The Great Interior Clean-Up: The Hose Down

One of the things about following God's will as men ought to be a sort of rugged manliness infused with holiness. Manliness? What is that?

My friend, I'm not at all surprised you ask. I mean, let's face it, we live in the most emasculated epoch of our entire western civilization. If you grew up with even the slightest ounce of testosterone, it was nagged out of you by years of feminist elementary school teachers. You know who I'm talking about. It was the math teacher who insisted (against statistics) that girls were better at arithmetic than boys. It was the health teacher who reminded you girls matured more quickly than boys (when you define maturity in just the right terms). It was the gym teacher who outlawed dodgeball because there were too many losers. It was the history teacher who injected world history with all sorts of feminist revisionism. If you managed to make it passed all that, there was always mom, regaling you with stories of her time with Ms Magazine, or a whole substratum of society that calls men to all sorts of vegan-latte-sipping wine and soy-cheese parties. What is manliness? It's certainly not something to be found these days among the leading men of America.

The United States was founded on manliness: men who valued freedom for their families more than cowardice before a tyrant, men who ventured westward into the face of danger to bring orderly to a chaotic frontier, men who woke early and worked all day to bring home the bacon to a family barely scraping by in the grips of the Great Depression.

I'll talk about manliness in more depth later, but it's certainly got to be a part of what being a fiat man is.

For the meantime, let's focus on what I'm going to call the Hose Down. Men get dirty, and when we do, we don't take baths in lavender and camomile. We hose down. We hop in a shower, crank on our elephant showerheads, and slather ourselves in musk.

So if we don't clean our bodies like pansies, why do we clean our souls like pansies? Why do most Catholic men go to Confession only occasionally, mumble through the whole thing, avoid mentioning the gravest sins, and have not the strength to admit their faults and make firm resolutions not to sin again?

If you want to be a Fiat Man, you need to strive to know and follow God's will at any time, and you need to do that like a man. How can you know and follow God's will if you're routinely, habitually violating His will through sin? How can you turn from that sin to make a real effort to know and follow His will if you go to Confession like a pansy?

Newsflash: sin is worse than cancer. Cut it out. Take repentance seriously. Turn from sin and be faithful to the Gospel.

I went to Confession this afternoon. I listed all the sins I could think of, in number and kind, and I got it out. I know the priest. Was I a little nervous about being embarrassed? Sure. I dealt with it. How are you going to get spiritual cancer out if you're not honest with the doctor?

So, fiat men, if you're serious about the Great Interior Clean-Up, I implore you: get yourself to Confession! And make it a hose down! Be a man! Be a Fiat Man!

Pax,

Micah