What's It Take to Make a Man?: A Handbook for the Parents of Boys by R.O. Bloch

Author:R.O. Bloch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Perspective

Feeling

Armed with those three virtues, any Man will have the self-confidence he needs to make the right decisions when the chips are down.

CHAPTER 7

THE HOLE-IN-THE-SOUL GENERATION

You don’t have a soul; you are a Soul. You have a body.

C. S. Lewis

It should be plain to you by now that boys need a lot of direction. Our society does boys no favor nowadays when we simply allow them to develop their character on their own. We’ll talk more about this as we go along, but first, let’s see how a Man’s character is entwined with his soul, which we’ll start out by defining as the part of him that contains both his earthly and immortal being.

In our list of Manly virtues in Chapter 2, “His Own Relationship to the Universe” was listed last because it is certainly the most philosophical, and the most difficult to get our minds around. You may rightly ask how any young man could possibly develop even the concept of such an expansive relationship in the first place. The answer, like everything else in this book, is that it begins at home, and right on page one of your kid-raising manual. Before a boy can relate to the large scale, he must first be taught to relate to the family. Once developed through family service, a Man’s relationships can blossom and expand to broader groups like school, community, country, world, and ultimately, even the vast universe. Of course, girls need to develop the same kind of relationship, but it seems that relationships of any kind are easier for most girls to establish than they are for most boys. This is probably because, as we saw earlier, many girls seem to come prewired with a sense of their relationship to the family, which gives them a vital head start.

Over the years, writers and philosophers have expressed in one way or another that a Man’s soul is what consummates his relationships. For example, the Greek philosopher Diogenes once defined true friends as “one soul abiding in two bodies.”

But what is a soul, anyway? People of every culture on earth have wrestled with that question for eons, and there is no good definition that exactly fits to everyone’s satisfaction. For our purposes here, most of us would no doubt agree that at the very least, a Man’s soul is the part of him that makes him alive and able to perceive; it’s his consciousness and awareness component. To this writer, it seems that many of the wayward boys today instinctively are aware that something is terribly wrong deep within them. They are conscious of a huge void, but absolutely clueless how to fill it up. As parents, that’s our job, and as we talked earlier, we have only a very limited opportunity in his life to make significant headway.

It’s important first to understand that there are two very distinct parts to a person’s soul, an earthly one and an eternal one. We’ll touch on the eternal part a bit later. As

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