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O P E N I N G T H E D O O R S O F WO N D E R
OPENING THE
D O O R S O F WO N D E R

Reflections on Religious Rites of Passage

A R T H U R J . M AG I DA

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses
in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship
in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are
supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions
from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2006 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Magida, Arthur J.
Opening the doors of wonder : reflections on religious rites of passage /
Arthur J. Magida.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-520-24545-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-520-24545-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Ritual. 2. Rites and ceremonies. 3. Religions—Customs and
practices. I. Title.
bl600.m28 2007
203'.82—dc22 2006007729

Manufactured in the United States of America

15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 50, a 100% recycled fiber of which
50% is de-inked post-consumer waste, processed chlorine-free. EcoBook 50 is
acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/astm d5634–01
(Permanence of Paper).
We can only see as far forward as we can
remember back.
african proverb

Memory is the diary that we all carry about

with us.
oscar wilde
CONTENTS

Prologue 1
Introduction: Sometimes, the Magic Works 11

PART ONE · CHRISTIANITY: Soldiers for Christ

1. The Descent of the Spirit 21

2. Bob Abernethy: No Fundamental, Life-Changing
Experience 48
3. Chinua Achebe: What Makes Someone Give
Up Their Religion? 55
4. Huston Smith: Religion Saturated the House 64
5. Julia Sweeney: That Soldier-of-Christ, Slap-across-
the-Face Stuª Is Sick 71
6. Jim Zogby: The Wal-Mart-ization of the Church 81

PART TWO · JUDAISM: Would Anne Frank Sing Karaoke?

7. What, Really, Is a Man? 91

8. Leon Botstein: I’m Tone-Deaf to Belief 104

9. Roz Chast: I Was Like a Spy. Like a Closet Jew 112
10. Rabbi Harold Kushner: I Wanted to Make
My Parents Proud 120
 11. Letty and Abigail Pogrebin, Mother
and Daughter: “You Are a Woman” Meant
“You Do the Dishes” 129

12. Ram Dass: Mushrooms Gave Me What I Could

Have Had at My Bar Mitzvah 145

13. Rabbi Jeªrey Salkin: Israel and I Came

of Age Together 152
14. Elie Wiesel: I Am Not God’s Policeman 160

PART THREE · HINDUISM: Coming to Brahma, Knowing Nirvana

15. The Thread of Life 171

16. Deepak and Gotham Chopra, Father and Son:

Religion Is Frequently Idiotic 183

PART FOUR · BUDDHISM: Original Perfection versus Original Sin

17. Waking Up 197

18. Roshi John Daido Loori: Born a Buddha.

Die a Buddha 202

19. Robert Thurman: I Looked Like Henry Miller

in Drag 212

PART FIVE · ISLAM: Seven Essential Words

20. Allah Is One 223

21. Coleman Barks: Just Being Sentient Is Cause

for Rapture 230

22. Dr. Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens): Floating on

a Cloud of Mercy 239
23. Michael Wolfe: I Feel Like a Monotheist with Extra
Credentials 246

Epilogue: Would Anyone Riding by on a Horse

Even Notice? 257
Notes 271
Acknowledgments 291
PROLOGUE

When I was ten years old, my fifth-grade teacher used to make an an-
nouncement every week that I never quite understood. It had something
to do with “catechism class.” The second word was a cinch. Even I com-
prehended it. But “catechism”? It seemed like another language, maybe
from another planet.
The announcement would always come around two o’clock, usually on
a Wednesday or Thursday. Almost two-thirds of the class would tidy up
their desks, bolt out of their seats, and just about skip out of James Madi-
son Elementary School, a two-story brick building surrounded by a chin-
high metal fence painted a not-very-attractive lime green. At James Madi-
son, hoisting the American flag to the top of the pole in front of the school
early in the morning was a high honor, almost as distinguished as carry-
ing the erasers down to the basement at the end of the day and sucking
gusts of chalky dust out of them with a vacuum cleaner that some goofy
inventor had devised for that very purpose. But in my eyes, the greatest
honor of all was to be among those lucky kids who dashed out of this
school in bleak Scranton, Pennsylvania. I admired how clever they were.
Clearly they were privy to a secret, and they were keeping it to themselves:
not just how to get out of school ninety minutes early but also how to es-
cape our teacher, Miss Dyer, whom we feared and loathed. A bully and a
tyrant, she humiliated at least one of us every day in front of the entire
class—teasing, scolding, or just plain chewing out some poor sucker. Her
class was a gulag, a stalag, a slammer for fifth graders. From 9:00 in the
morning until 3:30 in the afternoon, we held our breath, never knowing
when she would strike or whom she would pounce on. Anyone who fig-

