On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison discusses the need for ceremonies or rites to signify the end of childhood and the entry into adult life … things that have almost completely disappeared in western culture over the last few decades:
I think modern society made a mistake when it assumed that getting rid of sacred rites would make people purely rational.
It didn’t.
Human beings still need thresholds, tests, stories, symbols and some clear sense that childhood has ended and adulthood has begun. We may no longer send young people into the wilderness for an initiation ordeal, but the psychological need to prove yourself, belong somewhere and become someone has not disappeared.
Traditional initiation rites were often harsh, sometimes brutally so, but they carried a clear message: your childhood identity is finished. You are now expected to accept duty, restraint, courage and responsibility.
Modern society is much less clear about that transition.
You can become legally adult at 18 while remaining psychologically dependent for years. There is often no agreed moment when society says: you are responsible now. Stop waiting to be rescued. Carry your own weight. Become useful to other people.
The danger is that the need for initiation does not disappear just because formal rituals disappear.
Young people invent substitutes.
Sometimes that becomes fraternity hazing, gangs, reckless behaviour, extreme risk-taking or ideological movements that offer belonging, enemies, heroes, rituals and moral certainty. Popular culture does something similar in a safer form. Star Wars, superhero stories, horror films and countless other myths repeat the ancient pattern: leave safety, enter chaos, face the monster, sacrifice something, return changed.
We keep telling these stories because they describe something real about human development.
The part I find most useful is that modern adulthood probably has to become more voluntary.
Nobody is going to drag most of us through a ceremonial rite and announce that childhood is over.
We have to do it ourselves.
Take responsibility before you feel completely ready. Accept obligations. Learn to tolerate discomfort. Become financially and emotionally useful. Care for somebody besides yourself. Face failure without retreating into nihilism. Test your beliefs against reality. Give up childish expectations that life should always be fair, comfortable or safe.
That is initiation stripped of superstition.
You enter difficulty voluntarily and come out carrying more responsibility than you carried before.
A mature society should probably find better ways of teaching that lesson, because if we provide no healthy path into adulthood, people will invent their own.
And some of those substitutes will be far worse than the rituals we thought we had outgrown.
