Imagine deep within your soul you want to give gifts to the world..but then life happens and you get tired.
Imagine having the passion of a Content Creator but not knowing how to put your thoughts into words.
What am I protecting? Is this modesty.. its own form of honesty?
In order to be a popular platform poster you need to “post every day” or at least a few times a week.
Ah
That might not work then.
Where is the passion I’m looking for? Where is the spirituality I once had or the zeal for living life as if this life is a rare commodity?
How do I take life for granted so much? How do I lounge in carefree boredom narcolepsy or not? Am I pregaming my midlife crises, getting ready for it, double fisting it?
Seems like a me thing to schedule such a thing rather than to be surprised by it.
Well why on earth am I surprised that there’s no element of surprise when I feel like I already know what the book of my life is about..like God and I deliberated and threw the book at me?
Sometimes I feel like I have some crystal ball or a blueprint to my life in my subconscious mind. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want the left hand to know what the right hand is doing. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of watching my movie from the outside.
Life and the enjoyment of life seems rather to be that the eyes and the ears and the nose would hear, see and smell what is here or at least whatever senses we have available to us. So strange that even Spiritual Doctors have remarked on sense “All knowledge comes through the senses.” Good job St. Thomas Aquinas for being like the Doubting apostle in your search for faith. I feel that heartily.
So there is that darkness in the soul of understanding (nous) to wit my life gives reference that I keep remembering that I don’t know and I do know. Part of me know my spirit though living in my body and not separate has separate agencies, faculties and ‘abilities’. I find it hard to be a gnostic because I’m an earthen vessel and yet though trying not to be “too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good” I find myself trapped between worlds, like a ghost with a preternatural stain on the ink blot tests of the collective unconscious of this age.
In my heart I watch kingdoms rise and fall revolutions turn and the sun set many a year. The ages of time acquiesce to an Apocalyptic dance that never seems to end. All of this is beautiful and is a verdict to my and the worlds mortality. I hope that I can learn lessons of this knowing that “the spirit gives life and the flesh is of no avail.” so that perhaps life can come to my dry bones again.
In the wake of the hideous, evil and racially motivated shootings of Asian women that we have all seen in the news these past weeks I have an important message not about sex addiction and not solely about the primary issue here of racism (both important and necessary subjects to discuss but nonetheless) I am here to write about toxic masculinity vs true masculinity.
As my sources are eclectic and draw from many sources per usual I would like to talk about how the sexist and insecurity based instincts of toxic masculinity are opposed to genuine masculinity from a variety of sources both sacred and secular, how they feed into sexual neuroses and how they even feed into racism throughout history.
Toxic masculinity is proof in the pudding for where St. Peter in the Bible warned that certain passages of Paul the unstable of mind could contort, wrend and distort to their own destruction.
Toxic masculinity is easy to see.
How many times in a tragic southern gothic did the abusive alcoholic husband demand unflinching loyalty from his wife out of the piecemeal interpretation of “Wives submit yourselves unto your husband. ” and entirely did that character also ‘ignore’ “Husbands love your wives even as Christ loved the Church giving Himself up for her. “?
How many times in history did we hear of the southern plantation owner who was already treating humans like cattle also treating the women as his objects of sexual gratification as well?
People like to try and neatly separate different qualities of moral/ ethical or phenomenological experience as if all causality is referential and scientific. There may be reason for deep thinking about this but existentially one must learn to discern the difference of good will and corrupted or bad will.
To explain I might say it simply. I believe the shootings were racially motivated that happened recently.
However some opposite my opinion might object that the person “was not right in the head”, “sexually addicted” and “deranged”.
Ok well I’d respond that I think every person who is racist IS deranged but I don’t think everyone who mentally has difficulties or perhaps even who struggles with ‘sexual compulsive behavior disorder’ is of a necessity a bad person or even deranged for that matter. Many people of good will fight imbalanced and excessive sexual urges and impulses or negative thought patterns without murdering people or sexually harassing others..the difference shouldn’t be too hard to highlight.
Where are you going on with this sir?
~To the roots.~
In my opinion racism and even much of the problems of sexual addiction can be traced to wounded or toxic masculinity.
