Seeds of relationship-building curriculum (#3) need for initiation

Notes from Iron John by Robert Blye, Vantage Books, 1990,
Mircea Eliade says of male initiation: 'The puberty initiation represents above all the revelation of the sacred..before initiation, (boys) do not yet fully share in the human condition precisely because they do not yet have access to the religious life.'
Religion here does not mean doctrine, or piety or purity or 'faith,' or 'belief,' or my life given to God. It means a willingness to be a fish in the holy water, to be fished for by Dioysius or one of the other fishermen, to bow the head and take hints from one's own dreams, to live a secret life, praying in a closet, to be lowly, to eat grief as the fish gulps water and lives. It means being both fisherman and fish, not to be the wound but to take hold of the wound. Being a fish is to be active; not with cars or footballs, but with soul....
An ocean of shame sweeps over a child when it is shamed...
In 'The Raven' (Grimm Brothers) a young girl changes into a raven when her mother objects to her behaviour, and remains so enchanted for years; in the 'Six Swans,' six young boys turn into swans when the father, through his cowardice, opens the house to evil, and the boys remain enchanted for years...
The Wild Man's water does not itself heal the wound that led to the escape or ascension; but it gives strength to the part of us that wants to to continue the effort to gain courage and be human. (p.38-39)...
As we know from Phillipe Aries's Centuries of Childhood, before the nineteenth century or so there were no clothes designed especially for children. During and after the Middle Ages the child said, "I am a small- sized adult" and he or she wore clothes similar to those the adults wore. That practice had some drawbacks, but the reversal has been catastrophic. When people identify themselves with their wounded child, or remain children, the whole culture goes to pieces. We learn from  teenage pregnancies that children cannot mother their own children or father their own children. People lead lives that radiate destruction to the immediate famly as well as to the neighbourhood. Everyone is in the emergency ward. (p. 35)
The recovery of some form of initiation is essential to the culture....
All wounds threaten our princehood. The shame blows, 'Who do you think you are? You're just a snotty-nosed kid like all the rest,' are like blows to the princes stomach. And there is always something wrong with us. One boy feels too thin, or too short, or too stringy; anothe rhas a stutter or a limp. One is too shy; another is 'not athletic' or can't dance, or has a bad complexion. Another has big ears, or a birthmark, or is 'dumb,' can't hit the ball, and so on. We usually solve the problem by inflating ourselves further. A little ascension takes us above it all.
Perhaps some grandiosity or godlikeness us useful in protecting ourselves when we are very young. Alice Miller remarks that when abuse enters, when the parents do cruelties the child cannot imagine any parent doing, it takes either a grandiose road or a depressed road. If we take the grandiose road, we climb up above the wound and the shame. Perhaps we get good grades, become the one in the family hired to be cheerful, become a short of doctor of our own suffering, take care of others. Something prodigious carries us away. We can be cheerful but not very human.
If we take the depressed road, we live inside the wound and the shame. We are actually closer to the wound than those on the grandiose path, but we are not necessarily more human. The victim is an imposing person, too.The victim accepts the crown of victimhood, because a prince or a princess in another way. Sometimes men with no fathers take this road.
Each of us takes both of these roads, though we use one on Sundays' and holidays, and the other on weekdays. Some take a third road: it is the road of paralysis, robot behaviour, seriously pursued numbness-a hollow at the centre, no affect, no emotion upward or downward, automaton life.
Ancient initiation practice would affect all these responses, since it gives a new wound, or gives a calculatd wound sufficiently pungent and vivid-though minor- so that the young man remembers his inner wounds. The initiation then tells the young man what to do with wounds, the new and the old. (p.33-34)
The recovery of some form of initiation is essential to the culture. The United States has undergone an unmistakable decline since 1950, and I believe that if we do not find a third road besides the two mentioned here, the decline will continue. We have the grandiose road, taken by junk-bond dealers, high rollers, and the owners of private jets; and we have the depressed road, taken by some long-term alcoholics, single mothers below the poverty line, crack addicts and fatherless men. (p. 35)
Clearly, the need to discover, create, re-create, uncover...an appropriate initiation experience for all males entering adolescence, conducted by older men as mentors, who themselves may have been denied this significant experience and will therefore have to, themselves, undergo a similar experience of their own if they are to be effective as mentors for others is the next step, in any curriculum that seeks to develop healthy relationships between the inner and public self, between the young man and his peers, and the young man and his female peers. And while Robert Bly's book may seem both a little dated and written from an American perspective, and therefore not applicable to Canadian young men, there is considerable evidence that similar paths have been taken already by thousands, if not millions of young and not-so-young Canadian men.