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

Awe and wonder

Change

Community

Time

31 December 2024

7 min read

The bells that awaken awe in the new year

We need new rhythms if we are to navigate the world as it is today.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Restored church bells lined up in a cathedral, as crowds mill around them.

Notre Dame bells.

Notre Dame de Paris.

The jackdaws flap and caw as they come in to roost. The sun sets behind the bare trees; its fiery farewell doing nothing to warm the cold air. The village church bell rings out 4pm. My young daughter stops what she is doing, says “ding dong”, then carries on. That’s what we all used to do: stop what we were doing and be called to something else, the bell’s rhythmic tolls cutting through our individuality and unifying us for a time. Perhaps we would go to church, or stop to pray, or remember the dead for whom the bell tolled. I have been thinking about that often-quoted poem by John Donne:

No man is an island,

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thine own

Or of thine friend's were.

Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

Now, church bells ring out the hours of the clock, and occasionally still ring out mourning and celebration too. They seem also to ring out a quaintness, a nostalgia, a past that is slipping away. I have been sitting by the old stone church listening to them, wondering what else they might be tolling for, what else might be slipping away. In Donne’s poem, he says the bell tolls not for them, but for us, because we are all connected. Each person’s death diminishes the whole from which they were a part, and so diminishes me. The bells used to remind us of that whole.

The bell could be melancholy but I notice how it tilts me toward hope, even in this deep winter stillness; an audible distillation of light ringing through the dimness. I think it is the hope of mankind which Donne tells me I am involved in. These old bells seem to ring defiantly despite the many other chimes that ring just for me: digital pings, messages, notifications, news, an algorithm that tried to force me down my own lone path. But echoes of communal life persist. Now, I hear the bell say:

Ding: listen

Dong: lift your head

Ding: look

Dong: life is a whole

Ding: face each other

Dong: this is the only way we will meet the future

A few days later, my daughter and I step into the village hall. We surface together from evening darkness into the light of song: it is the carol concert, we are late, and the music is about to start. The singers are decked in lights and earthy greens and rusty reds. They are a group from Exmoor who conserve and share traditional and local songs, as well as singing the songs we all recognise. My daughter’s cheeks are pink, her eyes blaze with delight. In a few days, the solstice will be here, and the earth will pause in its movement before turning back to face the light. Here in this old hall, the songs seem to reach towards that coming light: we are here, we are together, and we choose to lift our individual voices as one chorus of community.

I think about the people in this hall gathering to mark other things — memories, celebrations, vision, care — and I wonder about the more figurative bells that draw them together to do so. What are the bells that keep us together now, when so much encourages us into isolation and individualism? — The bells that remind us we can never be the islands that we are so often encouraged to be: independent, tough, believing consumption will heal us, packaged into a personal brand; everything encouraging us to be seen, not known.

I try to listen for these bells, to hear how to inhabit time reverently and with reciprocity, not with urgency and isolation. In many places the actual church bells are silent, but I think we still need the bells of communality: bells that call us into share rhythms, reminding us to pause in our individual movement, reminding us to gather, to mourn, to remember things and find the light and the hope in each other, just as the tilting of the earth pauses at the solstice before it turns to face the light.

Nature’s cycle is one way of doing this: tuning in to the turn of the year that makes new life possible. The solstice and equinox; wassailing in January to bless the apple trees; noticing when migrating birds appear or leave; sharing planting and harvesting days. Liturgical calendars are a way that Christian communities kept and still keep time: advent, Christmas, lent, Easter. These rhythms become familiar, reminding us that time isn’t linear, much as the myth of infinite progress would have us believe otherwise. Time is cyclical, expanding and contracting; old events revisited regularly in new ways.

Knowing that it is not just me looking at these stars, but people across the world and through time, brings me into a peace, a reverence that can be hard to come by.

And there are other things that can bring us together too: causes, hobbies, interests, protests. These can take on the role of bells perhaps, drawing us together around shared purpose – but shared purpose and shared existence, shared being, are not always the same thing.

Perhaps we need new rhythms if we are to meet the world as it is today. Imagine if a bell tolled — literally or figuratively — not just for human funerals, but whenever a species went extinct, or a tree cut down. Imagine if neighbourhoods gathered to light candles and share stories and soul and care each week, offering a space that church used to provide to lots of people through the ages. And what if we resurrected old traditions for a new age: ‘beating the bounds’ as a way to mark not just the boundaries of land but the places that need restoring and regenerating now; harvest festivals not just as something for school children and rural churches, but as a way we can better connect with food and farming. What if we looked at old wisdom; the way the church calendar aligned with the farming calendar, asking us to remember that food and the soil it comes from are sacred things.

Our friends were near the beach in Costa Rica. They noticed that at the end of the day, everyone stopped what they were doing — fishing, fixing, working — and watched the sunset. This moment of beauty seemed to bring people together into synchronicity. In his book Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder, scientist Dacher Keltner shows us how experiencing awe can, amongst other things, help us to experience humanity, see patterns in life, and better collaborate with each other. He says: “The last pillar of the default self—striving for competitive advantage, registered in a stinginess toward giving away possessions and time—crumbles during awe. Awe awakens the better angels of our nature.” Perhaps putting ourselves in the way of awe might help us hear the bells — old and new — that ring in this current age, and that might bring us together and love each other well. If love only exists in relationship, and love is what helps us to see and to care, then protecting and restoring relationship seems to be vital work for our time.

Now, the winter sky is dark and the stars shine brightly above. They shine with a clarity that matches the peal of the bells in the village. They call me beyond myself into something unified, something older, something necessary. They call me into wonder and awe. Knowing that it is not just me looking at these stars, but people across the world and through time, brings me into a peace, a reverence that can be hard to come by. I step back into the house but my mind faces outwards into the world.

Church bells used to call people together to worship, bringing a sense of shared time and purpose. They still ring, but they can be hard to hear against the noise of individual time. I think they are calling us together again now. And if we can’t hear them, perhaps we need to set new bells ringing. May the bells that ring this New Year’s Day inspire us to do so.

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