Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life (10 page)

The painful awareness of his difference from most of the boys in the neighborhood dashed the father’s expectations and deepened the son’s dark sorrow.

It is a burden borne silently by more men than most men admit.

The signature behaviors we have been taught to think of as essential to being seen as “manly men” and “feminine females” are, in large part, bogus. What we have been taught as essentially male and female behaviors are learned behaviors, not our innate characteristics.

I saw a picture gallery of men taken the moment they each got a first look at their newborn babies. The tenderness in those eyes, the tears they shed, the awe and awareness of the ecstasy of fatherhood they reported brought the world clock to a stop. This was not male indifference or detachment or distance. And all the while, under it all, the common feeling they reported was, “Now I am a man.”

No swagger here, no chest thumping, no affected distance from what is “woman’s business.” No, human disassociation is not innate to what it means to be masculine. Instead, it’s what we each bring to the common project of being full human beings which gives us the gifts that, if allowed to develop, will become the measure of what it really means to be man or woman. To limit either is to damp the full development of both.

The sorry truth is that the world bequeaths standards to us that are ancient and unproven, hostile and exclusive, unfriendly but determinative. What has “always been” takes on the aura of truth and requires us to commit ourselves to maintaining the system that spawned them: the monarchy, for instance; rugged individualism, for instance; social stratification, for instance—like men over women, women over children, and children over small bugs. However useless or illogical those standards may be.

The fact is that everyone is different, all of us someplace
along the continuum that runs between totally masculine—whatever that is—and totally feminine. But we’re only now, as a people, beginning to accept that fact. We have been told and we have learned the lesson well: It is emotionally, physically, psychologically dangerous not to meet the pattern.

So we go through life dealing with the underlying question that rages on in us: Who am I—really? we wonder. How am I meant to behave?

The movement away from reductionist notions of tribe and clan and nationality to concentration on ideas of what it is to be a person, an individual, unique, rather than one among many, has been a long, hard, slow one in human history. Issues of what it means to have a soul, to accrue human knowledge, or, on the contrary, to be outside the norm of normal human behavior—to be mentally ill or mentally challenged—became subjects of human research, philosophy and concern as long ago as fifteen hundred years before the Common Era. Philosophy and medicine led the pursuit of these questions, but religion and custom, fear of ghosts and hints of a netherworld led to resistance. For centuries, the practices of vivisection, dissection and embalming that offered other ways of bringing physical data to the discussion of what it means to be human were suspect or routinely forbidden in large parts of the Western world.

So, the questions lingered and grew but fear rather than fact ruled the day.

Psychological study of feelings and personality, of human needs and emotions, of the nature of maleness and femaleness, of personhood, of human “normalcy” and fundamental
pathologies came late to the party, less than one hundred years ago. Exactly what it is that makes us all the same and yet all different both drives us and escapes us at the same time. And yet, even now, the question of what it means to be an “individual” has yet to be defined definitively.

The question haunts us from dawn to dusk, from night to day. Exactly what is a woman? What is a man? Or better yet, what is a “real woman” and a “real man”? And whatever the answers, how do we show it?

The issues that characterize this problem of identity are more than simple scientific ones. They are socially cataclysmic. Everywhere children learn young that invisible social barriers separate them from the fullness of themselves.

Males—boys, in particular, who do not epitomize definitions of the manly man—who suppresses emotion, exudes physical prowess, and emphasizes sexual conquest—are excluded from contemporary social life for reasons far beyond their control.

They are small boys who play with dolls—and are laughed at for doing it. They are young male teenagers who prefer to learn to knit or dance or sing rather than be athletes and so are hounded to an early grave because of it. They are grown men hiding the truth of their sexual identity from their mothers who want them to get married and produce grandchildren. Or they are young males hiding their softness from fathers who want them to drink hard and kill animals, rather than write poetry or join the local theater group. They are men who learn to feel diminished
by doing “women’s work” like babysitting or child care. They are grown men who grow up full of self-hatred for not being muscle-bound and autocratic, loud and overpowering of others, sure of themselves, demeaning of others, rough and tough and controlling.

They are men with sensitive hearts who love to hold their children, who kiss their sons and teach them to cook, who encourage their daughters to greatness, who have no expectations of being waited upon by women who have full lives of their own to live.

And yet they spend their lives questioning their identity to the point that the questions themselves are madness-making. Only when we all come to the point where “masculinity” can claim for itself the kind of feminine freedoms to love and cry and care which the psychologist Carl Jung speaks about can men become the fullness of the real man they are meant to be. It can only happen when the rest of us begin to realize that the questions we’ve been asking about what it means to be a fully developed person are themselves wrong.

The great question of life is not so much, What is it to be masculine or what is it to be feminine? The great question of life is, What is it to be human? Then, the humanity of all of us will be safe. Then the humanization of the human race will really be possible.

Loss is part of life. It’s just difficult to know when loss is really loss or gain come from another direction. The examples are legion.

“Every night,” the woman told me, “I wondered if tomorrow would be the last day.” Her young middle-aged husband had suffered for years with myocardiopathy; at this point he was bedridden twenty-four hours a day with no heart transplant in sight. She had raised the kids, held down the job, nursed him through it all. The very thought of losing him was more than she could bear.

Carl saw it happen to other people but he never thought it could possibly happen to him. Wall Street CEOs of much bigger companies than his had already been removed, yes, but they were the culprits, not he. “I didn’t leave the company,” he said later. “The company left me.” He was devastated by it. He got other job offers, of course, but refused
them all. The very thought of going through it all again somewhere else was simply too much for him to risk.

