Column

Change

Masculinity

Psychology

26 October 2023

7 min read

The crying man and the content of sadness

In the latest in our series on men and masculinity, psychologist Roger Bretherton reflects on what he learned about being a man from his own mid-life crisis.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is a Clinical and Coaching Psychologist.

A person stand looking out a wide set of windows covered in rain.

Daniil Onischenko on Unsplash.

My midlife crisis began with crying. Alone. In the car. In the study surrounded by books. Curled up on the bathroom floor. Waves of sadness crashed over me, and I couldn’t hold them back. So sudden and inexplicable was this lapse into grief that I felt the need to keep it to myself. It was shameful. It took a month before I finally told anyone and even then, my hand was forced by bursting into tears in front of them. They wondered if it was hormonal. Maybe I was eating badly or sitting still too much. But I knew the sadness had content.

I was slowly being crushed by the feeling that I had failed to be, or missed the opportunity to become, the man I was supposed to be.

It is difficult to make sense of such sadness though. It doesn’t come labelled with its own meaning. It fails to announce itself. It doesn’t ride into our consciousness on a unicycle waving a sign that reads: you are now sad about getting old and feeling like you have failed as a man. It takes a bit of detective work to find out what it all means. But in the end, I had to acknowledge that I was slowly being crushed by the feeling that I had failed to be, or missed the opportunity to become, the man I was supposed to be. In the three areas of life that mattered most to me, family, work, and church, I was a failure. I knew that’s what I thought because my tear ducts started twitching whenever I said it aloud. Of course, I couldn’t get anyone to agree with me. It’s not a fact. It is a massive unrealistic incapacitating overgeneralisation. But apparently the poor twisted neurones of my emotional brain had failed to get that memo.

Every feeling of failure implies a vaguely defined sense of the success that could have been ours but has been lost. If I had failed as a man, what kind of man was I supposed to be? I came to realise that I had unintentionally imbibed a seductive model of masculinity that was ultimately unachievable. For want of a better term I came to call it the man-at-the-centre. The man-at-the-centre game is really easy to play. It is a simple rule of thumb for what any man should be. It works in any context you can think of, and goes like this…

What should a man be at work? He should be at the centre of a team of adoring colleagues.

What should a man be at home? He should be at the centre of an adoring wife and family.

What should a man be at church? He should be at the centre of an adoring congregation.

The man-at-the-centre game requires that every situation a man enters should immediately configure itself into a picture postcard in which he holds pride of place.

Obviously, this view defines masculinity entirely in terms of power. And not even the kind of power that makes any sense. Not the power to be wise, or brave, or generous, or fair, or honest, or loyal. But the power to force other people be exactly as we would like them to be. The insistence that social life is only acceptable if made to conform to our exact specifications. The man-at-the-centre equates masculinity with being in charge, and even the tiniest lapse in control as a failure to be a man, a surrendering of one’s right to exist as a male. Kierkegaard summed up despair in precisely these binary terms, the desire to be Caesar or nothing.

A one-way ticket to Blametown

I can’t be sure if this insight is true of ALL men, some men, or just me. Maybe it has nothing to do with masculinity at all. Perhaps I’m just describing my own narcissism. But either way, it’s embarrassing to admit that I even thought this. I don’t even know where this belief came from. It goes against everything I have stood for in support of women, and in collaboration with men. It is quite frankly a ridiculous thing to believe - and yet there I was, just as surprised as anyone else to find myself believing it. It turns out the old church billboard was right:

You are not what you think you are; but what you think, you are.

And I don’t really want to chalk it up to The Patriarchy. Whenever anyone starts on about The Patriarchy, I have the ominous feeling I’m about to be blamed for something. It reminds me how I used to feel when I worked in mental health services in the NHS.

