2011

Burning Man theme, 2011

Rites of Passage

The theme for this year’s Burning Man is rites of passage. That theme provides an opening for me to talk about the Unitarian church where I teach Sunday school. As society has become less traditional and more individualistic, rites of passage have fallen by the wayside. Ironically, Unitarians are so nontraditional that we have circled all the way back to doing some pretty decent rites of passage.

Communal rituals in general and rites of passage in particular used to be a big deal. Adolescent males had their flesh gashed or penises sliced. People endured punishing ordeals or lonely vision quests. Greeks went to Eleusis to have their minds blown in secret mysteries, which apparently involved drinking a psychedelic concoction. Today our rites of passage are attenuated. We still have personal milestones, such as getting your driver license or graduating from school, but rites have lost most of their power. A Bar/Bat Mitzvah or a confirmation ceremony carries less weight in the community at large than does reaching your legal drinking age. As Nietzsche said about modern marriage, rites of passage have lost their meaning and are as good as abolished. Elders have ceded initiation rites over to frat boys, who haze their initiates in a crude approximation of the rites that once inducted boys into manhood.

The Lutheran church I grew up in had two rites of passage, both anemic: first communion and confirmation. In ancient times, these rites accompanied the life-changing event of adult baptism, marking your initiation into the body of church. Often, your ties to family were severed at the same time. But when I experienced them, these same rites lacked any sort of gravitas and even lacked any real supernatural weight. Given my experience growing up, you can imagine my surprise when my Unitarian church turned out to deal seriously with a young person’s rites of passage.

The first stage of passage from child to youth is a world class sex ed program for middle schoolers. Unlike the dry, tentative programs you find in public schools, the Unitarian sex ed program deals forthrightly with feelings, desires, social roles, and personal issues, not just anatomy and condoms. A male and a female teacher run the class together, and a promise of mutual confidence among the students encourages open discussions. The visual aids are remarkably frank, and a broad range of sexual expression is portrayed as within the pale.

The second stage is a full-on coming-of-age program. The goal is to help the kids develop their own beliefs and ideals, rather than inculcating in them any particular set of official tenets. Each child is paired with a same-sex adult from the congregation, someone with whom the child can develop a personal relationship and have confidential discussions. The program also engages in group bonding events, such as a ropes course. The program culminates in a weekend retreat. The kids leave on Friday as children and return to their parents on Sunday as youth. We don’t pretend that they’re adults and instead acknowledge “youthdom” as a distinct stage of growing up. On the retreat, the kids participate in imaginative rituals, designed to have psychological effects rather than supernatural ones. The most arduous trial that these kids face is sitting alone in the woods for six hours without any electronic devices or other distractions. It might not be as severe as the mutilating ordeals of adolescents in many other cultures, but let me assure you that the prospect of this “vision quest” strikes fear into the hearts of these multitasking kids.

As modern people, we no longer have the option of participating in the rites of passage that our ancestors passed down to us through the generations. As the poet Wallace Stevens repeatedly alluded to, we’re in a brave new world where we have no choice but to find our own way. I’m lucky to have found a congregation where the elders take the challenge of growing up seriously.

Now we Unitarians might not be much for proselytizing, but if you know some nontraditional parents with grade-school or middle-school kids, consider forwarding this link to them.


PS: This post was originally written based on my daughter's experience with these classes. Since then, I've served as a coming-of-age mentor myself and have now seen the program from the inside. It’s pretty remarkable. —JT, 2015

Other Posts about Rituals

Burning Things with Meaning, 2021 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2021/07/burning-things-with-meaning.html 

Dance Church Seattle, 2017 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2017/09/dance-church-seattle.html 

Table Grace for Nonbelievers, 2016 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2016/07/table-grace-for-nonbelievers.html 

Land of Nice Atheists, 2014 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2014/10/land-of-nice-atheists.html 

Reading about Religion, 2014 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-about-religion.html 

Christmas Unitarian-Style, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/12/christmas-unitarian-style.html 

Welcome Ceremony at Burning Man, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/09/welcome-ceremony-at-burning-man.html 

Burning Man Temple, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-burning-man-temple.html

2011

Aristotle left a mark

Our Real Souls

If, on one hand, someone tries to tell you that your soul is a ghostly entity that lives on after your body dies, don’t buy it. And if, on the other hand, someone tries to tell you that you have no soul at all, don’t believe them, either. If, on the other other hand, someone tells you that our souls are the realest things about us, then read their blog post.

The old idea of the immaterial, eternal soul has lost ground with the advance of science and of modern culture. Scientists have mapped the universe from the quark to the galaxy, and mapped the human being from the allele to the brain wave, and the ghostly soul is nowhere to be found. Besides, the whole idea of the soul seems suspiciously useful as a tool for controlling the rabble. Promises of heavenly rewards and threats of hellish punishment keep the little people in line. Stories about the afterlife distract the poor, the oppressed, and would-be reformers from real-world injustices. Christian priests threatened peasants with hell, Hindu brahmins threatened the lower varnas with horrible reincarnations, and Mormons justified discrimination against Africans by referring to sins that they had committed as spirits before birth. An eternal, immaterial soul? Smells like a con job.

