Question for Christian Men

What is your experience of God and/or Jesus? What attracts you to the Christian faith? What do you find are some obstacles to maintaining faith and hope?

I have a secondary MC who is struggling life (kind of a midlife crisis) and I want to portray God and the Faith in an accurate manner. The secondary is in his 50s, struggling with depression, job-related stress and demands, cut in pay; his wife is retired and off most the day with her friends. His kids are grown and moved out. God's about all he's got left, and he's not too active/hopeful on this matter either!



Mods - sorry if this is in the wrong area!

Is there anything in your own experience that you can draw on? Is your question about the difference between how a man handles this and how a woman handles it, or is it about how age comes into it, or something else?

A man in his 50's has probably seen some things in life that didn't fit with what he was taught in Bible School. He might be having a crisis of faith; coming through that he might have given himself permission not-to-believe, and then realized that he must choose to believe in order to finally "grow up" in his faith.

Hope, and a star to steer by.

Hope, concretely, for divine intervention and in the promise that their sins will not be seen. Hope, abstractly, through the positive symbolism of various archetypes presented in the Bible. A star to steer by in that silly literal "what would Jesus do?" sense, but also in the profound sense of a moral compass that can be checked in ambiguous scenarios such as, "Is it better to leave my wife, or to stay with her and cheat?"

Ursula LeGuin once wrote, in the voice of a male character, that as a man grows older his way grows narrower until it is no longer a matter of what he can do, but one of what he must do (I have paraphrased; this is from the Earthsea books). That narrowing of the way is a moral narrowing, and an intellectual narrowing, as much as it is one of circumstance.

More cynically, a certain amount of male power in western society is due to patriarchal values reinforced by what the church teaches little boys and little girls about who they are. Old men sometimes owe their stations in life to the patriarchy, which receives from them in return their devotion.

For me (male, 40) the draw to faith is knowing that I am really, really important to God (e.g., he loves me). I'm not sure there's a single "male" view of it, God is after all the same no matter what your gender. But where I live at least (UK) churches tend to have significantly more women than men in, so there must be some difference somewhere in terms of how we relate to God compared to how we relate to everything else in life. As I wrote somewhere else, given the dreadful way the church has treated women in the past and in some quarters continues to do so, what on earth must we be doing to men such that churches still contain more women than men?

My experience is that work takes up so much of your time and emotional energy (note that I'm not saying this isn't the same for women!) that you don't have a lot left for everything else. And unless you can find a way of relating what you do at work to your faith, faith quickly becomes something peripheral to your life - something you do on Sundays. Not that you don't believe it intellectually, just that if it seems irrelevant to the largest part of your life then it quickly becomes something not very important.

I think men are taught that it's good to be independent, so obviously he's not going to talk about his issues with friends or anything like that, or with his wife. He'll just carry on from day to day as best he can as if nothing was happening. (Or is that just being English?) If you can see inside his head, he might well be feeling envious of his wife, and also aggrieved that she doesn't want to spend time with him. But he may not be aware of exactly why he's feeling this way, so he might just come across as grumpy. If she's got problems too he's unlikely to be very understanding of them.

Of course men vary hugely ...

And angels and demons, or anything supernatural which means we don't have control over our own lives, are very very very scary.

Caveat: from your novel description I wonder if this man might be a catholic? I'm not, and my suspicion is that catholic culture may be significantly different from my experience (just as UK and US Christian culture are almost unrecognizably different at times). I've heard, for example, that the caricature at least is that church ministers in my church tend to be a bit weedy and effeminate (not the ones I've met, I'll have to say), whereas catholic priests are proper men's men. No idea if that has any basis whatsoever in fact, quite probably not.

And different people get different things from going to church. I know men who like the tradition, the sense of being grounded in something that's been there for a long time.