Ronald Rolheiser has a chapter on Honest Anger in his book, The Fire Within.  In my opinion, this chapter speaks to a deep issue in the lives of men.  “We live and breathe within a culture and a church that are growing daily in sophistication, adultness, and criticalness,” writes Rolheiser.  “This is not always a bad thing, but it is helping  to spawn a polarization, anger, and despondency that is making it almost unfashionable to be happy.”  He then makes this insightful observation: “Much of this despondency has constellated around two centers: women’s anger and men’s grief.”  

When women face gender issues, anger usually follows, producing the image of “the angry feminist.”  As men face gender issues they tend to get sad and begin to grieve,  producing “the grieving male.”  However, Rolheiser points out that anger and grief are not that different. When love has been wounded there is opportunity for reconciliation.  Rolheiser suggests the opposite of love is not anger but hate.  Hatred breeds “frozen anger.” You become angry and hate when the soul is wounded. .

Anger and hatred in the beginning are a sure sign of love.  “The deeper the love, the deeper will be the anger and hatred if love is wounded and betrayed.”  Anger and hatred are “love’s grief.”  Most anger is a form of grief, while most grief is a form of anger. 

But Rolheiser gives this caution: “There is honest anger and there is dishonest anger, there is honest grief and there is dishonest grief.”  He lists three cautions:

1. Anger and grief do not distort.  “Honest anger is real anger, it feels and points out what is wrong, but it doesn’t… lie about what is and what was good.  It lets the good remain good.” 
2. Anger does not rage.  “Honest anger… seeks to build up, to bring to a new wholeness, to reconcile something that is felt as fractured or broken… Rage wants only to bring down, to break apart, to utterly destroy.  Its wound is so deep that there is no more desire for unity and reconciliation. 
3. Honest anger has a time limit… [it] never sees itself as an end, a substitute for the lost love.” 

Andrew Comiskey believes most men live with an “ancient, deep well of grief and regret. It rumbles with the ache of unexpressed suffering.  And in our silence and isolation, the pain fuels our striving and addiction.  We thus live in the darkness of unexpressed affliction.  Rather than driving us toward relationships, the pain drives us back unto the wheel of striving.”  

It was during my midlife crisis that I could begin to admit that I had a  deep well of grief in my soul.  It was a cover for anger and resentment.  I kept it all inside, while it spilled out in relationship with those closest to me.  With my personality type, I continually found myself on the treadmill of people pleasing.  It exhausted me spiritually, so that my life became a “performance.”  Of course, as a pastor I had to be “good.”  But inside  I was grieving.

My testimony is this: I accepted my anger and resentment, learning over the years to cry out, “Lord, be merciful to me a sinner!” I continue to experience my own well of grief.  But I am learning: 1) to accept the reality of imperfect relationships, 2) to seek continued inner healing for my soul  and 3) to keep my heart open to love others, no matter what the cost. 

Remember, men: “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit (Ps. 34:18).

In an article entitled “Common Good Men” (Touchstone), Nancy Pearcey asks, “How can Christians create a balanced view that stands against the outright male-bashing that is so common, yet also holds men responsible to a higher standard? ” She decides to “dig into the history of the idea that masculinity is toxic.”  

Throughout much of human history, people lived on family farms and in peasant villages.  Family and industry were not separate activities.  Fathers were “as comfortable in the kitchen as women, for they had responsibility for provisioning and managing the home.”  Both fathers and mothers were responsible to sacrifice individual interest for the common good.  But men began to surrender their traditional paternal role as the industrial revolution took them out of the home and into the factory.  And “rhetoric around masculinity began to focus on traits” such as ambition and self-assertiveness.  

The individual replaced the household as the basic unit of society, with fewer moral obligations.  Increasing numbers of men grew up as “mushroom men” emerging and growing up without many social obligations.  Pearcey asks, “If there was no common good, then a man’s duty could no longer be defined as responsibility for protecting the common good.”  Men could now pursue self-interest rather than to “be servants of one another” (Gal. 5:13). 

Removed from the private sphere, men lost an “active religious sense” of values meant for the private sphere. “The male character was redefined as coarse, pragmatic, and morally insensitive,” notes Pearsey.  Religious values became part of the private sphere, cultivated by the women in the home.  “Men were being told that they were naturally crude and brutish – and that they needed to learn virtue from their wives.” Women were now considered morally superior to men.  As Anthony Rotundo writes, “women took men’s place as the custodians of communal virtue.”  Masculinity was being “de-moralized.”

The church failed to stand against the demoralization of men, but rather started to appeal more and more to women – and became increasingly feminized.  Women became the custodians of virtue.  Men attended church less, often being described as morally hardened and spiritually insensitive.  “If men are repeatedly told they are naturally less religious,” Pearcey observes, “eventually they will begin to believe the cultural narrative.”

Women’s attempts to “tame men” began to focus more on public vices such as drunkenness and prostitution. Rotunbo saw this as “a plan for female government of male passions.”  “It gave men the freedom to be aggressive, greedy, ambitious, competitive, and self-interested, then it left women with the duty of curbing this behavior.”  

One can begin to see the emerging roots of toxic masculinity: “Men are inherently coarse and immoral – virtue is a womanly trait, imposed upon men only through great difficulty.”  The idea of being less spiritual and virtuous was insulting to men.  “When virtue is defined as a feminine quality instead of a human quality, then requiring men to be virtuous is seen as the imposition of a feminine standard.”

Concern developed over the “overcivilized” man becoming soft and effeminate.  Mothers filling the gap left by missing fathers created a “boy culture” in which boys became wild and rambunctious.  Attention was given to the wild, untamed masculine nature of men.  Now “manhood was redefined as crude and combative, governed by the biological instincts for lust and power.”  Churches began to teach about “Muscular Christianity.”  

Pearcey suggests a biblical view of God as servant leader, featuring gentleness, love and compassion as masculine virtues.  Many young believers learn just enough about headship and submission, but not enough about responsibility and sacrifice.  Rightly understood and practiced, “Christians have a practical answer to resolving the war between men and women… We should be bold about bringing it into the public square as a solution to the charge of toxic masculinity.”