Two- or three-times a year it seems the national media are obligated to run a story about the inadequacy of care for people with mental illness. Usually based on a report about people being let down. The catastrophic failure of care for young women with eating disorders, or young men with depression, or women on the autistic spectrum. The stories are heartbreaking, and everyone agrees that something must be done. As a lowly frontline worker, nobody blamed me, but I knew that in the weeks that followed I’d be subjected to something that felt very much like blame. No one said it was my fault, but the demands, the hours, the targets, the scrutiny, the bureaucracy would proliferate. None of it would solve the problem, but those who were trying to help would not go unpunished.

So, as a one-way ticket to Blametown, I’m not keen on too much talk about The Patriarchy. But when I consider my hardwired tendency to think of masculinity as the man-at-the-centre, and the despair that accompanies the failure to definitively accomplish this, am I not describing something a little bit like patriarchy? A social system that offers men such a restricted view of what it means to be male, that almost no one can be happy confining themselves to it. An invitation to inhabit a narrow bandwidth of conversations, interests, clothing, emotions and sitting positions so as not to score an own goal for the men’s team by betraying weakness. It’s not like any of this is working for anyone but, beyond exorcism, what can we possibly do about it?

The real Man-at-the-centre

It's not a huge surprise that this midlife crisis struck when it did. Every crisis has a context. Every breakthrough starts with a breakdown. Sometimes I feel like I invited it, because for the last five years I have been practicing contemplative prayer. Twice a day – on a good day – I hole up somewhere alone. Sometimes the study or the bedroom, my office at work, a bench in the park or a seat by the window. I pray in the same places I cry. The twenty-minute timer on my smart phone begins and ends with the sound of a monastery bell. And when it is set, I close my eyes and follow the simple rule of contemplative practice: lifting my heart to God with a humble stirring of love. And for twenty minutes that is all I do. In response to every distraction or entertaining thought, I turn from the noise of my mind back to being lovingly present to the mysterious Presence in the present moment.

Among all the well-intentioned ideas, initiatives, and apps that promise a solution, this is the only answer that has truly addressed the crisis of my own masculinity.

One of the central tenets of contemplative prayer is that when we make space for God like this, we not only meet Him, but we also meet ourselves. I don’t think my insight into needing to be the man-at-the-centre would have been available to me, if I hadn’t been practicing its polar opposite several times a day. In the discipline of contemplative prayer, we decentre the ego, we step over our self-absorption, we fill our consciousness with something that is not us. My experience of it is that when I turn to God with love, I find myself held in a vast field of loving attentiveness, infinitely greater than my own. And over time, this creeps into every corner of life, infecting every moment of contact with family, friends, colleagues, and students with the supreme joy of simply being there for that unique unrepeatable moment of their existence. Whether I am the man-at-the-centre of home, work or church becomes an irrelevance. What matters is not what these situations give to me, but what I can give to them.

This speaks to the supreme paradox at the heart of Christianity. One that is in constant danger of slipping through our fingers. If we grasp it too hard it crumbles in our hands. It stems from the fact that there is a man-at-the-centre of the Christian religion. Arguably the most famous man of all time. Depicted in icons, brushed into frescoes, melted in stained glass, moulded in sculpture, and portrayed on camera. His face appears everywhere, and if we are not careful, we may mistakenly assume that we are celebrating his fame – the greatest influencer ever born. But what makes Jesus the man-at-the-centre is not the ingenuity with which his publicity machine crowned him king of the hill, but the absolute giving of self that characterised his life. The real Man-at-the-centre is the radically de-centred Man.

Personally, I find there to be a seamless continuity between the Jesus I meet in scripture, and the Spirit that animates the life of prayer. Among all the well-intentioned ideas, initiatives, and apps that promise a solution, this is the only answer that has truly addressed the crisis of my own masculinity. Not a humiliation of masculine power, but a profound transforming and redirecting of it. It is the only thing I have yet found that can truly photosynthesise the carbon-dioxide of fear, rage and self-hatred that suffocates so many men, into the liberating oxygen of joyful loving strength that is their birthright.