After years in the ministry, after years of struggle, Val left it, sure of only one thing: However foolish it may be to leave it with nothing to go to, it was even more foolish for people to stay where they knew they did not belong. The spiritual dimensions of life had grown ever stronger over the years but the struggle to manage the poles of the institution had simply become too complex to think of spending a lifetime doing it.

In all three cases, and in hundreds—thousands—of variations of them, the loss was major. It was also unavoidable and permanent. For none of them was it easy to lose what they thought they would never lose. Nor was it something that any of them had at all foreseen.

It was simply that other piece of life, the unknown part, the one unplanned and unwanted that had intruded on their perfect worlds to require a new decision from each of them. Marriage was forever, she was sure. The company was sound, he was sure. The ordination was of God’s design; surely God would sustain it. And yet all of them knew, those days, those fidelities were over now.

But all of them had been mistaken. And all of them went through what were, for them at least, cataclysmic losses.

Whatever the nature of the loss—death, status, circumstances—the pain of it feels almost surgical. Sometimes we lose things we had. Sometimes we lose what we wanted but could not have, like a child or a place in the system we value so much. Sometimes we mourn what we
never had and go to cement simply waiting for what will never come. Whatever the nature of the loss, it leaves a vacuum in the heart. Despite the fact that she had taken care of her invalid husband for years, the widow felt abandoned. Carl felt betrayed and angry for having trusted the company with his life. Val felt bereft, misunderstood, cut off from a spiritual bloodline.

The fact is that when we lose a piece of ourselves—a marriage, a family, a defining institution, the kind of status or stability we have depended on this person, this place to give us—we lose a much larger part of our identity than we ever realized was possible. Not to be Mrs., not to be Sir, not to be Reverend—not to be the person on the block everyone knows, the tenant in the building who has the best job, the one in the office who does all the computer work, the one in the parish everyone depends on to chair the festival, not to be the “One who” is important to everyone around them anywhere they are is a mighty loss. Then the question screams into the night: Who am I now? Is this all there is?

The very thought of losing those things is enough to wake a person up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.

And yet, there is a resurrection that comes with loss. People can no longer see in us the person they saw before, true. But that is one of the gifts of loss. Loss frees us to begin again, to be seen differently, to tap into something inside of ourselves that even we were never really sure was there. But, whether we knew it or not, did badly want.

We can now—perhaps must now—be ourselves but in some very different ways. We don’t have to go on making
a success of the family business. Or even being Mrs. Anybody. Or being called upon so often for the same things in life that we never get to show the world that we can do other things, as well. No doubt about it: Loss is liberation time.

Then we must begin even to know ourselves differently—as more than the mother or the son, the doorman or the doctor or the groundskeeper or the mail carrier. Now we have to dig deep inside us to find out what other parts of ourselves are waiting to be discovered.

It’s when we hunker down inside ourselves at a time of great loss—withdrawing from the world, refusing to bloom again some other place—that the loss stands to destroy us. When we walk through the door of loss we find it always open. The only problem lies in whether or not we take that first step over the doorsill.

It is, of course, possible to freeze in place. We can simply sit our lives away waiting for someone to discover what we were and want us to be it again. The problem is that, unknown even to ourselves, perhaps, it wouldn’t be possible even if we tried. We can’t simply go back to being what we were before. Everything has changed. The situation is new. The life demands are new. And we are new now, too. We know what it is to be wrenched out of the only self we have ever really known, the one we thought we would be forever. Most of all, we know more about life and more about ourselves now. We are meant to go on, yes—in fact, we have no choice—but we are meant to go on differently. As Heraclitus of Ephesus said, “No one ever steps in the same river twice.” Life moves inexorably on.

At the end of the day, though, one thing has become painfully, positively clear: Loss is not loss. It is simply the invitation to find the more of ourselves that is waiting to become the rest of ourselves.

“Success,” Winston Churchill said, “is bounding from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” And Churchill should know. He began government service in England as lord of the admiralty, lost that post, regained it, became prime minister, lost that post, regained it, and lost it again. Losing is clearly part of life. Sometimes its most arduous part, but never its most destructive part.

If anything, loss is not meant to ruin us or our sleep for the rest of our lives. It simply prepares us to lose better the next time, to go into life over and over again, knowing full well that this phase, too, will end so that we can take our own unbounded enthusiasm into the next part of coming to wholeness. Whatever that may be.

It happened long years ago but in lonely times even now I still cling to it as the icon of possibility, a real lifeline through loneliness both then and now. I was a very young nun then, in my first teaching situation—a rural one—and living with sisters who had been in the community for years, many of them in their sixties. Unlike me at the age of nineteen, they were all professed nuns. I was a scholastic, a student nun. I didn’t know any of them personally, we had nothing in common, and community customs simply did not provide for any way to make personal connections. In fact the rules said that professed sisters were not permitted to speak to the nonprofessed except professionally. It was a very lonely, very desperate kind of time. At that age, at a new point in life, I needed more personal contact than that. I began to wonder if I would really be able to get through it.

I couldn’t leave the place. I couldn’t change the place. I could only get more and more dour by the day. The question plagued me: I was surely not the first person who had ever been in a situation like this, so was I suffering from loneliness or self-pity?

Clearly, getting through this was up to me.