Men or Babes

I was doing some serving tonight. I was packing lunches for kids to have meals on weekends when not in school. This elementary school gets a grant to get this food, and we were helping pack it into bags for the kids to take home.

While doing so, this boy, whom I had the priveledge of having at weeks of camp and also getting to baptize earlier this year, was there helping. We had to undo plastic wrapping and open boxes. So I loaned this boy a knife. I showed him how to use it and how to be very careful.

I have carried a knife since I was 10. I grew up in the country. In my family, we cut strings off of bales of straw or hay daily. We open packages. We need knives daily. Carrying a knife was a rite of passage for me, and a very important one. A knife represets the ability to carry out work. Can a knife be dangerous? Absolutely. If not, it would not be a rite of passage to becoming a man.

You see, if there is no danger, it isn't really masculine. Look at football. Twenty-two men on two sides who hit each other as hard as they can. Rock climbing is obvious. Skydiving, rafting rapids, backpacking the AT, all these have an element of danger. And men are drawn to them.

Well, this boy's mom started to disagree. She was scared. "You should live with him. He's immature. I have to tell him to brush his teeth." Though she did not take the knife away, she repeatedly, verbally expressed her doubt in her son. Afterward, she continued this rant.

No matter what I said, I could not possibly get her to understand what she was doing. Masculinity is bestowed. It does not happen passively. It must be passed down. And in cannot grow in the mother's bossum (to use old-fashioned expressions).

The reason he is immature, is because she suffocates maturity in him. She tells him everyday to brush his teeth, so he doesn't have to remember to do it. In two weeks of camp over two years, I never once told him to brush his teeth or shower or change clothes or pick up his dirty clothes. Yet he did it, because he was ALLOWED to mature. As long as she keeps controlling his every move, he will NEVER grow.

Women cannot teach, cannot bestow masculinity. In our world, men are rare. Men come home and plop down in front of the TV. They don't teach their sons how to become men. Most of them are boys themselves, who don't know how to be men. They never learned how to be dangerous. They never learned how to lead. They never learned to live. And they certainly never learned to teach what they didn't learn.

It is sad really. So women, release your boys. Let them go. Let them GO. LET THEM GO. They have to fall and pick themselves up, or they will never learn to walk. Men, take them from their mothers. Teach them. In some native American cultures, after a rite of passage, they would take them back to their mothers, who would pretend not to know them. The man that bestowed masculinity upon them would introduce the young man to his mother. Her baby was gone. He was a man now. Let that be a lesson. Raise up young men.