Hello, good men

Rod, I think this vector, though worthy, is not directing itself at a modern phenomenon. A UWash sociologist suggests that more and deeper female involvement in religion is found across all faiths, all denominations. Is it nature? Nurture? Either way, it seems to be part of the territory of the religious and spiritual life.

If I were inclined to be snarky, I'd say real men don't need permission or clergy role models to be men in church. But if I wanted to get serious, I might expand my view from a self-reinforcing notion that feminism, feelings, or other modern non-conservative notions of relationships are the only factor in play. I think that if we were to look at any single factor, it would be the father's example in religion. This would seem to go along with the lines of the sense that many boys are being left behind in academics. Father who read to their children, and who are seen by their sons as being interested in the intellect, will be better equipped to pass on a respect for and love of learning.

I suspect we need more father who take their kids to church. Simple as that. And I'm not sure we can blame parishes for not having opportunities for "doing." The Catholic Church provides any number of opportunities for people to "do" religious things: feed the hungry, sing in choir, coach sports, visit the elderly and clean up their yards, or do any number of physical, get-off-your-butt, turn-the-tv-off kind of activities. If any of my male parishioners told me there was too much fluff at my church, I'd have to consider they were kidding, and I'd be inclined to laugh out loud.

Cassocks, fiddlebacks, lack surplices: yep, those pre-conciliar Catholics had it all over us for manliness.

Btw, post-conciliar Catholicism isn't the first historical setting for this phenomenon. Ann Douglas's controversial classic The Feminization of American Culture deals with this process in Protestantism in the Northeastern US during the first few decades of the 19th century. With the decline of old, New England Calvinism, ministers reformulated the faith into sentimental constructs. The composition of their congregations became much more heavily female. Ministers and women engaged in the joint venture of working on their men through moral suasion and sentimental appeals. (Not a pretty picture, in Douglas' opinion; her book is controversial in part because, for a feminist, she seems awfully found of the good old days with patriarchal Calvinist preachers who clanked when they walked into the meeting house, so to speak.)

"In many ways that’s what the Tridentine Mass was. "

Yup-- that is what we old farts keep trying to say. The new disposition may get me back to church yet....

Why has Eastern Christianity been more resistant to the foppification that's crippled Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism? You probably could boil it down to "No Marty Haugen" and not be too far afield.

Any one piece of Haugen lounge lizardry is probably as fine a summation of what bedevils the Western Church as you'll find, and it's set to a ditty that will stick in your mind, rubbing your synapses raw until you want to throw yourself into a giant bonfire, trying desperately to make it stop -- SWEET JESUS MAKE IT STOP! MERCY! MERCY! LORD HAVE MERCY!!! -- but it won't and the torment just continues and never ends and you cannot be granted the tender mercy of death.

But you'll never forget why the Church is hosed, now, will you?

www.revolution21.org

http://revolution-21.blogspot.com/

The Reformed Episcopal church I attend has a pretty good balance of men and women. One thing that I think is a key to this is that -- by contrast with TEC practice -- a lot of roles in the church are male only. Only men serve as bishops, priests, lay readers, and chalice bearers; the acolytes are boys exclusively. Lots of male responsibility. And lots of strong old hymns. You can be very manly wearing cassock and cotta when you're singing Ein Feste Burg.

I've discussed this topic on my own wee little blog a few times (http://rjak.livejournal.com/), and I largely agree with Rod's points. One of the things I like most about my Catholic parish is the balance it strikes between masculinity and femininity (avoiding such hysterical rants as Daniel went on above). We've got both a men's & a women's house of discernment for young people, both well-populated, we've got numerous ministries that attract all sorts, our Eucharist adoration group provides challenging talks and silent adoration, and our liturgy is full of the mystical transcendence Rod so rightly commends.

