"The real voyage of discovery consists not of seeking new lands but in seeing with new eyes"
Adults are not born but made. The shape begins early in life, communicated in ways we are held, what we are fed, when and how we are consoled, why we are sung to or smiled at.. It continues over the years as we are told what stories are worth our attention and what adventures are worth our energies. We are taught what to value and to ignore. Eventually we are ready to be admitted to the rights and responsibilities of full cultural membership. Only then do we become adults.
The final entrance into adulthood has been provided from time immemorial by the "coming of age" ceremony. Like the other major life chronicle ceremonies accompanying birth, marriage and death, the coming of age ceremony located the individual anew within the surrounding community and indeed with the universe as a whole. It was a critical moment of expansion, the entrance into larger responsibilities, larger privileges, larger secrets, larger institutions, and larger understandings. It amounted to a second birth, entry not into physical life but into higher life of culture and the spirit. Accordingly, it called for the society to display itself to full effect, giving presence to its myths and traditions, physical expression to its animating beliefs.
The sophistication of the post industrial world, by contrast, holds ceremony suspect, seeing it as a kind of primitive witchery that tricks us into beliefs that the intellect would not otherwise find its way to. Further damage has been done by the countless repeated fragmentations that have exploded nearly all of the comfortable assumptions needed to cushion any act of ritual acknowledgment. Ceremony lives, by continuity, not change. And so the Coming of Age ceremony in its pure form has disappeared from all but the most traditional and isolated societies. This is highly regrettable in the view of many people who point to the floundering of contemporary youth - their extended identity crisis and the frantic searching for self in the fires of intense experience as a symptom of the loss of any discernible threshold to pass over into accepted adulthood. The gateway is gone, leaving the younger generations to thrash through the underbrush on their own in the hope of finding reasonable passage.
But the beginnings of a counter trend have appeared. Increasing numbers of people are attempting to re-ceremonialize this and other life transitions. These new coming of age rituals vary from some having a quick fix and do it yourself feel to them; whereas others are eclectic with an enthusiastic regard for incorporating words and actions that have served other peoples in other times. But to understand both the need for such rituals and the forms they are taking requires a look backward to the traditional elements of coming
Common to all methods of achieving adulthood is the separation from family, the taking leave of the smaller immediate world of experience in favor of an expanded realm of cultural images and mythological promise. In some traditional societies, this separation was sudden and traumatic. When the time for initiation arrived, the men of the tribe swept in from the brush and kidnapped the young from their mothers. In a gentler way, the same ffinction is served by mentorship. The young person becomes attached to an unrelated member of the older generation in order to learn a craft, a cultural role, a more expansive set of values.
The outward trajectory often takes the form of a journey or quest. Traditional peoples frequently thrust their adolescents out into the world in a literal way, requiring of them a solitary wilderness retreat or similar exposure to the vast surround of nature. The physical removal from the close circle offamily was thenjoined to a search for cosmic belongingness. It was a time to experience the hidden dimension of things and to listen for the silent voices that could help to guide one's way in the world.
The period between separation from family and incorporation in the society of adults was traditionally a time of ordeal and training. The young were acquired to fast, maintain sleepless vigils and bear physical pain. On a physical level, the ordeal revealed to the initiate the depth ofhis or her resources, at the same time demanding that he or she be able to make agonizing sacrifices in personal comfort for the sake of the group. On a spiritual level, the ordeal was a form of crisis and destruction; the old childish self was required to undergo symbolic death before rebirth into adult hood was possible.
Training replaced the broken images of childhood with the icons of culture. The individual was given practical knowledge, instructed in appropriate roles, equipped with a map ofultimate meanings, and admitted to the religious mysteries. The training filled all the inner space opened up by the ordeals.
Symbolically, at least, the individual was broken and remade in the image of the culture. Many times the person was given a new name in recognition ofhis or her new adult identity. Sometimes the everyday name remained the same, but a sacred or spiritual name was added to acknowledge the individual's expanded condition.Given the human fondness for signs, the final change of status was usually marked by some distinctive bodily alteration a circumcision performed, tattoos applied, certain paints or ornament applied. More often than not, this meant doing something with the hair cutting the hair or shaving the head for the first time at ppberty. When not cut outright, thebair was bleached, braided, oiled, decorated, or otherwise arranged in distinctive adult fashion.
School is probably the nearest modem equivalent to the ancient initiation rites. Both are compulsory, both try to bend the unruly energies of youth to constructive social purpose. Both teach obedience, discipline, and the basics of proper social comportment. Both exppress and communicated the central value of the sponsoring culture. Both reveal previously hidden knowledge. Both are challenging and exhausting. Both eventually result in new ways of seeing the world. Both certify the youth for participation in the larger society as an emergent adult.
But there are significant differences, too.
The old rites were religious, The new rite is secular.
The old rites ran by sun and season time. They were outdoors and active. The new rite operates by clock and calendar. It is mostly sedentary and pursued behind closed doors.
The old rites centered on concrete reality experiences; The new rite relies heavily on words, numbers and abstractions.
The old rites were dramatic intense events forceful and fast. The new is slow, strung out, often vague about ultimate destination.
The old rites stimulated awe; The new rite commonly produces detachment and boredom.
The old rite typically gave a sense of vital participation in the historical unfoldment of the culture as a whole. The new rite is more often conceived as a holding pattern, as isolation from the larger cultural reality rather than an intensification of it.
The old rites resulted in immediate and unmistakable status change. The new rite provides no such direct deliverance into adult roles and status.
The old rites were over in a determined place and at a determined time, witnessed by the community as a whole. The new rite can meander on indefinitely, disappearing down corridors of specialization that may never lead back to the general consensus or any act of community witness.
Given how unsatisfactorily school fulfills the psychological requirements of a true rite of passage, many families are moving to provide their own ceremonies to clarity and dramatize their children's passage to adulthood.
For those that are tempted to create adult-making experiences, here are some of the elements it is useful to bear in mind.
Contact with nature - young people on the verge of adulthood are capable of a very intense binding with the natural world. It is an ideal time for some extraordinary indepth contact with nature, which provides the ultimate surroundingfor us all, no matter how distracted we are by the illusion of continuous civilization. The exposure can he as soft or strong as you wish - a day in the outdoors, a week or month outward bound experience - whatever, it should allow sufficient isolation and beauty so that a sense of grandeur can arise.
Ordeal and challenge - Young people need tests of strength in order to experience, appreciate and command their growing capabilities. A fast, an all night vigil, the completion of an unusually unpleasant but ultimately satisfying task, or a similar exercise in self-discipline can bring a new sense of personal power. It is important that the challenge be carefully considered - great enough so that it is new and significant, not so great that failure is more likely than success. The perfect ordeal taxes one's strength to the utmost before it subsides and is overcome.
Solitude - only away from the calmer and confusions of everyday life is it possible to hear and feel the tiny stirrings of the future within. Complete physical withdrawal or silence.
Public witness - Some announcement, ceremony, or gathering with family and friends is required to reincorporate the person with community; and to authenticate the ritual and give it social meaning culminates in some shared acknowledgment of his or her changed status.
Symbolic representations - Some graphic representation of change in status and new relationship with the family, community and world beyond choice of totems, renewing the godparent bonds etc.
If your children are already grown - and the opportunity for creating a family coming-of-age ceremony seems to have passed irrevocably by you might take renewed heart from the Mentawel tribe of western Indonesia, where the usual practice was to admit a man to full adulthood only after he had successfully raised a family. Once a man's children were grown to the point where they could support him, he would formally adopt the children, marry the mother, and retire to the workless, semireligious status of father of a family.