The Death and Birth of a Man

When people ask me about my life and the process I went through to becoming a man I have a simple little response to give them.  “Being a man is torture, But!”  These are five simple words I have found that hold a lot of meaning to me.  I don’t say them flippantly and I don’t intend to be discouraging when I say them.  I have actually found a lot of comfort in these words.  Let me break it down for you.

Take the first three words, “Being a man”.  You see I believe that manhood is not something that we do.  Manhood is not something that we can become.  Either you are a man or you aren't.  The test of manhood is not whether you can build a log cabin and kill a bear.  These are stereotypes that destroy men and manhood.  We kill the boy before he ever has a chance to become a man.  We set the standard so high that no one can ever reach it.  When the truth is that we are already there.  My manhood is not based on what I have either; my possessions are just things and they do not measure my manhood.  My manhood is based on the simple fact that I was created to be a man.  The true experience of manhood is about “Being” and not about “Doing” and especially not about “Having”. 

Now look at the next part of the phrase, “is torture”.  Being a man is hard stuff.  There is nothing easy about it.  The struggles that men face today are overwhelming.  I like to use the word suffocating to illustrate these trials.  Trying to live up to the standards that this world has established is almost impossible at times.  You are judged for every failure, every weakness, and every wound you expose.  Over my short forty-four years I have come to find that torture is a very accurate word to describe trying to live as a man.

And finally lets look at the word that saves me and you from hell; “But!”  One of the most glorious words you will ever find.  I could talk to you for the rest of my life trying to unpack this word and not even get close to telling you everything it means to me.  Every time I see the word in scripture I know that something great and majestic has occurred to rescue me.  And that is the jest of the word as I know it.  I am a man because that is what I was created to be.  This world creates a hostile atmosphere for me to try to live as that man.  But the one who created me will not leave me to suffer in this alone.  He has delivered me from death and brought this man to life.

Four years ago tonight was the last time I was able to talk to my Dad.  Dad’s cancer had come back with a vengeance and he was failing fast.  So Mom and I took him to Boone Hospital to die.  After we got Dad into the room and situated I told Mom to go home and rest.  She had spent the previous week in the hospital with Dad in St Louis and she needed to get a real night sleep.  So Melissa and I settled into Dad’s hospital room to watch over him.

Sometime close to three a.m. my Dad woke up and was restless.  He asked me “Brian will you take me into the living room so I can sleep in my chair?  I can’t sleep in this bed.”  I raised the head of his hospital bed up and said “Dad, we aren't home right now, so we can’t go to your chair.”  He said “Okay” and went back to sleep.

The next morning when Melissa and I woke up my Dad was close to the end.  He wasn't able to talk anymore.  How funny is it that the last words my Dad spoke on this rock were about sleeping in his favorite chair?  Later that afternoon I noticed he was sweating a lot.  So I got a cool wet wash cloth and went over to wipe his head.  The previous three and half months I had done many tasks a son is burdened to do like giving him baths, wiping his ass, feeding him, and dressing him.  So that afternoon I was wiping the sweat off of the face of a man that I had loved and hated.

I had never felt close to my Dad.  He was not an emotional, touchy, feely, father.  Not to me at least.  He didn’t tell me he loved me.  He didn’t tell me he was proud of me.  He was always quick to judge and condemn me and my faults.  But he was still my Dad and I longed to love him and be loved by him.  

My Father/Son stories are the same as his though.  He was trained to be this way by my Grandpa.  It was the old Irish way.  We were trained that all you needed was to work hard.  You don’t need someone to make you feel good.  You go into this broken world and you fix things by working harder than anyone else.   That’s why you’re here.  You don’t need love, you just need to bust your ass and get the job done.

And there we were that afternoon; he sweating from the heat of the cancer war that his body was raging inside him; and me there with a cool wet washcloth wiping his face.  I was tenderly wiping this face that for forty years had been my image of a man that I could never equal or be good enough for.

It was then I realized that I had a choice.  I could live my life bitter and tortured by this dying face, or I could open up and let grace fill my heart and heal my wounds.  I could send the man behind this face into eternity knowing that I was still that wounded and scared boy or I could let him know that I would not live my life the way that his father had taught him to live.  There in that moment I knew I had to choose so my life would be different.

So I leaned in close to his face.  I listened to his labored breathing for a few moments.  And then I spoke.  “Dad, I love you, I forgive you.”  I pressed my lips against his forehead and kissed him.  And while I kissed him he took his final breath and my Dad died.

