The Initiatory Path

Seeing through your son’s eyes

Let me share with you a harrowing view of modern life that I’ve also heard in different ways from many friends and parents for whom raising a sane boy is a wonderful and onerous task in a world that is spiralling towards voracious insanity.

If we can bear to see the world he’s looking at without blinking, we wince at all that comes into view, and we worry in the solitude of the wolf hours about what is yet to come. We know it may not be forever, but it might well be for ours and possibly his lifetime, and we’re having to find our way through this vast swathe of unknowns.

Here’s some of what he sees, hears and notices:

The oceans are suffocating, the soils are depleted and chemically manipulated, the air is fouled, the atmosphere ever warmer. Small farms struggle to make it, while large industrial companies expand. Just to buy fresh organic vegetables, or fish that is neither endangered nor farmed, or a dozen eggs, is quickly becoming impossible for most families.

Meanwhile transhumanists dream of Mars, while plane-loads of people with the means escape on vacation to get away from it all and forget for a while longer.

Personal health is deeply political. When illness is upon us, we find that pharmaceutical industries have become overlords in a health care system that’s either on its knees, or plain unaffordable for most. And the phone flashes a stroboscope of biohacks, the latest superfood, and exciting news of eternal life.

In just a few years now (or less), every breath from birth until death will be monitored and monetized by all things algorithmic and digital.

And for the duration of that one unique iteration of his existence, screens mine our boy’s sacred attention and unique passions for profit, crumbling his concentration and depleting his deepest and most soulful longings.

Artificial Intelligence replaces contemplation with repetitive platitudes. Homes are intelligent too, and empty for most of the day, listening to the silence of our absence. Conversations fall on deaf ears on trains, buses and airports. Books disappear along with cash and anything that wears, tears, weathers or changes hands And most of us adults just can’t seem to avert our screen-addled eyes long enough to see the dissolution of human relations in real time.

There’s a spread of fascism, tyranny, the willful bombardments of whole peoples, genocide, environmental refugees, repression. There are ongoing low-intensity conflicts on most every continent now. Tourists bask on beaches while enemies shoot each other in nearby forests.

Driving much of the news are affluent men and women who wield tremendous power, accountable only to shareholders and investors. They cover their transgressions with double-speak and more mayhem. A brutal loneliness follows in the wake of such relentless violence, abuse, profiteering, consumerism, extraction and social fragmentation.

The young suffer from anxiety, depression, self-harm, eating disorders, suicidal ideation, stress, while the pixelating profiteers flood in to offer dopamine addiction as a life-saver. Some influential men with cigars, pneumatic muscles or strong opinions appeal convincingly to the young man’s lonely longing for structure, fortitude, invincibility in the midst of this waxing chaos.

To some rudderless boys, these preachers of male supremacy and self-reliance are attractive role models. They promise a path to abundance and power in a world that a growing boy is at a loss how to inhabit.

There is little context for the flood of information that reaches your boy now. The narrative is random and stochastic. It seems senseless and it seems endless and it seems to be just the way things are in the global village.

In the daytime we put on a brave face. We don’t wish him to see all our worries and struggles. But in the solitude of the prayer hour we ask into the darkness: “What kind of world will my son be living in long after I am gone? Will his gifts be valued by the machine, or pulverized by its progress? Will he be ok in the face of all this? Will he be happy? Have I done all I can to set him up well?”

In the face of all this uncertainty, it is so tempting to collapse. We all sense a flicker of resignation when it seems that the benefits of yielding to the algorithms and to globalization are beginning to outweigh the costs of serving creation. We see him want to be ‘normal’, pulling away from all that we have wished to impart to him about our connection to earth, community, spirit. We wonder if maybe it’s not as bad as we fear, and tell ourselves that likely our boys on the threshold to adulthood will be fine. It will sort itself out. He’ll find his way.

That may be so (and let us pray that it is), and I’m with all those parents among us who won’t give our son up to civilisational malaise without first helping him leave boyhood behind so he can come to the times he was born to as a maturing young man with a sense of belonging and a deep love of life.

There’s an old idea that says we ought not seek to do what our ancestors did, but instead to seek what they sought. For many of us, what our ancestors sought was to bring boyhood and all its comforts and privileges to a conclusive end, so that the fire that burns within the young man can be fed to the communal hearth in service of creation.

This is what we seek in a Grassroots Rite of Passage too, that men and women whom we trust and love, guide our boy towards the unknown, that he might emerge as a young man with an embodied understanding of what it is to be a cultivated person of time and place.

Over the final year of his boyhood you are ending childhood so that his adulthood can begin. You are asking others to mature his soul alongside his body. They will attempt to teach him to be responsible for his decisions and their consequences.

As parents you will slowly say farewell to parenting a boy so your family can transform alongside your growing son. Each member of the community who is drawn into this work will be transformed too, in ways unknown by the burden they accept to carry.

And your son’s heart will be tempered and tenderized so that he remembers to adore the living earth and praise its beauty. He will learn that he is not at the center of things anymore, that he is neither more important nor less important than any other living being, He will learn that life is hard for all of us. He will come to understand some of what and who has sustained him for all these years. He will get a chance to know his own mortality as a lifelong companion. He will be presented with the chance to learn how to be of benefit to others, now that he is no longer a child.

You will be planting a seed that may not emerge for many years yet. Your son still has at least a decade before his physical maturation is complete, and his brain development is stabilized.

There are other life stage transitions that he will come to, gods willing. You might not even live to see your grown son one day become aware of how this single year of collective guidance has rippled through his days. You might not live to see him pass something similar on to other boys.

You are tending a sapling that one day will offer welcome shelter to your son, and later, to someone unborn or yet unknown. You are collectively seeking to make a human being who thrives and serves in a time of great unknowns for a day you may not live to see.

Taking on the communal task of initiating a boy is a romantic act of courageous and daring rebellion that can bring health to every member of the family and beyond, while serving the holy in nature.

It is human-scaled culture in the making–your boy coming of age through a heartfelt celebration of all things human, natural, original, unique and local, with the guidance of little tiny people, doing little tiny things in a little tiny neighborhood.

Warmest,

Miki