By Randy Morris, PhD
We live in strange and difficult times – the biggest pandemic since the 1918 flu, the biggest economic crisis since the 1929 depression, the biggest racial unrest since the riots and marches of the 1960s. It seems that society is unraveling before our eyes. What can a small nonprofit organization like Rite of Passage Journeys contribute to a world in need of hope and healing?
For over 50 years, Journeys has insisted that intentional rites of passage are necessary for the healthy growth of individuals and communities. A rite of passage is a set of ritualized activities that marks the transition from one phase of life to another. They typically take place at certain inflection moments in a person’s life – adolescence, mid-life and elderhood – though they can take place whenever a transformation from a lesser state of knowing to a greater state of knowing is required. Journeys has developed programs for all of these phases of life and in all of them a basic assumption is made about the nature of human nature. It says that every human being is born, not as a blank slate to be passively written upon by social forces, but with an innate image, an acorn, an individualized soul image that is an inborn part of our psychic structure.
This is true for every human being, no exceptions. It is our birthright, given freely to us by the Earth. This ‘soul-spark’, as the poet John Keats calls it, needs nurturing and guidance in order to grow into maturity. Every individual is responsible for doing the ‘soul work’ necessary to overcome limitations imposed on them by the circumstances of their birth or the social conditions that seek to keep them small. At Journeys, it is our job to create the conditions where the soul-spark of each person is welcomed, seen, valued and nurtured. In a world of troubles like ours, it is helpful to know that every person, without exception, has something to contribute to the solutions. We are each called in unique ways to mend the fabric of a torn world by uncovering and enacting our inborn gifts.
Unfortunately, the social conditions arrayed against our ‘soul spark’ can be quite formidable. A simple but comprehensive way to understand these forces comes from the Buddhist tradition, which says that all human suffering is caused by three mutually reinforcing poisons: greed, aggression and delusion. When these human forces are institutionalized, they become forms of consumerism (greed), militarism (aggression), and state and corporate-controlled media (delusion). These institutionalized poisons create a kind of ‘trance’ from which it is very difficult to ‘wake up’. This trance obscures the truth of our soul-spark, making it difficult to cut through the spin and hype of our culture, and preventing us from a clear view of the work we were given to do in service to the healing of our planet.
At Rite of Passage Journeys, we have found that nature-based soul work in the company of a beloved community is the best way to break the trance of late-stage capitalism, and wake-up to the soul-spark within each of us that yearns to express itself in acts of compassion, beauty and solidarity. For any who have witnessed the return ceremonies of our youth trips, when participants show up tired and dirty but with a new-found clarity in their eyes; or felt the buzz of excitement at the end of one of our adult programs, you know first-hand what it looks like to have awoken from a trance. Of course, life-span rites of passage imply that discerning and fulfilling our soul-spark is not a one-time event, but rather a living, dynamic process that extends across a lifetime, from adolescence to mid-life to elderhood and death. As we awaken from trances within trances, we become more conscious and thus more able to repay the Earth for her gift of life and the soul-spark within.
What happens when the body undergoing a rite of passage is a collective body, like the American public, or humanity as a whole? Do the same dynamics of a rite of passage described above hold for the collective as well as the individual? The short answer is ‘Yes!’. Things seem so dire because we are engaged in a global rite of passage for humanity as a whole. The earth cannot support the injustices being visited upon it. We have to move to a sustainable world. A rite of passage is being called for so that the soul-spark of humanity can realize itself. This will require us to wake-up from trance states that are destroying the earth so that we can become a more conscious species, dedicated to the cause of life and celebrating, as only humans can, the wonders of the beloved earth community and the sentient cosmos which gave it birth.
Further Reading: To explore some of the ideas behind this blog post, enjoy the following:
Anne Baring, The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul (2013)
Thomas Berry, “The Dream of the Earth: Our Way Into the Future,” Chapter 15 in The Dream of the Earth (1988)
Michael Meade, The Genius Myth (2016). See also www.mosaicvoices.org
Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker, Savage Grace: Living Resiliently in the Dark Night of the Globe (2017).
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling (1997)
Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown, Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide To The Work that Reconnects (2014)
Bill Plotkin, “Inscendence – The Key to the Great Work of Our Time: A Soulcentric View of Thomas Berry’s Work”, in Laszlo and Combs, eds., Thomas Berry, Dreamer of the Earth: The Spiritual Ecology of the Father of Environmentalism, 2011.
Andres Rodriquez, The Book of the Heart: The Poetics, Letters and Life of John Keats (1993)
Richard Tarnas, “Is The Western Psyche Undergoing a Rite of Passage?” at https://cosmosandpsyche.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/revision-rite-of-passage.pdf
