Wounds (Part 2)

INTRO

We started Chapter 4.

Every man comes into this world set up to fail.

There comes a time when we simply have to face the challenges in our lives and stop backing down.

Many women ask their sons to fill a void in their soul that their husband has left.

FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH

Masculinity is an essence that is hard to articulate but that a boy naturally craves as he craves food and water. It is something passed between men.

“The traditional way of raising sons,” noted Robert Bly, “which lasted for thousands and thousands of years, amounted to fathers and sons living in close—murderously close—proximity, while the father taught the son a trade: perhaps farming or carpentry or blacksmithing or tailoring.”

EX.: Learning how to grow a garden with my grandad.

EX.: Building a basketball court.

The act were never really the important thing. It was the delight, the contact, the masculine presence gladly bestowing itself on me.

And despite the details, what is mostly passed along is the masculine blessing.

Ex.: Father and son in tribes (Spending time failing and teaching)

Knowledge is craved and digested like food.

TESTING THEIR STRENGTH

Ex.: Wrestling with your sons.

Son sneaking in to land a punch.

They have to see that it hurts (Do they have the strength like Dad?)(Fernando’s sons knuckle punch with Pastor Randy).

“The ancient societies believed that a boy becomes a man only through ritual and effort—only through the ‘active intervention of the older men,’”

Bly reminds us. The father or another man must actively intervene, and the mother must let go.

There is a ritual in which a man leads his son away for initiation, when he returns, his mother pretends not to know him and to be introduced to the “young man”.

This shows that a mother can cooperate in her son’s passage tot eh father’s world.

If she can’t do this, it will make everything a lot messier later-especially when the son gets married.

When a mother clings desperately to her son, the boy develops a bond with his mother that is like emotional incest. His loyalties are divided between his mother and his wife.

That’s why in Gen. 2:24

Genesis 2:24 (ESV)

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

A man cannot be united with his wife if he is united with his mom.

Talk about a father walking his daughter down the aisle.

The walk

The giving the daughter away

Groom replaces father

Name and covering change

Sometimes, when the mother clings, the boy will try to tear himself away, violently.

This typically comes in the teenage years and often involves some ugly behavior, maybe some foul words on the part of the young man.

She feels rejected, and he feels guilty, but he knows he must get away.

These young men may grow to resent their mothers and won’t know why.

Because the mom is reluctant to seeing her son as a man, the young man senses that proximity to his mother endangers his masculine journey.

Almost as if he would be sucked back into his adolescence.

Sam, didn’t ask his father “Dad, did you really think that I was a good little boy” he asked him “Did you really think that I was a wild man up there?”

The boy was concerned with his strength and his ability to overcome.

He didn’t contemplate on how “sweet” he was.

A boy’s passage into manhood involves many of those moments.

The father’s role is to arrange for them, invite his boy into them, keep his eye out for the moment the question arises, and then speak into his son’s heart, Yes, you are.

You have what it takes.

And that is why the deepest wound is always given by the father.

As Buechner said, “If strangers and strange sights can shake the world of children, it takes the people they know and love best to pull it out from under them like a chair.” He was speaking of his own father’s suicide.

THE FATHER-WOUND

Story of a family argument

Son came home to find his dad verbally abusing his mom.

The son took the mom’s side and dad calls him a “mama’s boy” as he walked out.

Because he didn’t have a strong relationship with his father because there were years of distance between them.

the dad had his own business so he was gone most of the time and they rarely spent time together.

His son felt like he was a disappointment to his dad because he wasn’t a star athlete in which his father thought highly of.

The son had a spiritual hunger and he attended church but his dad didn’t value that.

So those words from his father really sent a death blow to the son.

Lenne Payne said this,

“When the father-son relationship is right, the quiet tree of masculine strength within the father protects and nurtures the fragile stripling of masculinity within his son.”

Story of the Jocks vs Musicians

Charles loved playing the piano.

His father and brothers were jocks.

Father and other sons came back from gym to find the son playing his keyboard.

After bottled up anger over the years, the father angrily declared, “You’re such a faggot.

Story of the Great Depression

A man recalls his time growing up during the Great Depression.

His father was an alcoholic and rarely employed.

He hired his son out to a local farm.

The son wouldn’t see his father for weeks and then out of the blue his father would show up to the farm to collect the son’s wages.

