Coming of Age in a Time of Transition

In indigenous cultures, initiation rituals helped adolescents to cross the threshold into adulthood. Are we today as a culture at a similar threshold between immaturity and responsible humanity?

Some time ago, I watched a YouTube video on the Slice channel, which is dedicated to documentaries about indigenous peoples from all across Earth. The video was about a coming-of-age ritual, boys becoming men, in a Zambian tribal village. Preparations took weeks and the families of the boys went to great expense to pay for a banquet for the whole village, new clothes for the young men, and other expenses. Precious cows were sold. Animals slaughtered. The Makishi, evil spirits, come to the village to go after the boys. A sacred space, the Mukanda, is built outside the village in the jungle, where the men taught the boys the sacred ways of their people so they can keep the Makishi from doing harm. At the end of the weeks-long process, the new men (some as young as seven) are given Western-style clothing and carried triumphantly on the shoulders of the older men to celebrate with the entire village.

This coming-of-age ritual follows a classic pattern. Meredith Little and Stephen Foster, pioneers of contemporary ritual, trace the arc of such a process as severance, threshold, and incorporation. For the Zambian boys, they sever their ties with their mothers and the world of childhood, cross the threshold into the secret and sacred world of men, and then return to community to take their place as young men.

In an interview with Little by Marietta Schürholz for the film Ritual, she explains the purpose of contemporary coming-of-age ritual as realizing “what it means to be a man or a woman in our culture.” The threshold that is crossed is boy to man, girl to woman. The Zambian ritual is no different—in fact, this is what “coming of age” means. One leaves childhood behind and enters adulthood.

But what age? And whose idea of man or woman? At this time of great change, there is no consensus on what a man or woman is, or what sacred wisdom needs to be passed on, which makes the need for guidance even more urgent but far more difficult to find. Perhaps the chaotic crises we are in the midst of are signs of transition, a coming of age, not just for youth but for humanity as a whole. Understanding how such ritual processes work then might provide some orientation to navigate the larger process humanity is in the midst of.

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Ritual as a Response to Crisis

For Meredith Little, her path to become a ritual guide came from her recognition that so many young people were lost and deeply troubled. They didn’t know how to meet life and step into adulthood. This was the 1970s, she was working with Stephen Foster at a suicide prevention hotline for young people. Little explains that she and Stephen “noted that a lot of the people who were calling us did not really want to die physically. But they did not have a way of moving through the difficult times they were in. And we recognized that, not only young people, but we all needed these old ways that would support people moving through life transitions, especially young people who were abandoned.” The situation with youth suicide, depression, and substance abuse has only become worse in the ensuing decades.

Studying ritual with her anthropologist stepmother, Little and Foster “started to build a basic skeleton that people could fill with their own prayer, their own meaning, their own values, in a meaningful way to mark the transition that they were in.” The “bones” that they uncovered were simple: “solo time, no food, no company, no artificial shelter.” Risk, “that place of feeling that they might die,” was essential. Alone in wilderness, fasting for four days and nights, something powerful happened to the young people--many of whom were already in existential crisis. As Little says, “The more we did it the more people were coming and asking: What are you doing, my son or my daughter has changed or the probation officer [Bewährungshelferin] would come and say: What happened to these young people?” They were no longer troubled or depressed but bright eyed and clear. “We didn’t know what happened,” says Little.” All we knew was that there is some inherent old, old space that gets entered when we hold the ceremony. People step into it and something happens.” Risk catalyzes mystery.

Over time, Little and Foster would clarify that process as having three parts: severance, threshold, and incorporation. In other words: cutting off from the past so that there is no way back, stepping into the unknown all alone, and embodying the new and offering it to one’s community. “Ceremony has its own life that I don’t understand,” she says. There is an existential core to the process. When thrown into a confrontation with one’s existence, the extra ordinary can happen. Deeper and often deeply personal patterns in nature and in the relational field come to light. A symbolic reality becomes evident and its meaning clear.

