Rites of Passage

I went to this great talk last night. It was put on by an organization called Journeys that's based up here in Bothell. The discussion centered around the lack of meaningful or productive rites of passage in our culture - specifically the need for a symbollic rite for teens.

Other cultures, all over the world, create ceremony to acknowledge the movement of an individual out of childhood and into adulthood. This usually involves the removal of the young person from their family for a period of time, often for as long as a year. This time allows the youth to go off with mentors from their community, and to break some of the comfortable ties that bind us to our child-parent roles. It also gives the parents time to mourn/celebrate the loss of their child so that they can welcome the adult that will return in their place. In some cultures, the body of the child will be permanently scarred in some way as a visual reminder to everyone that that child no longer exists.

We lack these rites of passage. Some religions have ways of acknowledging the transition, such as with a bar or bat mitzvah, but generally these youth are still treated as children and the occasion loses significance in day to day life. In the absense of true rites of passage, we have generations of adults who have never been able to move out of their teen years. I know that I frequently feel still a child myself, and often wonder who could possibly have thought it was a good idea to go out and let me get married and raise children - and I'm in my mid-30s. Rites of passage make a clear distinction between child and adult, and the realization of new privilege and responsibility.

In the absense of rites of passage led by mentors, we have created our own symbols of passage into adulthood. Getting your driver's license, prom, graduating high school, being old enough to vote/drink, first experience with sex/drugs/alcohol. Some of these rites are self-destructive and lack the honor of a RoP acknowledged by the community. Others lack the Testing required to really make one work for their passage (though this is obviously not true for everyone). I think that adults in our culture don't often take the time to help teens prove their age in ways that require hardwork and commitment, nor are adults in our society likely to honor a transition to adulthood that happens in the early teen years.

I found the Journeys discussion to be really thought-provoking. I wonder how these sorts of "artificial" rites of passage - taking city kids out into the wilderness - could impact the usually negative stereotypes we have of our teens. I would love to see our society no longer diminish the good of our teens, and really increase our expectations of and for them, and allow them to be adults in their family's home. I love this idea of creating rites of passage, and I hope that when my kids get older we'll have the wisdom to allow them to become adults, and the strength to give up our children.