My Dad was dead, but I was re-born.  I knew that life could be different.  I finally knew that I didn't have to be him.  I didn't have to try and measure up to a standard that didn't work.  I could live a life exposed as broken and wounded and it would be a great life.


Now be sure I still get stuck in those old ruts all the time.  But just like every July 31^st is a reminder of my Dad’s death; every July 31^st is a reminder of my birth.  And God faithfully pulls me out of my ruts to keep going forward on this journey called manhood.  So, being a man is torture, but it is also a life filled with love, joy, beauty, mystery, grace, freedom and wonder.

The meaning behind the title

So what is a Wandering Mystic?  What is a Mythological Liar? 

I don’t know.  I had to come up with a title for this blog.  And unfortunately that was the first cool sounding set of words I could come up with.  But honestly, I believe there is something deep inside my soul that connects with these words and that is why they came to be here in this place, at this time.  So I may as well try to unpack them so we can go on with our lives.  Cue the lights and start the music.  I have a feeling this could get overly dramatic in a hurry.

I am not home and I have never felt like I have been.  I am just a poor wandering soul on this rock.  I’m not homeless by any means.  I have a place to stay, a bed to sleep in, and a roof over my head.  I’m one of the lucky ones.  But that is different then being home.  I have never really connected with anywhere that I have lived.  I can feel just as connected in a hotel room in Aspen, Colorado as I can in the house that I own in Hartsburg, Missouri.  While sleeping under a million stars in Copper Canyon in the middle of desolate Mexico I have felt more connected than I have in my own bed.

Am I crazy?  Am I stupid?  No, I am just not connected.  Part of that is I have a hard time with relationships.  I recognize that aspect of myself and I am working on that.  The lack of strong relationships with those around you will cause you to experience a huge disconnect with where you are.  People keep you grounded.

But also a part of this equation is that I just know that I am not home yet.  I dream about living in Ireland, but that is not my home either.  That would just be another map point on this journey.  I have an even deeper longing for a world that I have never seen.  My heart yearns for eternity.  You may not believe in eternity.  There are days I struggle to believe that there is more than what I see and feel.  I know that someday in the future my soul will get off this rock and I will be home.  It really doesn’t matter where my feet walk, and it definitely won’t matter where you bury my body.  And until that point, I wander.

I know that a lot of people don’t like the word mystic.  Many of my traditional Christian friends especially don’t like the title.  But I love it.  To me, God and Heaven are not things that I can easily explain.  I can’t sit down with you over a cup of coffee and lay out the infinite characteristics of God and all of the wonders that He has created.  To me, God is mystical, magical, miraculous, and so much more.

And I call myself a mystic because I am simply just a wandering soul who searches to discover the beauty and power in the mystical nature of God.  God can never be put into a box.  In truth, a god in a box is no god at all.  And our God has given us so many signs and wonders to point to who He is.  All we have to do is allow ourselves to look and see what is there.  If we will search the Bible and search His creation we will discover and see His glory.

One of my favorite essays by a Christian theologian was Jonathan Edwards’s writings on spiders.  Here is one of the greatest thinkers in all of Christianity and he spends his time in a field looking at spiders.  That’s my kind of theologian.  That is mystical.  And that is who I am.  I am the guy staring at the fire.  I am the guy staring at the stars.  I am the guy who loves walking through forests, and up and down mountains.  I love to watch water flow down a river.  Because in all of those things I can see the one who created them.

Everything in my mind is bigger than reality.  I am the guy who caught the three foot catfish when I was twelve.  That was thirty-two years ago.  Was it really three feet long?  It seemed like that when I was holding it up to show my Granddad and my Great-Uncle.  My Uncle Walter had talked about that catfish in his pond for as long as I could remember.  And that one summer night I was the lucky kid to haul it onto the bank.  My Aunt Becky grabbed the fish from my Uncle, who wanted to throw it back into the pond so he could try and catch it later, and she cooked it up that night so we could feast.

Now when I tell the story in person you would think that the fish I was describing was the killer whale from Free Willy.  The fish is mythological in its representation and in my presentation.  My wife tells me all the time that I am being too dramatic.  I don’t tell my kids to wash the dishes; I unleash a Shakespearian soliloquy upon them to render their hearts and minds useless in resisting my decrees.  So yeah, I am mythological in nature.

