Rites of Passage
“When a child is twelve, he is ready for the adolescent experience, and that means the explosion of physical aptitudes and emotional responses to them – the call to dangerous adventure.”
John Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture
Boys Need Adventure.
Boys learn through contact with the physical world in adventures.
Boys acquire wisdom not only through the study of the past, but also through intense experiences of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Boys need adventure – which is why so many have run off to join the navy, or taken up with a circus, or galloped away with a troop of cowboys. They thrive in difficult situations. They come alive when there is something on the line.
To Become Men, Boys Need Rites of Passage.
Restoring healthy masculine formation requires the recovery of traditional rites of passage — the methods by which cultures across time and space have brought their boys into mature manhood.
In a rite of passage, a boy is first temporarily removed from his domestic family. He is then initiated into manhood through challenge. Finally, he is assimilated into an adult vocation and into a set of peers — his band of brothers, who are the men of the community.
These rites “work” — they help shape boys into men — because adolescence itself is a time of passage. Puberty removes a boy from his childhood, whether he likes it or not, and he only exits adolescence when he has achieved some degree of settled adulthood.
Adolescent rites of passage are effective precisely because they do not create but rather honor this given reality, which is the reason we find them practically everywhere — in virtually every culture that has ever existed, in coming-of-age stories ancient and modern, and throughout the Scriptures. The stories of Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and David all feature removal, initiation, and assimilation.
So too the story of Jesus.
Adventures Built into the Schedule
After their morning chores, classes, and a lot of good food, the young men at St. Dunstan’s don their uniforms and head to the fields for feats of athletic prowess — either soccer, or rugby, or a run through the school’s obstacle course.
“Mens sana in corpore sana,” a sound mind in a sound body, was the ancient ideal, and our day includes plenty of gymnastic education, which young men crave, and which connects their bodies and souls more fully to what they study. There will be daily intramural competition for boys to throw themselves into joyously, picking up bruises and badges of honor in the company of the platoon.
Whether finding their way back home through the woods, trying to build a table with their own hands, setting out to learn 100 songs by heart, throwing their bodies headlong into action on the sports field, or trying to recite a 120 line poem from memory, boys do well when challenged. The challenges need to be real challenges, not something artificial made for a lesson plan alone. And the boys need to know they might fail. Trials shape the tastes and habits they will have as men. We call young men to practice as many good and difficult things in their formative years as we can.