beloved

“To heal is to touch with love that which was previously touched by fear.”

For me, being a man has meant a constant confrontation with standards of masculinity. I grew up in a culture where the term “biblical manhood” was often used, and so I looked at Jesus as the ultimate example of masculinity like my christian community told me, and for a while, I was fine with that because I was a sensitive kid and Jesus seemed like a sensitive and caring guy. Eventually, though, I noticed that the men who followed this ideal of biblical manhood often would attribute qualities to Jesus that I never would have expected. The more I moved towards this ideal of masculinity, the more I felt uncomfortable in my own skin, and I noticed that no man in my life seemed like he was comfortable with who he was either. At this point, I’ve decided that there is no way to achieve masculinity. The boy who eventually becomes a man in his own mind inevitably feels weak at some point and is pulled along towards more and more toxic forms of masculinity. My hope now is that men of the younger generations will learn from movements like feminism and see the freedom that can be found in throwing away useless gender norms.

Compassion is, by definition, relational. Compassion literally means “to suffer with,” which implies a basic mutuality in the experience of suffering. The emotion of compassion springs from the recognition that the human experience is imperfect.