If we do not initiate the young, they will burn down the village to feel the heat.
(African proverb)
Why would a 19 year old walk into a crowded mall with automatic weapons and open fire on innocent civilians? Mental instability? Easy access to guns? A diet of violent movies and TV? Racism fueled by toxic ideologies? Copycat killings? Certainly parts or all of these rationale can apply. But none of them ring true at the deepest level. Certainly not when it comes to them becoming commonplace.
Teen boys no longer have socially acceptable means of proving to the world that they’re men. They’re no longer initiated and mentored into young adulthood, into maturity, in ways that prove to themselves and the world that they are worthy, that they’re sufficiently tough and courageous, that they have arrived, that they deserve to be called a man.
If teen boys are not provided with pro-social ordeals – tough challenges – that are culturally sanctioned, supported, contained, and informed by elders, they will continue to seek them out in dysfunctional ways – reckless drinking, drugging, and driving, stealing and robbery, rape and domestic violence, dangerous thrill-seeking, and yes, indiscriminate killing.
But what about hormones and the undeveloped pre-frontal cortex? Aren’t these boys somehow deranged? Just born bad, with evil intent? People scramble for answers while overlooking what has been dominant cultural practice across the planet for at least 20,000 years. Boys are genetically encoded to need trials where they can experience the depths of their human capacity. They need rites of passage where they can symbolically die to their adolescent self (“Me, me, me…”) in order to be reborn as a functional adult (“Us, us, us…”). Facing death, their own and others’, is a requirement for accomplishing that. Until they do they will have no respect for life. Given our wholly dysfunctional culture – that has forgotten the necessity and means of initiating and mentoring teens, that no longer applies meaningful ritual in daily life to awaken the human psyche to the preciousness and wonder of this thing called living, that denies the coming reality of death, much less teaching us how death can serve us and help us grow – we should not be surprised when our abandoned and resentful teen boys act in these ways.
Creating murder and mass mayhem is bad enough. But uninitiated boys will never know their true calling in life, their soul’s calling. They won’t know the gifts or “medicine” that is uniquely theirs to give, and they won’t know that the community needs them, desperately, to take their place at the table to help restore it to wholeness. They’ll never be taught other key lessons of initiation: mental, spiritual, and physical resilience, emotional intelligence, accountability and integrity, how to live cooperatively, not just competitively. Going down in the “glory” of a hail fire of bullets, these boys will never gain the traction of their own life. The weeping is not merely for the innocent unjustly lost; it’s for the entire culture that won’t wake up to its responsibility.
Fortunately, it’s not too late. Schools, community groups, and mentoring programs can adapt some of what they’re already doing to re-introduce ROP rituals. Parents can seek mentors for their kids and reinstitute rituals of meaning back into daily life. Every child needs initiation and mentorship to cross the threshold into real adulthood. Every child deserves it.