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.

Events

Belief

Creed

Digital

Wisdom

26 September 2024

6 min read

The wisdom of living with the question not googling the quick answer

Are we trading wisdom for apparent certainty?

Elizabeth Wainwright

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

A person sits on a window sill with one raise knee.

In much of the work I’ve been involved in, whether writing, coaching, hillwalking, local politics, or international development, I’ve learned to ask questions I don’t have answers to, and sometimes neither do the people I’m with. We sit with the question, decide whether it’s the right one, try to discern what else emerges in our peripheral vision as we focus on it. It takes effort to come to something like an answer, and in doing so, we peel off layers of unknowing. It has taken practice, and it can be slow work. But in searching for good questions, I see they can be an entry point into not just information but wisdom too. And there are many places that are hungry for wisdom.

I longed for better questions and more curiosity when I was a district councillor. Curiosity that made space for residents to share their stories and opinions, curiosity about different political positions and what might happen if we work across divides, about what might be possible if we could get past the way things had always been and imagine what they could become. But the desire to save face, to be seen to be in control, was strong, and I felt it often got in the way of real conversation. To be committed to the process more than the product takes courage, I think. The courage of uncertainty, of saying, “I don’t know”, of putting humility and honesty before status. Sitting with questions can be difficult, perhaps even feeling like a luxury, but they show us ourselves and the world a bit more clearly, offering a pathway to relationship, to collaboration, to humanity, to wisdom.

I have been thinking about the temptation to trade the wisdom of questions for the apparent certainty of instant answers, even wrong answers. It is a temptation that, in our age of one-click everything and the importance of image, is only quickening. It is a temptation that I have been thinking about, wondering if it started with that old temptation in the Garden of Eden. Staring at a painting of Adam and Eve in the Prado gallery a while back, I wondered whether that original temptation set us on a path of instant information but also of depleted wisdom.

As I peered into the painting, a thought sparked: what if God told Adam and Eve they could eat fruit from any tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil not because he wanted us to stay ignorant or innocent (something that Philip Pullman explores in his Northern Lights books) but because he knew it was too easy for us to eat from that tree. He wanted us to live, and to search for knowing and wisdom ourselves. Eating the fruit would bypass experience, there’d be no need to develop muscles of thinking and discernment. And he wanted us to be wise, to keep creating and tending the world with him. When those first pulled-from-the-earth humans ate the fruit, it was like us still-dependent-on-the-earth humans asking Artificial Intelligence to write us an essay: we might get what we want, but we’ve bypassed the experience of thinking, creating, discerning what’s ours to say.

This analogy creaks when pulled too far, but it lingers all the same. There’s a quote I’ve long appreciated, from the biologist E.O.Wilson:

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesisers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”

Picking the fruit, becoming reliant on AI, gives us information but perhaps not the ability to think, and not the wisdom to make good choices. God wants us to be wise. The Bible’s Book of James says we can ask for wisdom. It is not withheld from us; it is not hidden. It’s everywhere, waiting to be called on.

There are no digital shortcuts to the difficult work of community, no AI-shortcut to loving well, just as there was never a shortcut to complete knowledge of good and evil.

It’s so easy to find answers now — Google solves problems and democratises access to information, unless of course you’re in a part of the world that has no digital access. In rural mid Devon and in rural Zambia, both places I’ve worked deeply with communities, you can’t simply access an online meeting or find the answer to a question you might have. Sometimes this feels a life-giving challenge: it increases the need for relationship, for trust, for community conversation. Other times is hinders progress: it means people can’t access jobs, or basic health knowledge, or government decisions that affect them. Google has changed who can access the world, how we interact with it, how we think and learn. Historically, people memorised poetry and scripture and news. The printing press changed that; words were pulled from minds and printed on paper. Our online existence has accelerated that: I don’t need to stretch my memory if I don’t want — I can find and store what I need digitally. We’ve outsourced our memory, and I wonder whether we’re also outsourcing our capacity to think and discern.

In doing so, we risk disconnecting from ourselves, our relationships, our communities, our places. No longer do we need to rely on each other for knowing and wisdom — we can trust faceless digital forces that profit from us doing so. We risk too our unique ability to think creatively, to discern good sources, to think deeply and with nuance about a topic. If AI learns from everything that has been, it can synthesise and perhaps even extrapolate from that and project forward, but it can’t creatively imagine. It can’t reflect and speak wisdom.

There is an ease and convenience to Google, to AI. There was an ease and convenience to picking the fruit to gain knowledge. But we are not called to ease and convenience. I think we are called to love, to care for our neighbours, and these things are necessarily inconvenient. Digital access to information is a tool, a resource, a gift that benefits many of us in many ways. But it could easily blunt our humanity, becoming a temptation that bypasses the work of truly living. There are no digital shortcuts to the difficult work of community, no AI-shortcut to loving well, just as there was never a shortcut to complete knowledge of good and evil. With information available at the tug of a fruit — a click, a download, a request to an artificial intelligence — I am curious how our ability to sit with questions will change, whether we’ll feel beauty or fear in not having all the answers, whether we’ll lose our ability to discern, and to “have faith in what we do not see.”

Sitting with questions, with curiosity, is I think an entry point to faith and to mystery.

Jesus calls us to questions, to relationship, to love, not to answers that might be easily won but little interrogated. He knew that questions, not answers, were often the best response to questions. Questions to sit with, to hold up as a mirror, to walk as a path to wisdom. He asked a lot of them. Who do you say I am? How many loaves do you have? Do you love me? What do you want? Why are you afraid? The Bible records Jesus asking questions, and sometimes offering answers too. But the point often seems to be the question itself, giving endless chances for people to question their assumptions, and their judgements, and to deepen their faith and make it personal. In doing so, Jesus offered a path to deeper and more meaningful knowledge of God, the world, others, and ourselves. And by asking questions he gave dignity to people, listening deeply to them, loving them, calling them into themselves.

Sitting with questions, with curiosity, is I think an entry point to faith and to mystery. And we have companions as we do this: Jesus, early Christian mystics, prayer, the Psalms, each other – these are all places I turn to dig deeper into the knowing that comes through unknowing. To live with questions and within mystery, to listen deeply to each other, to speak the language of soul rather than certainty, might be difficult and countercultural. But in an age where the future is becoming less certain despite the whole world seemingly at our fingertips, I think it is where our hope is. After all, “what good is it for a man to gain the whole world but forfeit his soul?”