WARDSBORO — Our society does little or nothing to help young people negotiate the difficult transition from childhood to adulthood. By and large, we do not honor, let alone celebrate, the significance of this passage.
Among indigenous peoples all over the world, the passage to adulthood is seen as a second birth. The first birth is into the family, where ideally the young one is nurtured and protected from any threat to his or her safety. Sheltered within the family cocoon, the child can grow, play, explore, and learn. The second birth is out of this womb of innocence and irresponsibility into the challenges and responsibilities of adulthood.
The child must die for the adult to be born. But the death of the child demands that the young person give birth to who he or she truly is, independent of family and the narrowness of his or her culture.
To accomplish this difficult second birth, indigenous peoples created formal rites of passage. These initiations created a context within which the young person would be tested in order to find out what he or she was made of. The outer challenge mirrored the symbolic death that he or she needed to undergo in order to assume his new identity as a man. The outer challenge contained intimations of death, for it is only in a confrontation with death that an individual can truly find life.
For instance, among the Sioux, a young boy was placed in a hole on a hill away from the tribe, naked, with only a buffalo robe for protection. He was told to stay there for four days and nights without food or water and to cry for a vision. Having everything stripped away from him brought him close to the experience of death. The boy's nakedness and vulnerability created an opening in which he could have a direct, unmediated experience of the sacred.
Such an experience became the new ground he could stand on as he left behind the safety of the maternal ground. His unique experience of Great Spirit gave him the authority to wear the mantle of adulthood. In this encounter with Spirit, he would discover the story that was seeded in him at birth - his soul's calling - and discover the unique gifts he had to offer to the world. He would become the author of his own life.
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In our society, we do not meet our young people in the often painful threshold space in which they find themselves - their fears, their pain, their longings, their passions, their questions. They are asking the essential questions: Who am I? What is my purpose in life?
Instead of responding with skill and care, our culture tends to gloss over the momentous significance of these questions, of the quest itself, with vapid admonitions to our young people to get their acts together. Or worse, to pathologize the quest itself. We label the young person deviant or mentally ill, and then try to medicate he or she into conformity and mediocrity.
By our actions, we do a grave injustice that, in the long run, will place our culture in peril. For if we do not lovingly tend the fires of youth and create the means for our young people to add their fire to the hearth of the community, they will never grow up. Instead, they will turn their anger against the culture or themselves.
We must recognize that the quest is an archetypal blueprint imprinted at birth in the human soul. The quest is a natural, primal longing for initiation that demands to be met. All of the tremendous energies of youth are geared toward an experience that can truly mark the passage into adulthood. In failing to meet this need, we have abandoned our youth, leaving them to drift aimlessly into alienation and meaninglessness.
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my vision-quest mentor, the late Steven Foster, said that adolescents in our society are like a plane revving up on a runway but with nowhere to go. Standing at the edge of a gaping void, they are left no choice but to initiate themselves on their own. As we know, these peer initiations often involve alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, and other risk-taking behaviors that sometimes end in death.
Often, beneath the alcohol and drug abuse, there is an unconscious longing to be touched by spirit. And in the risk-taking, they know instinctively that that they need to brush up as close as they can to death and still talk about it, in order to see what they are made of. It is only in a confrontation with death, as the ancient wisdom schools taught, that a person will be able to fully claim life. Youth suicides are a real death resulting from the absence of a symbolic one, and from the absence of understanding and care from the elders of the community.
Each of us is born into this life with a destiny woven into the fabric of our soul. Our destiny calls us toward the fullness of who we uniquely are. Each soul is woven from the threads of fate, comprised of family, cultural circumstances, and our own particular quirks, and from the thread of destiny that seeks to draw us out of the limitations of time and fate into what is eternal.
The quest is about untangling the thread of destiny from these fated elements, so that each soul may express its unique character, find its own gifts, and sing its singular song into being, like the fabled songlines of the Aborigines of Australia. Each song is a note of the eternal reverberating through the tumult of the world.
We owe it to our youth to help them find their unique song in the unfolding quest of their lives. It is our responsibility to respond with wisdom and heart to their struggles and longings by honoring and celebrating the quest.