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This is a week two, the second week of a two-part series on the Revolution of Tenderness. It's just such a resonant phrase I like saying

just the title. So I saw a cartoon. It had two entirely metal-bedecked generals and they're

striding down the halls of the Pentagon and one turns to the other and says, you know,

it really shook me.

I dreamed the meek inherited the earth.

And it made me think about how in today's culture the totally predominant version of masculinity

is the one shaped by primitive instincts, the kind of grasping for power,

the disdain for vulnerability.

From a psychological perspective, it's really called the shadow masculine because it's driven

by the survival brain and cut off from our more recently evolved capacities for empathy,

for reason, for mindfulness, for compassion, for moral discernment.

And when dominant, not only is the shadow masculine destructive to the very best that's emerged in our civilization.

Being immersed in the atmosphere, it blocks us from taking in the beauty that's here,

the mystery of life, the loving that really gives life meaning.

It really bleeds into everything and creates a kind of fear mentality

that cuts us off from what we cherish. So I want to read you a bit of a poem called

Testimony by Rebecca Baggett. She says, I want to tell you that the world is still beautiful. I tell you that

despite children waived on City Street, shot down in schoolrooms, despite the slow poisons

seeping from old and hidden sins into our air, soil, water, despite the thinning film that encloses

our aching world, despite my own terror

...