The other day I caught up with my colleague Chris and he told me about a new service he was developing for fathers and sons on male initiation.

‘Male initiation’. I’d never heard of it. So I asked him what it was all about.

He described it as a rite of passage where a boy performed a set of rituals or moved through a series of tests to symbolize his transition from boyhood to manhood. It was not merely ingesting knowledge, but an “embodied and relational learning experience,” he said. His intention would be to invite boys into the wilderness, where they would need to go on a 10-mile hike, 5 miles up and 5 miles down a mountain, alone. While they hiked, Chris, another supervisor, and the boys’ fathers would act as emergency supervisors. But the boys would have to struggle on their own, learn about what they were feeling, where in their body they felt it, and ask why. After, there would be reflection sessions and teachings centered around Richard Rohr’s five imperatives for maturing into a man in his book Adam’s Return.

“Life is hard.

You’re not that important.

Your life is not about you.

You’re not in control.

You’re going to die.”

Rites of passage can be traced across thousands of years of history in cultures around the world, from bar mitzvah among Jews, dokimasia in Ancient Greece, breeching in the Western world, shinbyu with the Burmese Buddhists, okuyi in West African traditions, berserkergang among the Vikings, walkabouts for the Aboriginal Australians, and many more.

But look at the Western world today. What widespread rites of passage might declare a boy a man?

A graduation ceremony? A boot camp? Hazing? A baptism?

What even is masculinity in the Western world? Is that a thing anymore?

There seem to be a number of failures and complications across parenting, education, religious communities, and organizations that have left boys needing to make up their own minds about what makes a man, a man.

Having worked as a high school teacher and young adult pastor at different points, teaching and counseling boys from various contexts, ethnicities, and backgrounds, I fear some conclusions they’ve arrived upon for themselves about what makes a man a man include whether they’ve f*cked enough b*tches, achieved influencer status, outmuscled or maneuvered their peers, and stacked enough paper to brag about.

So, sex, popularity, dominance, and money. Is this the milieu of modern manhood?

Mark Sayers, a systems thinker and Western critic, writes in his book A Non-Anxious Presence that as the American Century (20th) ended the US entered a gray zone, where a self-reliant age of human flourishing that was promised to bring security began breaking down all around us. He posits that American individualism combined with a shared social anxiety and desire for comfort led Americans to internalize and cling to a Western promise, “That we can find shortcuts to success without pain of growth.”

But the unsettling challenges we are beset with in our 21st century - from prejudice and racism, political tribalism, the amplification of negative emotions on social media, to climate change, inflation, and the disruption of generative AI - suggest a different kind of reality, filled with more limitations than we’d like. 

The Portuguese writer Bruno Macaes commented on how we are responding to these limitations, not with human maturation, but a cruder approach where we devolve into spinning fantasies in place of reconciling with reality. “The new American frontier is the frontier between reality and fantasy,” Macaes wrote in History Has Begun. Where we become fake people, and sell fake products, to forge new fantasies that free us from the constraints of reality.

The novelist Philip K. Dick suggested in the 1970s that this would result in society’s transformation into “a very large version of Disneyland.”

The Western promise then persists: we can still do whatever we want, despite the challenges we face.

What kind of effect must this be having on boys transitioning into manhood?

Perhaps it leads them to hold an opposite set of values from those found in Richard Rohr’s book Adam’s Return.

Life can be easy.

You are that important.

Your life is about you.

You are in control.

You can live forever.

Sayers assures us that “the gift of gray zones is that they bring us back to reality.” They can serve as a kind of wilderness, where we must figure out who we are. But this requires deep inner work.

“What if we did the inner work instead of trying to change the outer world?” my friend Johnnie Moore has asked.

A decade ago while in Pittsburgh, I had just turned twenty-five and met a strange old man while out at a bar. After a few beers and a surprisingly rich conversation, he shared with me that in his youth he once had a bizarre dream.

“I appeared in a wilderness. To one side, all was comfortable and lush. To the other, all was barren and wilderness.”

“So in your dream, you chose the lush?” I asked him.

And then he smiled at me with a kind of twinkle in his eye, that suggested he knew I would conclude that.

“No.”

As the bar closed, the old man wrapped his scarf around his neck, and looked at me. “I never knew what to do with this dream. But I think I’ve just been shown. I think I was meant to share it with you.”

We left the bar and went our separate ways. I don’t remember his name. But I do remember his role in my male initiation.