Making My Podcast: Season 1, Pilot and Episode 2

I have been hemming and hawing about making my first podcast for some time. Having Mondays off, my spouse is at work and I have the house to myself, so, I sat down at my living room Ikea folding table last week and recorded the Pilot episode of my very first podcast.

Manly: Reframing Masculinity Season 1, Pilot: Desire, Attachment, and Suffering

Using the Anchor podcasts iPhone app, I decided to make it happen. There isn’t much to say about my pilot. It wasn’t bad and it wasn’t great. I rambled a lot and there were a ton of ummms and uhhhs as I recorded at my table. One of our cats, Rev, interrupted me with a piercing “mew” while I recorded. I don’t have “fancy” equipment or mics right now, so, it’s just me in my quiet lakeside cabin. The quality, however, is not as bad as I had worried it might be.

I will say this about my pilot: it’s raw, real, and gut-wrenchingly honest. I can hear my voice pleading for understanding. It’s an interesting social experiment to have your podcast published wherever podcasts are available and to have recorded yourself saying things like, “I’m a recovering addict” and “I identify as queer” to ears that have never heard these things before, including certain members of my family.

To me, this is more than just a podcast. It’s my Confessions by St. Augustine. It’s my auditory memoir. It’s painful and freeing and relieving all at once to record it.

Image courtesy of https://www.crystalinks.com/sacred_feminine.html

Manly, Season 1.2: The Holy Feminine, Part 1

The following is the transcript for season one, episode two of Manly, A Podcast About Reframing Masculinity:

Welcome back to Manly: Reframing Masculinity. I’m your host, Josiah, and today we are going to tackle the tiny, inconsequential topic of The Holy Feminine. Do not worry, dear listeners! This is only the very first episode about The Holy Feminine. We will talk a LOT more about this topic across the Seasons of this podcast!

Shall we begin?

Several months ago, my therapist, a hardass counselor with no time for bullshit — especially my bullshit — challenged me. Now, here, I must clarify a couple of things: I like to call my therapist “mean” and by “mean” I mean, she’s incredible. Because she won’t allow me to get away with the old manipulative patterns inherent in my addiction, I have been forced to face every part of myself and make difficult decisions about each of these parts — which parts to embrace and which parts to face and change. Transformation is possible, and I credit my therapist with helping me transform. The second thing I must clarify is that “challenge” is all she does. I go see my therapist for my weekly mental, emotional, and spiritual beating.

I told my therapist about a dream I had. In my dream, I was sitting at the breakfast table in a bathrobe eating toast and drinking black coffee. The newspaper was spread out in front of me and a headline caught my attention: Clinical Chaplain Rapes and Murders Fifteen-Year-Old Girl. Under the headline was a picture of me next to a picture of a young woman with platinum blonde hair, rosy cheeks, and a white, lacy dress. She had a pink bow in her hair.

I was instantly filled with intense fear and panic. My toast caught in my throat. My gut began to swim and gargle violently and I could feel the anxious shits knocking at the door of my clenched asshole.

I woke up suddenly drenched in sweat and panting. Had I actually raped and murdered a poor, young, innocent girl? I felt like I was going to vomit and I began to softly cry into my hands as my spouse slept deeply next to me.

Then, like a wave of sweet, sweet relief, it hit me: I had been dreaming. None of it was real. I had not, in fact, raped and murdered any person! But here is the larger question: was it not real or was it not fact? Reality and fact, in the case of dreams and waking life, can be two very different things, can’t they?

I left it to my Jungian therapist to take care of this one. Like a pretty, middle-aged Jedi Knight with the stern, badass demeanor of Trinity from The Matrix and the heartfelt wisdom of Master Yoda, she reached into the dream world of my fucked up psyche and asked me a question. The question came like a bullet ripping through a spider-web, deadly and with total ease and swiftness:

“Do you remember how old you were when you raped and murdered the feminine nature within you?”

I said it probably started around fifteen because that was the age I lost my virginity, in a shopping mall dressing room, to my older, more experienced girlfriend.

I’m no dummy. I knew where this was going. She and I had spoken several times about my relationship to masculinity and how I never “fit the mold” when it came to the kinds of rural American WASP-ish males I was raised around. Real men loved Jesus, played at least one sport, were wise and service-oriented, voted in favor of patriotic ideals, and always ALWAYS always loved women.

Horny? Marry a woman.

In love? Marry a woman.

Looking for a successful goddamn future? Marry a woman.

Want to be a good family man? Marry a woman, fuck that woman (regularly), and make babies.

These babies are then your responsibility to raise as responsible, thoughtful, hardworking members of society who can give back to their community in meaningful ways.

Never mind who or what gets to define words like “meaningful.” By who or what…I mean…Baby boomers and my parents’ generation.

Oh yeah…and lastly…you never have a “partner.” You always ALWAYS always have a…wife. You are never attracted to the same gender or non-gendered persons…EVER. How could you POSSIBLY ever think that was ok??

If you are finding yourself attracted to individuals who are not women, then, you are defective and must be FIXED, for fuck’s sake, you silly little queer, you! ;)

I didn’t fit my white, conservative, fundamentalist Evangelical Christian community’s definition of a “man.” I loved the arts. I was very in touch with my feelings…too in touch with my feelings, in fact. I wanted to sing my heart out on stage and wanted to put product in my hair. I wanted to hold hands with someone I loved and experience beauty with this person. I wanted to sit and talk about Star Wars for hours on end.

But…I also wanted to be a good boy. I wanted to become the kind of man my dad and my grandfather expected me to become. Now, my dad and his dad, my Poppy, had very different ideas of what a man looked like…especially in regard to politics and relationship to Jesus.

