Wild at Heart?
.John Eldridge hopes to inspire men to rediscover lifes' passion by making everything in life an adventure, a battle to win, and a beauty to rescue. Things like marriage, career, and church become heroic quests instead of binding chains.
You might be thinking, "ok so what...if it inspires a few men to feel passionately about their lives, what's wrong with that." Well I will tell you what's wrong, this circa 1950 ideal of manhood in the long run has detrimental effects on men, women, families, and the church.
Chap Clark, Associate professor of Youth and Family Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary says "The basic premise that men need a princess to rescue has set back male-female relationships in the church 30 years." He continues by saying that treating women as figurines instead of in the image of God hurts relationships over time.
Despite what I would call the obvious problems with the book it has been translated into 16 languages and sold over 1.5 million copies in English. I was partially motivated to write about this because of a blog I read earlier this week that deals with some of the expectations women (specifically mothers) deal with.
Instead of selfishly turning inward to "rediscover the warrior within", men should be discovering how our wives need to be loved, how our churches need us to serve, how our children need our attention, and in what ways we can show Christ in our workplace. Eldridge might say that I am just trying to box men into a set of expectations that make them feel trapped and obligated to be meek, wimpy, and too nice. Men feel trapped because the life they live reflects the choices they make not the fantasies they conjur up.
If men quit fantasizing about naked airbrushed women, their HEMI engines, and training their offspring to live out their own dimenished atheletic abilities then perhaps we would have men who are sexually completed with their wives, content with their belongings, and just as moved playing catch with their daughters as they are with their sons. It's a fantasy to think that turning men into creatures of "the wild" will make them happier, healthier, and better men. I just might not be "Wild at Heart" material, but that's ok by me!
7 comments:
Thoughtful post, Jason. Thanks for sharing your insight.
I went on my first men's retreat this past
October. The topic of choice: Wild At Heart. Suffice it to say, it was the worst experience I've ever had. There I was with 40 men whowere at least 10 years older than me, and we were watching violent scenes of Braveheart, Gladiator, and some military movie with Mel Gibson that I had never seen. Come to think of it, it seemed like most of the movies involved starred Mel Gibson or were connected to him in some way. There's nothing quite like sitting through gratuitous battle scenes and suggestive sexcapades for 30 minutes with a bunch of middle
aged men. To top it all off, we watched some of the gut wrenching scenes of "The Passion of the Christ," to get us in the right mindset (because Christ pursued his bride!). I'm not sure what the make up of your church is like, but where I go to church, not every man is married. Where I go to church, not every man has a woman in his life. Where I go to church, not every man is even attracted to women. I say these things because it shows what a blatant fallacy his writings are, and for some reason the evangelical Christian group bites at every smelly piece of bait that plunks into the water. When we got back from the retreat, all of the men were acting like a bunch of idiots, acting like they had reclaimed something that had long been lost or stolen from them. But, alas, like all Christian fads, everything was back to normal the next weekend. Gender is such an interesting construct. It seems to me like it's time that we revisit our notion of what it means
to truly be human and return to the Source. I always find it amusing when people defensively react to being "found out" by saying, "What, I'm only human!" Perhaps one day we will realize the folly of our way
and understand that we're really never human enough. I commend your most recent post. Blessings to you in your ministry.
Jason,
I really appreciated this post. I think some of what Eldridge writes is worth considering, but I definitely hear ya! Amen!
I really enjoyed this book. I agree that one fault it has is that it makes a mass generalization that this book applies to all men, which it doesn't. And really you have to read the whole book to get the benefit. The first half of the book really sets up the second half of the book, where he talks about defining your manhood as a child of God.
Do you think Elderidge transforms God's image to fit his own image? Elderidge had some good things to say, but it seems he has bought into the redemptive violence myth that has virtually socialized all boys into the process of maturation. Geez. Its the mentality of, "If you don't get your boy to kill a deer before he's 10, then he'll turn into some sort of queer."
Matt:
Thanks for the comment. I did not read the book all the way through and what I did read left me with the impression of where he was going, however I could have been mistaken. I am curious as to how Eldridge, in your opinion, redefined manhood within the context of being a child of God?
Anyone:
Also if there was to be a "Wild at Heart" for women, what would be the heart of it's message using Eldridge's model of masculinity and femininity?
Before I read the book I defined myself as a Christian man as someone who went to church, was nice to everybody, even went on mission trips every now and then. But I didn't really have a drive to be anything more than that. What the book said to me is that a Christian man is a soldier in God's army, and that you need to care less about being nice and more about furthering the kingdom.
Now that doesn't mean I've stopped being nice, that just means that now instead of being nice so that people won't think that I am mean, I am nice because I am a Christian man who wants to serve.
Honestly, you can ask my wife (if you knew her) that book took me on an emotional roller coaster ride. Through the first half of the book my whole personality changed, I wanted to be manly, dangerous, I wanted to wrestle a lot and things like that. After I finished it made me think about what I was doing to really serve, and that the heartless serving I was doing now wasn't enough.
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