The Killer and the Lover

Coming to terms with the reality no man can escape

“The Lover keeps the other masculine energies humane, loving, and related to each other and to the real life situation of human beings in a difficult world.” Robert Moore & Douglas Gillette

“Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold.” Jesus (Matthew 24:12)

During Thanksgiving week, a man took a Greyhound bus to New York city. After spending a number of days bumming around, he woke up Wednesday at 5:30 am in his hostel room. He dressed, walked several blocks to a Starbucks, bought an energy bar and a bottle of water, and walked back outside. He milled about before crossing the street, pausing between two cars on the other side to let a man with a light blue suit pass. He stepped out behind him, raised a gun and fired several rounds, killing the man.

His mission complete, he disappeared into an alleyway before he hopped on a previously planted bike and rode to Central Park. Once there, he changed his clothes, ditched his bag, and hailed a taxi. That taxi took him back to the bus station and within an hour of the murder he ended his New York stay.

If you keep a pulse on the news, you’ve surely heard this story of the murder of the health insurance CEO. The suspect left very few clues, showing investigators that he was intelligent, disciplined, and determined. They noted he took a bus and not a plane to avoid security checks. His two roommates at the hostel said he never spoke a single word to them so as to avoid any accent detection. He showed impeccable planning, knowing the CEO’s arrival at a conference to within 5 minutes. He waited for the man to walk past so he could surprise him from behind. He took a professional shooting stance and deftly unjammed his gun. He knew his routes, planned his escape and executed it impeccably. And most notably, he wore a mask the whole time.

Well, almost the whole time.

On the day he checked in to his hostel, the woman at the front desk struck up a conversation with him. She started flirting and asked, “Can I see that pretty smile?” He couldn’t resist and dropped his mask. I saw the picture and you can too. It looks every bit like a real smile.

After 9/11, New York city installed thousands of security cameras. Investigators scoured something like 10,000 hours of video to find any shot of the suspect’s face. And the only glimpse they captured was this one moment of flirtation. Prosecutors called it his damning mistake. And indeed, that’s proven true. Luigi Mangione was caught just this week at a McDonalds in Pennsylvania because the worker behind the counter recognized that face.

This is a story of a lot of things for sure, a story that is unfolding every day. But it appears now here is a man whose heart had become angry, even for good reason, but hardened enough to commit murder. Murder seems now to be the justice he decided to take into his own hands.

And yet even he could not resist a moment of flirtation, a moment of warmth.

Here’s a Killer caught, in the end, by the Lover within.

Think about that. Despite being literally in the act of walking out a planned murder, with all the intense determination and discipline and coldness that took, he could not escape his desire to love and be loved. He couldn’t keep his heart from responding to the trappings of romance and the beauty of a woman. The internet even ran away with how cute his smile looks, which I think reveals it strikes most people as really genuine. He really did warm his heart.

And what if he had let that moment of warmth grow in his heart? What if he had let it change him and stir him towards love again? What if it had made him question, “What the hell am I doing here?” What if he had remembered what he was made for and what he most longed for? Maybe it could have prevented a murder and the absolute sabotage of the rest of his life. Instead, he became as cold hearted as the unjust insurance industry he hated.

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

No One Can Escape

I am convinced every man is a Lover at heart. No man can escape the design of his heart to love and be loved, to give and receive pleasure, and to crave awe and play, beauty and sensuality. You can do a lot to kill it off, avoid it, disown it, not take care of it, hide it. But you cannot rid yourself of this heart. It will always come back. And so, to live alive and well, you must do something with it.

If you disown your Lover heart, it will jump you and show up in your life like someone desperate for oxygen. You will struggle with addiction or an affair that seems sudden and out of the blue. You may find yourself in erratic patterns of relationship, craving strong connection one moment before fleeing in self protection the next. You will binge sensuality and beauty but in a way that brings you no closer to being an integrated or healthy man.

To be an alive and whole man you must make the Lover your very center, your North Star.

I wrote a whole book on masculine sexuality because I believe we’ve lost this center in our sexuality. If every man is a Lover, then the center of a man’s sexuality is not his loins but his heart. I feared though (as did my publisher) that this idea might not land well with men, that they’d reject it outright. But my book turned 6 months old this week and it’s doing far better than I could have imagined. And the absolute best evidence of this has been hearing story after story from so many men who actually resonate with the Lover within. Men get this completely!

One man told me he remembered writing poetry to a girl he liked in high school. One day word got back to the guys in his class and they ruthlessly mocked him for it in the locker room. Seeing it as so unwelcome in the world of men, he came to hate and hide that part of himself. But when he read my book, he knew instantly what I meant and remembered his poet heart. He saw just how masculine and virile he had truly been as that young lover writing verse. And he welcomed that part back.

When I wrote my book, I searched a stock photo site for “men reading books” and printed off pages of images. I needed to picture these future readers and imagine what might be true of their lives, stories, and struggles. I spent a long time praying over these men (and women readers too) and it helped me realize a book could be an act of care and love to these readers.

These times of prayer fostered this hope: I want my book to start a revolution of Lovers in the world. We don’t need more warrior in men. We don’t need more talks on grit or drive. Not on the whole. Most of us need a place to let the alive and sensual and loving part of us get validation. That’s the conversation we are desperate to have as men. We hold that part of us in so much shame and shadow.

And I pump my fists in the air every time I hear one of these stories from a man who owns the Lover within again. These guys are the brave ones—breaking the silence and changing the face of masculinity.

I’ll repeat it again: You will never escape your lover heart.