For example: my Poppy was a conservative Evangelical Republican Christian who used a lot of war language to describe Jesus. My dad was a conservative Christian who voted his conscience and used only the language of non-violence and compassion to describe Jesus. Basically, my dad was a Mennonite in disguise. I believe my Dad is some kind of an agnostic, now. My Poppy, sadly, passed away in 2013 due to cancer. We didn’t agree in every way, and yet, he was an absolutely amazing grandfather.

Back to the conversation with my therapist. My sexual experience in the mall dressing room with my then girlfriend, who I will call Jocelyn, was elating, for more than one reason:

1. I believed that getting an erection and ejaculating while a naked woman’s mouth and hands were on my genitals was a good sign! It meant I wasn’t less of a man! It meant that older, sexier women liked me and desired what I had. THIS, I believed firmly, WAS THE ANTIDOTE TO REJECTION! As long as I can keep up my sexual activity, I can prove to myself, and to the world, that I am manly enough.
2. This sexuality thing, however, was more of a sexuality PROBLEM. Why? I was a young, teenage boy whose brain and body were still developing AND there were very strict, shame-based rules in my faith community around sex before marriage. Like I said before, the solution to all problems a young man will face is…Marry a woman.

Men, like all humans and many other mammals, fear rejection. When I was a spiritual counselor in an urban addiction treatment center in Minneapolis, I was required to take a six week class on rejection. SUPER fun! I learned some super interesting shit about rejection. First off, rejection sucks! Well…feeling rejected sucks!

We were asked, in this class, to recall our first memory of rejection. We probably experienced a feeling of rejection when we were very small. This rejection hardwired itself in our brain….isn’t that insane?? And…it started to inform our relationships…to ourselves, others, and with God. The reason rejection hurts so much? It is stored in the same part of the brain that stores pain when we break a bone. What our brain tells us, essentially, when we experience rejection is…YOU ARE EXPERIENCING EXTREME PAIN. Do you remember the first time you broke a bone? We never forget that shit! So it is with rejection. I rest my case.

So…my therapist asked me: “Do you remember how old you were when you raped and murdered the feminine nature within you?”

Yes, therapist. I was probably fifteen-ish, although I’m not certain it was a one time event. Maybe it was the sexy mall experience…maybe it wasn’t. Either way, I began to actively reject a part of my being that my therapist referred to as “the holy feminine.”

So, what is the holy feminine?

In the Hebrew Bible, the Holy Spirit is described in both feminine and masculine terms. The gender of the Holy Spirit is a hotly debated topic across…well…communities of theology nerds. You probably don’t give a shit. I do..but…that’s not surprising.

Either way, God is not gendered. God does not have “dangly bits,” to quote my systematic theology professor from my college days. Therefore, since we are Imago Dei (created in the image of God), God embodies and is revealed in all gender expressions but is none of these gender expressions. Trippy AF. Isn’t that what the kids are saying these days? AF?

Not only is the feminine nature a part of who I am, it is also a holy, sacred part of who I am.

Much like the word “masculine,” I am certain that a person who identifies as a woman could have a podcast about all the many associations with this word, as well. That is not my goal today, dear listeners, so, let’s stick with the point.

What IS the point? I’m not sure. All I know is, I began a journey, of which this podcast is a crucial part, involving embracing the holy feminine within me and allowing it to leak out my pores and appear as freely as it wants to. It has started to heal the parts of my psyche wounded by rejection. It has helped repair burned bridges with others, myself, and God. I am able to say, honestly, the male language for God was a serious barrier to meaningful, spiritual connection for me. God is a nurturing, compassionate, gentle mom to me. All gendered language for the Divine can be problematic, but it’s all a part of who God is, just as much as it isn’t what or who God is, at all. Wrap your lips around that celery and crunch it! Preferably with peanut butter…

If God is my mom, and She is, then, she’s got big, warm bosoms. Why? I need to able to rest my head somewhere! God also lives within me, and, that feminine part is so healing for me. Once I started to embrace that shit, I became a better man. I reframed my relationship with rejection and the opinions of others. I have started to embrace my queer identity and have started to stop feeling so shitty about my body. I am soft and manual labor does not interest me. Sports, other than the occasional baseball game, hold ZERO interest for me. War, weight lifting, tons of meat, guns, and penis size don’t interest me…well…not as much as they used to, anyways.

Stereotypically and culturally speaking, my spouse and I are the exact opposite of what the culture says we SHOULD be. The word Should SUCKS, by the way. There are ABSOLUTELY NO SHOULDS in life! When people use the word “should” with me, I say, “Don’t should all over me!”

My spouse tends to be the physical and mental heavy lifter in our family and I tend to be the spiritual and emotional heavy lifter. I am emotionally sensitive and like to talk things out. My spouse hates feelings, especially traditionally negative feelings, and wants to DO stuff. I want to TALK. She wants to DO. She’s a human doing and I’m a human talking…or something.

I am, every day, slowly resurrecting that holy feminine being who looks like a blonde fifteen year old girl with rosy cheeks, a lacy white dress, and a pink hair bow that lives in my spirit. I am becoming more integrated and it’s so relieving. And no, it’s not bad, and no, no one gets to fucking tell me what a man SHOULD be. Bullshit!

I am, as my spiritual director likes to say to me, “swimming in the waters of freedom.”

So, I think that’s all for today. Good stuff to wrestle with! I invite you to explore what being “manly” looks like for you, and, if it looks like something other than what your culture has laid in front of you, don’t just settle for suppression. Live your life and swim in the waters of freedom, friends.

Please, if you haven’t yet, rate and review my podcast. It is now available EVERYWHERE where there are podcasts! It would mean the world to me! Thank you!

I’ll see you all next time on Manly: A Podcast About Reframing Masculinity.