A friend, a journalist, e-mailed me the other day, and he said he was writing a piece about what it is that men want, and he is interviewing several men he calls “influential.”

He wanted to know if I had a particular vision about what I wanted to see happen in the world, apart from the apparent – peace, climate justice, a kinder and gentler world.

I passed on the offer, I do not see myself as influential, but this startled me because my daily afternoon reading yesterday (My Quiet Hour of Reflection, Meditation,  And Contemplation) was an essay by Thomas Merton called Rebirth and the New Man in Christianity.

This happens too often to me to be an accident. Something is thinking of me.

I am not a Christian, but my reading and goals often bring me back to the early and earth-changing ideas of the Christian prophets and mystics, and philosophers, including Jesus Christ.

I don’t seem to have found a God in my life, but my goals are Christic, I realize. Somewhere along the line, Christ got into my head and stayed there.

I’m increasingly pulled by the feeling that my work in this world is helping the needy and the vulnerable and making that an integral part of my life. And using my blog for good.

And that, along with my blog, has become a vocation for me.

I am not interested in being perfect or being a saint. Still, I have experienced a renewal of the self, the “new creation” that is so often associated with Christ and Christianity. Mine is not, in my mind, a religious experience, but a personal revelation.

I think a lot about what it means to be a new man, how empathy is strength and cruelty is weakness and how so many men have lost a sense of connection to the earth or the joys of a life of compassion.

Today, I got another chance to learn when Maria told me she was saving the left behind coins from our piggy bank because she wanted them to be free and out into the world. She would not, she said, return them to the piggy bank but bring them to the other bank to be set free and go do their work.

As most men would, I laughed at this and made fun of her.

But I stopped laughing when I realized as we talked that she was much closer to rebirth than I was; she was able to feel empathy and compassion for a pile of humble pennies, an excellent metaphor for the poor and the needy. It’s the people who worry about the pennies who will save the world, not the men who feed their selfish and cruel egos.

Several women instantly messaged me after reading my blog post, stating their connection to Maria and offering their own empathy stories, for which they had all been made fun of, dismissed as “emotional” by men, and subject to ridicule or another label.

Erika wrote that when she got new shoes as a child, she would take them for a walk to show them where they would be going. She would move pebbles in the forest to have a different view. I would wager she never told that story to her father or brother.

Jean wrote that the world would be/could be different with more Marias in it.

“I live in Vermont,” she wrote,” where some of us are trying to work on legislative bills that would reduce cruelty to wildlife. It seems like women who testify in favor of these bills get labeled as “emotional.” 

The women who wrote me these very beautiful messages all understand just what Maria felt, and almost every woman I heard from has similar stories to tell. No man wrote me about the piece. I suppose in a way, it had little to do with most of them.

I realized, to my discomfort, that I has been acting out the man’s role – dismissing feeling, emotion, and mercy – and Maria was acting out the part of  women – showing empathy and mercy for all things, even coins.

I apologized and corrected myself, and instead of laughing at her, I listened to her. That is the path to renewal for me. When I walk past the rescued coins, I see them in a different way. The interesting thing is that I see them at all.

In all of my life, no man had ever taught me how to be emotional, show emotion,  or what empathy was.

I heard nothing but contempt and dismissal for women who did. Now, I am in love with this profoundly empathetic person and am opening my eyes to what it really would mean to be reborn.

Merton wrote that the conventional male idea of rebirth – a formalistic method of gaining for oneself a “good place in the other world” – was shallow and obscured the real meaning of a rebirth. The prophets were aiming much higher.

The death to the “old self” that the Christian prophets preached and wrote about meant much more than salvation in heaven or the hereafter, but a transformation of one’s present life.

Rebirth and renewal were not only of religious faith but instead meant becoming “a new being,” a new creation,” a redefining of what it meant to be human.

The Christians never wrote about renewal and rebirth for women. It was as if they believed women were not open to it. We see in our time just how false that is.

Merton’s idea imagined renewal as an inner revolution, a radical change of the soul, a transcendence of human society’s norms and attitudes and traditions of human culture.

And this is my wish for men, this is what I would have told my friend: the new men experience a radical change in the soul, in norms and attitudes.

The new man stops trivializing and ridiculing women (and men) like Jean or Maria and cheers them on.

“I find it interesting,” added Jean, “that caring, kindness, and wanting to reduce suffering get labeled and dismissed as being “emotional,” but hatred, callousness, and vengeance are not labeled as such.”

Interesting, and for much of the world, tragic.

Hatred, callousness, and vengeance have become the mark of the powerful and ambitious men seeking to gain control of our country and our world.

She might add lying, self-pity, and grievance to that.

I think the new man should regain and renew some of the best traditions of men. They were often caretakers of children, nurturers of their family, close to nature and the animal world.

They did not pity or feel sorrow for themselves or blamed others for their troubles. The new man rejects hatred, he does not promote it.

A good man is not just a strong or tough man. A good man cares about caring, kindness, reducing suffering, and like Christ, caring for the poor and the vulnerable.

Hatred and vengeance are not only not labeled as such; they have become the rallying cry and ideology and politics of millions of people, primarily white men who cannot change or empathize.

A good man, a renewed man, teaches his children to be honest and kind. He rejects violence as weak and ineffective.

He teaches his children to think of the weak, the needy, and the poor. He teaches his children that every man must use his strength and instincts to reduce the world’s suffering, never to increase it or laugh at the people who care about shoes and pennies and animals.

The new man doesn’t try to crush his enemies or those who disagrees with them,  but respects them and listens to them. He doesn’t tear people down; he builds them up.

The man who undergoes renewal and rebirth, says Merton, is henceforth superior to the laws and norms of society.

He is bound by the higher law of love, which is his freedom, no longer directed at the fulfillment of his own will and needs and ambitions, but to the good of all men and women.

The idea of the “new birth” is at the very heart of Christianity, but also in the heart of every man who wants to be better, help the world find peace, end suffering, support women, save our earth and teach love to their children.

I can’t say my idea for the New Man is remotely realistic or can even ever happen. How could I know?

I believe men can change one at a time, from the inside out. That is my personal hope for myself and for the world,  and perhaps the only hope for the world. I do think it is possible.

When the new man dies, the best thing that can be said of him or written on his tombstone is that he never hurt anyone, and he helped ease suffering.

He stood with the people who called for peace or fought for pennies and shoes or fought for the helpless animals of the world and for the very earth they live on.