GIRLS AND BOYS

Little play soldiers, if only you knew

what kind of battles are waiting for you.

                                                ~ Martin Cooper

When our oldest daughter was little, we – like many enlightened parents in the 70s – were determined to give her a Barbie-free upbringing. It was part of a developing movement based on raising children without gender roles or stereotypes.¹  We were pretty  successful until the day, when she was four or five, she came home from her baby-sitter’s with a cardboard box full of Barbies. We gave in and gave up. She played happily with Barbie for the next few years and then passed the Box-o-Barbies on to her little sister. The box now sits in our attic, where it will no doubt one day be “discovered” by her daughter, little Violet, born just five days ago.

Violet has a three year old brother, Sam. His parents (and grandparents) are raising him without toy weapons, and he has a completely non-violent toy box. The other day he was working on a cardboard puzzle – some kind of bright, happy Big Bird scene. He picked up one of the large puzzle pieces, gripped it in his little fingers, and announced, “Hey, this could be a gun!” Yesterday, his weapon of choice was a (closed) soap-bubble bottle. He brandished it like a ray gun and “blasted” us with imaginary bubbles.

Personality development and gender roles are subjects of much study, and my opinions are not professional, but based on observation and the experience of a being a kid, a parent, and a grandparent. Allowing for important exceptions, the emergence of gender-related interests and traits in boys and girls (like a three-year-old boy’s determination to turn almost anything into a gun) seems almost genetic, and no doubt some of it is. But certainly a great deal of it has to do with those things that we (parents and society) introduce our children to – both consciously and sub-consciously: the colors we dress them in, the way we talk to them, the books we read to them, the toys we buy, the images they see. My guess is that many of the most important teaching events are so subtle that we don’t notice them and we don’t realize we are doing them.

And, of course, genetic or cultural, there’s nothing predictive or automatic about it. My loving parents gave me a Roy Rogers (or Gene Autry or Hopalong Cassidy) gun belt every Christmas from about age five through age ten. Few days went by during those years that I didn’t have a six-gun in a holster slung at my hip. Like my grandson, I discovered an interest in making the bad guys “go dead.” (I laughed at my girl cousin because she didn't know how to make a proper gunshot sound.) Today, although I don’t have the courage to be a pacifist, I am not interested in guns.

(Similarly, although I am not a hunter, I have fond memories of pheasant hunting with my dad, and I think that the male camaraderie of the hunt was an elemental part of my development – especially since my dad’s hunting buddies were the same guys I saw in church with their kids – my friends. Another subject for another time.)

Yet, to use an over-used metaphor, there is an elephant in the room. It is this: the developmental interest in guns among boys (whatever its cause) combined with research that demonstrates that our brains aren’t capable of critical thinking and decision-making until age twenty-five means that our society raises (quite deliberately, I think) young men who are only too happy to join up to make the bad guys “go dead.” Until they reach twenty-five, that is. Then they wise up and want to stay home and raise their own boys and girls. (It is no coincidence that twenty-five is about the age that heretofore immortal young men realize, "Hey, I could go dead, too!") This is why recruiting or allowing volunteers under the age of twenty-five for war-fighting is immoral and criminal. Military operations should be limited to men and women over twenty-five. Then let us see how many Iraqs and Afghanistans there will be.

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1. I do not mock this movement. Although there was some trendiness about it, it was (and is) part of the ongoing liberation of men and women from harmful, limiting stereotypes. That said, I recall an essay I read back then, written by one of these enlightened parents. She recalled a conversation at the playground between two moms raising gender-neutral kids. Each had a boy and a girl. "And yet," said one, "there is a difference isn't there."

WHAT'S THE GOOD WORD, PREACHER?

"...One of the shaman's jobs was ensuring that solar eclipses would be temporary. Nice work if you can get it." ~Robert Wright, The Evolution of God

It has occurred to me—with a combination of humility, seriousness, and not a little amusement—that I am the village shaman. (Perhaps I should say a village shaman.) The calling of the preacher traces its lineage back into the mists of pre-history, to the emergence of the tribal wise man, the shaman, the witch doctor (from which profession the line evolves and finally divides, leading, on the one branch, to the humble parish pastor and on the other, the medical doctor – who, for some reason, ended up making more money.)

Although in most religious communities the clergy person is charged with the task of passing on the sometimes narrow, dogmatic beliefs of a particular creed, I mean, for the sake of this discussion, to set that aside. I am speaking of the more general sense in which those who are called to lead various “flocks” are looked to as “wise” men or women – the ones who are expected to say something worth listening to regarding how to find meaning in life and a purpose for the living of one’s days, including:  “How do I go on now that my Mildred’s gone?” “Do I have to take that chemo?” and “What’s it all about, Alfie?”

For thousands of years the primary means of receiving this dispensed wisdom has been in a weekly address of between fifteen minutes and an hour or more in length. (We can take today’s standard sermon length and add five minutes for every fifty years going back in time.) My seminary professors would no doubt remind me (and I agree) that a sermon is not about the preacher’s personal philosophy or homey tips for living. (As one of them liked to say, “Remember, preach the good news, not your good views.”) But I’m speaking here of a kind of “folk” understanding of the preacher’s task.

