Preparations are under way again for the Men's Rites of Passage in Perth, Scotland in July 2011. This is an initiation for men into their elderhood, devised by students of Fr Richard Rohr's teaching on male spirituality.
I took part in this last year, and it is an extraordinary journey lasting 5 days and taking you back into a fuller appreciation of the eldership of men, something so sadly lacking in the west. We have no initiations for such moments. Granted, we can be confirmed by our local bishop (a bit of a milk-and-water affair, as I recall) if we're in a mainstream church, or even baptized as adults by full immersion. I've done both of these, and the baptism outstripped the confirmation by orders of magnitude. We go through rituals when we are named, married, and die, but little else.
But the rites of passage was uniquely male, full of power, passion, failure and brokenness, grief and release, it was earthy and humane, carried a recognition of the inevitability of loss and a reframing of the second half of a man's life in which the graph levels out and starts to turn south.
Can such a project and an approach be brought to bear on the adolescent male? Can we devise meaningful rituals for young men to bring them into conscious and competent manhood? There's an old African saying that if we don't do this, the young men will come back and burn down the village. Isn't that what's happening right now all over the west? Young men don't know who they are - though it's not so surprising, since we as their fathers don't really know either.
We cast aside the old ways and the wisdoms of our ancestors without a second's thought, all in the name of individual rights, self-expression, my freedom. Not all traditions are good, but having no traditions at all is much worse.