Have we lost our Rites of Passage?

It is common these days to hear that “we have lost our rites”. But, the way I see it, rites are not manufactured and cannot be lost. Rites are as inevitable as the waning and waxing of the moon. Birth, childhood, adolescence, sexual maturation, matrescence and patrescene, sickness or injury, menopause, eldering, and death. These physical thresholds are the architecture of the soul's journey. During these times changes in our bodies awaken us and guide us into to the wonders and mysteries of the next phase of our lives. We are prepared from within to let go of former identities and receive the teachings and imprints with which we will engage the responsibilities and opportunities of the phase we are entering. I believe it is the physical and inevitable nature of these rites that has evoked the human culture of ritual and celebration.

So, what is this sense of loss? I propose that what we really mean when we say that “we have lost our rites” is that there has been a take over of our rites by a culture we are collectively beginning to question and reject. It is a culture of war and domination. We live in an increasingly technocratic culture of war and our rites are, in fact, sheltered and ritualized by this culture on behalf of this culture’s aim. This culture has been on a mission for millennia, and is now deeply entrenched across the globe. The loss we feel is the grief that accompanies the moment we realize that we are initiates in a culture of death.

It is the women’s mysteries and birth in particular that most explicitly demonstrate the physiological imperative of rites of passage and that all other ritualized rites of passage originate from. It is from this vantage that I want to explore the war culture’s hold on our rites of passage. I want to begin by celebrating women, and the men who protect and respect them. I celebrate the sheltering of the Rite of Birthing from the war culture amid unbelievable pressures and atrocities that span thousands of years and countless generations. However, in the last several hundred years, with the weapons of patriarchal religion and the witch trials of Europe, women’s sovereignty in the birth rite has been penetrated by mechanistic medicine and male domination. The invasion of the culture of war into this most primary and sacred rite is so complete and so nuanced that it is difficult to know where to begin. It is important to remind us that though women’s bodies are at the center of harm, it is not helpful to divide humanity into victim and perpetrator along gender lines. Women are vulnerable and especially so during childbirth. In this way it is inevitable that women and children would receive the brunt force of a culture at war, though everybody is complicit in its origination and continuation.

A core function of any rite of passage is that through the conditions of the passage, our innate gifts are revealed and we receive the inspiration and instruction about how to use them of behalf of life. In a life affirming culture, this is an initiation into self respect, personal responsibility and ultimately, service. In the war culture, these affirmative qualities are turned on their head, for it is in the interest of the culture not to uplift the woman but to ensure her submission. The rite of childbirth in war culture is an initiation into control, submission and technocratic takeover of what is physiologically normal. For example, women in childbirth are expected to subject themselves to genital touch and manipulation in the form of cervical checks and obstetric techniques of holding the vulva open during the emergence of the baby with fingers or instruments. I have witnessed obstetricians force cervical exams on mothers who were crying out in pain and anguish for them to stop. Often, having a check is not offered as a choice but as an inevitability. It is not necessary to check the cervix in labor, and should be a consensual offering from care providers, not a requirement. But to the medical model, cervical dilation is the linear map of progress in labor, and without it they don’t have the information they need to control the flow and timeline of the birth. Checking without true informed consent is a blatant demand for submission.

Another example is the use of technology in birth without evidence that it benefits mothers and baby. Studies demonstrate that continuous fetal monitoring does not improve outcomes for babies or mothers and that it increases surgical and instrumental birth, that is, birth with forceps or vacuum. Surgical and instrumental birth has major implications for maternal and child well being on physical and emotional levels. Yet women birthing in the hospital are not “allowed” to decline continuous monitoring. When the external monitors fail to capture heat tones through the abdomen and contracting uterus, the obstetric model may even go so far as to artificially rupture the membranes and screw a tiny monitor into the scalp of the baby still within the birthing canal. Women are expected to give up their informed consent, intuitive knowing and critical thinking, yielding to information interpreted by “experts” trained to adhere to routines and protocols that are not in service the unique woman and child before them. When a woman’s intuitive knowing and critical thinking produce differing conclusions from the “care” provider, such as declining routine cervical checks or questioning the routine use of continuous fetal monitoring despite the lack of evidence that it is helpful and known impact on the birthing outcomes for the woman, women may be ignored, abused, gaslighted and risk their children being kept from them or their homes being invaded by child protection agencies. In this way, women are initiated into self denial rather than self respect and sacred responsibility.

