Monk and the Lover Second Essay

You might think, from the preceding essay, that because I plunged deeply into the things of the mind around 2003-2004, with even more focus in 2007, that I became a lover then, and that all the love I needed to show and feel in life could be found in my study. Isn't that, indeed, what a monk is supposed to do--direct his love to his study and service, receiving it back in secret ways? But life is more complex than that. I suppose that if I were a disembodied spirit that all the love I would need to show and feel might be in my studies and writing. I could just become a sort of "living text" to complement those texts that I find so entrancing.

But, that isn't me. Because, to a large and as yet fully undiscovered extent, I am a lover. I have both a capacity to receive and give love (much of which hasn't really been tapped) as well as a desire to see how love might be the cornerstone or foundation of a life lived well. This love is not an ethereal one, a love that is simply directed to "God" or the "Universe" or some abstract entity in our mind. It is a kind of complex and mixed up love-lust-energy-engagement-riveting and knock your socks off-type of love, as well as a slow and tender love, with whispered intimacies and quiet and unforced times. This love is something that for many reasons didn't really "come out" during my marriage nor during my earlier days in life. As with my "monkish" tendencies, a word of history is probably helpful.

Explanation # 1--Early Days

I grew up in a family of four boys. Females, except for my mother, were never in the house. When I started becoming interested in girls in junior high/early high school, I had no idea what I was dealing with. Just as I was doing some important learning in this "gender" area in ninth grade (1966-67), our family moved to CA from CT (summer 1967). So strange and different was the San Francisco Bay Area in 1967 from CT in 1967 that I think I sunk into confusion. In addition, it took a while to "get to know" new people in CA. But then, perhaps to remove some of the dissonance in my mind, I became an Evangelical Christian late in 1968/early 1969. That is, I brought a little bit of the conservative New England "soil" into my heart while flaky CA was all around me.

But becoming an Evangelical messed me up (there will be essays on this!) as much as it blessed me up. One of the ways it functioned was to fool me into thinking that God was all I needed. After all, if truth was all in God's Word, I could do nothing better than spend all my time in that Word (you can see the roots of my monasticism here, can't you?). So I did. I didn't date at all, and the first woman I went out with more than once was the woman I married. The long and the short of it, then, was that when I got married, I had no idea what a woman was or how love was to be felt, expressed or could become part of a life with two people in relationship.

Speaking about not "knowing what a woman was," I recall learning from the early (first generation) feminists at Brown University, where I was an undergraduate from 1970-74, that the roots of patriarchal oppression (I learned the key vocabulary quickly) were in men developing gender stereotypes of women and then taking control of women's lives. Thus, the major point to realize, I was told, was that women and men were the same. As the Brown University Chaplain* told me at the time, men and women are the same, except for some minor biological differences And, here I was thinking that those biological differences were rather major! How silly of me.

[*I later discovered that he was wrestling with his sexuality at the time, and he finally came "out of the closet" as gay before most of us knew there was a closet to come out of...]

Explanation # 2--Discovering My Attractivness

So I got married in 1977 to a woman who was the same as I was except for minor biological differences. Well, that was what the ideology taught me and, because I had no experience with girls/women previously, and because I was in love with God, I entered into marriage in this confused state. Things of course got worse, but we hung on together for 24 years. But in all of this I never once reflected on the fact that I was a very attractive man. Of course I spent a lot of time as an adolescent looking into mirrors, but I never as an adult saw myself as attractive. I didn't see myself as unattractive; I just saw myself as caught up in God. But then, when I began to learn after about five years of marriage that my wife maybe was slightly different from me, I also began to learn that I was a quite attractive man. How? Well, someone happened to tell it to me.

I recall the occasion. I was 32, a youngish professor at Reed, and now very focused on beginning a political career. It was March 1985. I know the precise date not because I just have a good memory but because the Oregonian, where I would work in Summer/Fall 1985, endorsed my candidacy for the Portland Community College Board in an editorial that said in part, "Long, 32, with a mind overflowing with ideas..." Well, it was during this campaign that I met a lot of folks and one woman, whose name I don't even remember, said to me, "Bill, you are a very attractive man." I recall looking at her as if she was speaking Mandarin. "Attractiveness" wasn't supposed to be a category of life for me. Smart, yes. Engaging, yes. Friendly, yes. But "attractive"? Well, it just had never entered my consciousness. Because the feminist movement in the 1970s taught me that men oppressed women by first looking at their bodies, I felt that any kind of focus on physical attractiveness was betraying the revolution. But there it was. A woman told me I was very attractive. What did I do with that?

Experience # 3

I didn't do much with that one short sentence for about a decade. I didn't really believe it; I didn't think much about it; I didn't feel it was that important. But then, as my marriage began to crumble in the 1990s, her words from 1985 returned to my mind--"You are a very attractive man..."

Since my divorce in 2001, that conviction has grown in my mind. And, since my divorce in 2001 I have also wanted to explore the "soft" side of my life. So, I began to date, first before the divorce was finalized and then in more earnest in 2002. I perhaps will write about that experience in more depth elsewhere, but suffice it to say that I am discovering that women and men aren't the same except for some minor biological differences. Ideology, once again, has to bite the dust as it comes face to face with the steaming, simmering facts of life.

Conclusion

But why is there a contradiction between "Bill as monk" and "Bill as lover"? Because the lover side wants to cultivate, spend time with, immerse into the life of another. But every time I do this, I become like the child learning to ride a bicycle. The child is doing fine without parental guidance but then, looking around and seeing no parent holding his seat, gets worried and crashes. So I have begun relationships, built relationships, traveled with women, had great and deep times with women but then, when lying there in bed or thinking about life I say, "I need to work....I need to plunge back in.." And, then, I tend to "forget" the woman. If women and men were the same, as the ideology of the 1970s taught me, that might not be a difficulty. But, I am discovering, women don't like to be "forgotten." Hence, the pain.

But that is enough for now to give you the picture of why I am both the monk and the lover. And, I haven't yet found a way to make them compatible.

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