Masculinity and Beauty

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine said that he didn't think men were drawn to beauty as much as women. This surprised me, with him especially, because I always thought of him as someone with a longing for beauty. Maybe what he meant is that women desire to be beautiful more than men, and to this I would agree. But that's not the same thing.

Whenever I've interacted with women in my life (especially my mom and sister growing up), I've thought that women don't understand beauty like men do. It's almost as if, when they use the word, they mean something totally different than men do. The fact that so many women can't empathize with men's tendency to have wandering eyes makes me wonder that these women possibly have never recognized beauty in anything they saw, because once you have an encounter with beauty, you look for it everywhere and at all times, and it takes real discipline and self-control to practice custody of the eyes. It can be a real struggle for men seeking virtue and purity of heart.

I think that beauty is attracted to masculinity and masculinity is attracted to beauty. The more masculine a man is, the more he desires to possess what is beautiful, and the more beautiful something is, the more it yearns to be possessed by a masculine man. I think it's interesting that heaven itself is called the Beatific Vision, as if God, who is Beauty itself, desires to make Himself beheld in the end. Men long to see the face of God, and God longs to have his face seen by men, so much that he became man and died to make it possible.

I think that the neglect of beauty in Catholic art and liturgy is a direct result of the increased feminine influence in the Church's leadership (or the absence of masculine leadership).

I know I might be wrong about this. I think it would be interesting to read what a woman thinks about beauty: i.e. what she finds beautiful and how she knows it's beautiful and why she is drawn to it.

Or, if women aren't drawn to beauty like men are, what might they have a keener sense for than men? Perhaps goodness. (I don't know; I'm not a woman).

I was thinking of these things today, because I was making a list of what I want in life, and what I would need to do to achieve it, and beauty kept coming to my mind. What must I do in order to be worthy to behold beauty with purity of heart? Whom should I become? And the answer - a man in the fullest sense.

Value in Missing

In our world today there are so few opportunities to miss things. I miss missing things. I don't miss having access to food; I have access to food everywhere and at all times. I don't miss music; any song ever recorded is in my pocket. I don't miss light; I can make my house brighter than the sun any time I want. I don't miss being informed about the world; it takes a heroic effort to be uninformed.

It's hard to miss people, too. I have no excuse to have time apart from people. I can text or call or Facetime anyone at any moment.  Practically speaking, death or estrangement are the only ways we can get away with missing someone. There is no benign way of not speaking to or seeing someone for a while because doing these things are so easy.

I find, though, that I do miss some things. I miss a simple meal after a day of hunger. I miss a pitch-black night after a bright day. I miss that first moment of a concert or a CD or a record when I hear the music I've waited a long time to hear again. I miss places so absent of noise that I can hear the breeze blow over things. I miss the days I had where I used to wonder about the answers to things, but I had to wait until I could go to the library and find books about them.

I miss, most of all, the days when I almost forgot the way a person looked, or the sound of their voice, or the quirks of their personality, and then they were there again, in my presence, and I was flooded with joy.

A world without missing is a world without joy.

What am I?

Man is not capable of knowing what he is. What man is must be revealed to him by God. This is one thing (flowing out of the thought of St. Augustine) I read in Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, which I have been reading since I went to Savannah.

I think that whenever a people has an overly narrow idea of what man is, God proves them wrong by bringing into existence men who don't fit this idea. Oftentimes people wish or do violence on these enfleshed reproaches; it is not the reproaches whom they are angry with, it is with the God who delivered them.

I have been angry with God, but I thought I was only angry at myself or at other people. I wasn't ready to accept what He made me to be. I wanted to fit the narrow ideas that the world offered for my compliance. But, learning that God wishes to speak to me and through me in my very being, I now wish to be silent to learn what He has to say. Allowing God to speak can be a dangerous thing. Many times I prayed but was afraid He'd say something.

The thought that God willed me into being in order to speak through my being may be the most frightening thing I've ever thought about myself. What if I don't want to speak what He has to say? What if I'll be hurt? What if I won't make it out alive? What will become of me if I don't allow Him to speak? And yet, He speaks without my consent. He speaks while I'm asleep, while I'm daydreaming, while I'm busy with other things. Even now.

And what applies to me, applies to everyone. Therefore for whomever I wish were never or were no more, I wish to silence God.

What is a man?

Since I was a child and learned more and more about what science tells us about ourselves, I was always fascinated by asking myself who we are as human beings. So many things we know go against what we intuitively think about ourselves.

For instance, there are more bacterial cells in our bodies than human cells. Yet, I think of my mass as 100% human and not part-human, part-bacterial. I don't say I weigh 170 pounds minus the contents of my digestive tract and the bacterial colonies populating my skin and hair. No, I just say I weigh 170 pounds.

I also consider that the materials that make up my body are continuously flowing in and out and replenishing themselves. Every time I inhale, eat, drink, or apply substances to my skin, new materials are incorporated into "me." Every time I exhale, urinate, excrete, and sweat little pieces of me leave and diffuse into the environment. This so happens over time that after a decade or so, little or none of the matter that once made up the past "me" is now part of the present "me." Those parts are all in the air, in the soil, in the water, in other animals, or in plants. Maybe some escaped into space.

I wonder about this in relation to Christ as well. Did only the matter which made up His Body at the time of His death rise from the dead, or did all the matter which ever made up His Body rise also: the spilled blood, the sweat, the tears, etc? Some of this matter, if it did not rise also, is still in the world. Atoms that made up Christ's body could still be all around us, diffused around the world in the intervening millennia.

Diogenes the Dog, who when reminded that he had once defaced the currency, replied that there was a time when he also used to wet his bed.