Article

Change

Freedom of Belief

14 March 2023

7 min read

How an oppressed people are finding a home in Britain

While repression continues in their homeland, Iranian converts to Christianity are building communities in the UK. Robert Wright meets with them.

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

Community members celebrate at lunch.

Jonathan Samadi.

On the first Saturday each month, in the basement of St Luke’s, an Anglican church in Earl’s Court, west London, a group of around 20 people gathers to go through the familiar rituals of the church’s Eucharist – or holy communion – worship service. Led by a priest, the group sing praise songs before preparing for communion. The pattern has been honed by millennia of Christian tradition.

Yet, while the service’s structure and rhythms would be familiar to any regular Church of England worshipper, the liturgy is entirely in Farsi, the language of most of the 88mn people of Iran. The organisers of such a service would risk imprisonment if they mounted such a service in Iran for people who, like most of those at the Earl’s Court service, were born in that country as Muslims and converted to Christianity.

The group is one of a growing number in Iran as well as the UK and other countries catering to Iranian Christian converts. While the exact number who have changed religion is unclear, an estimate used by the British government says there are at least hundreds of thousands in Iran and possibly more than 1mn. The number compares with an estimate of just 500 Christians in the country in 1979, when a revolution led by Shia Muslim clerics installed a government determined to rule the country according to a highly conservative interpretation of Islam.

The rapid growth is partly a reflection of the growing, widespread discontent within Iran with the clerical regime’s hard-line rule and its strict interpretation of Islam, according to Margaret Walsh, a Roman Catholic nun based in Birmingham. Walsh, who for many years worked with Iranian converts and other people seeking asylum, founded St Chad’s Sanctuary, a church group that works with people in Birmingham seeking asylum.

Iranians’ unhappiness has been highlighted by the outbreak of widespread, large anti-government protests following the death in September last year of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman arrested by morality police for breaching religious rules by covering her head inadequately.

'She subsequently sought asylum after Iranian security forces raided her parents’ home seeking information about her.'

Walsh says Christianity provided some of those she met with “an alternative to the regime”.

“This was a way that they could protest by embracing Christianity and rejecting Islam,” she says.

In the UK, however, converts have faced scepticism, especially after Emad Al Swealmeen, an Iraqi man who converted to Anglicanism in 2015, died in a botched, Islamist-style bombing attempt outside Liverpool women’s hospital in November 2021. The incident prompted a Home Office official to tell the Times that many would-be refugees from Muslim countries sought to “game” the asylum system by converting to Christianity.

Jonathan Samadi, an Iranian-born Church of England priest who is leader of the Persian Anglican Community in the Church of England’s London diocese, acknowledges some converts are insincere. Samadi, who oversees the Earl’s Court congregation as well as serving as a vicar in Staines, in Surrey, says some people disappear from church once they have been granted refugee status.

Nevertheless, while he hesitates to give precise numbers, he insists that there is also a significant, large-scale spiritual movement under way.

“I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of migrants converting to Christianity over the years and remain faithful disciples and Christians,” Samadi says.

The converts and those who work with them, meanwhile, tend to stress the vividness of the spiritual experiences that prompted them to become Christians. Many testify that helped them to withstand sometimes harsh treatment at the hands of the Iranian authorities.

One member of the Earl’s Court congregation, who gives her name only as Marta, describes how she faced academic sanctions after becoming a Christian while studying medicine in Isfahan, one of Iran’s centres of clerical conservatism. She left to study in the UK after her parents grew worried about her safety. She subsequently sought asylum after Iranian security forces raided her parents’ home, in the city of Shiraz, seeking information about her.

Other converts tell stories of fleeing police raids on house churches or even periods of imprisonment for converting to Christianity or proselytising – both regarded as serious crimes under Iran’s Islamic legal code for people born Muslim.

Marta insists the difficulties only deepened her commitment.

“I relied more on Jesus,” she says.

At the heart of many of the converts’ accounts is a sense of disenchantment with Islam as practiced in Iran. They say they have found far greater satisfaction in Christianity.