1
 ured out how to get away from Miss Dyer, even for something I did not
comprehend—like “catechism”—automatically went up in my esteem.
Many years later—decades later, in fact—I’d learn that catechism was
more of a mystery than I’d dreamed back in Scranton. In their church a
few blocks from school, within thick stone walls and beneath a spire so
tall it seemed (from my short grade-school perspective) almost to touch
the sky, the Catholic kids were being instructed in the fundamentals of
sin and salvation, two lofty abstractions that exceeded the cramped com-
prehension of most fifth graders. Most likely those kids knew only that
they were hearing serious words with serious implications. Beyond that,
such ideas were better left to adults to figure out, which was pretty much
how we felt at that age about anything that was grave and somber and had
the weight of the world resting on it.
Of course, I didn’t know that the way the catechism was learned—
committing to memory volumes of questions and answers and being drilled
on them again and again—could be traced all the way back to the ancient
Jewish rabbis and teachers, who were fond of posing and then answering
questions, in a sort of one-man Socratic dialogue a few centuries before
Socrates was even born. Jesus, who was well aware of the power of ques-
tions, often used the same approach in the impromptu sermons he deliv-
ered in villages and synagogues throughout ancient Palestine: “What think
ye of Christ?” “Who do men say that the son of man is?” “Who do ye say
that I am?” Question after question challenged Jews’ lack of faith, their
corruption, their dull inability to realize that they were living in apoca-
lyptic times, that Armageddon itself might break out before sundown. Je-
sus wanted to shake people up, make them change their ways before it was
too late: “O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?” “Why do
ye transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?” “O ye hyp-
ocrites, can ye not discern the signs of the times?” Even as Jesus’ strength
drained while hanging from the cross, one last question was left in him:
“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”—“My God, my God, why hast Thou for-
saken me?” Then he was quiet, but far from forgotten.
The question mark, then, characterized Christianity from its start, a
mode of learning and preaching that Christians inherited from their Jew-
ish brothers. Questions took people on quests; occasionally, questions ac-
tually led to answers. I didn’t know any of this, not in fifth grade and not

2 PROLOGUE
in Scranton. All I knew was that these kids left school much too early once
a week and that I was stuck with Miss Dyer—all . . . day . . . long.

Somehow, with time and eªort, I figured out that this catechism stuª was
bringing these gentile kids to an essential juncture in their religious life,
just as Hebrew school was bringing the Jewish kids to a similar juncture.
The Christian kids had communion and confession and confirmation, and
the Jewish kids had bar and bat mitzvah. All of us were lurching toward
some kind of destiny at our respective altars, although few of us really knew
where the ritual led. “Lurching,” in fact, was the best description for this
journey. As newcomers to religion, we were only doing what we were told
to do. And whenever obedience exceeds comprehension, there is confu-
sion, and there is uncertainty, and there is lurching.
We were reasonably sure that wherever we were heading would satisfy
clergy and parents and grandparents. It might even satisfy God Himself,
and what could be better than making God a happy God? But the deeper
reason for the satisfaction that we were so diligently sowing among our
elders and our beloved deity was really beyond us: we were passing from
one phase of life to another, learning secrets and wisdom that stretched
back generations, maybe to the Creator Himself. How could we know this?
At that moment in our young lives, about all we were capable of grasp-
ing was the simple, elementary tautology that you did this—whatever it
was—because you were your parents’ child and you wanted to be “good”
in their eyes and in the eyes of God. There were no choices. There were
only imperatives, mandates, expectations, and assumptions, with little lee-
way and scant latitude and not much of what I would later learn was called
“free will.”
Still, I never quite forgave my Christian friends for abandoning me to
Miss Dyer. Maybe, I figured, their luck had something to do with the
messiah they worshipped and the Bible—the “newer” one—they read.
It was all so frustrating. After all, their God was giving them a free “Get
Out of School” pass. That was divine intervention, although maybe not
the kind that was really needed in that sere and devastated region of north-
eastern Pennsylvania, with scars upon the land and the heart. Unem-
ployment almost rivaled that of the Great Depression, streets built over
abandoned coal mines were caving in daily, the air was filthy and black-

