Rites of passage

Over the past few years, it has become increasingly clear that many of us men are living our lives without a deeper motivating purpose.  This can be seen in the passionate intensity so many men have for various fashions, fads and strange ideological movements.  The unthinking greed and consumption of things is astounding to me.  We consume everything including our life experiences.  In a sense we are consuming ourselves.

So may men I meet these days seem to act like children in grown-up bodies.  It really is sad.

Becoming a man is not just a naturally occuring status.  It is a complex social and cultural achievement.  We become men within a social context. 

Our culture needs to offer the following for men to flourish:

1. It needs to pay appropriate attention to men.  Not to give them undue status or subservience but simply pay attention to them and their lives.  To really "see" them as persons rather than a collection of roles.
2. The culture we live in needs to reward the giving and receiving of appropriate affection from and to men.  
3. There needs to be space for men to truly flourish in our world.  Not just to perform or to misbehave or "do" things.
4. Men need to be accepted and acceptable in our public discourses.  Too many tropes belittle men or are about the unnacceptable male in our popular culture. 
5. Finally, our society needs to appreciate men and manliness as a vital, creative and life-affirming element of our world.  We tend to focus on the destructive aspects of men to our detriment.

​All these things come together when we ask our boy children to engage in rites of passage into manhood.  How are you supporting the boys in your life to become men?