Here is the second chapter of Re-Visioning Adolescence and the Rite of Passage. I’ll continue to post chapters until I’ve given you the whole book. Again, I welcome your comments and ideas. For those of you who prefer fiction, many readers have told me that my novel, Washaka-The Bear Dreamer is the fictionalized version of this book. You can order it at www.manykites.com
CHAPTER TWO
Challenge-The Heart of Initiation
Malidoma Some’ (1993)1, a medicine man of the Dagara tribe in West Africa, was taken from his village at a young age and raised by missionaries. Later, in returning to his own people, Some’ discovered that his place in the village was lost to him. In spite of his advanced age, and with great determination, he underwent the arduous six-week initiation and rite of passage ritual of his tribe. When he completed it, he felt as if he was home again at last. Some’ (1994) said of our culturally disconnected country:
I don’t know yet what the content of American initiation will be, but I do know what it’s going to look like. It has to have a moment of separation from the family and the community. It has to happen in nature and be a genuinely challenging ordeal. Whatever the initiates feel before entering this cycle must be deepened to the point of transcendence, giving them the opportunity to feel whole. Finally, and most importantly, there has to be a strong community ready to welcome the survivors of the ordeal. This welcoming must be massive, not like a simple ceremony of giving a diploma, but a recognizable, wholehearted embrace and valuing of the initiate’s power to contribute to the community.
In just a few sentences, Some’ summarizes what we all need and want, no matter our age. However, it’s a real Catch 22. We can’t successfully borrow the traditions of other cultures, but many of us can’t recall our own traditions either. Are we then doomed to go through eternity performing empty rituals around meaningless Hallmark holidays or marking our progress in small, ineffective ways while we continue searching for what we long for but cannot find?
There is a hunger in us. We need connection. We need ritual, guidance, mysticism . . . we need initiation. The more alienated and alone we feel, the more we seek a culture that can guide us. Our young, as we will explore further, feel bereft of this support. In the absence of it, they cleverly create their own subculture and design what is missing.
I recall the significant moments in my own life when an important passage was obtained. In seventh grade I bravely auditioned for a school play in order to overcome a severe shyness. With sweating palms and a pounding heart, I took that script in hand and recited the lines. In my early twenties I spent six months in Europe. At one moment I stood alone before a train schedule in Switzerland deciding whether to take a train to Rome or Paris. What a giant moment that was! There were also times of suffering, of being uneasy and depressed, entangled in the darker underbelly of my youth culture. In the late Sixties, my friends and I sat under full moons with kegs of beer and a campfire on a beach. We sat in dark rooms reading Lao Tzu with joints of marijuana burning. As I look back at the settings we chose, the things we did, it is now clear to me that we sought a tribal presence in our lives.
One day, long after I had moved out of that treacherous era, I was substitute teaching in a high school classroom when a young man walked in with his hair in stiff, rigid spikes rising from his scalp like a helmet. I smiled inwardly. He looked both like a magnificent warrior-and a ridiculous boy-but I admired him. Oh, how I wanted to sit beside him and explain why we now-grown kids of the Sixties are so difficult to shock-our generation wrote the book on self-initiation.
On one of our collection trips we visited Atka, an island along the Aleutian chain in Alaska. The island is home to about 100 people of the Unangax3 (aka Aleut) tribe. Milt and I stayed in a small guest trailer next to the school. The wind was so fierce at times that I thought that poor trailer would tumble over. The Unangax2 people have blended the Russian Orthodox Church with their own native traditions. We noticed many of the people, young and old, wore a small gold stud pierced beneath the lower lip. Ethan, our host, explained that there is a ritual piercing that happens in puberty to signal the beginning of adulthood.
I thought of all the young people piercing and tattooing body parts in our modern culture and saw again the driving urge we have to find a tribal sense of ourselves. Both piercing and tattooing have, for thousands of years, been part of initiation rituals in many tribal cultures across the planet. The Lakotas pierce the skin as part of the Sundance ritual; the Samoan traditional men undergo extensive tattooing over the entire lower part of the body.
Like so many other things, this trend toward tattooing and piercing seems to be a visible signal from the young people expressing their need to undergo some tribal ritual of belonging, a test or challenge that may even include pain in order to win their place. When that place is given too easily, without effort and challenge, it is not easily taken. At the risk of sounding trite, many of today’s youth are too soft, drowning in a false sense of entitlement resulting from the prize being given-but not earned. Adults often scorn these alternative practices among the young, yet offer no viable alternatives.
What is this web of culture we’ve created? Does it satisfy? Does it feed not only the body but also the soul and spirit? Are you, sitting here reading this book, finding your life to be all that you had hoped it would be? The truth is, many of us are none too sure of this culture we have created or inherited. We scurry to and from jobs and activities that don’t challenge and don’t change, a dull landscape of days passing by. We make money so that we can buy stuff, and then run ourselves ragged taking care of the stuff. We seem to just go along without seriously questioning this creature of culture that we have created. We long for our own deeper initiation into something big and mysterious. We are, in fact, the uninitiated.