PROLOGUE 3
 ened from burning culm dumps along the perimeter of the city, there
was an unwanted incandescence in the middle of the night—with all that
going on, the best God could do was to get the Catholic kids dismissed
from Public School No. 33 a few hours early every week? What about
us—the chosen people? A few thousand years before, God had freed hun-
dreds of thousands of Jews from slavery after punishing the Egyptians
with one plague after another—killing their firstborn, ruining their
crops, turning the Nile into blood—and now He was freeing someone
else? I needed no further proof that the Lord moves in strange and mys-
terious ways. I’m sure that He had His reasons—His very wise reasons—
for letting the Catholic kids troop out of my fifth-grade classroom. But
at the tender age of ten, the reasons sure as hell eluded me.

In certain ways, all of us, Christian and Jewish, had embarked on diªer-
ent versions of the same adventure: the Catholic kids were memorizing
catechism; the Jewish kids were memorizing their aleph, bet, gimmel—the
Hebrew ABCs. Everyone was learning Bible stories: Abraham smashed
idols in his father’s house. Joseph wore a coat of many colors. Moses de-
scended from Sinai with two extremely heavy tablets. And of course, for
the Christians, there was the matter of a certain virgin birth and a mira-
cle involving loaves and fishes and a resurrection that resounded through-
out all eternity. Everyone studied, and studied hard. No one wanted to
risk the wrath of God, clergy, or especially parents. The world was scary
enough without that.
Being Jewish, I had a bar mitzvah—for me, a great disappointment. My
most lasting memories of it have nothing to do with the thrill of reading
from the Torah for the first time or the pleasure this gave my parents.
Rather, I remember being yelled at a lot and wearing a suit that never
stopped itching.
For months, I was drilled, coached, scolded, and intimidated by a man
I didn’t like—the cantor at our temple. He had bad breath and a short
temper and wore rumpled clothes, and every year he had to perform a mir-
acle: turning boys whose voices were still changing—they were equipped
with the vocal equivalent of a yo-yo—into halfway competent singers.
While teaching, he shook his head in dismay, knowing that regardless of
how bad we were (and most of us were very bad), we would still have a
bar mitzvah, since the ceremony had nothing to do with musical talent

4 PROLOGUE
and everything to do with a kid turning thirteen. My dear cantor had been
around too long. He knew the ridiculously small odds of a boy chanting
his Torah portion with soaring glissandos that echoed through the stone
arches of the synagogue’s massive sanctuary while congregants and guests
from afar thrilled at the young Caruso, honored to be in his presence,
stunned that they were witnessing musical history.
Of course, that never happened.
The other major memory from my bar mitzvah involved a gray flannel
suit. My parents and their friendly haberdasher had decided that this styl-
ish garment was “ideal” for the occasion. The problem was that it itched.
Nonstop. At the bar mitzvah itself, every itch was a nudge, a reminder to
stand up straight and enunciate precisely and make everyone proud of me.
For all I know, it worked. I’m not sure because I have no idea how well I
said my Torah portion or my “learned” talk to the congregation about
that portion. I don’t remember any of that. I do remember the itching.1
I figured that, years later, I would look back on this moment— one pos-
sibly fraught with holiness—as the one when I started becoming who I
was meant to be. For now, though, it was hollow. If I’d been more rever-
ent or had better understood those commandments I was now obliged to
follow, maybe the rite would have nourished me, even changed me. And
if my parents had practiced a diªerent kind of Judaism, then maybe that
would have rubbed oª on me. True, they brought me into the temple and
they brought Judaism into the house. But it never seemed to sway or in-
form them. Their Judaism, quite simply and quite annoyingly, was a func-
tional Judaism. Prayers were said and candles lit, maybe as obeisance to
their parents or maybe, to go way back, as obeisance to Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob. I don’t know. No one ever talked about it. This stuª was oª
limits: too sensitive because it was too personal, although the personal was
where truth lay.
There was no questioning, no discussing. You did this stuª, this reli-
gious stuª, because that was who you were and what you’d been born into.
My parents, Florence and Paul, knew the mechanics of religion—the ges-
tures, the words: when you light candles and when you say prayers; the
proper demeanor at synagogue and, especially, at a Passover Seder, where
neither a giggle nor a smile was allowed. But the spirit behind these ges-
tures and genuflections—what Judaism calls kavvanah, the intention be-
hind an act—was missing. Who knows? Maybe no one ever exposed my

PROLOGUE 5
 parents to kavannah—a lapse not unlikely, since their lives were filtered
through duty and obligation, not spirit and joy.
So in the end, I couldn’t relate to my Torah reading or even to the Torah
itself. The pity is that a day so loaded with meaning and imagery and
majesty was, in the end, a complete and devastating dud. The attention
was great and the presents were grand. I still have some of them. But in
the end, this rite took me nowhere. There was no passage.

