"The way a man's life unfolds nowadays tends to drive his heart into remote regions of the soul. Endless hours at a computer screen, selling shoes at the mall, meetings, memos, phone calls. The business world - where teh majority of American men live and die - requires a man to be efficient and punctual. Corporate policies and procedures are designed with one aim: to harness a man to the plow and make him produce. But teh soul refuses to be harnesse; it knows nothing of Day Timmers and deadlines and P&L statements. The soul longs for passion, for freedom, for life. As D. H. Lawrence said, "I am not a mechanism." A man needs to feel the rhythms of the earth; he needs to have in hand something real - the tiller of a boat, a set of reins, teh roughness of rope, or simply a shovel. Can a man live all his days to keep his fingernails clean and trim? Is that wat a boy dreams of?
Society at large can't make up its mind about men. Having spent the last thirty years redefining masculinity into something more sensitive, safe, manageable and, well, feminine, it now berates men for not being men. Boys with be boys, they sigh. As though if a man were to truly grow up he would forsake wilderness and wanderlust and settle down, be at home forever in Aunt Polly's parlor. "Where are all the real men?" is a regular fare for talk shows and new books. You asked them to be women, I want to say. The result is a gender confusion never experienced at such a wide level in the history of the world. How can a man know he is one when his highest aim in is minding his manors?"
John Eldredge