Is it any wonder that the young look in our direction with doubt and mistrust in their eyes? Sometimes I simply drive around looking at the monolithic houses we’ve built and wonder what portion of body and soul (not to mention the earth’s resources) does it take to simply keep those houses standing?
When was the last time you were assaulted with a challenge so great that you were completely uncertain if you could make the grade? Did you take the challenge-or slither back to safety? How, then, can we uninitiated adults determine what a young person needs to learn? And then how do we teach and initiate them?
Asking these questions caused me to look more deeply into my own life. It wasn’t pretty. I had a dozen books on my computer that had not even been submitted because “what if nobody liked them”? I was afraid to make phone calls that could get me work and support my life. I had an obsession about being a nice girl. Mustn’t make anybody angry or upset. I passively waited for things to come to me instead of deciding what I wanted and working toward it. I selfishly didn’t want to do what I didn’t like to do.
Rather than wallow in my uninitiated swamp, I undertook several challenges myself. I began to speak more bravely, made a few people angry, finished my master’s degree, sent the books out and about, etc., etc. I haven’t died yet from taking risks-and life advances. Perhaps the hardest part of my initiation was to stand beside my young children after their father died and allow them to grieve knowing I couldn’t fix it or change it. All I could do was be there to watch them bear the unbearable.
Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.”
Initiation of the young and the final rite of passage, the event that marks the movement from childhood to adulthood, is the stuff of stories and myths found across the globe and in all forms of literature, religion, and culture. Consider Jack confronting the giant at the beanstalk, David slaying Goliath, the three little pigs off to seek their fortunes, or Hansel and Gretel facing the wicked witch who would have them for supper. Consider Odysseus standing on the shore of a massive lake undergoing one trial after another. Every culture is rich with hero legends and the mythologies intended to guide our lives.
This mysterious passage is not only through time or space but is an interior journey toward a stronger sense of self, a deepening of our human experience of soul. It is the young boy facing the whale on a gray sea or the giant buffalo on a sea of pale grasses with nothing but a tiny weapon. It is the young girl moving into the mysterious arts of her sex in preparation for the great moment when she will give birth to the next generation. The themes play over and over again across the globe. A child enters a dense, dark forest-and emerges an adult. The movement has an inevitable timelessness to it.
Initiation is not just for teens. Any time we enter a new stage of life or go through a transition, we again enter a period of initiation. We must all undergo these passages. Essentially, we are climbing the ladder of the soul.
Challenge-the Heart of Initiation
As we have explored, challenge and risk-taking are the twin moons of this passage from childhood to adulthood. It is the times when we are suddenly forced to reach deeply into our reserves of memory, knowledge, and experience. With appropriate challenges, the triune brain begins to branch, grow and explode into the frontal lobes to bring about a higher level of experience. If there is no risk and no challenge, there will be no growth.
However, growth requires incremental challenges, small steps that move ahead but do not overwhelm. When the risk is too great, we freeze. Children, especially, need strong families and a wise culture around them to guide these steps. They need to feel firmly connected first to the family and then to the culture in which they live. This web of connection provides the safety net that later allows them to walk the tightrope high above their heads. As the child grows, the level of challenge and risk can also grow and, in adolescence, there is a leap forward.
Who better to provide the safety, challenges and the basic necessary skills than an adult or Elder who has gone the route? Throughout human history, the initiation of the young has been the responsibility of the Elders and parents.
In ancient tribal traditions, initiation and the rite of passage for the male and female children was guided by life itself. Guidance varied according to the role each was expected to play within that culture-and the roles were determined by the needs of the community.
For instance, in a culture dependant upon the land for sustenance, the use of tools and weapons and methods for successful hunting and fishing took precedence. Survival wrote the subtle laws that evolved over many, many generations, and these natural laws were then passed on to the next generation through the initiation process. However, in spite of many cultural variations, the biological laws took precedence.
Boys were taught to provide food and safety, and the girls were prepared by their Elders to have children, although all members of the community gathered food. Often the boys were challenged with harsh and stringent initiation practices. The girls generally underwent a more subtle initiation. It was not because the girls were the “weaker sex” but because the Elders knew that the young women would undergo their own trial by fire in the birthing bed. In childbirth, a woman faces death. The boys, however, needed harsher measures in order to prepare them to protect those women and children. Without this basic division of labor and expectation, there would be no clan or tribe or next generation.
I use the past tense here with some tense confusion and want to remind the reader, and myself, that there are still many existing traditional cultures that continue the rituals much as they have for thousands of years. However, there are also many tribal communities struggling to redefine themselves in the modern world with almost total cultural loss. They stand with one foot in an ancient tribal way of being, and another in the realities of this modern world. Both past and present tense are appropriate when speaking of tribal cultures.