Danger and Initiation

Watching the Zambian boys run in fear as the evil Makishi chase them, I am aware that I cannot apprehend the world that these boys inhabit. I do not see evil spirits but only men wearing gruesome masks and covered head to toe in bright cloth. Do the boys see this? I don’t think so. Their reality lives inside the story I am watching. What I see as play is the shared world they live within. Because of my literal-mindedness, I am blind and deaf to the spirit world that opens to them in this ritual space.

Many indigenous coming-of-age rituals place the initiates in real danger or put them through often painful tests. The boys of Pentecost, Vanuatu, are invited to jump, headfirst with vines tied to their ankles, from a thirty-meter wooden tower as a rite of passage into adulthood. This demonstrates their manhood and ensures a good yam harvest. They start jumping at age seven or eight, after they have been circumcised, and begin at a lower part of the tower, working their way up as they grow older. Wisdom is usually only revealed after the initiate passes tests involving pain or danger. A Diné elder in North America explains that young men are painfully whipped with yucca strips at the entrance to a sweat lodge where they are then told about evil men, the weaklings, the strong, and then, most importantly, the spiritual man. At the end of the girls’ ceremony, where the young woman has ground corn and run for three days and then danced in her tipi all night, she is told that, at this moment, she has all the power of the creation spirit, Changing Woman, and can give blessings.

Danger—being pushed to the edge to the point that one fears for one’s life—seems to have the power to reveal patterns and forces that have deep meaning and take one to a new level of understanding life. This can be a physical or psychological danger. When this takes place in the wild, nature seems to respond. Sleeping on earth under the stars, a man feels the living inhale and exhale of Earth herself, leading him to rethink a life of science based on the belief that matter is inert and dead. This potential that existential risk enables may be why extreme spiritual practice is part of so many traditions. The Tibetan Buddhist monks who meditate for years in caves, sitting up all night in a box so that they don’t slump, are extinguishing egoic desires but also discovering communion and communication with the land, beasts, and cosmos that surround them. When one is brought to this existential edge, if one stays present and lets go of fear, a greater coherence can arise that reveals the wisdom one needs to take a next step. Mysteriously, discrepant experiences fall into an intelligible pattern. One feels touched by something sacred and true.

Humanity’s Coming of Age

In coming-of-age rituals, danger catalyzes the movement of mystery that brings one the knowledge to step into adulthood. Right now, humanity as a whole is in danger of ruining our life support—the air and water and life that we need to survive. As a species, we are like adolescents who don’t realize that when you drive too fast, the car—with you in it—can’t stop in an instant. We have invented the term “adolescence” to go in between childhood and adulthood because it takes a long time for humans to develop the skills and knowledge, whatever they may be, for being a modern or postmodern adult. As a whole, humanity hovers before adulthood, pushing the danger of our own recklessness out of mind. It’s too big, too much to deal with—and look how fast we can go!

If, however, this moment is, or could be, a transition, a coming of age, based on what we know about the coming-of-age ritual process, what could that mean? The danger to all that we love is present. Can the danger catalyze an opening to the wisdom that we need, individually and collectively? We would have to move collectively from severance to threshold. That means cutting off from a childish past and crossing the threshold into the unknown. However, humanity has not set a mark and declared that we want to be self-responsible as a species—that we will sever from the past. As a whole, we are not yet willing.

But what about us, you and me? Meredith Little sees their coming-of-age rituals as healing the split between Nature and human. Human nature is not separate from Nature. Slowing down, allowing ourselves to see what is happening to places on Earth that we love, listening for our own authentic response, brings us back into this primal relatedness. Seeking the clues and symbols that open us to the gentle space of sacredness. Can we cultivate our sensitivity to the life that surrounds us? Inevitably, this simultaneously opens the gates to grief and joy. As the adults that Earth needs, we can sever the habits of disconnection and numbness to cross the threshold into living communion with each other and all that is sacred.

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