I started writing this post in a kilt. The traditional garb of the Gaelic warrior. I felt a connection to those long faded memories of warriors. The Scots fought in WWII in their kilts and routed Germans in their fierceness. They fought off the English for years in the cold highlands of Scotland.
I did several Google searches for "kilt" and found it fascinating.
Until very recent men wore unbifubricated garments and in some countries they still do, just not in America (the western hemisphere).
No I don't have a camo kilt. It's a
utilikilt mocker.
Our youth today are bombarded with sex. It's has worked its way into everything around us. It drives advertising, whether it is overt, or subtle. We also want to sanitize our gender play. No guns, dolls and dress up are for both boys and girls. We can't accept that we are
inherently wired completely different. Girls want to
nurture and boys want to hunt and conquer. By the way, that's no girly man in the picture, that's all masculine man competing in a Scottish games.
This is our confusion.
How do we clarify?
Well as I wore my kilt and let the visions of Celtic and Scottish warriors battle an intriguing idea came to me. We as a church have not come to the place where we celebrate boyhood and manhood. Do we take time as men to interact with the boys, man-to-male? Do we mentor them? Who teaches the boys at church? Men? Or is it a few dedicated older ladies? How about our teen boys. At the time they most need men and are stumbling along fledging away from their parents, who is reaching out to them? When they come of age, do we celebrate their manhood? Many cultures have a coming of age celebration. The Jewish boys have a bar miztva. The Aborigines have a walk-about. The Native Americans had a vision-quest.
Perhaps we need to reach into our deep past and create a modern-day celebration of manhood.
Here's some interesting links about rites of passage:
Circle of Life and
Rite of passage. I do not necessarily espouse their beliefs or opinions.
I just finished reading Jon Krakauer, "Where Men Win Glory" a biography of Pat Tillman. "Pat Tillman walked away from a multi-million dollar NFL contract to join the Army and became an icon of post 9/11 patriotism. When he was killed in Afghanistan two years later, he became a tool for the White House propaganda. Thus a legend was born. But the real Pat Tillman was much more remarkable, and considerably more complicated, than the fiction sold to the public."
Spoiler alert: This is a raw telling of war and life in war. It as much a political statement against the American leadership at the time as a biography.
Krakauer quotes Lee Harris' "The Suicide of Reason" in the post script.
"The problem is not that Fukuyama is dead wrong; the problem is that he is half right. Unfortunately for us, the wrong half. In the West, we are perilously getting down to our last man. Liberal democracy, among us, is achieving the goal that Fukuyama predicted for it: It is eliminating the alpha males from our midst, and at a dizzyingly accelerating rate. But in Muslim societies, the alpha male is still alive and well. While in America we are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin, the Muslims are doing everything in their power to encourage their boys to be tough, aggressive, and ruthless... We are proud if our sons get into a good college; they are proud if their sons die as martyrs."
What do we want for our boys? Good college and a comparable lifestyle, or do we need to shun the status quo and foster in our boys adventure, courage, discipline, ruggedness and devotion to follow God's call, even to martyrdom?
