Absent (2010)

John Eldredge: Self

Quotes 

• [first lines] 

  John Eldredge : Think about this: Your father is the first person in the outside world that either chooses you or doesn't, and it's the answer to that question that will inevitably shape you and everyone around you for the rest of your life and theirs.

• John Eldredge : Every man has one question - one - that they're asking: "Do I have what it takes? Right? Am I powerful? Am I real? Can I come through?" That is the core question of the masculine journey. I mean, that shapes and drives everything a man is and says and does - "Do I have what it takes?" - and the boy is supposed to get the answer to the question from his father.

• John Eldredge : It is normal right now, i-in the culture in the west, for boys, young men - and even grown men now - to experience life without fathering. It's like he walks around with a question mark on his chest for the rest of his life. And he's looking for the validation, right?, in a hundred places, you know? He looks to the woman. "Tell me who I am as a man," right? And so many other ways, so that the father wound comes when the boy doesn't receive the affirmation and he doesn't receive the validation that he needs to become confident and secure, right?... and selfless man.

• John Eldredge : So, boy or a girl, right?, the... the father has been given this incredibly powerful role to bestow a... a blessing, an identity, a confidence, an assurance, a settledness in the soul, right?, and... and, I mean, you can... you walk in any psychologist's office in the world and, nine times out of ten, the root issue in the "presenting problems" or whatever they are - the addictions, the affairs, the depression - it's a father wound.

• John Eldredge : Earlier cultures understood that there's a warrior in the heart of a boy, right? And you take that and you shape it to be good, right? To serve others, right? To serve what is right and noble. But you don't tell them it's bad. You don't just take it away, and, you know? And so, "Well, we don't let Timmy play with guns," right? "We... we don't want our sons doing that. Don't play army. Don't do any of that stuff." Absolutely emasculating. Are you kidding me? Of course your kid's gonna play with guns, right? The little boy is wired for it. He's gonna make it out of graham crackers or sticks, right? I mean, my sons turn every broom into a sword, right?, or a bazooka or something like that. It is so deep in the heart of a boy to be the warrior that to... to tell them that aggression's bad - "That's all bad" - is profoundly emasculating. Boys are wired for adventure, and boys are wired for aggression. And aggression is good. I mean, you want a boy to stand up as a man to apartied, right? You want him to stand up to injustice, then he has to have something in him that's learned that there are good forms of aggression.