But who says the soul has to be eternal and immaterial to be real? Aristotle said that an ax’s soul would be chopping. Chopping is the ax’s purpose, definition, and use. Similarly, the Stoics said your soul was your “leading edge.” Defining the soul that way lets us atheists use the term honestly. I can say that a particular bar has “soul,” or warn a friend not to lose his “soul” at a job, or put my “soul” into my work. It’s a good word and a useful concept, and it fits everyday terms such as “soul mate.” Admittedly, it feels strange to define the soul as something other an eternal spirit, but that’s just because the medieval Church wants a monopoly on our minds. Aristotle predated the popes by a thousand years, and he said your soul was natural, not supernatural.

Before the fall of Rome, Christianity was tolerant. Theologians surmised that the Logos (Word) had gone to all the world, and that people in Asia, for example, could find salvation without ever hearing about Jesus. Then the barbarians sacked Rome, and Christianity developed a narrower outlook. Aristotle’s real-world view of the soul managed to hold on until after the Reformation. In response to Martin Luther, the Roman Pope and his loyal bishops responded half by reforming and half by retrenching. On the matter of the soul, they finally came down officially with Plato. For me, it's hard to believe that a thousand years ago in Europe there were intellectuals who held to Aristotle’s view of the soul, but it’s true. The Church wants you to believe that it’s the ghostly soul or nothing, and that's what I learned when I grew up.

Today, with the advance of science and philosophy, Plato’s version of the soul is in disrepute. You can’t literally believe in eternal spirits animating temporary bodies. Even so, you still have a soul. What could be more real to you than your own self? It’s your you-ness. You might call it your personal edge. But even if a person’s them-ness seems real, is it really real? Mystics and like-minded seekers might ask. If you’ve ever gotten to know a person, you have encountered the sort of soul I'm talking about. Hell, if you are acquainted with a dog or a cat, you have met a soul. A goldfish? Maybe not. We humans are the most soulful of all. We have evolved to discern other people’s what-nesses. Our senses and instincts are finely tuned to read each others’ souls, making human individuals compellingly real to each other. It is this act awareness of others that enables our unparalleled awareness of self.

Nietzsche said, “Be hard.” If your soul is your edge, as with Aristotle’s ax, I’d rather say “Be sharp.” Better yet, “Be keen.”

2021: In From Darwin to Derrida, David Haig frames concepts of meaning, purpose, and the soul in material terms. His treatment is a lot more thorough than mine. 

2011

Monkey Chant at Burning Man

Burning Man is a yearly festival of radical self-expression, interactive art, and intentional community. That’s fertile ground for an atheist Sunday school teacher. Last year at Burning Man, for instance, I attended my first monkey chant. When I say that religion is largely about community, my experience with the monkey chant is not far from my mind. As science writer Nicholas Wade writes in The Faith Instinct, rituals of shared song and dance are society’s traditional community builders, all the way back to our hunter-gathered days, and all the way up to the boot camp drills and chants in the modern military. We seem to have evolved to form heartfelt communities through shared song and dance.

The monkey chant is just such a ritual of shared song and dance, provided one defines the terms loosely. People at the center of a big tent lead a mob of participants in nonsense chants and rhythmic, bodily gestures. It’s held at the HeeBeeGeeBee Healers’ camp, as part of their mission is to spread “healing energy” into the world. I might deny that healing energy is anything more than a really useful metaphor, but there’s no denying that the HeeBeeGeeBees run a fine monkey chant. Here’s a video from 2007. You get the idea pretty quick, so don’t feel like you need to watch all two and a half minutes. The thin, dark-haired guy running the event is amazing, like a mad guru played by Abraham Lincoln. The dance is based on sacred Balinese dances, but it looks thoroughly upgraded.

The chant goes on for over an hour. My vocal and rhythmic talents were not 100% sufficient to the task. But I did get to the point at which I could chant along without even trying. My voice was on autopilot. Maybe it’s like saying the rosary a hundred times, except that you’re following a leader’s changing nonsense chants rather than speaking by rote. The monkey chant is pretty remarkable, and it’s a ritual we could have undertaken even before we evolved speech.

Today modern religion is more abstract than ecstatic. Music still involves dancing, but not always. For most languages, “music” and “dance” are the same word, as neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin says in This Is Your Brain On Music. Today we have plenty of music no one dances to: hymns, anthems, operas, orchestras, and Pink Floyd. There are also plenty of modern people who never sing or dance, and many of us who do so have clearly not had sufficient practice. We’re a far cry from when the entire tribe danced all night around the fire in healing ceremonies that sent us into trances. But these ancient neural networks are still there in our stone-age brains, which is what makes the monkey chant so compelling.

So if you’re going to Burning Man, check out the monkey chant. It’s held Monday through Thursday from 2 to 3:45 at the HeeBeeGeeBee Healers’ camp, located at 7:00 and Divorce. Predictably, it attracts more of the tribal crowd and fewer of the neo-futurists. Check out the official event post, which has a nice description of the monkey chant and some good links.