A Boy's Life with Unisex Scouts
The Boy Scouts are en route to holding that there is nothing to being a boy, and nothing to the boy's becoming a man; they might as well be the Unisex Scouts, as they are in Canada, where the scouting movement has collapsed.
I see a boy.
Luke is ten years old. He sports a cowlick across his forehead, and a bright smile.
Despite the birth of a child a thousand miles away with vestigial organs of the opposite sex, and despite genetic anomalies that blunt the edge of masculinity or femininity here or there, everyone is certain he is a boy. It took the doctor in the delivery room but a moment to declare, "It's a boy!"
Luke is outdoors a lot, running after baseballs, footballs, and soccer balls. He has what Marilynne Robinson happily calls "skinny boy strength." You can see it in the muscles of his chest. His voice is pitched high, but not really--as if a flute were played an octave low.
People who pretend not to know what a boy is will scoff, but he runs like a boy, he makes boyish jokes, he shoots toy guns like a boy, he horses around the yard with a boy's abandon, and if he helps his mother bake cookies, he does that like a boy, too. It helps that he has a father, who was a boy once, and who still has a lot of the boy in him, as most fathers do.
Consider that boy, Luke.
Look at him through the eyes of his father: that is to say, with philosophical love.
He has the boy's body that shadows forth the body of a man. He will have sturdy shoulders, and the swelling in his throat suggests the timbre of the man's voice. He is going to be taller than the average woman.
Fallen creature that he is, Luke stretches to the limit of what his parents allow, but already he is taking into his heart the Rules his mother represents, Rules that make for decent life among other people from day to day, and the Law his father represents, moral truths that can no more change than can the polestar fall from the sky.
He is a boy: vir futurus, a going-to-be man. Meaning: He will join other men, brothers fighting to attain or defend the common good. Greater meaning: He is made for a self-giving that is categorically impossible among his male friends. He is made for a woman. It is the orientation of his body, in its sexual form. It is the orientation of his masculine being, developing in a natural and healthy way.
None of this should be controversial, no more than claiming that the noonday sky is blue. Should someone protest, "It isn't so! I saw it green once, when a tornado was coming," we'd look askance, and wonder whether he had lost the capacity for normal communication. A boy is not a girl. A boy grows up to be a man. A man marries a woman, for love and for a family: That goal is stamped upon his body. Even savages without a doctorate in philosophy can figure it out.
I see a boy.
Luke is ten years old. He sports a cowlick across his forehead, and a bright smile.
Despite the birth of a child a thousand miles away with vestigial organs of the opposite sex, and despite genetic anomalies that blunt the edge of masculinity or femininity here or there, everyone is certain he is a boy. It took the doctor in the delivery room but a moment to declare, "It's a boy!"
Luke is outdoors a lot, running after baseballs, footballs, and soccer balls. He has what Marilynne Robinson happily calls "skinny boy strength." You can see it in the muscles of his chest. His voice is pitched high, but not really--as if a flute were played an octave low.
People who pretend not to know what a boy is will scoff, but he runs like a boy, he makes boyish jokes, he shoots toy guns like a boy, he horses around the yard with a boy's abandon, and if he helps his mother bake cookies, he does that like a boy, too. It helps that he has a father, who was a boy once, and who still has a lot of the boy in him, as most fathers do.
Consider that boy, Luke.
Look at him through the eyes of his father: that is to say, with philosophical love.
He has the boy's body that shadows forth the body of a man. He will have sturdy shoulders, and the swelling in his throat suggests the timbre of the man's voice. He is going to be taller than the average woman.
Fallen creature that he is, Luke stretches to the limit of what his parents allow, but already he is taking into his heart the Rules his mother represents, Rules that make for decent life among other people from day to day, and the Law his father represents, moral truths that can no more change than can the polestar fall from the sky.
He is a boy: vir futurus, a going-to-be man. Meaning: He will join other men, brothers fighting to attain or defend the common good. Greater meaning: He is made for a self-giving that is categorically impossible among his male friends. He is made for a woman. It is the orientation of his body, in its sexual form. It is the orientation of his masculine being, developing in a natural and healthy way.
None of this should be controversial, no more than claiming that the noonday sky is blue. Should someone protest, "It isn't so! I saw it green once, when a tornado was coming," we'd look askance, and wonder whether he had lost the capacity for normal communication. A boy is not a girl. A boy grows up to be a man. A man marries a woman, for love and for a family: That goal is stamped upon his body. Even savages without a doctorate in philosophy can figure it out.
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