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We’re going to continue talking about helping boys make the transition into manhood. Historically cultures have rites and rituals: initiation rituals that help a boy make the transition from boyhood into adulthood. There’s a lot of wisdom in this kind of approach because that transition is very, very significant in most cultures that are healthy have transition ceremonies.
When you transition from a state of being single to a state of being married, really all that’s required is to decide you’re going to do it, and start shacking up together and say “this is it, we’re married it’s for life.” That’s the practical reality, but the law has imposed a reality that you have to legally get married, and religions also impose or ask for you to observe a ceremony and initiation into marriage.
We have rituals for death, we have rituals for birth. We even have rituals for birthdays. But one of the things that we don’t have is a ritual for probably the single biggest change outside of birth, marriage, and death that any human being can go through. And that’s the transition from childhood to adulthood.
Physiologically it’s a real transition, so we’re talking specifically about boys because I happen to be an expert in the transition from boys to men. I did it myself. I’ve raised two boys. I was raised by a man. I am a man. And I’m watching my grandsons approach that age. So yesterday I talked about the ways that men are different from boys and beyond just the physical.
We’ve got the psychological differences, the emotional differences, the volitional differences, and the differences in appetite. As a man you pick up an appetite that you don’t have as a boy, and that’s the appetite for sex. And that particular appetite will dominate your life, outside of the appetite for food and for air. The sexual appetite is the strongest that a man experiences.
Now there’s one difference between a boy and a man in the physical area that I didn’t talk about yesterday. The external physical differences are quite obvious, but there’s also another physical difference and that’s the change from dependent to independent. A boy is, as a rule, dependent upon others for his physical survival; whereas a man, as a rule, is independent and is able to take care of himself, and hopefully able to take care of others as well.
Let’s talk about that ceremony of transition. There’s a whole bunch of things that are going to change for this boy as he becomes a man. Those are those things I just listed. We don’t prepare our boys for that and we need to be doing that, so we need to be intentional about it.
Some of the more archaic ancient cultures that live closer to the land or closer to nature, the hunter-gatherer cultures, tend to have very profoundly powerful ceremonies for the boys making the transition to men.
There are cultures that did that where a boy is not allowed into the Fellowship of men until he has executed his first live kill of a prey animal. In Africa sometimes there are tribes that have to kill a lion or some sort of big prey animal. I just watched a video where there’s a group in Kenya and they approach lions who are actively eating on a fresh kill. They walk into the group of lions and steal meat from those lions, and that’s part of their ceremony.
There are tribes that take a boy out into the wilderness and leave him alone for a night or sometimes even an extended period of time. The boy has to, on his own, face the wilds of nature and stay alive. You can look these up, I’m not going to go into the details.
The point is that this boy is ritually subjected to the vicissitudes and the cruelty of life and of nature and must handle them on his own.
Some of the more advanced civilizations don’t subject a boy to those physical rigors, but instead he’s subjected to psychological rigors or mental rigors.
One of the best examples of an initiation ritual that I know of, not personally but I’ve observed it, is the Jewish ritual of Bar Mitzvah. The boy is prepared to participate in the life of the community and as a man and what that means is that during the Sabbath worship he is allowed to read from the Torah. He is at that point he is considered part of the life of men in the community.
He’s prepared for that though, and he goes to a test. The Rabbi will actually quiz him and there are answers that are given in prayers that have to be prayed, and the boy has to has to pass through the tests that the rabbi imposes upon him. And if the rabbi says “yep, you got it” then he’s admitted into the Fellowship of men.
So, as we think about our sons, and bringing them into the Fellowship of men we need to prepare them. “You’re going to change psychologically, son. You’re going to change mentally; you’re going to change in terms of your will. You’re going to change in terms of your appetites. You’re going to change in terms of your physical dependence upon your mother and your father.
All of those things are coming, and we are going to subject you to a test or a series of tests to see if you are ready for manhood, to be welcomed into the company of men.”
I’m going to say one more thing. One of my goals, because we didn’t have a formal initiation of manhood ritual in in my community, I had decided that by the time my sons were seniors in high school they would get to make all their own decisions about their own lives. Except that they were living under my roof, so I told them and I prepared them, by the time you are a senior in high school you’re going to get to make your own decisions, but you’re still going to be living under my roof and I’m going to have a little bit of veto authority.
I prepared them for that. I made sure that they knew how to work. I made sure that they had jobs. That they were making money. I had subjected them, along the road, to various testings and rigors themselves. And then when it came time, when they were seniors in high school, they got to make their own decisions. For example: when do they get up, when do they go to school, when do they go to work, how did they spend their time.
The idea was that they were allowed to make mistakes. Make bad decisions from that a little bit of a safety net of living at home. Now I would prefer to have had a more formal type of ritual, one that was that was observed by the entire community, but that’s what I had.
Let’s hear your ideas.
What are your ideas for helping our sons make the transition from boyhood into manhood? Knowing that they’re going to change physically, psychologically, emotionally in terms of their appetites, in terms of the addition of a sexual appetite, in terms of their volition. How do we do that?
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