of being lost. Compound that with being alive in this age of watered-down values, loose morals, and the fear of actually speaking your mind, and it’s even worse. To add to that, imagine being a man, perhaps even a white man. Look around. You don’t need glasses to work out that there’s an attack on masculinity. Then add being a Catholic to this recipe. As the media would have it, you’re someone who supports the sexual exploitation of young children. Finally, to make things even more volatile, imagine learning the science of destroying a human body in a methodical and effective manner. Violence is bad, apparently.
That’s me. I am all of those things. I’m alive in an age where conforming to the ludicrous school of thought is a must. I’m a male. Yes, the opposite of a female. One of the only two genders there are. Yes, my skin is white, but my heritage isn’t. My bloodline is from a little country called Lebanon. I’m a church-going Bible-bashing, Eucharist-accepting, confession-visiting, Hail-Mary-praying Catholic, and a Maronite Catholic at that. And on top of all those things, I’m a teacher and a student of what has to be the best of the best in science-based fighting systems.
I have my own unique take on things. I do things my way, but really I’m part of a community and a group of mostly similar people. I think the biggest difference between me and my close group of friends or family is that I’m the only one who actually engages in the structured training and teaching of self-protection. Most of my friends don’t. They may have dabbled here and there in some form of martial art or boxing or other combat sport, but none has travelled the path I have. However, I think it would be fair to say, most of the men in my family are alpha males. We don’t back down from a confrontation when our values are threatened. I think it would be fair to me to say, most Maronite men I know are like that.
Like most people who loosely fit my description, that is, the Catholics, the men of around my age, have a sense of being lost. Every single person has his own struggle of sorts. He may be struggling with debt, or career, or relationships, or kids, or family, or something of critical importance. In my view, that feeling of being lost is like a disease of the mind. Victims of this disease may feel hopeless, or unfulfilled, or empty, or misaligned (or even unaligned) with God. It’s a horrible feeling. We experience this big obstacle wherever we turn. It’s as if every good thing we want in life is on the other side of an unconquerable obstacle.
That was me, once. Like one of those guys, I spent my weekends doing fun stuff, going out, and having at least one visit to Mass. Those of you who go to Mass should know that it isn’t always fun. Your mind can wander, and it isn’t always a fruitful experience. But at other times it can be a profound experience, where something that is said or done within the service touches you to the core, despite it being a seemingly mundane thing. And when that happens, it’s as if a spark has been ignited inside of you. All you want it to do is to burn hotter and bigger. You want it to turn into a raging monster of a fire that will engulf you. To some it’s a scary thing; to me it’s called faith.
For me, however, I needed something else in my life. I needed something that I believed Mass couldn’t do for me. Or rather, I wanted something that would help me understand and see the experience I had in worship of God, in a different way. For me, going to church was like going to a tutorial at university. It’s where I went to learn the theory. I needed something else that would help me approach this thing called faith in a way that I could test, to see if it would work for me and in me.
That other thing was my training. At the time I went looking for it, I had not idea what “it” was. I had no idea what “it” looked like and I had no experience in anything outside of work and study. I don’t remember my journey precisely, but I can tell you that prior to actually finding something I believed was suitable, I spent four years going from gym to dojo class, to learn different styles of martial arts. I tried them all. Judo. Karate. Kung Fu. Aikido. MMA. Boxing. Olympic wrestling. Taekwondo. But nothing clicked with me or enticed me to stay. Tai Chi was even something I tried. Something was still missing from this training experience, and something was still not clicking for me. I did however, believe that I was close to finding an answer.
Then came the break I was looking for. Then came the day I met the instructor who changed my view on all things martial arts. The first day I met him, I thought he was not only full of himself, but also a fake. My beliefs about instructors were thrown out the door when I encountered him. He was nothing like what I imagined he should have been. He wasn’t the Mr Miyagi that I thought I needed, like in Karate Kid, and he wasn’t someone who “looked” like he was a master. He looked unassuming and he looked like someone who would blend into the crowd. Beyond his physical looks, there was no energy there that I imagined instructors or teachers should have. That was the first day. The rest is history.
What I can tell you about this experience, and how my faith was challenged, tested and triumphant, was that it happened in a way I never believed possible. It happened through what I call darkness. It was no coincidence that, outside of training, I was going through some rough stuff in my personal life. I had so many demands on me. I felt trampled and unable to breathe, some days. The thoughts in my head were like a runaway train, and the tracks were running out.
What I learned about faith and about being a man was that human life could be fragile, but at the same time it could be a ferocious force. Two ends of the spectrum, two sides of the same coin and I was stuck in between.
I believed life was fragile because throughout the course of my training, I learned it was so easy, if you knew how, to take someone’s life, or degrade their quality of life until they wished they were dead. This could be done through physically manipulating the human body by way of defensive tactics. That is to say, if someone attacked me, and I used what I had learned to the fullest extent, turning my attacker into a quadriplegic wasn’t difficult, even if my attacker was a nine-foot tall, muscled-up body builder on steroids. It raised lots of questions that I didn’t have answers to, and this concerned me because the very questions my mind was entertaining were weighing me down. More weight wasn’t what I needed at this point in my life. I wanted to feel lighter.
Some of the things that went through my head were questions like “Who am I to take a life?” or “Ok, so this guy broke into my house, and he’s carrying a knife ready to stab someone. Should I really gouge his eyes out?” or “But what if I’m not ready for this attack?” or “I can’t trust myself with this; what do I do now?” Thus self-doubt grew. Like a corrosive evil tumour, this self doubt grew uncontrollably. But with it, grew the knowledge of power gained from my training. Two dogs fighting for the same space in my head.
My training filled every vacant space in my mind—even the space occupied by other things such as education, career and family. It was like a cuckoo kicking out the eggs in a nest of another bird. A rapidly-spreading virus within me that was forcing me to look at the world in a different way. I searched high and low in every book on self-defence theory, in an effort to answer these questions, but nothing satisfied me.
One day in my later grades, something my teacher kept telling me again and again finally clicked. “Paul,” he said, “if someone is coming to take your life, will you let them?” This was the point at which I no longer felt my doubts were an ocean of misery in which I was drowning. They had shrunk down to fit on my spectrum of ideas. At the other end of the spectrum, as I now understood it, I realised that a human life could be a ferocious force, an immovable object, an unstoppable juggernaut, should it decide to be, but it could also be the most fragile delicate flower requiring the utmost care.
The more I learned about the system I was studying, the more power I realised I had. I, a mere mortal, a garden variety, turn-the-other-cheek Catholic guy, had a choice of being a doormat for anyone to use, or the offspring of a tropical cyclone and an earthquake, ready to destroy anyone and drive them into the ground to be swallowed up by the earth. This was the part of my development that switched my self-doubt into cockiness. It was typical of the kind of training in which students bailed out of their course of study because they believed they knew it all, and went
