One of the deepest perversions of Germanic mythology feeding into our modern Western culture is the destruction of masculine tenderness. Men are wired for tenderness. We have no trouble understanding that David and Jonathan were buddies, but our entire cultural orientation refuses to understand that men can be so very close and affectionate without some perverted notion of homosexual entanglement. In our minds, it simply is not possible for men to be tender without an erection. The only purpose of male tenderness in the West is cajoling for sex.
So far as we know, no other civilization or culture is so deeply afflicted with this. Today you can travel across the Middle East and see un-westernized men embracing and kissing, even cuddling, with nary a hint of sexual desire. Their culture understands the dire necessity of human nearness and the unique way that male hearts resonate with each other in a distinctly masculine way. Western hearts are dead. David and Jonathan were close enough to recognize each other by smell and it was like the breath of divine Presence. The full immersion of sensory entanglement was entirely natural in the sense of being consistent with cosmic moral righteousness.
While we cannot simply pretend to forget a lifetime of social conditioning, we are obliged by the redemptive power of God’s Laws to start moving in that direction. If there is one most troublesome element of Western mythology that men must fight, this is it. Not only can men learn to be tender without sexual arousal, but they absolutely must do so to establish their sexual identity. We are hard wired to fellowship with other men in tenderness and commitment and we cannot possibly create any part of God’s shalom in our Christian communion without it. The full power of God’s moral character in us depends on establishing this first. If we don’t fix this, we cannot possibly have a male sexual identity consistent with Christ. Instead, we’ll have a false Christ.
By the same token, godly manhood itself demands that each man find his own path to recovery. If we start down the path of me providing for you the specifics of psychological recovery, then your manhood remains dependent on mine. That’s the wrong answer. Making you aware of the failures of Western social mythology and the existence of a better answer is as far as we can go cognitively. Christian manhood is the result of self-definition within the revelation of Christ.
Manhood requires a certain amount of intensity arising from shared experience. Men in war, in the hunt for game or in the daily drudgery or hard work together build a resonance that cannot be gained any other way. Could we share even a month or so of such intensity, I would be in the place to pastor you and counsel you closely on specifics. Otherwise, we will both have to rely on Christ Himself to miraculously provide the firm anchorage out of this vast ocean of human failure in which we live today.
Aside from this, each man must cut his own path through the wilderness of lies. The man who does not have his own sense of calling to the truth has no truth. You must discover it on your own terms. This alone helps to explain why my writing is loaded with moral generalities. Your moral power arises from your personal discovery of moral particulars. No one else knows your life as well as you, and joined with Christ, you both know it best of all.
God help us; the distance we have to go is beyond human imagining.
This reminds me of the Sts. Sergius and Bacchus revisionist history: they were gay saints that expressed covertly through their adelphopoisis (a formalized “friendship bond,” for those not in the know). But those ceremonies were common all throughout history and cultures…Sergius and Bacchus’ case is just more well known since they are the subject of saintly art.
It’s astounding the mental acrobatics people have to perform in order to backread all this coded homosexuality into intimate relationships between two men in history. The modern West is the real anomaly, not the ancients.