From many friends, I’ve heard similar accounts about their rites of pas-
sage. In virtually every faith, things seem amiss and people are perplexed
that the day—their day!—didn’t reach further into them, that it wasn’t more
conclusive, more decisive. Few people are transformed. There’s no reworking
of the soul and there’s nothing profound. For that, the heart must move
in tandem with the grain of circumstances, the sacred circumstances, and
that may be too much to ask: miracles don’t occur on demand.
Decades later, a Zen monk in Berkeley helped me figure out what may
have happened at my bar mitzvah. Every day, the monk meditated for
hours. It was always torture—di‹cult and intractable, especially when
there were so many other things he could be doing, like cooking and shop-
ping and being a good husband and doting father. Then one day he real-
ized that his meditation wasn’t changing, but his life was. Those sessions
of quiet, intense focus were transforming how he experienced the world.
Meditation was subtly enhancing his compassion, his wisdom, his patience.
He was “progressing,” although not as he’d anticipated.
Expecting something magical from a ritual—a bar mitzvah in Penn-
sylvania or meditation in California—could mean that you’re looking in
the wrong place. The gradations of life are too slow for these instant trans-
formations. True: satori (Zen enlightenment) arrives in a flash, but only
after years of preparation; and kavannah (Hebrew for directing your heart
toward God) animates prayers, but only after the heart has been humbled.
“Magic” takes a nanosecond to strike but a lifetime to nurture. Placing it
on a timetable guarantees disappointment.
That is why I wrote this book. I wanted to see who isn’t disappointed,
who is changed, how they’re changed, why they’re changed—who, if any-
one, is rescued from a probable familiarity with the crushing hand of fate;
who is blessed with an exciting and extravagant psychic charge. Depend-
ing on our religion, we get dunked, sprinkled, lectured to. We read, we

6 PROLOGUE
sing, we chant. We make promises and we take vows. We wear white robes
or orange robes or brand new suits or dresses that we may never wear again.
We might think about heaven or hell or God or messiahs, about this life
or the next one. Or, to be more honest, we might just think about the
party following all the mumbo jumbo.
And when it’s all over, have we “arrived,” whatever that means? If some-
one didn’t have one of these events, did they compensate in any way? Is a
rite of passage a rehearsal for the competence and general bravura we need
to get through life, with all its disruptions and annoyances and exasperations?
Each of us has our hunches about these questions. After all, life is a se-
ries of hunches and guesses strung together into a story— our story, a story
that’s perplexing, charming, entertaining, confusing, confounding, and
maybe best of all, unexpected as hell. It’s a story riddled with rites and
with passages and with destinations we have yet to reach, a story that we’re
making up as we go along and whose ending we haven’t figured out yet.

A few words on stories and on the structure of this book: Every world re-
ligion gets its own section—a chapter that explains the evolution of its
coming-of-age ceremony with its elements and their theological meaning.
This is followed by several interviews with famous or influential individ-
uals about the rites of passage they had in that faith. Here you will find a
Nobel laureate, a New Yorker cartoonist, an internationally renowned holis-
tic guru, a former rock star, a Zen roshi, a college president, a TV anchor,
two rabbis, a psychedelic pioneer, a novelist from Africa, a comedian who
became famous on Saturday Night Live, and more.
Hearing their stories is a privilege. These people are smart, savvy. Some
are devout; some want to be devout. A few are cynics; a handful have no
use for religion. But let’s put what they say into perspective. While, in one
way or another, the people I interviewed have shaped our culture and our
times, in the greater scheme of things our stories are just as valid as theirs.
We all have stories. In fact, we are our stories. They’re indispensable to
who we are and who we’ve been and who we want to be. Stories rescue us
from the chaos of the everyday. Without them, our birth would mean little,
our death might mean less, and everything that happens between those
two goalposts of our lives would be blurry and inchoate.
The Harvard psychologist Jerry Bruner understood how stories struc-
ture our lives. “The self,” he said, “is a perpetually rewritten story.” We’re

