Well, there's a Lisle and a Manton (and lots of killdeer) in Australia. That may make the last two macho-man lines understandable. I prefer Wilbur's "Running" retrospective on happiness.....

Less than a century, dammit. In an oral culture, dammit. Where men did all the editing, and had done so for over a thousand years, dammit. And women are were generally not full partners, dammit.

I have heard male evangelicals talk about their love of Jesus (to the point of tears) more than their love of the Father or the Holy Spirit. I suppose that because Jesus is the Lord any kind of homoerotic tinge is removed. But is it? I do think that men have a harder time talking about their love of one another than women do. I often used to see male Indian students holding hands as they walked to class. It's a custom of friendship, I suppose. Men do seem to a bit more frequently huggers of each other than they were in the past. There's always this:

https://poets.org/poem/hundred-collars

Thanks, Sam. Frost's customary appearance of ease. I think Ishmael shares the bed with Queequeeg the first time they meet, in an inn. But these two cases are less about bonding, I think, than about trust. And the ways we meet strangers.
I've often found it odd that Father and Holy Ghost get such short shrift from believers in a nominal Trinity. Jesus perhaps seems more approachable, like Mary. Though the Father does have a big white beard.

Cheers,
John

x
The dismantling of male machismo is in full swing. But they die hard. We have a zombie macho man in the WH. They will continue to haunt. In general men are hard-wired to be sexually repressed. Change the children.

In my family men kiss men on the lips. I think that's the most honest expression of love regardless of who is who. It is pretentious to think the poem in question (way back when Sam posted it) is anything other than a man's inclination to compare ecstatic experiences with the groin. I am a dandelion. I do not.
x
x

Jim is nobly trying to get us back on topic, but I wanna digress again....

This is, in my opinion, a big part of why the Ten Commandments include a prohibition on images of the ineffable. Once worshippers have in their heads and hearts a specific visual image of what or whom it is that they worship, it's very hard for some of them to dislodge that in order to glimpse anything sacred in people who don't match that picture.

I'm convinced that many white male Christians are essentially worshiping the image of themselves in power. Their notion of God is tied to a picture of a frighteningly temperamental old white authoritarian and a somewhat nicer, younger white guy who went around performing special favors for people he deemed deserving, and threatening evildoers with future woe. They feel it is their sacred calling to emulate those two models.

The fact that the historical Jesus was almost certainly not European-looking just can't compete, in many people's minds, with all the beautiful European masterworks that depict him as such.

Many Christians are at a loss as to what to do in their heads and hearts with the symbolic representation of the Holy Spirit. It's impossible to take those artistic depictions as literally as artistic depictions of the old and young white guys, without feeling silly for worshipping a pigeon. So it's easier to just ignore it. And they do.

Yeah, Sam, boys do that here in Taiwan too. Though I don't think it happens much by the time they reach junior high school. I don't teach kids, but a few teachers here have told me that it's quite common.

What Julie said.

Cheers,
John

I should probably hasten to say that I think visual art is a legitimate form of expression and exploration in the area of spirituality/religion. I'm not an iconophobe. I'm just very, very wary of the power of both art and spirituality/religion itself to present personal and political agendas as universal truths.

It's why I'm happy when God is played by Morgan Freeman or Alanis Morrisette. Nothing wrong with visual images, from my end, but they deserve to be mixed up a bit. I don't believe God is an old white dude.

Cheers,
John