For the life of me, I do not see why it is so very difficult for people to accept the fact that masculine spirituality should be appealed to in church (just like feminine spirituality should!). I am not troubled if you choose to pray with a divine mercy icon, but as for myself, I will pray with Christ Pantocrator, and I'll thank the feminists to leave me alone in so doing. I don't object to a priest discussing the love of Christ, even the spousal love of Christ for His Church - such things should be preached! But I fail to see the trouble with also reminding us that Christ, in this love, ascended the Cross as a conquering hero, "trampled down death by death," and crushed the skull of Satan. These are all important aspects of the divine nature, and to choose to exclude one or the other is artificial and ultimately does injustice to God.

For someone who is attached at the mental hip to "the good old days," ya sure to view them through rose-colored glasses, Erin.

Go back and read what Daniel *wrote* instead of what you wanted it to mean when you read it.

~tv, if Daniel would have read my post instead of using it as a jumping off place for a rant about drunken Irish priests and how "masculine" means "hysterically homoerotic" (did you actually mean that, Daniel, or did you mean "homophobic"? I couldn't tell, reading the sentence), then maybe your complaint would be justified (though the mental hip comment was quite uncalled for; I've never had a particularly rosy view of the past, and I have an equally unrosy view of the present, with a so-not-rosy-as-to-be-that-ugly-shade-of-brownish-maroon view of the future; if anything, I'm an equal opportunity pessimist when it comes to the world and its ugliness).

And I'm not denying there were drunken priests, womanizing priests, and drunken womanizing priests (though unless your parents grew up in Ireland, Daniel, I'd wonder if *all* such priests were really the progeny of the Emerald Isle; I've personally known plenty of drunken womanizing men who hail from other countries, so it seems odd that only the Irish drunken womanizers would end up wearing the cloth). What I'm denying is that "blue-collar" is somehow code for "drunken womanizer." I know a few blue-collar guys, and some of them are even more likely to look down on the s.o.b.s who can't hold their liquor and regularly cheat on their wives than some of the white-collar people I've known. In other words, socio-economic status is hardly a measure of how moral someone will be, and implying that it is a foregone conclusion that blue-collar priests will all be drunken womanizers is pretty hysterical, and pretty unfair to the blue-collar men out there who aren't actual scum.

Cleveland, not *all* of us women like the musical tripe that's served up each week. :) And I've been known to prefer a darned good theological homily myself, from time to time. (The only times as a woman I was less than appreciative of a really scholarly homilist was when our three girls were all under age three--it's like attending Mass with tiny time bombs strapped to your body, so any homily that lasted more than twenty minutes tended to lose my full attention, so to speak.)

The process of returning the Mass to what it should be will take time, but it's eminently worth doing.

Both the Catholic Churches I have attended recently have a reasonable numner of men. At my Parish mass attendance is probably 35-45% male. At another Church I went to attedence is about 50-50. That Church is also the most diverse one I have been to. They have a great Gospel choir. All the musicians are men and close to half the singers.

Another thing that may be drawing men in, if the thesis is correct, is that both churches have had visiting Priests from Africa. They have all been wonderful speakers but there is nothing touchy-feely about them. It is the first time in a long time I have heard Priests mention sacrifice, moral decisions and behavior in an unambiuous way.

I don't know if bad music is something particularly related to women (look at who wrote much of the bad Catholic liturgical music - mostly men). I also don't know why the message of a loving relationship with Jesus is something that men should not aspire for (St. Francis and St. Bernard wrote and preached much on this subject). At the same time, I do think there is something to this issue.

I've always wondered if the culture wars are the crusades of the late 20th/early 21st century. A masculine expression of Christianity. That's not to say women don't share the same beliefs or enthusiasm for defending our cultural heritage, but it seems to me to be the way the issues are framed, it's in a more confrontational, male way.

I guess I think that this is an issue needing a lot of thought, but also one where it's important not to fall too easily into gender stereotypes.

I wonder the proportion of men in churches like John Macarthur's in SoCal. I'm no big fan of Macarthur -- I'm EO -- but his style of preaching and theology doesn't seem wimpy to me. I'd also be curious about men being attracted to e.g. RC Sproul's Calvinist theology.

Being masculine is not chiefly a matter of being butch. It has to do with the spirit, for the most part. Where I grew up, everybody knew men who affected masculine conventions, but who in their hearts were cowards, moral and otherwise -- i.e., Not Real Men.

