Self Initiations Price!

"For example, anthropologists who study initiation rites in tribal cultures tell us that in some of those cultures the rights are so severe and demanding that sometimes a young man or woman does not survive the rights, but dies during the initiation. Our present sensibilities are horrified by that. We cannot imagine allowing something like this to happen, Elders subjecting their adults to trials and ordeals that can lead to their deaths. Yet they lose few young people during those initiations, while, in our own cultures, thousands of young people die every year trying to self initiate, trying to find their own way into adulthood. There is a tragic irony here: we are horrified by what seems to us primitive and cruel, even as thousands of our young people died on necessarily in prematurely because they have no one to help them sort out the meaning of their own Energies. But that is the struggle, and none of us is exempt."

-Ronald Rolheiser. Sacred Fire.