One of the purposes of ritual is to reinforce and support our relationships, especially when those relationships are changing. Rites of passage are rituals that take place during periods of our lives when we are experiencing a great deal of change.
We have many of these in our liberal religious tradition. We dedicate children to celebrate their arrival into the world. We commitment to care for and love them, and to teach them well. We celebrate the transition from childhood to adolescence through a ritual called Coming of Age, and commit to supporting our youth as they move through those exciting and difficult years. This morning we had a Bridging Ceremony, celebrating the transition of some of our own into adulthood. We committed to keeping them in our hearts and minds, and to being there for them, even if they go far away. We celebrate through ritual when someone decides to join the church, and welcome them into our covenant of religious community. We celebrate marriages and holy unions. We celebrate life and grieve death through ritual when one of our own dies. We honor that person’s life and remember how they shaped ours. We may even offer rites of passage for divorce, so that those severing a relationship can ritualistically end what was created through ritual in the first place. This is why I say that the purpose of ritual is to reinforce and support our relationships, because it is during periods of change that we become acutely aware of our need for one another and the way our relationships change as we go through the stages of life.
Think of what was happening in you when you crossed the bridge from adolescence into adulthood. Do you remember the excitement and the fear? The impatience. What it was like anticipating being responsible for yourself in a new way? Perhaps you were going to college. Perhaps you were going into the workforce. Perhaps something else called you. Perhaps you stayed home and continued living with your parents, but I would warrant that not many of us made that decision. In North America, leaving behind adolescence and becoming an adult means moving away from the family home and becoming more independent.
The idea that adulthood means independence or greater distance from your family of origin is a distinctly western concept. It is not universal. In many cultures, adulthood means something quite different. In some cultures, adulthood happens when you are married. Until that time you remain with your parents. And even marriage doesn’t mean severing from one family unit and creating a new one. The unit simply enlarges. So growing up doesn’t mean creating more distance between you and your family. It means going in even more deeply with a new set of responsibilities and expectations.
When I taught at York University in northern Toronto, most of my students were either first or second generation immigrants, and the majority originated from Asia. They came from Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, India, China, Japan, North and South Korea, Vietnam, Laos, the Phillipines, and more. Many attended York because their family lived in the suburbs stretching around the university. In some of their cultures, it would have been considered abandonment for a parent to send their child away. Furthermore, it would have been considered betrayal for a child to choose to go away. It was the students who came from families that were, by that point, thoroughly “Canadian” who left their families and came to York. They were the ones living in residence and student housing.
One of my closest friends is from Iran, and he told me stories of growing up during the time of the Shah. The schoolyard there was much like schoolyards here, often filled with rumour and intrigue, and one of the favourite subjects was the mythical land of America. One day a rumour flew around the schoolyard that in America, your parents kicked you out when you were 18! This was quite a shocker, because no one could conceive of parents that would ever ask their children to leave. Not only that, but no one could believe that children would actually want to leave either, because in their culture, children should never abandon their parents in that way. In Iranian culture, children are given everything they want, knowing that when they are adults and their parents are old, they in turn will deny their parents nothing. One of the greatest fears of adults was that if they immigrated to America their children would become like Americans and turn their back on their families, and would leave their parents alone in their old age. Well, in 1979, after the Iranian Revolution toppled the Shah and Islamic fundamentalism ruled the country, many did indeed flee to Canada and America. Most were, to put it mildly, shocked at how we raise our children. Many simply can’t understand how we can send our children away. Don’t we love our children? Don’t we want to protect our children? How can we raise them and then abandon them? There is among some immigrant communities the opinion that North Americans really don’t value family and we don’t really love our children because we let them go.
CULTURAL ASSUMPTIONS
Fascinating isn’t it? When you are inside a culture, it just seems normal. Leaving home is just the accepted thing, the next step. And it’s fascinating to learn how that practice is viewed from the outside. Right now, with so much focus on immigration, we’re a nation looking at immigrants, often through an unforgiving dehumanizing microscope, judging them for their choices and for their differences. Do we ever wonder how they see us? And what assumptions they make of us and our way of life?
Knowing what I know now, I realize that I made assumptions about the maturity of my students based on whether they lived at home or had moved away to university. I saw those who had stayed home as more childlike and assumed that they had no spine, or that they were being unfairly controlled by their parents.
Consider the assumptions North Americans often make about young adults who take their time leaving the parental home. What’s wrong with them? Why aren’t they getting out there and making their mark on the world? When are they going to grow up and take responsibility for themselves? When are they going to pay their own way? We also judge their parents as unable to cut those apron strings, and often worry about the long term ability of those young adults to make it in the world. We see holding on, for both parents and children, as a weakness, as a lack of character, and believe it holds that person back from becoming a real adult and making a contribution to society.
Look at the different values at play here. One values duty and obligation. The family is paramount. The other values autonomy, independence, and self-determination. The individual is paramount. What is really significant here is that these differing values point us to the age-old human struggle to find the balance between individual freedom and community well-being.
