Passage from what to what?
Kobra's post on tattoos introduces us to the idea of rites of passage. In the old mystery religions, there were many of these. We know that in Christianity, the ancient baptismal practices were quite involved. The candidate would undergo baptism in the nude after a long vigil. Current practice is no doubt valid, in that it "counts" as a baptism in God's eyes. But perhaps it doesn't count as one in some of our own. What do we do to enlarge that?
In Christianity, the passage is from death to life. I remember once talking to someone about the nature of some of our holiday gatherings in our family. You could almost sing the end of the Gloria Patri over such an event: "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end...." This man suggested that it was ironic if the celebration of new life were itself the occasion for entropy and stuckness.
If we decide on what our new rites of passage are to be, and we create them for an intention, then we need to know what our purposes are. That is probably primary. Even if we say, "No modern intentionality. We want continuity with the past." Then the idea is to find something ancient and stick with it. Or we might say, "A break with mother. Connection with men and their wisdom." Yes. How do we get the boy to grab the key beneath the mother's pillow? They must reach beyond key in the story to grab the real one.
What is the golden key you grab when you reach under the pillow?
I'll give Bly a reading for my own life to say how I grab the key. To some degree it is in having the mentor I have. In Jungian terms, my pedagogue is an enigma to my mother. (And vice-versa. Her pedagogue, whoever that may be, is an enigma to me.) I follow a life course enigmatic to my mother. I am an explorer, sometimes not even able to articulate what I'm trying to explore. But I do it anyway. When some wonder whether there is even an exploration, I hack my way forward.
So what is the golden key you grab? Go ahead, be amorphous and enigmatic. Or pointed and specific.
If I had to create a rite of passage to make such a move possible for a kid, I think it would almost have to be a scavenger hunt. Only they could choose which clues to follow. Clues that resonated with them better would lead them to the right pedagogue. Perhaps God has already arranged such a scavenger hunt for many of us.
How would you arrange a rite of passage to endorse grabbing the same golden key you have grabbed? (Read the first chapter of Iron John to find out what the key beneath the mother's pillow is about.)
posted by solarblogger @ 11/08/2006 11:15:00 PM
10 comments
10 Comments:
For me the betrayal is/was much more sharp and obvious. It was a turning away from a certain type relationship to one where mom wasn't as necessary. I still have a good relationship, but she has lost something in it and I have left the old one behind. In fact it pisses me off when mom tries to undo the betrayal. Not because I can be undone but because it makes her look pitiful in trying to recapture the obedient boy who didn't want to upset mother.
As far as the rite goes, it is a step from boy to man. The rites that Bly mentions are great ones and I believe that there components of them that cannot be done away with. They must be shocking to the participant--while he will know about them in advance. They should be psychologically wounding as much as they are physically wounding. Not a malicious wounding of the psyche, but painful enough that the memory to accompany the wound will be palatable until the boy/man's last breath.
We have become so soft as a people that inflicting such a loving wound hardly seems reasonable to us any longer, but here is where I think we can learn from the eastern/primitive religions.
Just so I'm clear, the betrayal of the mother is a matter of disobedience. The child becomes a man by ceasing to be under the mental/emotional control of the mother. He departs her for the realm of the father and continues to betray her by refusing to allow her to treat him in a way other than the way a man should be treated. She must not be allowed to dote, baby, or other such practices. In a sense her affections, at least as shown as they were before the rite, must be stifled.
It seems that we not only leave the rite undone, but we don't even respect the product it was supposed to create. I wonder where you would have better results. In a culture where they still did the rite, but when the child went home most wanted him to act like the rite didn't happen? Or one where they had gotten rid of the rite, but everyone expected that the man should now act differently. Not that those should be the options. But I think our broader culture has stopped believing in the need for the shift.
Maybe the rite helps the culture to see that they have to be willing to cause certain kinds of pain for the needed results. When they are unwilling to do that, they are probably unwilling to see the results even if they should still arise.
Further down the same track we're on, I think there will come a day when a man can be arrested for using "that tone of voice." And it won't require a meter to measure it. If the woman feels she heard that tone, she did.
I think that it is why it is important for the rite to be traumatic enough to actually change the boy into a man. It should induce a sort of PTSD (for lack of a better term) that disallows him from seeing himself as a child any longer. So much so that it is an intolerable insult for his mother to treat him as any less than a man.
I think the rite would have to induce both the Hero and the Rebel. The hero that makes the boy feel like he can "handle it" and the rebel that teaches him that following the rules is not always necessarily doing the right thing.
I don't thing that many men have really undergone this sort of rite. Not many people care about producing good men. Instead they want worker bees for their assembly line corporate jobs
Yeah, Pablo, and Bly addresses that in the Moyer piece. He speaks of the king as being one who is at home in his vocation instead of a stranger in the vocation that the world has assigned him. Bly deems this man a king and I think he is more than correct.
And, I was looking at this through my theological lenses and I thought, "Did Christ betray his mother when he received his wounds?" Isn't a son giving himself over to death for his enemies the ultimate betrayal of his mother? I could be mistaken, but unless Mary was sociopathic I imagine she had some ill feelings about the whole affair.
Not many people care about producing good men. Instead they want worker bees for their assembly line corporate jobs.
I totally agree with that point. It relates to what I was trying to say in the post. If the culture DID find someone who had gone through the rite, it would try to get him "back to normal" as quickly as possible. We are at a double disadvantage. We have not only lost the rite itself, but the will to have such people in our midst. How can you say on one day, "You are now a man," and on the next, "Stay in your cubicle"?
So the culture purposely produces weak men. I wonder how much of this is contrary to God's design. God, who tells Job to gird up his loins and the church not to be lukewarm.
It is TOTALLY against what is expected. The older I get, the more I see the Gospel/Indicative side of that in addition to the Law/Imperative side of it.
Solarblogger,
Can you explain that a little more? The Gospel vs the Law part of it. Perhaps you could turn it into a post
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