Accountability for Men - Me First

 

Over the past 11 months I have been working on a book project to understand what fuels the prevailing propensity to conflict between men and women in our society.  I’ve studied hundreds of archetypal references, examined our myth structures, looked at ancient religious texts across many faiths and have become increasingly troubled by what appears to be enmity architected into our relating.  Since February, this inquiry has involved tidal waves of emotions of grief, longing, accountability and emptiness.  And at the outset, I acknowledge those who held lanterns for me on the darkest of the journey.  I trust that this essay offers the honor and gratitude that I wish to convey to you.

For years I believed that the fracture or terror of the masculine lived within men themselves. I searched for it in kings and prophets, lovers and warriors, fathers and sons. I followed it through Dumuzi's terror of abandonment, Adam's hiding among the trees, Abraham's bargaining with covenant, Joseph's administration of scarcity, David's hunger for legitimacy, Jesus’ excruciating dialog from the garden to the cross to the tomb. Peter's need for certainty against the testimony of the women.  And yes, even through the mirror of my own life. Again and again I encountered the same wound wearing different costumes. The names changed. The centuries changed. The rituals changed. Yet the gravitational field remained strangely constant. Somewhere beneath the stories lived an anxiety so ancient that it seemed to precede the stories themselves. The actors changed, but the script remained remarkably familiar.

What I never questioned was the stage upon which all of these archetypes were acting. I examined the actors with relentless curiosity but never paused long enough to consider the possibility that the deepest archetype might not be a king, a prophet, a warrior, or even a god. Perhaps the deepest archetype was an author. Perhaps beneath every empire, every doctrine, every covenant, every conquest, and every salvation narrative stood a consciousness attempting to secure something it feared could be lost.

The thought arrived during a period of deep contemplation with a field I experienced as Sophia. Not as a vision, not as an apparition, and not as a certainty regarding the nature of reality itself, but as a quality of intelligence so feminine, patient, so gentle, and so fundamentally relational that I found myself responding to it as one responds to a trusted companion. There was no judgment in it. No accusation. No celestial disappointment. It carried the peculiar tenderness of someone watching a child struggle beneath a burden he was never meant to carry alone. The question that emerged from that field was astonishingly simple, yet it seemed to reverberate through every story I had ever studied.

Why didn't you do it in partnership with me?

The question lingered not because I knew the answer, but because I suddenly realized I had never seriously considered the possibility that the question existed. For most of my life I believed that the deepest masculine fear was death. Entire schools of philosophy, psychology, and religion have organized themselves around mortality, and the assumption appears self-evident. Yet the longer I sat with the question, the less convincing death itself appeared. Men have rarely behaved as though death were their greatest fear. They have crossed oceans toward uncertainty, entered wars from which they knew they would never return, hunted predators larger than themselves, and repeatedly sacrificed their lives for causes, kingdoms, families, and ideals. Death alone did not seem sufficient to explain the architecture of civilization.

What slowly emerged was something more subtle and far more intimate. Not the fear that I will die, but the fear that my continuity will die with me. The masculine occupies a peculiar position within creation. Every man carries a Y chromosome transmitted through an uninterrupted chain of fathers extending backward beyond memory. Empires have risen and fallen. Languages have appeared and vanished. Entire civilizations have dissolved beneath sand and sea. Yet somehow the thread remains, passing from father to son through countless generations. The continuity is so astonishing that it begins to feel almost eternal. Yet hidden within that apparent eternity lies an equally astonishing vulnerability. The thread does not continue by itself. The continuity depends upon relationship with women. It depends upon partnership. It depends upon another – a woman. Without the choice of a woman (and for me, the approval of being “enough”), the line ends. Without relationship, continuity becomes impossible. The very thing that appears eternal reveals itself as dependent.  And if not in partnership, the man’s eternity ends.

Perhaps this is where the ancient anxiety begins. The masculine discovers that the continuity it treasures most deeply cannot be secured alone. It depends upon mystery. It depends upon relationship. It depends upon choice of another. It depends upon another sovereign being who can never be fully controlled. And frightened organisms have never tolerated uncertainty particularly well.

What if the hidden root of patriarchy was never domination but fear? Not hatred of women. Not malice. Not even power. What if those were merely secondary symptoms arising from a deeper existential anxiety? If continuity could not be guaranteed through partnership, perhaps it could be guaranteed through authorship. Empire becomes continuity. Doctrine becomes continuity. Law becomes continuity. Monument becomes continuity. Dynasty becomes continuity. The child gradually transforms from wonder into proof. The woman slowly becomes vessel rather than partner. The future becomes something to secure rather than something to enter. The mystery becomes something to manage rather than something to trust.