Another key component to rites of passage is the discovery of one’s personal power and connection to Source by meeting adversity, mystery and challenge. The initiate must be allowed to travel this hallowed ground on their own two feet, or they may never learn to trust the darkness, the fertile source from which all things arise. In the war culture, most care providers, parents and pregnant people are educated about birth as a linear trajectory. This model says that birth has a predictable and “safe” timeline and sequence of events and deviation from the sequence is reason to rescue the mother and baby through intervention. The truth, borne out by research, traditional knowledge, intuitive knowledge and first hand experience is that physiological birth is a labyrinth of possibilities, it is non linear and infinite in its potential. When a woman is “saved” from this winding path unnecessarily her discovery of her own power can be dramatically interrupted. This is not to say that every intervention in birth is unnecessary or that every birth with medical aspects severs a woman from her power. Women are resilient and amazing and life often gives us surprising obstacles to navigate in the fertile darkness of our rites. Sometimes, intervention is necessary to prevent harm to mother or baby or in the case of an epidural, for example, can be a compassionate contribution to the mothers passage. Sometimes, the disruptive “savior” is not even medical. It could be a midwife telling a woman to change positions when it was not her instinct to do so. This interruption of instinct could be as devastating to a woman's rite as an unwanted medical intervention or unwelcome cervical exam. Ultimately, what will make the difference between a compassionate intervention and a severance from source will be how the woman is treated and how she is regarded. Are the people around her treating her with utmost respect and reverence for her life giving, life serving act? Is the knowledge in the room being used in service to the woman or in service to the institution? Is this woman uplifted in her choice and personal power, or is her voice subsumed by dogma and control?

Finally, rites of passage must take place in the context of a loving community of humans and more than human relatives who know and care about us. The presence of a supportive community is, perhaps, the most essential ingredient in a rite of passage for a life affirming culture. Rites of passage happen within an individual on behalf of all life. If there is no community to serve, there will be no evocation of gift. Within the context of a loving community of family, friends and place, almost every rite can happen organically, naturally and healthfully. It is simply the nature of things. In contrast, for a culture bent toward war, division is central. Women are expected to leave their homes, family and land and entrust themselves to the medical industrial complex where it is very likely that they will be isolated from family and friends, from nature, from nourishment. The family will probably return to an empty home and a woman may spend her first many weeks of motherhood more or less alone with her baby. The severance of women from their support systems during birth and postpartum is one of the primary ways that the take over has been allowed to occur. A woman would only, could only, ever accept what the war culture has to offer her in the absence of her women folk who for eons have nurtured her passage in the most tender, celebratory and loving ways. In the middle ages, the flock of women who attended their sister’s births and cared for her in the following days and weeks were called “god siblings” shortened to “godsib”. Threatened by what happened behind closed doors in this women only space, the (male) church leadership forbade the practice. Thus transforming the “god sibling” of a life affirming culture into the “gossips” we are now familiar with; bitter or lonely women who talk behind each other’s back and take pleasure in the suffering of others. This interpretation of the gossip is a myth of the war culture, a fabrication of reality on behalf of a world view that aims to distort and divide.

We know that despite variations in its expression, physiological, undisturbed birth is undoubtedly associated with the least risk to mothers and babies. When Physiologic birth is sheltered and facilitated by skilled attendants who respect women and birth and are able to identify authentic reason for concern or life saving intervention (which will always include conference with the mother’s own inner knowing), birth as a rite of passage initiates women into profound stores of inner strength and a great contact with Love that prepares them for the journey of motherhood. It is required of these attendants to face their own fears, to release dogma and meet every moment new. To be in such a place of power is to be accountable to a store of wisdom that has been dutifully accumulated in service to life, never for personal power or gain at the expense of others. This is the task of every parent, every mentor, teacher and elder overseeing the rites of those in their care.

I will say here, that is it the task of wise and caring medical professionals to make amends for the abuse that has been done to women and the midwives and godsibs who have served them over the ages. It is the task of anyone initiated into the industrial and exploitative culture of modern medicine to do the hard work of unwinding their conditioning, discovering their true history, and use their skills to uplift the wisdom of those they are meant to serve. It is for medical professionals to ask themselves who they are in it for. It is for those of us at the gates; midwives, doctors, mothers, doulas, nurses and so many more, to make bonds on behalf of life that are woven in respect and mutuality.

All rites are ripe with the potential to raise up the individual to their most wonderful expression on behalf of the whole. In order to reclaim our rites from the war culture, we need to ourselves be threaded into the streams of life that are wise, faithful, and loving. We must apprentice ourselves to Life. We must re-member our own rites and recover what was meant for us, but was lost along the way. We must make offerings to the ones who safeguard these treasures. The forest, the mountains, the glistening hawk, the sound of the wind under an eagle’s wing. The old ones, the unseen ones, the little ones. We must touch each other with passionate generosity and tremendous care, care to give pleasure and ease and joy and never ever steal hollow gratification from the store of another’s life force. We must be willing to gather together and create a nest for the initiate, for the war culture isn’t going anywhere soon and will slip into any tear in the fabric. We must refuse submission while refraining from domination. We will return ourselves to the origin, forgiving our own births and the births we have given. We must go on, half blind as we are, on behalf of the youth, never losing the tune of the song that is our only guide to one another and, eventually, home together. It is the song of beauty and love, art and honesty and every possible faceted emotion. It is the lament of a vast grief, grief so wide and deep our echo may not return for generations to come but on it will be words of wisdom, ways to keep the children well and the waters clean.