PROLOGUE 7
 constantly making narratives, he said, narratives about ourselves. In the
end, we become these stories, stories which tell our lives and hint at a con-
clusion that we’re still shaping.
If every life is a story, then rites of passage are pivotal chapters in them.
The key may not be how we remember them, maybe not even if we re-
member them. The key—the real key—is that, at some obscure level, these
rites have etched a new story for us among the tales that buoy and sustain
us. In ways known and unknown, they make a dent on who we are and
who we may yet be.
Few people understood the power of memory better than the German
poet Rainer Maria Rilke. “Ah,” Rilke wrote, “poems amount to so little
when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather
sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime . . . and then, at the very end, you
might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are . . . experi-
ences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people
and things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and
know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morn-
ing. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods,
to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming. . . .
And it is not yet enough to have memories. . . . For the memories them-
selves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very
blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless. . . . Only then can it hap-
pen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their
midst.”2
To aªect us, rites of passage don’t necessarily have to hit a bull’s eye,
forever wedding us to a faith, a God, a tradition. But just like a memory
or a poem, they enter our blood and our glance and our gesture. As they
become part of us, they provide another story for our narrative, a story
that will exult, proclaim, exclaim, confuse, and befuddle. For all stories,
all good stories, enlighten and bewilder and hold a truth that is holy and
sacred and blessedly contradictory: elusive, fleeting, and above all, eter-
nally and enduringly momentous.

A postscript: The day after I wrote the above section, an old friend called
from Florida. I’d seen Ronni only a few times since graduating from high
school, but some ties don’t fade. She wanted me to know that Sheldon
was dying. I’d been good friends with Sheldon from fifth grade through

8 PROLOGUE
our second year in college, when he went his way and I went mine. That
happens to all of us: the years intervene, experience intervenes, life inter-
venes. The funny thing was that in the end—and for Sheldon, it was the
end—none of that really matters. He was dying and he was in pain, and
after Ronni’s call I was anxious to let him know that I remembered him
and cared about him.
I called Sheldon the next day. It was as if no time had passed. We talked
and joked, not with the awkwardness of not having seen each other for years,
but with the ease of having known each other for a long time. Most im-
pressive was Sheldon’s courage: blind from diabetes, one-legged after an am-
putation, he’d told his doctors to disconnect him from his dialysis machine.
In a few hours, he’d be in a hospice; in less than twenty-four, he’d be dead.
Even so, we barely talked about death. Rather, we talked about growing up
in Scranton and about old friends and about attending Temple Israel and
about once seeing a movie during Passover, when Sheldon sinfully ate a hot
dog on a roll while every other Jew in the world was eating matzo. And
maybe because Sheldon was on the verge of going through the ultimate
rite of passage, we talked about another journey—our bar mitzvahs. We
both admitted that, at the time, we hadn’t understood what they meant.
What was important was that the memories of having had a bar mitzvah
had stayed with us all these years. These memories abolished time. They
rescued the obscure and the forgotten. They obliterated oblivion. Our bar
mitzvahs—inconsequential though they had seemed—weren’t mere blips
on our childhood screens, something we did because we were nice Jewish
boys. No, our bar mitzvahs were part of us. Without them, I would not be
Arthur and he would not be Sheldon. And neither of us would be Jewish.
With these memories enjoying such longevity, who could deny their
power, their grandeur, even if, for some people, people like Sheldon, their
truth remained a mystery that lingered all the way unto death.

PROLOGUE 9
INTRODUCTION

S O M E T I M E S , T H E M AG I C WO R K S

Catholics don’t remember their baptism. Muslims don’t remember their

baby welcoming. Jewish men don’t remember their circumcision. Water
is sprinkled, a relative says a few words about the newborn, a foreskin is
cut. These are all done to babies, who have no say about any of this and
no idea what’s going on. A decade or so later, after several years of reli-
gious education and many visits to a church, mosque, or temple, children
may know what they’re doing and even why. They are conscious and they
are awake and that, along with so many other reasons, is why rites of pas-
sage during puberty are so diªerent from what we have as babies.
But consciousness doesn’t necessarily guarantee wisdom. A nineteenth-
century best-seller, for instance, a children’s Bible primer written by a re-
pressed, miserable, and possibly insane English woman, woke kids up to
the world around them. It also scared the bejesus out of them. The Peep
of Day, by Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer, was translated into thirty-eight lan-
guages, including such tongues as Yoruba, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil,
Cree, and Ojibwa. Despite phenomenal sales, over one million copies world-
wide, The Peep is one of the most sadistic books ever intended for chil-
dren. Consider this snippet from its first chapter:

How kind of God . . . to give you a body! I hope that your body will not get
hurt. . . . If it were to fall into the fire, it would be burned up. . . . If a great
knife were run through your body, the blood would come out. If a great box

11
 were to fall on your head, your neck would be broken. If you were not to eat
some food for a few days, your little body would be very sick, your breath
would stop, and you would grow cold, and you would soon be dead.1

How The Peep helped anyone is a puzzle. Most likely, it sent kids squeal-
ing to their mothers for protection from the evil God who’d designed a
body that could be diced, chopped, or pulverized any minute. What they
heard from that loony Mortimer woman could make them swear oª reli-
gion forever: we are all refugees from an avenging God who takes sinners,
even the smallest of them, none too lightly.
Obviously, being aware isn’t necessarily reassuring: readers of The Peep
were chilled to the bone. Yet awareness can confer knowledge; it can pro-
vide context; in the best of all worlds, it can bring wisdom. We may ad-
vance through life in fits and starts—few paths are direct—but wacky Mrs.
Mortimer had the wrong idea: you don’t scare kids into compliance. Guide
them gently, treat them kindly, and they’ll be open to the possibilities you’re
oªering them. A rite of passage isn’t a horror show. Religion should bring
kids into the light, not make them cower in their beds, scared of life and
happy to get away from it.

The words and images of a rite of passage guide parents and children from
one plateau to another: children venture further into the world, where
they’ll have many adventures and make many mistakes, and parents try
to cling less to their sons and daughters, knowing that their “career” as
parents is being reshaped. With grace and ease and, hopefully, little dis-
ruption, these rites ease families from one role to another, from one phase
to another: parents become elders; children are on their way to becoming
adults, eventually becoming parents themselves. As the world changes, it
stays remarkably the same.
Life is full of rites of passage. Mastering a challenge, coming to terms
with ourselves or with someone else, learning a new skill—a new language,
a new swimming stroke, a new whatever—all fit under a fairly porous,
generous definition of “rite of passage.” But in this book, we focus only
on the really powerful ones—those that provide connections and links and
opportunities to sense that our wisdom and knowledge and place in the
world are broader and deeper and more timeless than we would otherwise
suspect. The rites of passage in this book traverse the ordinary. Many ex-

12 INTRODUCTION
periences deliver us to a new and unanticipated realm, to a place that was
only rumors and fictions for us. But just as Melville in Moby-Dick speaks
of “reality outracing apprehension”—apprehension in the sense not of fear
or disquiet but of understanding—a profound rite of passage can be our
threshold to a land with illimitable borders, to a territory that defines us
even as it defies definition, sometimes even as it defies words themselves.
Common to all the lessons that can be extracted from these events is
that they make us more comfortable in the world and extend our hori-
zons. A woman I know in North Carolina never had one of these cere-
monies. Raised a Christian but as una‹liated as could be, she was never
baptized or confirmed and always sensed that something was missing, that
other people possessed a moment, a certainty, an understanding that she
didn’t. Now a teacher in high school, she has never missed a graduation
at the end of the school year. This is her students’ rite of passage as well
as her own. Watching her grinning students, in their caps and gowns, diplo-
mas in hand, reminds her why she teaches; indeed, this moment teaches
her that she has a mission and that every June she watches it reach fruition.
In a sense, there’s a certain timelessness at stake, just as with a religious
rite of passage: she’s connected to the future, to those marching before her
out of the commencement auditorium on their way to college or their
first job. But compared with a more traditional rite of passage, the sort
she missed as a youngster, what she experiences is fundamentally one-sided:
the future may spread before her, but the past doesn’t recede, other than
maybe the past four years of the students who are graduating. She is con-
nected in one direction, bereft and adrift in the other.