So how is your lover heart doing? How are you caring for it?

Another Killer

I heard an insight recently about the David and Bathsheba story that blows me away. Tim Mackey shared on the Bible Project Podcast that the David and Bathsheba story is written as a reverse Adam and Eve story. Because Hebrew writers wanted readers to meditate on these stories to learn their lessons, they often left hints hidden in the text to awaken us to ponder. This will make more sense as we go.

This story in 2 Samuel 11 starts off with David not going to war as kings do in the spring. Here’s the first clue. God charged Adam and Eve to “…rule and subdue the earth” (Genesis 1:28). And the writer of Samuel in previous chapters (2 Samuel 8:11) used this exact word “subdue” to describe David’s work of clearing out other idolatrous nations in the promised land. Make of it what you will, but the writer wants us to hear that David stopped doing his job.

Instead, David wakes from sleep one night at his palace and goes for a walk on the roof. The Hebrew word for roof here is almost identical to the word for garden. Often kings actually did have roof top gardens to prove their power and virility. Think of the famous hanging gardens of Babylon built by Nebuchadnezzar—one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. And so David wakes from sleep to walk a garden and there he sees a beautiful naked woman.

This was meant to conjure up an image of Adam. When God made Eve, he put Adam in a deep sleep and woke him up to meet her naked in the garden. Sleep, garden, naked woman. I believe the writer wants our absolute attention here because this tory diverges from here. Both men respond in wildly different ways. When Adam saw Eve in her naked glory, he burst into poetry—poetry that gushed about her shared humanity and equality. Adam’s words hold immense reverence for her and he revels in this chance at true intimacy and connection (Genesis 2:23,24).

David does the opposite. He finds out from his servant that her name is Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah, his elite warrior, which seems to tip its hat at “leave your father and mother being united to your wife” (Genesis 2:24), which she had done. She is not available to him as a lover. What would it have meant then for David to treat Bathsheba, even after seeing her naked beauty, with awe and reverence? It would have been to step away and appreciate her beauty and yet respect this woman in her privacy and her life story. To reverence her as a fellow human being.

But David ignores this entirely and sends for her. We need to be clear: this is not an affair of equal partners. You cannot refuse a king except at the risk of your life. A king can say, “Off with your head!” and it will be done. Bathsheba has no power here. And never is Bathsheba accused of sin because this is sexual assault. David is absolutely abusing his power, violating the created order by “exercising dominion over” Bathsheba, which Jesus later vehemently spoke against. “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them…But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves” (Luke 22:24-26).

A chapter later in 2 Samuel 12:9,10, the prophet Nathan says, “You took Uriah’s wife!” The word “took” here is the same word used when Eve “took” the fruit in Genesis 3. David sees her beauty and he plucks her up like a piece of forbidden fruit he must have. He is objectifying her. He is treating her like a piece of property, an object, a direct violation of the commandment against viewing a neighbors wife like coveted property. And to add tragedy upon tragedy, in order to cover it all up, David goes even further in his power abuse to murder his very own warrior, Uriah. He becomes the Killer, the snake in the garden he is charged to exterminate.

It’s a devastating picture. The writer wants us to see that David fails at being a redemptive Adam. David fails at being the sexually alive man and reverent Poet Lover. He fails at sex, awe, beauty, power, romance, and fidelity. Oh, it guts me every time I read it. This is the man who wrote endless poems of worship in our Psalms. He is the Lover-Warrior who shows restraint in not killing Saul. He is not a savage at heart… until now.

The Lover in David is clearly not well.

The only redemptive thread here is that after the prophet Nathan confronts him, David tastes the bitter hell he created and his heart breaks. And the wild glimmer of hope is that he immediately returns to writing poetry. We have Psalm 51 as evidence of this, a poem marked by broken repentance over this very sin. The worshipper and lover are ever so close together inside us. David awakens again to this Lover heart.

Join the revolution

You too are a Lover. You are made to love and be loved. You are made for beauty and awe and sensuality and pleasure. And if you don’t own that and cultivate that, it has the potential to ruin your life. Does it mean you will become a cold hearted killer? No, not necessarily. But your life may become thin and vapid and shallow and empty of the things that make life meaningful—love and sensuality, awe and beauty, connection and attachment. Addiction or binging sensuality or intimacy that only exists in fits and starts will sabotage your life.

And yet, I share these stories of King David and the CEO Killer so that you see, even in the most cold -hearted moments in a man’s life, a man’s Lover heart is never that far away. You don’t need to travel miles to get that part of your heart back. You can return to it at any moment.

And so I bid you sit with the question: How is your lover heart? How is his story? Where have you enjoyed love and healthy pleasure and sensuality lately? Where have you worshipped?

The world needs men who are Lovers at heart. Solidarity to you in the revolution.

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Thanks for reading!

Want to talk with me about this post? Monday, December 30, at 6:30pm MT/8:30pm ET, I am hosting a Zoom conversation exclusively for paid subscribers, where I teach a little more and answer all your questions. These are such rich conversations for me! To join us, upgrade your membership (see below) for $5 a month (cancel anytime). The Zoom link can be found here.

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Here are a few conversations I’ve enjoyed over the last few weeks: Undaunted Life with Kyle Thompson, Pirate Monks Podcast, a return visit with Dr. Cory Allan at Sexy Marriage Radio, the men’s ministry at Pulpit Rock Church, the Wild at Heart fires leaders, and surely some I am forgetting. I never tire of these experiences. Please message me if you know a podcast or men’s community that would enjoy talking about healthy male sexuality.

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