I enjoy conversations (not as much the sometime arguments) with my sons. As they grow in understanding and engage in the wider world outside our home, they show me the world in new ways and refresh my understanding of it. Things I’ve held as true without question they question, and I have to think about things. Is what I believe true or do I need to reconsider?
A couple of those conversations merged in my mind this morning after a chat yesterday with my youngest. He reacted to something he overheard in a snippet of podcast that played while we were pulling out of the driveway. The host said it was ridiculous to assert that “peace cannot come through war,” a reference to Pope Leo XIV’s recent comments. My son thought the podcaster was the one being ridiculous. I tried, and failed I think, to make the point though historical examples that enduring peace often only comes after a decisive victory in war. It might have been better to offer the example of a bully, who doesn’t ever stop bullying until someone punches him in the nose: A bully has no incentive to stop doing what he perceives to be in his own best interest until someone proves it is no longer in his best interest.
Of course, even the example of a bully might be lost on my kids and their peers who seem to equate bullying with anything that makes them unhappy or uncomfortable. Because nearly every moment of their childhood was supervised by adults, I don’t think many, if any at all, have experienced the kind of bullying that most of my generation saw far too often. My kids never had to wait at an unsupervised bus stop to take a 30-minute ride to school sitting next to someone who made it clear he “hated his guts.” You can tell the difference between young men who got into a few fights as they were growing up and those who were rarely even teased before someone broke up the “fight.”
These thoughts reminded me of a conversation I had with another of my sons last year about a column I’d read in the Wall Street Journal regarding education, his chosen profession. Late in the column the author briefly mentioned that teachers still expect boys to suppress their feelings as if this were a self-evidently bad thing to do. But is it?
I am a pastor and chaplain, so I am well aware that repressed emotions can be a bad thing. But this is, for men at least, the exception not the rule. Normally, it really is best for a man to be in control of his emotions. Only a society that believes that there are few significant differences between the sexes can believe that it is a bad idea for men to restrain their feelings.
This year, instead of exhibition games played largely by minor leaguers hoping to make the big club, I enjoyed watching the World Baseball Classic during Spring Training. I was surprised to see the amount of criticism Team USA suffered because they didn’t seem to care about winning as much as their Latin-American counterparts. Meaning that because they didn’t thump their chest after every caught fly ball or hard-hit single, or jump around and do cartwheels after every scoring play – especially the home runs, that Team USA didn’t really care if they won. How absurd. As if being cool under pressure and restrained in your reactions to game events both good and bad were bad things, and evidence of indifference. I can remember when watching it, let alone flipping your bat after a home run would earn you some form of retribution for disrespecting your opponent, usually a fastball in the ribs.
I am not advocating the use of force. Yet it’s true that a man’s actions are often held in check only by the threat of force. I’m less likely to take something that belongs to you or say something offensive to you if there are clear negative consequences to my actions. That this is so can easily be seen by how readily we are to say nasty things to each other over the phone, online, or in emails that we would never say to someone in person, especially if he’s bigger than I am.
But what if there isn’t another man around? What if the only people are smaller than me? The only thing left to restrain me is the extent to which I can control myself, and THIS is the reason that men MUST control their feelings. A man who cannot control his anger can really hurt someone. This restraint may seem like suppression to people who think every thought or feeling is worthy of being shared, but those people are fools.
“The simple believes everything, but the prudent looks where he is going. A wise man is cautious and turns away from evil, but a fool throws off restraint and is careless. A man of quick temper acts foolishly, but a man of discretion is patient.”
https://www.goarch.org/chapel/lectionary?type=OT&code=137&event=870&field=VESPERSOT2
The Holy Fathers knew this too, which is why they write so frequently about our passions and the need to restrain them. They explain that our human nature and its desires were misshapen by The Fall and became directed towards things other than the ends for which they were created, namely adoration of and communion with our Creator. We’ve turned them instead into self-adoration and self-centered versions of their original beauty. Communion, meant to share and uplift each other becomes pride and “what’s in it for me,” and “what do I get out of it.” Love, meant to offer our selves in the service of the Beloved, becomes lust and self-gratification. And when we’ve turned creation into a self-referential thing we don’t consider how our actions affect others and the world around us.
This is why the Church gives us fasting and almsgiving as essential tools for shaping our souls. They remind us, in the case of fasting, that we don’t need all that we want, and, in the case of almsgiving, that others need what we have. If we can learn those lessons then we also learn that all that we have, the fulfillment of our needs, also has a source outside of ourselves and thus we learn humility and gratitude, without which we cannot hope to break out of our self-centered, fallen perspective into the other-focused, divine vision.
All of us need to learn self-control and to manage our emotions and our actions, and to help us along the Church offers us its wisdom and experience. But until we master ourselves, we must keep one another accountable. Until all men learn self-restraint, we will need some men to restrain their brothers who cannot restrain themselves. Sometimes this is straightforward, other times it may be difficult and require force. In all times it demands wisdom, discernment, and—above all—love.
It is unfortunate that sometimes it does take war to bring peace. It is unfortunate that conflict must be confronted before any mutual understanding can be reached. I pray that as our fraying social fabric continues cast off our generational cultural restraints, that men and women will become more self-restrained. I pray that I will continue to learn restraint. I pray that my sons have learned restraint from their mother and me. I pray that all of us learn restraint from our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, and learn it before someone else, even before Christ Himself, does it for us.
An Orthodox Priest Abroad 