The timing of a traditional coming-of-age ceremony has two main influ-

ences. One is historical. For centuries, children were essential to the liveli-
hood of their family. They worked in the fields, in the kitchen, at looms,
in barns and, in their early teens, they took on even more work. At around
eleven or twelve, childhood, which was no great lark anyway, was essen-
tially over. In addition to having more chores and responsibilities, children
were now considered capable of making religious commitments aªecting
the rest of their lives, maybe even their eternal lives. If their young bodies
were reasonably mature, went the reasoning, then so, too, were their souls.2
The other reason for the timing of a traditional coming-of-age ritual is
biological. In our early teens, weird things happen to our bodies. Hair ap-

INTRODUCTION 13
 pears where there wasn’t any. Voices deepen. Breasts develop. Girls men-
struate. Boys ejaculate. This isn’t the body we were born into, and we’re
scared, excited, thrilled. If bodies can change, then everything can change.
Nothing is fixed. Panic, curiosity, bewilderment set in. Just as it seems that
everything is coming undone, we participate in a rite, an initiation, that
honors who we’ve been, recognizes what we are, and tells us who we just
might be.
The elaborate theater of a rite of passage constructs a spiritual shelter,
a refuge to protect us in bad times and bless us in good. But we can’t be
too sure about this. As the Indian grandfather says in Little Big Man,
“Sometimes the magic works; sometimes it doesn’t.” When it works, it
grabs us by the lapels, forcing us to pay attention. Then we have an urge,
a curiosity to see the invisible, to touch the untouchable: to know that
there is more to “us” than us. One of Jean Cocteau’s nieces had this same
instinct. When asked if she wanted to see the new brother an angel had
just delivered, she said, “No! I want to see the angel.”
When we do see the angel—when an initiation really works—it can
unsettle us even as it reassures us. As we separate from one role, we move
along to another, stepping into a new and, for us, unexplored terrain. We
learn—possibly even understand—arcane, esoteric stuª: the secret names
of ancestors or deities or the mythical history of our tribe or barely pro-
nounceable incantations and hardly understood creeds.
And when it doesn’t work, we get peeved and we can’t figure out why.
This is working for everyone else, we might think, so why not for us? A
Baptist woman, years after her minister asked, “Do you love Jesus and want
to follow him?” realized that “They might just as well have asked me if I
loved Panky [her stuªed panda]. It would have meant the same thing to
me.” If they’re going to ask you deep theological questions—well, “deep”
for a twelve year old—then they had darn well better explain them to you
beforehand.
There’s a reason that every culture and faith has these ceremonies: we
demand pauses and breathers along the arc of our lives. Without them,
life would be a blur, a shapeless, endless stream of time and energy. These
ceremonies provide the lulls, the repose, the time out, if you will, to con-
sider where we’re going and why; and where we’ve come from and why;
and what the rhythm of life is and why. As the hurdy-gurdy of life accel-
erates in our ever more “modern” age, it’s a relief to be thrown back—at

14 INTRODUCTION
least momentarily—on the steadier rock where time slows down to a sweet,
lovely crawl and we are almost palpably certain that we are not alone, that
countless generations before us have said the same prayers and been blessed
in the same way, as will countless generations after us. The brilliance of
these ceremonies is how well they connect us to an almost infinite DNA
of time and space. They are our antennae outward, inward, and God-ward.
It’s tempting to mistake these coming-of-age events for transformations,
instant or otherwise. They’re not. They can teach us and they can inspire
us. (They can also bore the hell out of us.) What really matters is not how
they instantaneously transfigure us—a specious claim, anyway—but
what they’re asking: “Who are you?” “Where are you?” These questions,
says the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, are “the beginning of the
way. . . . We can let God in only where we really stand, where we live, where
we live a true life. If we maintain holy discourse with the little world en-
trusted to us, . . . then we are establishing, in this our place, the Divine
Presence.” 3
Without a way—a Muslim way, a Christian way, a Jewish way, a Hindu
way, a Buddhist way—there’s a chance that we will lose our way. These rit-
uals are the maps to ourselves: they are an atlas of our soul. They intro-
duce us to a Presence, and they introduce us to our self.
Around the globe, this introduction is done in many ways. In Zaire,
teenage girls in the Bemba tribe catch water insects with their mouths and
kill a tethered chicken by sitting on its head. In Gabon, ten-year-old boys
drink a nauseating potion. If they vomit, adults chase them through the
village, yelling, “You must die! You must die!” No one is actually killed,
but a village full of grown-ups running amok is su‹ciently scary to con-
vince the boys—it’s su‹ciently scary to convince anyone—to drink the
potion. Next, the boys are locked in a house full of ants. As the bugs bite
the boys, their elders stand outside, chanting, “Now you must die. Now
you must die,” and the terror from the ants and the chanting and the pitch-
blackness of the night and the boys screaming from their pain reaches an
almost intolerable crescendo. But there’s still no reprieve. For the next three
months, the boys live in a cabin in the jungle—naked. They’re painted
white—the color of death for these people. At night, they can join the
dances in the village, but they have to sleep back in the cabin. By the time
they return to live in their village, they’ve proved their courage. They’ve
faced death, and now they’re ready for whatever comes before death.

