Sometimes I really don’t understand other men

You know, I’ve never been good at fitting in. Life has a way of reminding me of this on a regular basis.

This isn’t a point of pride, per se; nor is it a lamentation either. Nor is it a humblebrag. It’s just a recognition of an experience that has been fairly consistent throughout my life. Sometimes I feel good about being true to myself, sometimes I feel lonely, but mostly I’m just following the lion that I see, even when others aren’t. Que sera, sera.

Sometimes it hits me like a pie to the face, like when I overhear other men talking about women in crude terms, like “She’s the one with the huge rack” or “I’d love to get a piece of that.” The moment is like popping a clutch on Highway One. Conversation was riding smoothly along, the view sliding past as the warm wind blew across your hair, and suddenly the truck is lurching, the cargo is shifting and you’re left thinking “What the hell was that?”

I’m no naif innocent. I notice when women are attractive, and I’ve even expressed that attraction inappropriately. But I don’t get that need to treat women like they’re a piece of meat, and it’s utterly incomprehensible to me the way I’ve heard men in recent years speak as though they’re owed affection, sex or anything else.

You ask (in an appropriate way) for a date, a kiss, sex, whatever it is you want; she says no, you swallow your disappointment and move on. You also don’t keep asking. She already said no, and you need to respect that.

I don’t understand why this is hard to get, and sometimes the gulf between what I understand to be appropriate and what other men understand is so wide that I can’t help but wonder what’s wrong with me.

It hit me again tonight when I was reading a comment on Twitter. A fellow I follow asked a question about deconstruction. This is the popular term right now for former evangelicals who have been unpacking what they believe and either leaving the Christian faith or embracing a more progressive, less militant understanding of it. The Twitter user was asking people to name who kickstarted the process for them. (Common answers include writes like Rachel Held Evans and musicians like Pedro the Lion.)

Um, no one?

I started this horse ride about 20 years ago when we lost our foster son and I was forced to re-examine fundamental assumptions about what following Jesus was supposed to look like. It was driven by questions that came like spurs to the horse’s flank about obvious progression in the pages of the Bible itself from henotheism to monotheism, about biblical morality that just seems appalling, and by a growing sense that a lot of this stuff seems less like divine revelation than something we just made up as we went along.

Attempts to bring back the runaway horse seemed less like the efforts of a horse whisperer than the cries of a panicked stablehand who felt that if I would just pull the reins to the right a little more, things would be OK.

I’ve walked (or ridden) my own path for years. About 30 years ago, the principal at a Christian school where I was applying to teach asked the dreaded “testimony” question about how I had become a Christian.

So I told her. It was the summer after high school, I was by myself listening to the Stryper album “To Hell with the Devil,” and I understood from the songs that Christ was calling me to follow him, so I did.

She pointed out months later how unusual she found my story to be, not because of the involvement of a Christian pop/metal band, but because it was a solitary experience without another person directly involved and pushing me on.

This has been a lot of words, and I maybe I should just delete it without posting it. It feels self-indulgent, like I’m boasting of being an iconoclast who’s unique in all the world.

But the truth is, I don’t feel special or particularly iconclastic. Mostly, I just feel alone.