My piece yesterday on lifting with morality generated some excellent discussion, both here and on other sites. What I want to focus on today is to do with this comment by reader Razorwire:
I instead endeavor to help those boys and men who have taken some step – any step toward masculinity and giving them the benefit of the doubt that their choice in that matter makes them more likely a candidate for Godliness than less so.
The assumption here is that a pursuit of masculinity will have a better chance of leading to Godliness than without such a pursuit. I disagree with this assumption so let’s have a look at it in detail.
Over the past thirty odd years I have worked in a variety of jobs in which the majority of men were highly masculine. The best example of this is white water rafting, a job I did for over fifteen years all around the world. But I have also worked in exploration mining, offshore oil & gas and closely with police and fire fighting departments. Many of my colleagues have previously served in the military, particularly the special forces units. The number of highly masculine men I have worked with who were Godly was exactly one. A single example out of all of those men.
There are no churches in Australian mining camps where the employees number in the thousands. At least none that I have seen. And if there are I can almost guarantee that they are empty.
I myself, in most of those years, was just as spiritually empty as the rest of my colleagues. In fact, I am ashamed to say that I was a dim-witted atheist, as were many of my colleagues. The over-represented vice among most of these men was hedonism in various forms, whether women, drugs, drink, food, gambling, whatever you can think of. It was a life of material excess. A very worldly life.
If I could go back in time, say twenty five years ago, I would only change one thing about myself. I would make sure that I was on a spiritual path, a Godly path, from a young adult age. And then I would follow the same worldly journey but with a grounding in the spiritual, and with a determination to grow daily in spirituality as much if not more so than on my physical journey. In that sense I consider these past few decades to be for me personally a substantial loss. I can only imagine how much more aligned with God I would be now if I had done it His way.
But I am not crying over spilled milk. I am merely using my own life as an example, as a warning to young men today.
So what of the importance of masculinity. Is it important? Of course it is, it is critical. You do not want to be an effeminate man. The young men who devote themselves to church but then moan that they cannot land a wife are often in the trap of not having developed their masculinity. They are religious simps who have been brainwashed to believe that piety is what gets the girls. But it doesn’t. Masculinity will attract fallen girls. Masculinity rooted in Godliness will get the girls in a healthy and long lasting way.
While masculinity is comprised of physical strengths, it is not only that. Masculinity is experience, achievement, adversity overcome, mental strength, wisdom, patience, perseverance, courage and many other virtues. In fact, a man who possesses all of those virtues in depth but is not very impressive as a physical specimen will be that much more than some other man whose entire life is devoted to superficial bodybuilding for its own sake.
The pursuit of spiritual growth, the desire for Godliness must be the starting point from which everything else that we do will follow. That way you will have a chance, a chance mind you, to not fall into the traps of this world. But without that grounding you are a helpless leaf in a hurricane, to be blown wherever the world fancies at that moment. Perpetually in great danger of taking the very wide road.
Originally published at Pushing Rubber Downhill. You can purchase Adam’s books here.