Although one has to be either a megalomaniac or mighty humble to stand up before hundreds of people every week and presume to talk, uninterrupted, for fifteen or twenty minutes about the meaning of life(1), I think there is something to the premise I am putting forward here, both as a description and an expectation of the preacher’s assignment: The average parish pastor plays the role of something like a tribal shaman.(2) When I’m in the pew and not in the pulpit I do expect to get a word to instruct my life in one way or another.

My intention here is neither to ridicule nor to puff up the importance of my profession, but to observe, both from the inside and the outside, that all societies have had and continue to have their shamans. I write at a time when the persuasive power of the church and its preachers is (at least for the time being) waning. I know there are – and always have been – other “wise” ones to whom the community looks. I was going to list some candidates here, but let me ask, instead, who is your shaman? Is it important for someone to play that role in our lives, whether religious or secular? To paraphrase the Apostle Paul, “Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age?”

Where, dear reader, do you get the good word?

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Notes:


For many, the word "shaman" is synonymous with "charlatan." For this discussion, however, I mean it in its more objective anthropological sense as "tribal wise person."


1. "In some cultures shamans have struck anthropologists as psychotic, people who may indeed be hearing voices that no one else is hearing…. The Chukchee used to describe someone who felt driven to the shamanistic calling as 'doomed to inspiration.'” –Robert Wright, The Evolution of God

Martin Luther said that “after every sermon the preacher should fall on his knees and ask God to forgive him for what he’s just done”

2. This is one of the reasons that clergy who are charlatans, or who exploit for their own gain or sickness are so devastating: they’re messing with people’s understanding of life itself. Another post for another time.

IN LENT, AS FACEBOOK FADES FROM MEMORY... SORT OF

For two or three years, when our children were in junior and senior high, our family gave up TV for Lent.* Although it wasn’t their idea, our daughters went along with Dad’s scheme without too much persuasion. We put the television set in a closet, so there was no evidence of the bug-eyed monster in the house. My memory of that experience is that, after adjusting to the change for about a day, we really didn’t miss it. I can’t say that it resulted in idyllic sessions of Monopoly games or family readings in front of the fire, but we really didn’t miss it. I recommend it. Five weeks is a good amount of time to adjust to the change and then get on with a TV-less life. (A predictable question is, “Why did you turn it on again?” A good question.)

Now (at the time of this writing) I’m about half-way into doing without Facebook for Lent, and the result is much the same, with some variations. It was not the social connections I wanted to give up (certainly not you, dear friend!), but the process and screen-time of Facebook; and to evaluate how I use it. I don’t think I am any more a compulsive Facebook user than the next guy, which is to say that there is a bit of compulsion to it, and that’s what I’m temporarily weaning myself from, and quite happily.

I haven’t given up e-mail, and I have come to appreciate that digital niche more and more as a way of staying in touch with close friends and family. (I say “niche” because among the various e-communication media available to us: telephone, cell phone, texting, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc., I actually find e-mail to be uniquely “intimate.”) But I have come to enjoy some of those old-friend-Facebook-reconnections – the kind of communication that only happens on Facebook (these folks and I will most likely not exchange e-mails during my dry spell) – and these connections are one of the reasons that I will reactivate my account at the end of Lent.

When I do think of Facebook, it is to analyze what I’m missing, if anything, and to get a sense of if (or how badly) I want to go back to it. And I find that the thought of re-activating causes me more cold sweats than did the prospect of shutting down. It’s not just that I once again open myself up to the reports of what my friend’s cousin’s roommate fed her cat, or having to decide if I’m going to accept a friend request from my friend’s cousins’ roommate. And it’s not just re-opening that struggle with the near-compulsion of the lure of the Facebook screen…

It’s limiting myself once again to the narrow slice of myself that I present on Facebook. Oh, it’s not a phony presentation, or somebody I’m not, but it’s a narrow part of myself: The goof-off. With a few honorable exceptions, I’m basically just horsing around on Facebook.  In her new book, Alone Together, author Sherry Turkle proposes that on Facebook we’re all “performing” for each other. Although it may be a fine line of difference, I would say, rather, that (speaking for myself), I’m just goofing-off, both in the old-fashioned sense of wasting time, and in the other sense of being a wise guy.

I have no doubt exaggerated in that last paragraph. (And the reader will note that I’m only speaking for myself.) But I still seek a nobler cause for Facebook; and whether or not it is a trivial or an important part of my life is still an open question for me. FB is in its infancy – it’s still the crank-telephone on the wall into which we shout for the operator. It’s about twenty per-cent pure silliness, seventy per-cent idle chatter, and maybe ten per-cent meaningful discourse. That’s what it is now; who knows what it will become. But I’ll be there. Right after Easter. I’ll try to be noble.

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*Lent is a six-week penitential season in the Christian calendar leading up to Easter. The rationale for giving up anything for Lent is a subject for another post for another time.