Every Man's Battle: A Metaphor

The sermon this morning was entitled Christmas Through a Man's Eyes, and was an articulation of the nature of a Godly man by means of a character study of Joseph, the husband of Mary. During the part about true sexual integrity, the statement was made that a truly Godly man is one who will change channels on the TV, will turn off the computer, will leave the theatre when necessary — when the content is problematic to his sexual integrity. It was at this juncture that I recalled an incident from the past and began to make connections between the struggle commonly attributed to "every" man, and those I have been encountering regarding the cultural language and mythology of Leadership.

Some years ago, we used to receive mailings from a Christian organization based in western Canada that went by the name of International Centre for Leadership Development, or something like that. It was sort of a mail-order bookstore specializing in all the popular Church Growth and Christian Leadership material — books, audio material, study guides, programs, spiritual gift inventories, and the like. The mailers were all high quality, glossy catalogs of material available. The thing about these catalogs, however, was the descriptions of the material. Never have I seen such over the top marketing hype anywhere — the superlatives were lavish and the promises beyond belief. The descriptions of the material were so overblown as to become obscene — no secular source would have made such blatantly incredible claims. I remember coming to feel dirty just from looking at these mailouts. Time and time again, I would promise myself that the next time one came in the mail it would go straight in the garbage without even a glance. But too often I would get sucked into opening it up and flipping through it, only to gag at the marketing hype.

In time, this reaction grew to extend to almost all Leadership type material. And eventually I responded the way Christian men are taught to respond to any sort of pornographic material; I banned anything remotely "erotic" from my reading list, my home, my vocabulary — in this case "erotic" referring to just about anything that touched on Leadership in any way, whether over-hyped or not.

A little over a year ago my colleagues and I took some clients out to the Cirque du Soleil when it was in town. I remember reflecting upon the performance of one particular pair of performers — one man and one woman — whom I sort of tagged in my mind as Adam and Eve, due in part to their costumes and in part to the way their performance began. There was, I was reminded, an incredible beauty to the unadorned human form, distinctly male and female, that God had created and originally declared very good. It struck me that this beauty was a thing to be appreciated and delighted in, as a good gift of God. And I was reminded of Peter's vision of the animals on the sheet, when God instructed him not to call anything unclean which God had made clean.

I know that some Christians would take serious exception to what I have just said. To them, the power of fallen human sexuality is so powerful that only by avoiding anything and everything that might be capable of arousing an inappropriate sexual interest — in effect everything sensual related to human form — can one be truly "pure" — something which is, admittedly, an incredibly difficult thing to do in such a sexually charged culture such as ours. This advice is, no doubt, appropriate advice for those who have fallen hard into addictive sexual behaviours — just as total abstinence is appropriate advice for dry alcoholics. Yet I have often wondered if perhaps the extreme nature of this advice is not in itself what has made sex into the battleground of supposedly every man, by unnecessarily transforming what otherwise would have been appropriate delight in God's good gift of the beauty of human form into something unclean — by making the simple recognition of value the sin, rather than the desire to possess what is not one's to own. Can one not fully delight in the beauty of the mountains, without being overtaken by the lust to possess them for oneself? Similarly, can one not fully delight in the beauty of a woman without being overtaken by the lust to possess her for oneself? Indeed, can the delight in the beauty of a woman not remind one of the delight one has in one's own wife — a delight that can only be appropriately enjoyed in the context of one's own marriage — in a way that is pleasing to the God who made them male and female? For myself, I have long found the answers to these questions to be Yes!, and have always endeavoured to make them so practically in my own life.

In reflecting on this whole matter, I can see how much I have been influenced by the thinking of those who demand strict avoidance of anything sensual in my own response to the challenge of the heavily charged Leadership language of our culture. But, as I concluded in my last post, this is not a viable solution for the long run. The encouragement I find in this current reflection is this: just as I have been able to find ways to live comfortably in a culture charged with the language and images of the Sex god without falling into sexual addiction on the one hand and without withdrawing from all exposure to the beauty of the human form on the other, so too there must be a way of living comfortably in a culture charged with the language of the Leadership god without falling into idolatry on the one hand and without withdrawing from all exposure to leadership language on the other.

No doubt it will be harder to find my way on the Leadership side of this parallel than it was on the Sexual side, because I have had so much longer exposure to the dark side of Leadership. But today I am more hopeful that that way can and will be found.

Soli Deo gloria!