So given all this, given that our assumptions of adulthood are culturally based, this is what I wonder. We are a religion that proclaims a commitment to diversity. We say we welcome people from all walks of life. And I am convinced that we sincerely believe in this principle. But what kind of diversity are we best able to welcome when the reality is, that Unitarian Universalism deeply reflects North American cultural assumptions about the cycle of life. Unitarianism and Universalism both emerged in the newly formed United States at the dawn of the 19th century, during what is called the Antebellum Period, the ninety or so years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, a time that America gelled in its self-identity, and at its core, that identity was grounded in self-determination and autonomy. Individualism is at the heart of this country’s culture and it is at the heart of our religious tradition. Look at our first principle: We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We start with the individual, and this reflects the spiritual primacy we give to individualism. Consequently, we measure adulthood by the degree to which you assert your individuality and the degree to which you practice self-autonomy. Unitarian Universalism as we practice it is quintessentially “American”, at least if you define “American” as the values that emerged during its formative years. That’s one reason why Unitarian Universalism, not unlike other American-born religions, has difficulty drawing membership from the true diversity of this nation’s peoples.
Let’s look a bit more closely at the Bridging Ceremony that we had this morning and you’ll see what I mean. What are the assumptions embedded in that ceremony? It begins with the first line. “We call this a bridging ceremony because a bridge invites the traveler to journey away from home.” It goes on. “We are inviting you to remember, as you spread your wings, that your roots are here…. And if life settles you in a far corner of the world, we hope your connections here prompt you to look there for a Unitarian Universalist community.” There are three direct references to leaving home. And for many of our young adults, this is probably the correct assumption. This is the bridge that marks our entry into adulthood. But it is not the only bridge to adulthood, it’s just the one that most of us who call ourselves Unitarian Universalist, travel.
There are many references about moving from the known into the unknown, “leaving the security of the past … and embracing the uncertain future.” This is a time of newness, a time of transformation and change, a time of going out into the world and finding your way. Clearly our Bridging Ceremony is reflecting western understandings of the transition into adulthood. In some cultures, moving into adulthood is not an unknown. In fact, you may know from childhood what is likely to be your path in life. A ceremony like ours might well be meaningless, just like their ceremonies might be meaningless to us, for many of us do not often understand our lives to be carrying out the expectations and certainties of a previous generation.
CEREMONIES WELCOME THOSE IN TRANSITION
But there are other aspects to the ceremony as well, aspects that run more against the grain. One of the purposes of ritual, after all, is to reinforce and support our relationships, especially when those relationships are changing. The purpose of ritual is not just to usher you into a new time, but to honor where you have come from, to express what remains, and what you can come back to. The Bridging Ceremony is not just about saying good-bye to our young people. We’re not kicking our kids out when they turn 18. The Bridging Ceremony is about welcoming those of you making that transition into adulthood, and that means you are joining us. You are joining us to take your rightful place in the world of adults. What we’re saying good bye to is the child you once were, because if we don’t let that go, we aren’t letting you become who you are meant to be.
The Bridging Ceremony was developed in our churches because we were witnessing the consequences of what can happen if you simply kick your kids out at 18. That’s what our churches have historically done. We generally do pretty good at meeting the religious and spiritual needs of our kids. We are even better at responding to the religious and spiritual needs of our adults. But there was, and in many cases, still is, this gap and our young adults fall into it. At one time, it wasn’t uncommon for a young adult to hear upon graduating high school, “We’ll see you back here when you’re married and have kids.” The assumption was that they would simply leave the church, and we might see them once their lives stabilized again. In the last several years, we have seen the ramifications of this assumption. Our young adults are often lost to us, feeling, perhaps with justification, that there is nothing for them in our churches, because often, there hasn’t been. The Bridging Ceremony was developed as a response to this lack. We started thinking about what kind of commitment we have to our young adults, because this church is not complete without them. Some of our young adults may be leaving us, but we now hope that there is another church that you can make your home, because starting out your life as an adult is going to be full of struggle and full of sacrifice, and sometimes full of loneliness. There are times you will lose your way, and we don’t want you to be alone, or to think that you have no where to go. Furthermore, we also need to be a church that young people who have left home can come to. So that they really aren’t alone. And, we have to be ready to respond to the reality of their lives.
So this is what I want to say about adulthood. Adulthood is about being more independent and more self-reliant. But adulthood is also about taking on responsibility. Being willing to shoulder burdens that we rightfully expected others to carry when we were young. And, being an adult is also about developing the maturity to understand deeply, perhaps profoundly, how connected we are to everything around us. As children, we are permitted, often forgiven, when we are selfish and prideful, when we make it all about our wants and desires, when we make mistakes, when we make unwise choices. As children, others set our boundaries for us so that we learn how to make responsible choices. As adults, we are called to set our own boundaries, and to be more fully responsible for the consequences of our choices. And that is precisely why we need strong relationships, because we are fools if we think we can do this challenging thing called life on our own. The Bridging Ceremony is about affirming your call out into the world. It is also about holding out our arms to you so that you know you are still held, still needed, still valued and still loved.
Those of you who participated in this morning's Bridging Ceremony, wherever you go, whether you remain here with us, or leave for distance and not so distant places, we wish you well. We are richer for having you with us. May the spirit be with you, hold and protect you, and guide you on your way.
Posted: 5/8/06