If
reading the Scripture one-dimensionally is a real and present danger,
so also is our approach to people in their struggles. I find this
especially true in academic and ministry paradigms where we are
prone to look at people who are not “with the program” in terms of
simply making wrong choices. This is why I choose to include
in my study of soul problems books by authors who do not come from my
biblical worldview. It is not that I doubt the biblical worldview. It is
that I doubt our willingness to be life-informed in our biblical worldview.
The
bible is very soul conscious in the study of a world where people are entrenched in living for their own kingdom. It recognizes that there are
movers and shakers who establish cultural trends and package them in ways to draw people in and hold them captive. In so doing it speaks
with words which are graphic if we would let them be: bondage,
captivity, slavery, darkness, blindness and lostness.
I
say they are graphic if we would let them be because I find that we in
the Christian community do not do well in letting these words speak to
our imagination. We can be eloquent about the wrath of God, but academic with regard to the captivity of the human heart. Christians counselors have observed that we are often
forced to go to secular writers to discover what is happening among the sin-bound because
they are the ones doing the real life research. My observation is that
we are good at glimpsing the surface and giving surface answers. If we
take time to let our secular neighbors lift the covers we are forced to
dig deeper into the Word of God to find how to make ourselves available
to the souls they have exposed.
It is for this reason that I recommend a book such as Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Lives of Boys by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson. It by no means represents a
fundamental, evangelical or reformed Christian paradigm and, because of
that, does not jump to their presumptions before actually examining what
is happening in the lives of boys in our culture. Neither do I endorse most of their take on the account of Cain in the book of Genesis. My
recommendation has to do with the facts they uncover and the clear dots
which they are able to connect. I am not endorsing some of the ways they think the
problems should be resolved. I must also warn the reader that these authors deal with youngsters in the raw problems of life which most of us do not face until suddenly (and all too often unexpectedly) they explode in the life of a son or close friend. That means, if a reader cannot get past quotes which include the profanities of angry and hurting kids he might as well not pick up this book. For that matter, he might as well not make himself available for an authentic talk with a struggling kid.
No, I
am not in favor of the use of profanity. The force of such statements
as, “Let your conversation be always with grace…” and “put off…filthy
communication,” weigh heavily on my personal word choices. Neither am I
impressed by the current trend among “recovering” fundamentalists to
throw a four-letter vocabulary around as some kind of profound
authenticity. Nevertheless, that does not bar me from listening to a
troubled person or reading material which chooses to use their terms to
describe their frustrations. People who are in prison (physical or
spiritual) are in a culture of deep and vile darkness which will have
its impact on their vocabulary. Two of the last four chapters of Raising Cain
(“Drinking and Drugs” and “Romancing the Stone” - which deals with
sexual concerns) are especially difficult reads for a Christian
community, but I believe they serve their purpose well.
Besides
letting us look deep into the dark soul of a kid in trouble, the
authors help us put what is happening to the boy in the larger context
of home culture, peer culture and social culture which fail to define
manhood, sap men of emotional awareness and vocabulary, barrage them
with sexual messages, and offer no authentic rite of passage beyond
alcohol, drugs and fornication.
The book’s strongest feature has to do with its subtitle: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys.
Here, more than in any other issue, the authors expose a pattern which
is all too familiar both in the Christian neighborhood and in our
western culture at large. If reading Raising Cain would do nothing else than prompt the reader to begin to look for a way
to help boys develop an emotional vocabulary it will have been worth his time.
Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys
Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson
With Teresa Barker
1999/2000
Ballantine Books, Random House
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