The Unmanly Passivity of Adam;
the Noble Receptivity of Christ and Mary

The woman saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it…The man replied, “The woman whom you put here with me---she gave me fruit from the tree and so I ate it.” Genesis 3

Adam’s sin was one of passivity. He is compliant, lethargic, lazy, slothful, and impotent. By contrast, Eve’s sin is an active one: she grabs the fruit out of distrust, deception, and ambition. Adam “is with her” and then “she gave some to her husband.” The violence of Cain, often considered the primal male sin, is secondary and derivative of the original sin which was closer to sloth (in the classical understanding) than to anger.

This passivity was a failure of the vocation he was given. With Eve, he was to “be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish…” He himself was specifically commissioned to “cultivate and care for” the Garden of Eden. He would remain in communion with God and tend to the Garden and everything in it, especially his wife and eventually his offspring. He named all the creatures and was destined to “leave his father and mother and cling to his wife…” Instead, he stood by and allowed Eve to be deceived by the serpent and then take their destiny into her own hands. His was a sin of inaction, omission, and a failure in vigilance. He did not husband his wife. Gender roles were diabolically inverted: Eve took the initiative and Adam became compliant. We have had that same problem ever since: woman as anxious, controlling dominatrix; man as lethargic, compliant masochist and wimp.

We men are haunted by this Adamic curse of passivity. It is the primal, foundational masculine vice and finds expression in cowardice, weakness, gluttony, lust, and paradoxically in activism, restlessness, agitation and even violence. In the ancient ascetic traditions of the desert fathers, sloth in the deepest sense is not merely physical laziness but the sickness of a soul disinterested in the things of God. This often found expression as restlessness, geographical mobility, agitation, and activism. And so the fathers realized that hyperactivity and violence can camouflage the deeper malady of spiritual sorrow and deadness.

Consider contemporary manifestations of such emasculating passivity:

Alcoholism, Substance Abuse, Gluttony: These are passive processes in which the male regresses to an infantile comfort zone of ingestion. They can lead to fights, date rape and all manner of violence; but at their roots they are masochistic.

Pornography: Lustful voyeurism is again passivity: a taking in, through the eyes, in a greedy, voracious manner, without giving to another. It is the polar opposite of masculinity as donative, generous, and life-giving. It is the ultimate emasculation.

Couch Potato Spectator: Stretched out on couch, Bud in one hand, remote in the other, channel surfing, beer belly extruding from tee shirt…This is not what we were made for. We are destined to be gladiators, not spectators.

War and Peace: It is now 60 years since the UN declared “no more genocide.” Since then we have a litany of them. President Bill Clinton has repeatedly said that his biggest regret is that he failed to intervene in Rwanda. The Iraq war is small change compared to the human devastation of genocide (Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda) that could have been avoided were it not for post-Vietnam American indifference. The “Give Peace a Chance” and “War no More” chants are morally offensive to those who devote their lives and sometimes give their lives to protect us; they are morally offensive to the memory of the millions who died unnecessarily; and they are morally offensive since they express a retreat from the masculine mission to protect the innocent.

Indecision of our young men: Our young men today are having great difficulty in committing to career, family and children: They live with their girl friends or parents; drift from career to career; are reluctant to take responsibility for children. Is this not a repetition of Adam’s indecision and impotence?

What is the remedy for masculine passivity? Is it a muscular, voluntarist activism of some sort? Hardly! We already observed that muscularity, exertion of the will, and agitated activism are often symptoms of sloth.

The remedy is genuine receptivity as perfectly realized in the relation of Jesus to his Father. Jesus receives the will of his Father, for example in the other Garden, Gethsemane; Jesus goes into the desert where he fasts, lives on “every word that comes from the mouth of God,” and does battle with the devil; Jesus proclaims, heals, exorcises and gathers to himself a posse of apostles who will continue this work upon his departure...and all he does is in the will and work of his Father.

In Jesus, as in his mother, we see that genuine receptivity is never passive: it actively appropriates, internalizes, re-represents, amplifies, and responds. Jesus is receptive to his Father but active in every other way: towards the devil and his dark kingdom, towards the poor and the lost, and towards us.

And so, the masculine project is to regain genuine receptivity: to return to communion with the Father and his Son in the Holy Spirit. Let us highlight three dimensions of this all-important re-connection: God, our brothers, and our sisters.

God: Imitating Jesus, we need to passionately seek intimacy with our heavenly Father: prayer, immersion in the Word of God, silence before the Eucharist, sacraments, and ongoing study of God’s ways. These disciplines will sensitize us to receive the many graces descending upon us in everyday life.

Brothers: We desperately need a holy brotherhood. We need to encourage each other. Particularly, we need this mutual strengthening in spiritual combat: fasting, prayer, discernment of and renunciation of evil influences such as those mentioned above. We need accountability, vulnerability, solidarity, brutal honesty, mutual correction and affirmation.

Sisters: We need to consciously and intentionally place ourselves under the influence of good, holy women: our mothers, wives, sisters, family and friends.
Primary here, of course, is our Blessed Mother herself. It is impossible to overestimate the value of intimacy with Mary, especially this week when we celebrate both Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Immaculate Conception. She is the New Eve: replacing suspicion with trust, anxiety with serenity, jealous activism with joyous reception, domination with rapturous surrender, falsehood with truth, and seductive manipulation with virginal maternity.
Consider the contrast between the women who influenced Herod in the murder of John the Baptist and the wife of Pilate in the execution of Jesus. An inebriated Herod was manipulated by the incestuous Herodias and her provocative daughter Salome: he is the passive male whose lethargy makes him a tool for another’s violence. Pilate’s wife was of a different sort: she realized through her dream that Jesus was a holy man. She exerted her good influence but Pilate did not receive it, surrendering instead to opposing pressures. Would that he had listened to his good wife!
A few weeks ago, Fr. Groeschel hosted on his show a holy cloistered nun who had been active in the movies in the 50s. She worked with Elvis Presley on some of his films. She described him as a perfect gentleman with her: gentle and respectful. In fact, he loved to discuss scripture with her and would find opportunities to do so. Elvis was the ultimate male sex symbol of the last 50 years; yet much of his appeal sprung from a certain innocence. The same holds for his feminine contemporary, Marilyn Monroe. It was this combination of raw sensuality, glamour and innocence that made each of them so magnetic. Isn’t it interesting that he would intentionally spend time with this good and holy young woman in pondering God’s word? We need to do the same.
Let us cherish and enjoy the lovely women of our lives and allow their good influence to lead and strengthen us in our masculinity.

As loyal sons of our heavenly Father and of our Mother the Church, we are blessed to receive a steady flow of grace and strength in the Holy Spirit: in prayer and sacrament, in our brotherhood, and from our beautiful women. This power from above moves us beyond passivity, insobriety, voyeurism and sloth. We are strengthened to guard our hearts, to tend our garden, to husband our wives, to cherish our women, to father our children, to renounce Satan and all his lies, to become fruitful and have dominion over the earth.