The son seeing his father started running toward his father to embrace him only to have is father drive away, leaving him at the farm. The boy was 5 years old!

VIOLENT FATHERS

Sons that had violent fathers had their question answered in destructive and devastating way.

“Do I have what it takes? Am I a man, Papa?”

“Now, you’re a mama’s boy, an idiot, a faggot, a worthless excuse of a son, a disgrace, a disappointment, a mistake, you’ll never amount to anything...”

Those words can shape a man’s life.

The assault woulds are like a shotgun blast to the chest with a slug, the hole is gaping.

Without some type of help, most men don’t recover.

The wound of words is worse than the wound of swords.

—Arabic proverb

Anonymous

My Dad

The answer to my question that I got from my dad was worst I believe.

Although all of those answers are fatal to a son, the answer that I got, I’m still trying to recover from.

My answer from my dad was _______________(SILENCE)

My dad wasn’t even in my life to give me an answer.

His absence made me feel that I didn’t have what it took to be his son.

ASSAULT WOUNDS

These wounds can become wickedly evil when they involve physical, verbal, or sexual abuse that has been carried for years.

The thing about assault wounds is that they’re obvious.

PASSIVE WOUNDS

Passive wounds are gradual like a cancer.

Because of this, it can go unchecked or unrecognizable for a long time.

This causes the wound to continue to bleed and get worse, never healing.

Fathers can also be in the home and be silent.

There are fathers that retreat into their holes when they come home from work.

They checkout during a time where their sons need them the most.

Other fathers leave and never come back.

Divorce and abandonment is a wound that lingers because it makes the boy think that if he would’ve did things differently, his father would still be here.

With absent fathers, the question goes unanswered. “Do I have what it takes? Am I a man, Daddy?”

Their silent answer is “I don’t know…I doubt it…you’ll have to to find out for yourself…probably not.”

THE WOUND’S EFFECT

Every man caries a wound.

No matter how good your life may have seemed to you, you live in a broken world full of broken people.

Your parents not matter how wonderful you thought they were, you mother is a daughter of Eve and your dad is a son of Adam.

There is no way that you can escape without taking a wound.

Wounds may come from other sources as well.

Brother, uncle, a coach, a leader, a mentor, or even a stranger.

They do come and when they do, no matter if they’re assaultive or passive, they come with a message.

The messages that comes with them feel final and true because it is delivered with such force.

And our reaction to it shapes personality drastic ways.

From that flows a “false self”.

Most men are living as a false self, which correlates to their wounds.

Let me break it down to you:

Explain what your message from your father was.

We often misunderstand unruly teenage behavior as “adolescent rebellion” but those are actually cries for involvement for engagement.

Even though we get saved, most of us didn’t let God heal our wounds.

A lot of us are very driven.

But being so driven comes at a high cost.

To live a driven life you have to literally shove your heard down, or drive it with whips.

Our problem as men is that it’s hard for us to admit that we need or admit that we’re broken.

And that is why we create that “false self”.

We end up with the thought, “I don’t need anyone”.

Remember the message that we’ve received, “I’m on my own”.

DEALING WITH THE WOUND OF SUICIDE

Most families who dealt with a father’s suicide sometimes tries to move on, almost to the point of acting like it never happen.

The message is this, “the masculine in your family cannot even be spoken of; anything wild is violent and evil.

From this birthed this vow, “I will never do anything even remotely dangerous or risky or wild. I will never be like my dad.

I will be the nicest guy you ever met.

I will be gentle, caring, soft-spoken.

I will be a push over, can’t say no, or stand up for myself.

TWO OPTIONS OF MEN WITH WOUNDS

Will overcompensate for their wounds and become driven (violent men).

Will shrink back and go passive (retreating men)

It can also be a mixture of both.

CLOSING

The wound comes and with it a message.

It is then that a boy will make a vow.

It is then this vow that will create a “false self”.

In the center of all this is deep uncertainty.

So many men feel stuck

Whether paralyzed and unable to move, or unable to stop moving.

Will shrink back and go passive (retreating men)

It can also be a mixture of both.

14  He cannot succeed in healing the wounds of others who is himself unhealed by reason of neglecting himself.

Richard Baxter

The Reformed Pastor (17th century)

Richard Baxter

Man, by his fall, wounded his head and his heart; the wound in the head made him unstable in the truth, and that in his heart unsteadfast in his affections.

Stephen Charnock