Interestingly, I've heard Evangelicals here in Texas talk from time to time about how so many religiously involved Evangelical men are soft and effeminate. Effeminate not in a nelly way, but in a more metrosexual way. One former Evangelical woman of my acquaintance, who used to date these guys, told me (and I paraphrase), "You want men to be good, and strong, and faithful to God, and these are all good men who'd make good husbands. But you get kind of tired of the goody-goodies." I took her to mean that there's a difference between being a good man, and being a thoroughly domesticated one.

I took her to mean that there's a difference between being a good man, and being a thoroughly domesticated one.

If she's like many women, it's because she wanted to do the domesticating and training herself.

James P wrote,

Greece is a whole different story

What's the difference? I'm curious.

Maybe we should start talking to the Imams, since they seem quite good at attracting disaffected men. All that black-and-white fudamentalism wrapped up in theological certainty must be attractive.

In fact, it is -- far more so than feminized metrosexual mush. Once again, I'll quote from a Touchstone review I did of Episcopal cleric Chloe Breyer's memoir of her seminary training:
[begins]
Our Chloe decides to set up a Bible study for a group of Bellevue patients who are in from Rikers Island, the notorious city prison. She plays a video segment from the Bill Moyers series Genesis. The inmates see Bible scholars agreeing that Genesis gives us plenty of questions, but few answers. Her students don’t get it.

“They’re supposed to be experts, right?” says Tyrone. “So then why are they giving us all this stuff about not having any answers? I mean, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. not to have answers! And if they don’t have any answers, then who does?”

Others chime in with contempt for the equivocating liberal scholars Breyer so admires. Finally, a Muslim convert speaks up. “See, this is what I’m telling you, man. The Koran is the place to go for answers! . . . I became a Muslim because the Koran has the most truth in it. You don’t argue about what it means. You read it, and you know what to do. The Prophet got the word directly from God.”

“Is that right?” asks Tyrone. “Is that how it is? The Koran has more answers than the Bible?” Undeterred, and unable to grasp the significance of the moment, Breyer sets out to teach these poor sinners that the Bible doesn’t have to be taken literally. There are lots of gray areas, she tells them, and they should feel empowered by the fact that they can interpret Scripture any way they like. The inmates are unmoved.

“They want answers, not questions,” Breyer writes. “[T]he more contradictions I point out in the Bible, the more the inmates decide there is no point in wasting their time with a religion that lacks answers.”

Smart cookies, those crooks, who intuitively grasp the worthlessness of Breyer’s baptized sophistries to their broken lives. Their critique is utterly lost on this earnest young woman, who does not know, or perhaps simply does not have the courage or conviction to say to these men, that Jesus is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”

She reminds me of the faithless pastor in Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, who, when asked by a parishioner terrified of nuclear war for a reason to hope, had none to give him. The anguished parishioner commits suicide. The only consolation any of us might take from the education of Chloe Breyer is that her kind of Christianity is committing slow suicide—except that it is taking who knows how many souls down with it.

The Close natters on for a couple more chapters, but that is where it ended for me—appropriately, because though Breyer misses the point, her experience with the prisoners reveals where liberal Christianity ultimately ends up: not only impotent and ignored, but also in its irrelevance handing people over to false gospels and false gods. The poor, for whom Christ suffered and died, cannot afford the fashionable falsehoods proclaimed by the world’s Chloe Breyers. That’s why the poor want little or nothing to do with that counterfeit faith.
[end]

I always cringe when I hear the masculine/feminine dichotomy when it comes to spirituality or ecclesial character. Since true femininity consists of noble and necessary qualities for the Church, it is wrong to use the phrase "feminization of the Church" to make the point about the negative transformation which has been undeniable. Instead, we need to realize the roots are in the "effeminite": the pseudo-femininity of homosexual culture. The incomplete and perverted attempt to overwrite the Church's masculine character with an effeminite one is firmly based in the resentment and rejection of God's Fatherhood which was the basis for original sin. In more colorful terms, the effiminate goals of many clergy and academics has been to dress the Church up in drag. This is an insult to both its masculine and feminine natures.

