In Rites of Initiation I talked about how myth guru Joseph Campbell, in his The Power of Myth interviews with Bill Moyers, decried the fact that there are no longer any puberty rites to yank young people into mature adulthood.
In my own experience, gains in personal maturity come when there is a confluence of circumstances. First, there is something which precipitates trauma; one knows one is in trouble somehow, even if one has no idea what to do about it.
For me, trouble ensued upon the death of my mother in 1985.
The trouble can be mercifully brief, or it can last and last. If it lasts, part of the reason is often that we resist any and every imaginable strategy of relief.
In my case, the trouble lasted several years, during which time I was ill both physically and psychologically.
Next, there is typically a second precipitating event. This one somehow makes clear in our mind what general path we need to take out of the chaos of whatever trouble we have found ourselves in.
In my case, while I was sick in bed in 1990 I read for the third time a book by J.I. Packer called I Want To Be a Christian. The second precipitating event came when I was part-way through: for the first time, suddenly I was able to say of the Christian belief system, "I believe this!" Before, it had always been, "I just can't believe."
Often, there follows an information-gathering phase that will allow us to choose which particular strategy to use in following that general path.
For me, I bought and read Leo Rosten's Religions of America and C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, picked the Episcopal Church, and had a friend take me to a local parish, where I prepared for baptism and was duly baptized. (I have since become a Roman Catholic.)
My overarching point is, though, that there has to be some precipitating trauma — some sort of physical or emotional scarification that brings on personal chaos for a time that can be brief or protracted. Only then can (following a second precipitating event) there be healing. As we heal, we gain in maturity.
Our culture today (as Joseph Campbell pointed out) has gone to ever greater extremes to avoid doling out trauma to the young.
We find this on the secular front: our schools bend over backward to keep from bruising kids' egos and self-images. Corporal punishment is forbidden.
On the religious front, there are no frightening rites of passage such as existed in ancient and primitive societies. There are no ritual circumcisions of pubescent males. No scarifications. Not even any old-time baptisms where someone holds your head under water long enough for your life to flash in front of your eyes.
We allow no ritual doling out of trauma to our kids in part because there is such potential for abuse. In part, though, the problem is that to do so would mandate that the whole community agree on a belief system which justifies the (secular or religious) rite. But just the opposite happens. Parents say, "No one is going to traumatize my kids but me!"
Meanwhile, few parents spank. Few mete out harsh punishment. Few insist on adult-behavior-or-else.
Is it any wonder that so many young people today move back in with Mom and Dad after high school, or college, or grad school? Any wonder that they're waiting to get married until their late twenties, waiting to have children of their own until their early thirties? (Except, of course, for the recent upsurge in unmarried high-school girls getting pregnant in bunches for all the wrong reasons?)
We live in a culture that is averse to shock-trauma, and so sees ever-more-infantile behavior from supposedly adult human beings!
No comments:
Post a Comment