Recent daily emails from Richard Rohr have been looking at how men change. This one spoke right to my heart:
We men try not to be “touched” or changed by things. “Don’t let anything go too deep, neither love nor pain…. Keep cool!” is the message we hear. Yet we really don’t survive our many kinds of wars. They now say that the long-term effects of any violent war lasts for four generations as post-traumatic stress in various forms. This would mean that we are still suffering from the Civil War, the Great War, the Second World War, and the wars every ten years since. Is it any wonder we have so many neurotic and unhappy people? Human beings are not meant to kill one another.
Boys are taught to win. We men can’t admit to anything that can’t be configured as winning. We have to pretend it’s not true and make another group or individual the loser, which for some strange reason is supposed to make us the winners. It becomes so clear to me as I grow older that people who change, and keep changing, are the only people who grow up. And we grow up when we allow events to touch us, influence us, and quite simply move us beyond our fortified home base. – Adapted from ‘How Men Change: A Thin Time‘
God help me to be a person who changes.
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