This whole discussion, starting with the initial ideas of the post, piles muddle upon muddle until we have a tower of Babel based entirely on wet sand. If Jesus was such a "man," wonder why he didn't, after defeating Death itself, zap a few Pharisees and perhaps even Pilot himself? Sheesh, try reading a little Elaine Pagels and figuring out what Jesus was really talking about, rather than just spinning out myth upon myth upon myth.

It's not a gender issue in the Eastern Orthodox faith, with St. John Chrysostom Liturgy as a part of the practice of Sunday worship.

It's about your personal relationship with Christ, the Son of God, God and Mother God and the Holy Spirit. The ritual of taking communion is a sacrament, actual transformation of bread and wine into the spiritual food that is Holy through the power of prayer.

Eastern Orthodox did not change a thing in the sacraments nor in the prayer/liturgical expression of mass since the birth of the Church, Orthodox.

The difference between the Orthodox faith and Catholic one is liberalism of the West, versus the strict doctrine of the Orthodox that no man can represent the closest link to the Son of God, Christ. Whereas the Catholic faith advocates that the Pope is the direct descendent of St. Peter (check this fact if you can) throughout history. Orthodox do not believe this.

Whereas being Orthodox, if you study the sacraments, one realizes that through a personal relationship with Christ through prayer and worship of God in our Church that we can attain salvation and be like Christ, the attributes, but not actually be the Son of God, ourselves. Through this belief and act of faith and sacrifice (strict fast and prayer) we can do great deeds as Christ once did on earth and greater in the service of God.

Orthodox humble themselves to God and Christ. We do not proclaim that we are gods. Nor do we proclaim that we are the gods of men. We can be a part of the Holy Mystery, in relation to the Holy Spirit, but we do not feed our egos or judge other faiths or people along the way. We worry about our own personal relationship with God. Christ did not even portray the attributes of machoism, nor fail in the temptations that the judges threw at Him as vestibules of questions of the Mysteries of God and the miracle work.

The ritual dissection that you propose is more important or attractive to men is bizarre to me. You do not take into your analysis the relationship between patterns of worship that is brought down from generations of families.

PS. If your parents sung in the church choir, the children, non gender specific will also.

People learn faith first, then by divine will there is a Mystery that unfolds, when one realizes that one is apart of God's plan or divine mystery -- a choice is presented. You either choose what God unfolds or you desert Him and yourself from your divine rite.

There is no coincidence. There is no such thing as blind faith, and it is not gender specific -- God doesn't choose more men to uphold the Eastern/Catholic faith -- in His eyes we are born of choice and free will -- He presents the circumstances for us to grow in His Will.

As sentient beings we are drawn to beauty in songs of worship and ceremonies for special days in our faith of choice. Songs do not have gender, nor do they discriminate. What is important is that we derive personal meaning from participation. It's an evolution in process.

If you find peace and love, you are in the right place. I'm a woman and don't feel that it is my duty or battle to correct misguided male energy in the Churches you spoke of. I get what God gives to me. I get Him not those that deliver the message -- the men or women who profess what they believe.

If you perceive that more men are drawn to ritualistic traditional practices, by the nature of your question, you are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ask God. Meditate on it. It's simple.

How do you quantify the presence of gender in worship from one Sunday to the next, as opposed to many Sundays?

How do you quantify believers and non-believers of a certain faith?
Aren't we really asking what aspect of divine liturgical practice is important for sustaining believers' faith in God and Christ?

Why did humans that are Christians create more than one Church to represent worship of God and the belief that Christ is the Son of God and Man?

Dig deeper than gender. Ego of mankind will always find ways to leave the heart space and seek the legitimization of faith in worldy terms.

A Orthodox monk in Milton, Ontario once eased my conscious by saying the Church is not out there, in some building that man created. The Church is inside each one of us -- inside our hearts and souls.

I hope this eases unrest in the hearts of men. Thank you for this opportunity God to share with my fellow believers and non-believers.
August 8, 2007
Woman of Eastern Orthodox Faith, Toronto