Samadi, the priest, recalls how a conversation with a Christian friend while he was studying in Armenia prompted him to start reading the New Testament.

“After Chapter Six of the Gospel of Matthew – the sermon on the mount – I could really see how much God is on my side,” Samadi says. “The whole sermon on the mount, the values of God and his kingdom, were very refreshing for me.”

'She fainted after realising it looked exactly like the building in her dream.'

Marta, meanwhile, says that, after an ethnic Armenian friend suggested she try going to church, she had a dream in which Jesus spoke to her directly. When she followed His direction and went to her friend’s Armenian Orthodox Church, she says she fainted after realising it looked exactly like the building in her dream. Churches serving traditionally Christian communities, such as Armenians, are allowed to operate in Iran, while the authorities treat harshly anyone proselytising Muslims.

“When I woke up and opened up my eyes, I saw lots and lots of Armenian ladies around me and they tried to pray for me,” Marta says.

Marta says she subsequently started reading the Gospel of John and was immediately struck by the first verse – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”.

“It was very, very amazing and I felt really, really moved by that verse,” Marta says.

'They were also disturbed by the harsh punishments, including executions, meted out to dissenters.'

A similar disillusionment with Iran’s state religion motivates many asylum-seekers who convert after leaving Iran for non-religious reasons, according to people who work with the group. Brother Benedict, a monk in the Anglican Society of St Francis, who accommodated some Muslim convert asylum-seekers when he lived in north-east Leeds, says that many were disillusioned by how women were treated in Iran. They were also disturbed by the harsh punishments, including executions, meted out to dissenters.

“This made them question their faith,” Benedict recalls. “Many of them were Muslim in name only. Many of them were recommended by a friend when they came to the UK, ‘You go to a church’.”

Benedict stresses that he sought to avoid rushing into steps like baptism, trying to ensure that converts were sincere and understood the step’s significance before they underwent it. Others working with converts say they take a similarly cautious approach.

Margaret Walsh introduced a ceremony of Christian initiation for converts, allowing them to make a public sign of commitment before they were ready for the more rigorous process of undergoing baptism.

Benedict would nevertheless sometimes go to asylum tribunals and other court hearings with converts to testify to their being regular church attenders.

“The important thing for us was that they had a relationship with Jesus Christ,” Benedict says. “That was the fundamental thing. Although I was going to the court with many of them, that wasn’t really the purpose of the church. The purpose was to give them a good foundation in the Christian faith.”

Yet, however robust their new faith, there remain considerable challenges for Iranian converts who have fled to the UK. Marta, who left Iran in 2008, has only just received her full qualification to serve as a doctor in the UK. Marta, who is 40, has resumed her medical career, working as a general practitioner in Oxfordshire. Her younger brother, Simon, 37, who converted separately and fled to the UK after a short period of imprisonment, is still learning English in the hope of resuming his medical career.

Samadi has a vision that Farsi-speaking believers will support each other as the community puts down deeper roots.

“I’d like to see a network operating and connecting them together,” Samadi says.

Brother Benedict says help from local, English-speaking congregations will be critical to supporting Iranian converts as the asylum process moves them to different parts of the UK.

“I’d like to say many more need support from English congregations but I think it needs a bit more encouragement,” he says.

'Life in the UK remains a second-best compared with an eventual return to Iran.'

Yet, for Samadi, life in the UK remains a second-best compared with an eventual return to Iran. Like many other converts, Samadi hopes that the current pro-democracy protests could eventually bring about the transformation in the country necessary to allow that.

“For those Christians I’ve served in the UK, I think their intention and their dream is to see people in Iran can worship God in freedom, without fear of persecution and being interrogated or deprived of their freedom and rights,” Samadi says.

The “dream”, Samadi goes on, is to be able to return to Iran to worship in freedom with the Christians who remain in the country.

“For all those Christians, the whole intention is one day they can share the gospel freely and worship freely with all those who are Christians,” he says.