I also think about my past self in terms of actions and memories. I have no more control over actions I did five minutes ago than any stranger on the street, since neither of us has the power to alter the past, and yet I have the sense that those actions belong to me and not to the stranger. I take responsibility for them, and I assign responsibility to others for their past actions.

Thinking of the child who wet his bed, I say that I wet my bed, though the atoms that made up that child's body are not part of my body now, nor do I have any control or influence over the actions of that child who I claim was me. And by what authority have I the right to claim he was me? By memory I claim he was me. But what is memory and why have I so uncritically granted it this authority? I have some of this boy's memories, but I do not have all of them. Some of them he lost, and I have no control over what he lost. Perhaps, then, since I am dependent on his choices rather than he on mine, I should say not that he belongs to me but that I belong to him. Yet, we would not say that a man is slave to the boy he once was. He may have left behind some memories which I possess, but he has no more control of my present actions than I do of his past actions.

A possible conclusion from these thoughts is the absurd idea that we can never call a man good or bad except based on what he is currently doing, and whenever we call someone good or bad we are only describing persons who no longer exist. Since he has no control over his past, he can neither claim credit for any good nor incur debt for any bad. Those all belong to a past self, which is no longer in existence except for the memories bequeathed. And, since the present is always flowing into the past, we could argue that we can call no man good or bad, even in the present, for by the time we begin to speak we speak of a person in the past.

The price we pay for accepting credit for what someone else did is to accept blame for what someone else did. The price we pay for assigning blame to one for what another did is to give credit to one for what another did. We do all this unconsciously with our belief in the continuity of the self, which is somewhat in contradiction with empirical evidence.

The Universe is Biased Toward the Good

I once heard someone say that we are usually right in what we like and wrong in what we dislike.

I think this is so. It is tempting to think that the world is indifferent, that good and evil are on equal footings, but this is not so. The universe is biased toward the good. Evil is relative but good is absolute. There is not anything which does not have some good, while anything that is all evil doesn't even exist.

If we were to take up a thing which is thought to be evil - take Adolf Hitler as an epitome - and stack up the evil in him against the good, we would find the evil to be like a piece of dust and the good to be like the mass of Earth. Even in Hitler the good so outweighs the evil that the evil can be thought of as negligible. I have no special regard for Hitler; I only use him as an example of what popular opinion conceives of as a greatest evil. Sometimes in church I hear such things as "God loves each of us as if we were the only one who exists." Being a man, this applies to Hitler too. In fact, try as I may, I will never love Hitler as much as God does. God loves Hitler more than any man will ever love his wife, more than any mother will love her child. God loved Hitler so much that He made Himself capable of death in order to die to save him. Knowing the zeal with which any parent comes to the defense of their child, dare I wish evil on Hitler, whom God cares for far more?

If Hitler would not have committed suicide, had escaped, and were found decades later, would not just about anyone turn him in to be killed? And yet, if he were found as the last human alive by an alien civilization that had been searching for other intelligent life for thousands of years, would he not be taken in and cherished? Would they not lavish their wealth on him to keep him alive and, if possible, ask questions? Would they not behold him in absolute wonder, marvel at all the workings of his mind and body, thoughts and feelings, and seek to preserve his life as long as possible? Because human life appears to us to be so abundant, we are prone to regard some lives disposable. But if we were to see things as God does, every human life would be as precious as the only human life.

"But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). If anyone stops to meditate on the fact that a human being is so precious that God considered him worth dying for, even while he is still sinning and not only after conversion, there can be no argument about the goodness of even a sinner. There is a prophetic insight in a fragment from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus: "To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right."

Running

I like running because it clears my head. By this, I don't mean it gives me time to think. As a rather neurotic introvert, thinking is about the only thing I ever do. Sometimes I beg, "Please God make it stop. I'll do anything." I've never been too busy to think. The busier I am the more I think. 

I need something occasionally that shuts down my thinking. Since I don't drink much, or use drugs, or watch TV, it has to be something else, something that requires everything I have to give. Running does this for me. If I can think while I'm running, I'm not running hard enough. I need to be gasping for air, with sweat pouring off me, muscles on fire, eyes in tunnel vision. I need an outlet for aggression and competitiveness. I need to be focused on one thing only, the task at hand. Usually to get to this point, I need to sprint, preferably uphill. 

Afterward, I feel awesome. I am warm inside. My mind is quiet and focused. I get great sleep. I am at ease around people. This is what I mean when I say running clears my head. 

Being a Man of Goodwill

We are about to put the Gloria away for Lent. I was thinking about the line from it, peace to men of goodwill (St. Luke 2:14). What is a man of goodwill? Am I a man of goodwill?

I thought of two definitions of a man of goodwill:

A negative/small definition. A man of goodwill is one who forgives, who lets go of grudges and aversions.

A positive/broad definition. A man of goodwill is one who sympathizes with the good and aims to bring it to fruition.

Just as it's easier to tear something apart than to put something together, so also any man can condemn what is bad, but it takes a man of higher virtue to sympathize with the good. That is why we love to be around optimists so much, even if they sometimes overlook aspects of reality. They show in themselves a rising above our natural inclination, which is to see the bad first. And this is why the law needs a presumption of innocence, and gossip is so pernicious, because our native tendency is to more readily believe the evil story than the good. But this doesn't have to be so.

God sympathizes with the good in us more than He condemns the bad; this imbalance manifests itself in Grace. God tips the balance in favor of the good, because He wants to help us please Him. So, I think a man of goodwill is like God; he treats his fellow-man graciously, sympathizing with the good in him and helping to bring it about.

In this case, I know that I'm not always a man of goodwill. But I aspire to be one, and I must begin by treating others as God has treated me.  I must sympathize with the good, and aim that it should flourish.