Dear Shoeless Joe, What Does It Mean to be a Man?

When someone's referring to me and they describe me as a man, it feels weird "I'm not a man yet, I'm just a guy "I'm not old enough or have my life put together enough" But I am a man I'm not a child anymore So why does it feel weird when people call me a man Happy Thursday, Shoeless Joe It's Ptony, your friendly Catholic vlogger This is a response video to your video: What Does It Mean to Be a Man? That you published about a week ago Great topic, thanks for bringing it up It's been really good for me to ponder and I just wanted to add a couple things to your ponderings that you started on your channel But first, if we're going to be talking about being manly, I should be drinking a beer, right? Obviously Alright also let me just highlight somethings that stood out in your video that you said You said it feels weird to be called a man I find that very relatable You talk how a major distinction between being a child and being an adult is the difference between spending time playing and spending time working And in society today we don't have to work as much, it seems In many ways we can just be a continuous consumer Imbibing social media and luxuries and who knows what else, Netflix? Also talking about being a man, there are all sorts of stereotypical manly skills Like a man is able to fix a car and do plumbing and is able to bench press 400 pounds And obviously talking about manhood in those terms is a very limited way of talking about manhood And there are bigger and nobler things to look at But also is there a grain of truth to all that? That was a good point to bring up There is an attraction to having some of these more basic stereotypical manly skills and abilities And do I have those, and should I have those a little bit more? question mark If I'm not able to do those things, does that make me worthless? No, I always have worth as a human being But you make a great distinction between worthless and useless Am I useful person? I don't know And obviously you and I both have certain things that we're good at I mean everybody does, right? For example your reference how you're good at making videos And yes you are But you dismiss it as something that just comes naturally and wasn't a challenge for you And as men, to be manly we feel a need to battle, to accomplish something There is something fundamentally attractive about being manly in more of a primal sense And it's hard to capture that today And wow does that ring true with me Those were the highlights for me from your video A lot to ponder A lot, a lot to ponder I was pondering some of these things during stations of the cross last Friday And I thought specifically of three men that are in the story of the Stations of the Cross: Pilate, Simon of Cyrene, and Joseph of Arimathea How manly are each of these men? And here's my working theory: "What does it mean to be a man?" is an identity question And we're talking about identity questions, there's a temptation to try to answer them through the things that we do But I think that's a trap I don't think that leads to happy endings Instead when we're answering identity questions, we need to go back relationship The only we can appropriately answer identity questions is by looking at relationships in our lives That way of thinking is not my original thought I stole that from somebody else I should really look up who But look up RIM Stands for Relationship, Identity, Mission There's a lot of good material out there that talks about that if this piques your interest Also as I pondered, "What does it mean to be manly?" I thought a lot of this book right here, you ready? Interior Freedom Wait, like this Interior Freedom by Jacques Philippe Great book And one point that Jacques Philippe talks about again and again is the idea of expectations Expectations that we have of ourselves and we have others, that others have of us Which ones are appropriate and which ones are not? And also what expectations does God have of us and do we have of God? And I'm going to posit that being manly in a healthy way, even including some of those more primal aspects Means being attentive to what God's expectations are of me personally and being strongly disposed to say yes to those expectations What struck me in the stations of the cross about Joseph of Arimathea and Pilate and Simon Is that each of these three men seems more or less manly Pilate seems very much less manly Simon is the one that seems the most manly to me And Joseph of Arimathea, he's kind of in between I mean he's not a bad guy but you know, I would shoot for a higher role model And it's ironic because it runs counter to our sense that manly men are powerful Because the most powerful of these three was Pilate He had extensive judicial power And yet he is the least manly Joseph of Arimathea is a pharisee He has some religious authority or religious influence, if you will And he's the middle guy And Simon of Cyrene is just a passerby And yet we remember him And the early Church remembers him and talks about his children He has a legacy in the early Church Let's look at each of these men through the lens of expectations What were the expectations that each of them had to fulfill? What are the expectations for Pontius Pilate? The expectations are, what he should do is defend the innocent Administer justice within his jurisdiction And Pontius Pilate recognizes the innocence of Jesus Christ And yet he does nothing about it He doesn't defend the innocent He allows for the verdict to be passed to send the innocent to be crucified Joseph of Arimathea, what are his expectations? This is a little more vague, but Joseph of Arimathea is a follower of Jesus Though secretly, for fear of the Jews, right? What does that mean? If someone really follows Jesus, how should that affect a person's life? Should it be visible? I'm going to say yes But Joseph keeps it hidden until after Jesus dies And then he comes out and he talks to Pilate and he says, "Can I give the body of Jesus a burial place?" And it's unfortunate because he could've played a better role I would think But since he waits until after Jesus is dead to finally act on his belief in Jesus Christ His moment with Jesus is after Jesus's death So he doesn't get the same time with Jesus that he could have had But you know, he does okay with what he has Finally there's Simon And Simon... he doesn't have much that he's able to do He's just a passerby, he has no idea who Jesus is And still he's the one of the three that I would call manly first That I would fist call a man He's forced to carry the cross with Jesus And he's *forced,* but he does it So there In other words all that's put on Simon's plate is this very minimal thing of doing what he's being forced to do And yet, that's enough He fully does what's put on his plate where the other two don't He fulfills those expectations before God And it bears fruit in his life They talk about how since the bible mentions the children of Simon, Alexander and Rufus That heavily implies that Alexander and Rufus where a part of the early Christian community In other words that Simon and his family became Christians So what does all of this imply? It implies that to be manly isn't a question of how much I am able to do It's a question of how much do I respond to what God has put on my plate It implies that if I feel a tug to be a more manly person -which I do now, thanks Joe- Maybe that's an invitation from God asking me to pray a little bit Maybe it's an invitation to turn to him and say, "Hey God, what are things that you've put on my plate that you want me to do in my life? "I mean, not for me to do alone, for us us to do together" You know, being an instrument of God and all that complicated grace vs. free will theology stuff Those expectations that God puts on my plate But in the long run that's not what matters Simon had the low bar expectations of these three men What matters is that Simon met his expectations through the grace of God And those are my thoughts That prompts me to do things that have been tugging on my heart that I've been ignoring for a long time We'll do that right after I finish recording here It'll be great Thanks for bringing up the subject Joe This has been good for me to ponder God bless ya and ciao! For all my viewers, if you don't know who Shoeless Joe is, he's great I'm subscribed to him, I have alerts turned on I don't watch all of his videos, just the ones that stand out to me But whenever I watch his videos I am never disappointed Honestly I should watch them more But y'know, time and life and everyone understands how that works, right? But please check him out I put a link to the video I referenced in the description below And while you're there check out some of his other videos He does great things Alright that's all I got Bye!