INTRODUCTION 15
 And in Northern California, teenagers in some Native American tribes
stay awake for several days. This is more than just not falling asleep. As
the philosopher Mircea Eliade wrote, fighting exhaustion really means
you’re “being conscious, present in the world, responsible.” The boys pull
this oª splendidly, largely because they help each other: talking and teas-
ing and nudging each other and doing just about anything they can think
of to stay awake. This is the power of community, of friendship, of hav-
ing comrades who care about you as much as they care about themselves.4

We Westerners are proud of how we transmit religious culture. We like to

think that we’re kind, gentle, compassionate, that we don’t harm anyone,
that we’re “civilized.” We don’t scare anyone out of their minds, like those
kids in Gabon who are stuck in a cabin in the middle of the jungle for
three months. And we don’t circumcise teenagers, a painful practice com-
mon in Africa. We don’t require teenage boys, as they do in the Ndembu
tribe of Zambia, to drink powder made from the burned foreskins of pre-
vious initiates, thought to contain their ancestors’ virility and to bestow
energy, wisdom, and strength. Jews cut the foreskin of a boy when he’s eight
days old, certain that this seals the infant to his eternal covenant with God.
But the Ndembu believe that a foreskin actually contains an inheritance—
a covenant, of sorts; that it possesses the same substance that nourished
the warriors and sages and chiefs who came long before them.
Initiations into today’s world religions are much more tame. We induct
youngsters by reading and studying and reciting texts and chanting prayers.
Of course, we don’t call these “incantations” or “spells” or “charms.” That
might sound much too “superstitious” from a Western perspective.

In his wonderfully tender memoir, North toward Home, the writer Willie
Morris points out how faith can wear out after a while, especially for a boy
like him—smart and ambitious and raised in a small town in Mississippi,
where the only real exposure to religion came from weekly visits to the lo-
cal Methodist church. “As a boy gets older,” Morris wrote, “unless he has
special inner resources, or a tailbone made of sheet-iron, or unless he gets
saved by Billy Graham at twilight in a football stadium, the simple small-
town faith starts wearing thin. . . . With me, the older religion gradually
began to wither not as a result of the exercises of brain cells, or the en-

16 INTRODUCTION
lightenment of civilized discourse, for I would not have known what that
was, but from plain human boredom.”5
We all get bored, and we all wonder from time to time what religion
can really oªer us, if the solace and comfort it sells is the genuine article,
fit not just for eternity but for the present. In fact, eternity has vastly diªer-
ent meanings for youngsters whose faith and parents and community are
all clamoring for an initiation of some kind, something that will signify
the seriousness of this endeavor we call “life,” with all its confusion and
frustration and hope and disappointment. Sometimes, we find the answers
we seek without religion, and without ever having one of these rites of
passage. And that’s fine. But when done right, and experienced right, and
understood right, these events can be incorporated into our lives, maybe
not the day they’re celebrated, but slowly and almost invisibly—days af-
terward, years afterward. Then, the day can be a true turning—a turning
toward God, toward ourselves, toward those “inner resources” that Willie
Morris recalled so sweetly and so gently.
That’s where the real power of these days lies, not so much in their pomp
or their ceremony, but in what they transmit and endow. They can fill us
with grace and maybe with understanding. They can help us embrace life
and shape life— our life. Minus this grace and understanding, we mud-
dle along, doing the best we can. When these events work—really work—
when they shift our awareness and our psyche and cohere us to our faith
and our people, when they open the door of wonder that’s waiting for us,
then we have the wind at our backs—the wind of our God, our tradi-
tions, our people. That’s better than walking upright and alone into the
nonstop gale we call “life.”

INTRODUCTION 17
PART ONE

CHRISTIANITY
Soldiers for Christ

Come Holy Ghost, Creator blest,

And in our hearts take up thy rest;
Come with thy grace and heav’nly aid
To fill the hearts which thou hast made.
catholic hymn

As I went down to the river to pray,

Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the robe and crown,
Good Lord, show me the way.
Oh brother, let’s go down,
Let’s go down, come on down.
Oh brother, let’s go down,
Down in the river to pray.
traditional american gospel song
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