Recently, a friend and I were talking about the state of your youth. She is Lakota and was incensed by the rate of incarceration and suicide for Indian youth. I pointed out to her the rates are extremely high for all young people. We finally agreed that if you are Indian-and adolescent-you are doubly damned in this culture.
To tribal cultures struggling to hang on to their traditions, the modern world poses a difficult challenge. For instance, the small community on Atka, while still a very closed community, is also globally wired to the modern age. They have Internet access, computers and a link to all the resources of the mainstream culture. The globalization of our modern society is becoming a major factor in how communities define themselves-and also how they can lose a sense of identity and connection. Paradoxically, the growth of the global family also demands that we redefine how we do culture and belonging.
Regardless of our rapidly changing world, it is still the family and the culture which are responsible for the many processes that transform a child into an adult. Unfortunately, we are not doing a very good job.
In this modern world, the roles between men and women have been muted and blurred. The giant Gap or Calvin Klein billboards show the girls looking like boys, the boys looking like girls and none of them looking too happy about it. Our roles are confused. This gender confusion is exacerbated by several other factors of the newly emerging world.
For instance, risk and challenge have been neutered in our liability-conscious society. We are afraid to let our young stray out into that dangerous world. We are afraid to let them risk anything for fear of being labeled a bad parent.
Organized and professional sports have replaced the hunting and warrior societies. Our collective memory as farmers or hunter/ gatherers has turned us into obsessive shoppers, constantly roaming the aisles, baskets in hand, to survey the wares provided so abundantly for us.
And sexual initiation, once a beautiful and gentle unfolding of natural procreation, has either become just another sport or a source of worry, fear and shame.
The goal of all ancient rites of initiation was to bring the child into the community as a contributing member of that community. Rather than being initiated into the role of providing assistance to the family and community, young people now hoard their first paychecks from McDonalds and Wendy’s, and plot how to spend the ‘me’ money, thus entering the role of consumer rather than contributor.
Is it any wonder that our young people are unable to determine the role they must play, unable to feel the value of their own contribution to the family and community in which they live, and unable to move fully into their own open-ended potential? In this new world, our forests have been laid over with concrete, the giants are long gone, the lands have been tamed, and the mysteries banned. We raise the sword of our own skills and find nothing huge and scary upon which to turn the blade of our own courage and character-and so we turn it on each other.
Malidoma Some’ (1994) said, “Initiation is the bridge between youth and adulthood. In my village, a person who is not initiated is considered a child, no matter how old that person is. Without initiation we cannot recall our purpose. To not be initiated is to be a nonperson.”
Extending Adolescence
It is clear that today’s adolescent is having a tough time growing up. In a summary of research on adolescent development, Frank Furstenberg3 explains that use of the word adolescence only emerges in the mid-20th century when the children no longer took their working place within the family and community but went to school instead. Furstenberg (2000) described a central paradox in this cultural shift. He said:
To a great degree, the problematic features of adolescence and the transition to adult-hood are structurally created and maintained by social institutions that isolate youth from adults; ironically, this is done to prepare them for future roles.
In other words, we’ve created institutions designed to advance our youth but find now that, when isolated from adults, they will grow their own subculture.
Adolescence as a stage of life was created by the shift in our culture toward formal education for all children-and away from the natural movement of the child into the role his or her parent occupies. Educational systems, as has been well documented, were created to prepare children to serve the industrial age. Unfortunately, this isolation and the creation of adolescence as a life stage have not advanced our development-they have delayed it.
Robert Bly, a well known poet and contemporary teacher, suggested his book, in The Sibling Society, that the vast majority of our population is frozen in adolescence, forever stuck with making limited choices based on “me and mine.” While Bly’s assessment may very well be correct, it presents a terribly bleak view of human development at the beginning of the new millennium. However, in societies as in individuals, crisis, breakdown and chaos are often the forerunners of transformation. Perhaps we can take hope in that and wonder what new uprising of human potential is about to unfold. Ventura (1994) said:
Adolescence is a cruel word. Its cruelty hides behind its vaguely official, diagnostic air. To say someone is ‘adolescent,’ going through ‘adolescence,’ or worse, ‘being adolescent’ is to dismiss their feelings, minimize their troubles and, (if you’re their parent) protect yourself from their uncompromising rage.
I’ll not spend a great deal of time here analyzing what has caused society to weaken in this way. There are already enough committees, task forces, and other entities spending precious time and resources attempting to analyze the factors at play. We could spin the bottle and it would point at government, schools, television, rising divorce rates-and it would change with each spin.
Playing spin the bottle won’t solve the problem. It won’t bring back what has been lost or chase away what has arrived. We can only begin by looking at what our society has become-and then take advantage of our unique, human ability to adapt to our surroundings and go from there. Biology won’t change. Adolescence won’t go away. However, culture is man-made. We determine what it is and what it will be.