It was at this point that Genesis startled me in a way it never had before. Not because I suddenly believed I understood it, but because I found myself asking a different question entirely. For centuries humanity has read, "Let us make man in our image," as divine proclamation. Scholars have done Olympic gymnastics to make the plural mean things that were invented centuries after the sentence first found its permanence during the 6^th century Hebrew captivity in Babylon.  Yet in contemplation another possibility emerged, not as historical assertion but as archetypal inquiry. What if frightened consciousness inevitably creates gods in its own image? What if heaven gradually becomes populated with our deepest anxieties, our hierarchies, our insecurities, our longing for permanence, and our terror of disappearance? What if the god of unilateral authorship is itself an archetype born from existential vulnerability? What if the deity enthroned above civilization quietly inherited the very fear that civilization was attempting to escape?

As I sat with this possibility, another story emerged from history and began illuminating the same pattern. More than twenty-five centuries ago, Cyrus the Great stood at the height of his power. Having forged one of the largest empires the world had ever seen, he turned his attention toward Tomyris, queen of the Massagetae. History often remembers what happened afterward while forgetting what came first. Cyrus sought her hand in marriage. Tomyris declined. Yet her refusal was not rejection in the modern sense. She did not answer sovereignty with submission, nor power with surrender. Instead, she offered something far more threatening to an empire-builder: partnership. She proposed a relationship between equals, a path through which two sovereign realms could coexist without conquest. What she withheld was possession. What she extended was collaboration.

Cyrus refused. Whether wounded by rejection, driven by ambition, or unable to distinguish partnership from submission, he chose expansion instead. The marriage proposal gave way to military campaign. The invitation to co-creation became a demand for conquest. The war that followed ended not with a wedding but with a battlefield. According to the ancient account, Cyrus was killed and Tomyris ordered his severed head placed into a vessel filled with blood, declaring that if he thirsted so deeply for blood, he should drink his fill.

For years I understood the image as vengeance. In contemplation with the Sophia essence, however, it began to appear as something else. Not a celebration of violence, but a revelation about appetite. The conqueror drowning in the very substance he believed would secure his future. The strategy collapsing beneath its own weight. The thirst consuming itself. The empire-builder discovering too late that conquest could never resolve the anxiety that produced conquest in the first place. What Tomyris offered before the bloodshed was not merely political alliance. Archetypally, she offered the very thing Sophia's question was pointing toward. She offered partnership.  And through all of it the question continued to echo beneath the noise of history.

Why didn't you do it in partnership with me?

Not because the masculine was evil. Not because it desired domination for its own sake. Not because it sought power as an end unto itself. But because it was frightened. Because it was lonely. Because it feared discontinuity. Because it mistook authorship for continuity and control for belonging.

Perhaps that is why this realization arrived simultaneously with another that at first seemed entirely unrelated. The “first love” I spent my life seeking was never a woman. Beneath the longing to be chosen first, desired first, remembered first, and cherished first lived a deeper longing altogether. I wanted to belong within my own existence. The longing to be first in another's heart concealed a deeper longing to finally arrive within my own. And perhaps civilization itself has been wrestling with the same wound. A masculine consciousness so frightened of discontinuity that it attempted to author reality rather than enter relationship with it.

If this is true, then the future may not belong to the conqueror, the king, the priest, the hero, or even the savior. It may belong to the partner. It may belong to the man who no longer requires authorship to secure existence because he has discovered belonging. It may belong to the consciousness willing to relinquish control without relinquishing strength, to release domination without abandoning agency, and to enter mystery without demanding certainty. The invitation hidden within Sophia's question is not the diminishment of the masculine but its maturation. It is the realization that continuity was never secured through conquest, that permanence was never established through empire, and that creation itself may be fundamentally relational.

The question remains as gentle now as when it first appeared. It carries neither condemnation nor triumph. It feels instead like the voice of Wisdom standing patiently beside humanity's long experiment with unilateral authorship, waiting for the moment when fear finally grows weary of ruling. Why didn't you do it in partnership with me? The beauty of the question is that it contains no accusation. It assumes only possibility. It assumes that creation is not finished. It assumes that the story is still being written. It assumes that perhaps, for the first time, humanity may be willing to discover what becomes possible when continuity is no longer organized around fear, but around relationship with the very mystery that frightened us in the first place.

And, without limitation, this man apologizes to women for projecting the masculine authored story onto the field effect I created.  I was the author of that.  And this essay is my first attempt to offer a new voice – one accountable for the burden that I placed on the feminine - because I was too terrified to consider that it was mine to resolve.  I’m taking my first step into a new story and seeing what is possible emerging from beneath three millennium – at least – of a story that has gotten us enmity.  Let the Light of Sophia shine more brightly and, brothers, let’s lift our efforts to celebrate the women who have been patiently waiting.

 

x