The stigma towards those struggling with mental illness or merely experiencing non neurotypical wiring is already too overkill. In the experience of many kind nonneurotypical people the excuse of insanity is used far too many times by someone who shot a bunch of innocent people while the usual person with mental struggles is struggling with decision making, sensory issues and inhibitions to executive function in the negative or obsessively applying their mind to a project, special skill, radically excessive moralization or special interest in the positive. The average neurodiverse person or the person with mental illnesses is usually actually a person with ‘exacting’ fortitude of moral will. That is why so many of us don’t easily buy it when someone with much premeditation uses their will to breathe terror upon the innocent.
Racism is often a generational curse. It’s passed down through effigies, epithets, tits for tats, nic nacs, this and thats ‘and all that’s and I’ve rarely seen racism come without toxic masculinity.
{Photo: “Could there be Earth” by me James Dillon Broxson all rights reserved. Email shastat78@gmail.com for more info. }
“I’ve rarely seen racism come without toxic masculinity. “
What could be more toxic than seeing your ethnic conception of being a man as the absolute center in a universe/ potential multiverse so vast? David the Jewish king and prophet said it well “What is man that you think of him or the Son of Man that you pay him mind?” and continuing on paying homage to the Hebraic conception of angelic beings he states that man ‘one of whom he is’ is a little lower than they.
So here is David, extremely imperfect man that he is who had indeed also participated in intertribal wars and adultery and who handed more hides to the men that owned them than Gaston.. and yet even he at the depths when confronted with a holy G-d realizes that he is not all that matters. Far from it David the sexual deviant, patriarch and saint realises a truth that not only desecrates the mores of tribe central religious nationalism but even attacks man’s inherent speciestic religious bias.
Respect, for those who tread litely in this life so subsists in treating the other as a messenger of God and even perhaps other creatures like Balaams donkey or even as much as to be healed by a serpent on a pole.
How much more must we then intrepidly, as if we were communicating with ultra powerful spiritual beings be reverent and still in the presence of other humans of the many beautiful and varied ethnicities and cultures!?
And yet still many go astray. They ignore that the scriptures were written for our instruction so that we may not sin like our fathers did.
And of course many, falsely construing respect for their fathers as ignoring their fathers sin have decided not to shake that which underpins toxic streams in life which perhaps Source, ergo G-d would be willing to shake. Wrongly covering others sins often is equivalent to hiding a spiritual cancer diagnosis.
Jesus my Hebrew messiah as I believe Him to be was admittedly anti racist and I would definitely say He came to destroy toxic masculinity at its depths.
In Christ we see a tender father son relationship.. one that many men only crave and think is untenable if not contradictory to the faux masculinity hazing they received from their fathers
In Christ the celibate male preacher, Prophet and Teacher we see one so solidly rooted in his identity and intimacy with His Father that he was intellectually, emotionally and sensitively fulfilled, satiated and centered in righteous masculinity as opposed to toxic masculinity.
Me and my daughter.
In my life the pandemic turning me into a full time stay at home dad has felt like putting me on the frontlines in the war on toxic masculinity. Though the stigma of being the stay at home dad is lessening compared to 8 to 10 years ago it still exists and many men are made to feel less than masculine because they are not the ordinary bread winner or because they embody qualities that traditional mysogony see as feminine estate (kindness, compassion, child rearing and teaching etc). I would be lying if my personal encounter/ battle with the subliminal messages of the surrounding culture of said toxic masculinity has never been mentally draining. It takes a lot of security to be secure in your self and having your security based in Christ like virtues of mercy and compassion rather than might makes right and subsequent rejoicing in social darwinism.
During this Lenten season whether you are Christian or not or even perhaps a secular minded person, please join in with me in eschewing evil paths that toxic masculinity plows. It is not the path to the cultivation of manhood! It is not the sacred initiatory rites which our souls rightfully crave! Toxic masculinity is a vicious cycle that supports racism, objectification of women and others in general. If we want to truly make a better world as men we need to stake our masculinity in the Christ like virtues of compassion and mercy and listen to the words of Mary and ” Do whatever He tells you.”
Musings of a Picture Frame Conversationalist. 