Do You Hear What I Hear?

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self -
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time,
only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long difficult repentance, realization of life's
mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

- D.H. Lawrence

A speaker was telling the audience that men are "hard-wired" for this or that. Hard-wired? Hard-wired? I wanted to scream my best D.H. Lawrence: I AM NOT A MECHANISM! I AM NOT A MECHANISM! But I didn't. Guess I'm not hard-wired for screaming. But the longer I listened, the more despondent I grew because yet another "man speaking to men" was viewing "men" in a mechanistic way and then prescribing various things that would "fix" the wrongly working mechanism. Now the speaker was going to great lengths to assure us that he didn't want to "fix" us, but he betrayed himself, and us, by the very language he was using.

And lest you think it specific to men, I heard a woman say that about herself just the other day. Well, I know I'm hard-wired for... We also talk about our operating systems and we're not hitting all cylinders and I need to unplug or recharge my batteries...I could go on, but it makes me sad. We've swallowed this subtle lie and taken it to heart and out of the heart proceedeth a view of ourselves that couldn't be more dangerous: that we are mechanisms or at least mechanistic.

No, my friends. We are souls. And if we are ill, and I believe we are, then I agree with Lawrence:
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self -
And therein, I believe, lies one of the struggles for me, for us; we'd rather not look into that deep emotional self. The deeps have a tendency to be dark and moist and scary.

The other struggle is this:
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time,
only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
We'd rather not take the time. We're not patient. And that certain long difficult repentance stuff? Whoo-wee, we're not hard-wired for that. You might think it different in groups of people who say they believe in God, but for the most part, it's not. As Jim Harrison has said, "We like to count spiritual coup and then get on with it."