Men Are Called To Adventure

Intro for Newbies:

I'm a Catholic who goes to Mass every week. I live in San Diego, one of the wimpiest dioceses in the Church. Sitting through each week's sermon, I've identified 3 types.

1. God is love
2. Forgive others
3. Care for the less fortunate

I lump all these together under the category of kissy-kissy love-love. There's no edge to any of them. It's all flaccid sweetness all the time. It makes me want to vomit.

We had another kissy-kissy love-love sermon in church today. It was all good though, because it was 1st Communion for a bunch of kids. The deacon did a really nice job.

Still, I sat and ruminated while he talked to the kids at the first grade level.

It's not the love, it's the lack of villains. I just turned on a Jordan Peterson podcast to hear while I spread some bark in the garden when this idea hit me and I had to knock out a quick blog post.

The kissy-kissy love-love stuff all assumes there are no villains. In all of our lives, there are real villains. The drug dealers who sold to my brothers, the LGBTQWERTY influencers who preyed on my daughter, Muslim gangs who groomed thousands of little, British girls and then gang-raped them, etc.

It's not that kissy-kissy love-love doesn't have a place, it's that it only describes a small portion of the real world. Real villains call for real men to fight them. The adventure of life for men is battling villainy and protecting our women and children. As Jordan has said many times, that's the call to men demanding manhood from them. It's why I find the kissy-kiss love-love stuff so infuriatingly saccharine. 

Huge swaths of my life have been torn to pieces by true villainy. I've fought it as best I can, failing sometimes, succeeding others. Kissy-kissy love-love never worked against true villainy. It was never even vaguely applicable.

I love stories of adventure. I love the Arthurian legends. Knights in shining armor fighting for beautiful damsels calls to me. As Andrew Klavan might say, it is the archetypal masculine story, the one we all want to live out in real life. The villains exist and so do the damsels. The call to adventure is there. I'd just like a little acknowledgement of the existence of villains by the Church.

A Sweet Ending

One of the tiny damsels in my children's liturgy group came up to me after Mass and gave me a drawing she had made just for me during Mass. I was so touched that I teared up. Little Annabelle got to the old man.

God bless the little Annabelles out there. There are real villains out there who want to do them harm. They are the ones real men would lay down their lives to protect. There's adventure in that.

Cat would approve.

PS: Yes, Annabelle looks a lot like that. She is one of the purest little angels you have ever met. She's 80% innocence and 20% impishness. The perfect combination.