And last but not least I am a liar.  I don’t mean that the story about the fish wasn’t true.  I really did catch a catfish at my Uncle Walter’s pond.  And it was big, and we did eat it.  What I mean is that I don’t want you to know my true self.  I am scared to know the truth of what you think of me.  I place a lot of my own personal value on what others think of me.  If others think I am great, I feel great.  If others think I am worthless, I feel worthless.  So I do my best to deceive you to protect my heart.

It’s not so much that I lie, as much as it is that I hide.  If you don’t know the real me, then you will like me and I will feel valuable and experience meaning and purpose.  But that is the real lie.

You see, we all are wandering mystics on this rock.  We are searching for our connection to the great mysteries of this world and it’s Creator.  We all want to experience the glory and the power of eternity.  Deep inside we long for it and that is why we struggle and feel miserable when we don’t satisfy that longing with the material things of this world.

And to some degree we are all mythological liars.  We make ourselves and our deeds bigger than truth in order to hide our failures and weaknesses.  It’s human nature to do so.  We need to have purpose and meaning in our lives.  We need to feel valuable.  So we create a reality around us to satisfy those needs.

I will say this; it’s nice to live exposed for who I really am.  I am a Wandering Mystic, and a Mythological Liar.  To live without the mask and to just be what I am is a great way to live.  As Popeye would say, “I am what I am and that’s all that I am”.  I have found a lot of grace as I open up and expose my true nature.  I pray that you will experience that as well.

Risk and Adventure

I was raised to never take a risk.  Every time I went outside my Dad's comfort zone I was punished.  He taught me to sacrifice my dreams for the harsh reality of survival.  It's about making it to the finish line.  It doesn't matter how much you hate your life or despise what you have become; as long as you survived, you won.

This leads me to count my days.  I check off each day of the week as I work my way to Friday and my next paycheck.  Every week is the same stressful game of hustling through this life to get to the next event.  And over time I have come to feel the earth spinning faster and faster beneath my feet.  Time does not march, but it races through space like a run-away rocket, hurling me to my death.

I don't experience pleasure.  I eat too fast.  I drink too much.  I consume as much as I can, as quickly as I can.  My haste with the pleasures of this world is because I fear that I will not live long enough to enjoy them.  So in my rage I devour the goodness of this life like a vulture picking at a dead dog; all the while watching over his shoulder for the next car to come racing down the highway.

I thought that moving out to a farm would force me to slow down and finally breath in the beauty that God has created.  But that didn't happen.  I filled my calendar with event after event, searching for something to give my life meaning and purpose.  So instead of finding that my life IS filled with purpose, and that my life DOES matter to this world, I am still racing from day to day.  I wake each morning to scour my list of must do's that will help me survive to the next deary day.

It is a miserable life really.  Don't worry, I am not suicidal.  At least with my beating heart.  But I do want to kill this game of survival.  It is no way to live.  It is not how I am suppose to live.  It is not how you are suppose to live.  I long for a great adventure.

So I am creating a new game.  I am going to find the things that I am passionate about and I am going to learn to savor them.   I am going to learn how to feel the delicate touch of my wife's hand in mine. I am going to sit and engage people and listen to their stories and learn how to celebrate them.  I am going to learn how to slowly sip that $50 shot of whiskey so that everyone of my taste buds screams with delight.  I am going to learn how to live out of my heart and let that be enough.

And that's the kicker there.  To live out of your heart and let that be enough.  To trust that God really will take care of me and my family.  How am I going to let go of all of the little things of this world that I can't control anyway?  I have worked so hard my whole life to be in control.  My job, my finances, my house, my family, my church, my soccer team, my friends, my, my, my.  All of these things that consume my days and wreck my life.  I have no control over them.  But they control me.

So once again I come back to my new game.  I am going to learn to live out of my heart, and let that be enough.  "My grace is sufficient for you," Jesus says to us.  Over and over and over again He speaks to us.  "My grace is sufficient for you."  It's not some cheesy line to help us survive.  It's to let us know that He's got this.  All the little day to day checklist stuff.  He's got this.  And we can just rest in Him and enjoy the goodness that He has created.  He's got this.

Well, wish me luck.  I am sure that I will struggle.  We all do.  But I can find peace in the friction of this life.  Because, I am reminded constantly, that I am not here to just survive.  I am here to live.  To truly live is the greatest adventure.  And the greatest risk is to not let yourself take that journey.

Brian Wm Marshall
07-14-2014