
 

First UU Church Home | Church Newsletters | First UU Staff | Sermons | Elected Officers
Email Mark | Email the Church Office | Email the Webmaster

Last update: 02/02/2003