Salome
Our Struggle Between Emotion And Reason
Emotional Fuel
Is it nurture or nature that compels women to behave like children? Demanding attention, impatient, myopic, placing emotion ahead of logic. There are, of course, exceptions. What was so remarkable about the recent film True Grit was how different The Girl was. In an Oscar® —worthy performance, Hailee Steinfeld’s 14-ish Mattie Ross is sublimely disciplined about avenging her father’s murder to the point where she subjugates all other considerations in her young life. Ross is far from robotic, having all the emotion and verve of a very young person whose life had been torn from her but using her emotion as fuel for her mission rather than as an impediment to it. It is an amazing performance and a great film, flawed only by the artifice of a complete absence of sexual tension. This is a young girl, presumably now an orphan, out in the middle of nowhere, pursuing hardened killers with only the drunk, broken-down Jeff Bridges to guide and protect her. Yet there is not one inference, by good guys or bad, of even a hint of one of the ruffians in this male-dominated flick considering, even for a moment, taking advantage of her. Sexual tension, like the reality of horses defecating at will, seemed to have been excised from the film perhaps to focus more on how remarkably different this character was. But it is the very absence of any hint of sexuality that undermines both her performance and the film itself as I felt manipulated, the film moving out of bounds with reality. I mean, at the very least, at some point, somebody would have whistled at her. In stark reality, once she’d been captured (as she is in the film), the girls’ possible rape would have been a source of high tension. But nobody, good guys or bad, even considers it as a possibility. [Minor spoiler for the film] The film’s ending finds Mattie, many years later, still unmarried. As an adult, Mattie’s disciplined subjugation of her emotion comes across as an unappealing frigidity. This is not what God wants, either: men and women to be so disciplined that they lack spirit and verve. I believe God wants balance. Jesus died to set us free. We should be free from sin, from addictions and habits. We should not be a slave, in bondage to our emotions.
Half the battle between our
emotion and our intellect is keeping our mouth shut. [James 3] We are
halfway home if we just master the art of silence. Most sisters
I know immediately blurt out every unexpressed thought that
enters their head, the way children do. Most hold absolutely
nothing in reserve. They’re running their mouths day and night.
On the phone all day, in the car, texting, chatting, yabba-jabba
yak-yak ad nauseam. This speaks of loneliness which, to me, is
like a weak muscle group. Loneliness speaks to me of a poor
spiritual life. That you can’t be content or comfortable with
yourself, with the sound of your own voice. That there is
absolutely no quiet time in your life suggests there aren’t
spaces where you listen to or seek to hear from God. It’s all
you. Yak-yak-yak. Everybody knows your business. Everybody knows
what you think about everything and everyone. There is no
mystery, no room for thoughtful evaluation of you as a person.
You are easily dismissed because you’re not a thoughtful person,
not a good listener. You don’t process information but rebound
off of trivialities. There is no depth, no “there” there.
We are creatures endowed with the qualities of our Maker,
divinely blessed to experience emotion over a wide range. But we
are, nonetheless, charged to not allow emotion to rule us. [Proverbs
16:32, 25:28, ]
This is the argument for Christian sobriety, why we should not
drink or smoke dope or what have you. We are charged to be
emotional and compassionate people, but to be disciplined. To
subjugate our emotion to our intellect. To allow compassion to
influence our choices but to make those choices prayerfully,
soberly and with deliberation and focus.
It has been the rare woman I have met who engages her intellect
on par with her emotion: who makes a fair fight of it. Most women
I have known, including highly educated women, can be derailed
from efficient pursuit of their goals by rushes of emotion:
love, anger, disappointment, elation. It is, chiefly, why I am
suspicious of female preachers and especially female pastors. I
question their motives, their resolve and their longevity. I
wonder if their decisions are products of their emotion, and how
long they can run from the monster without falling down.
Using Emotion For Fuel:: Steinfeld's Mattie in True Grit..
Count To Ten
Most women I deal with have a strong defensive posture that
borders on irrationality. Nobody is always right, nobody is
always wrong. If you are in a personal or professional
relationship in which you are always one or the other, that is a
dysfunctional relationship. Run for the nearest exit. Before
picking up the phone to speak to one of these sisters, I have to
pause to deactivate my emotion chip. I am everything I accuse
these women of being and much more. I can be defensive and
quick-tempered and just as irrational as the next guy (or gal).
But I have learned that two people bouncing off the walls
accomplishes nothing. So I just turn it off. Take a deep breath.
Pray. Dial the phone.
Communicating with sisters, particularly church sisters, is, for
me, an incredible chore because I have to use my machete to hack
my way through the tangle of weeds inside these women’s head to
get past their emotional sandtraps to the matter at hand. Simple,
clean communication is rare, as an assessment of fault must
first be entered into the record by this sister before we can
move on.
I used to train my assistants about arguing with a monkey. Now,
I am not calling every person or especially every woman a
monkey, but I mean many of us waste far too much time reasoning
with people who refuse to be rational. Rationality is a kind of
meeting of the minds, see you in the middle. Attempting to
reason with a primate who has little or no emotional control,
who thinks urinating on or hurling feces at you is funny, is a
complete waste of time. We—men and women—have to make an
assessment of the persons we are attempting to communicate with,
of their ability to hear us and what language we need to speak.
Failing to do that, treating all persons in a one-size-fits-all
approach, is ignorance on our part. Demanding others meet our
subjective standard for reason, rationality and maturity is
sheer arrogance.
Men treat women like children because, to one extent or another, many women behave like children. And, having been so treated, many women grow emotional calluses which cause them to receive any and all data from a male as condescending, even when it is not. But this is the sum of our sister’s experience, the emotional luggage she carries with her. She is not mean or weak or hateful: she’s a survivor. This is important to consider before you pick up the phone: take a moment to see God about who this person is, about what her larger story is. Sacrifice your own rightness and your own impulse to get all frothy. Let it go.
