Re: this and this post, with the comments, on Sister Christine’s blog. I’m not sure I can do this, but it’s worth trying to explain it.
As a child, since my Dad often held jobs involving automotive maintenance and repair, I naturally had the common boyhood interest in hot rodding. That’s a hobby that involves understanding how to make cars perform better than they do coming from the factory. It was largely smart tinkering in my childhood days, not advanced technology as with today’s automobiles. And like many boys my age I would go and buy hot rodding comics and get lost in them, rereading them several times before squirreling them away somewhere.
One of the particular stories from those old comic books that sticks in my mind involved a bunch of not-so-brilliant students at a mechanic’s school going out into a semi-desert area where a massive and ancient salvage yard lay spread across a remote valley. In this story, as a project they cobbled together a mixed bag of components and created a running hot rod. My Dad saw me reading this and warned me it was fiction, explaining the concept of metal fatigue, plus the notion of careful engineering. His lesson was hard to swallow at the time because it shot holes in my childish reverence for “fine automobiles.”
By the time an automobile hits that kind of junkyard, it’s usually badly worn already. Most of them was pretty junky coming new from the factory, mass produced death machines. Add to that years of exposure to the elements and it would make them fit for little more than a smelter. A lot of critical parts aren’t metal in the first place. There might be a few items still usable to replace something damaged on an otherwise decent auto, but not enough to build an entire vehicle. You might know how to re-engineer things to fit, but it’s highly improbable that critical elements would be in working order.
Here we are at the end of Western Civilization and there is no end of amateurish efforts to reconstruct what “ought to be” from the worthless junk of a deeply shattered social order. Nothing in the junkyard of Western ideas was ever more than a bucket of loose and ill-fitting bolts in the first place; there never were any carefully engineered and refined norms. The whole thing has been from the beginning slapped together from disparate sources and wobbled off the assembly line barely held together by nothing but the shiny paint. And when did any one car with all the available factory options actually fit perfectly your needs? It was always a matter of choosing the least impractical pile of junk. The retail value plummets as soon as you drive it off the dealer’s lot.
When your average Western man or woman wants to discuss what constitutes masculine or feminine ideals, they are picking from a few brands and models of mass produced junk notions. Every now and then someone trumpets a new approach cobbled together from mismatched salvaged pieces in the junk yard of worn out failures. The stuff was crap when it first came out, so it’s not possible to come up with something good if you’re still digging around the same sources. The whole society was built from a materialist approach to life. There was no golden age, no good ol’ days when things were grand. There was no point in Western history when things weren’t any less materialistic and soul-sucking. You cannot build a human existence worthy of the effort until you rise above that level. You have to source your ideals from the Creator of all things.
Doing so puts you so far out of mainstream tolerance that you should hardly be surprised when folks attack you. Their criticisms will arise from that same materialistic approach to life, so those arrows won’t stick. You can’t shoot an arrow into Heaven no matter how high it flies. Instead of getting bogged down into the details and specifics, the image of what-ought-to-be will take on all kinds of shapes and flavors that reflect the specific needs of the person and the context. A different day and you will manifest different features. Outwardly visible traits cannot suffice to explain what’s going on behind the scenes. The norming does not rest on what you can see with your eyes, but upon faculties that Western Civilization denies exist. Any one still wallowing in the Western materialistic approach will never understand what you are doing.
Build your own brand and rebuild it as needed. You’ll have to decide as you go how much shock you are willing to offer the world around you, and how much crap you’ll have to face. Sometimes it’s your true purpose to pass through the crowd unnoticed. Even when you wear a facade that minimizes your different nature, that choice remains a manifestation of something truly unique. It shows you know how to fit the real need of the moment and stay on track with your true identity in Christ and your true mission calling. God’s ideal for manhood and femininity cannot be confined to a collection of observable traits.
