Rites of Passage for young men

There comes a moment in every young man’s life when something shifts. His questions deepen, his choices begin to carry weight, and his world grows wider than his own reflection. Cultures recognised this moment and marked it – with blessing, with challenge, with community, with truth. Yet in the modern West, boys now cross these thresholds silently, often invisibly, without the ancient scaffolding that once shaped their hearts, imaginations, and moral lives. This is why rites of passage still matter. They are not decorative. They are transformative.

Across human history, ancient cultures developed extraordinary ways to guide boys into adulthood. Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep observed that all rites of passage share three movements: separation, transition, and reintegration. Victor Turner later named the in-between as liminality – that vulnerable, potent space where the old self falls away and the new self has not yet emerged. Nearly every civilisation created rituals to guide boys through this space: Jewish bar mitzvah grounding adulthood in Torah, memory, and responsibility; Indigenous initiation ceremonies teaching boys their place in Country, community, and Dreaming; medieval knighthood binding strength to virtue through vows. Although each tradition differed, all understood a common truth: a boy becomes a man not by age, but through formation. None of these rituals were merely symbolic; they were spiritual, ethical, and communal curricula designed to shape the soul. The question facing us now is simple: why did every culture consider this necessary?

Philosophers, too, recognised that growth requires guidance. Plato believed the soul must be trained in harmony – reason, emotion, and desire rightly ordered. Aristotle insisted that virtue is formed through practice and community. Confucius taught that moral adulthood arises through ritual, reverence, and relationship. Aquinas affirmed that grace builds on nature, that human development must be shaped, not assumed. In short, human beings do not simply mature. We are formed. And boys especially need frameworks that teach them how to channel strength toward goodness, passion toward responsibility, and freedom toward service. A rite of passage is the philosophical answer to the ancient human question: How does a boy become a man of character?

We now live in a world where achievement is celebrated but transformation is neglected; where behaviour is managed but identity is rarely named; where boys know how to perform but not always how to become. Without initiation, we end up with confidence without humility, independence without belonging, ambition without purpose, strength without tenderness, and adulthood without wisdom. The soul cannot thrive on self-construction alone. It needs communities that call forth what it cannot yet name in itself.

Scripture is thick with liminal moments: Jacob wrestling in the night, Moses before the burning bush, Samuel waking in the quiet temple, Mary listening in the hush of her room, Jesus standing in the Jordan. God meets people at thresholds. And so do rites of passage. This liminal space – neither child nor adult, neither old identity nor new – is spiritually potent. Turner writes that in liminality a person becomes both no longer and not yet. This is precisely where boys discover who they are, what they value, what they fear, what they hope for, and what they are capable of becoming. Rites of passage create a safe container for this sacred uncertainty.

In ancient cultures, elders stood at the centre of initiation, men who embodied the virtues boys were to learn: honour, courage, restraint, wisdom, compassion, perseverance. Today, many boys receive their so-called mentorship from social media, celebrity culture, or online influencers who profit from bravado, anger, or ego. A rite of passage restores the rightful place of elders: men who are good, steady, and reflective; men who show that strength can be gentle, responsibility can be joyful, and faith can be lived with humility. Young men deserve apprenticeship in goodness.

Ancient rites also understood that a rite without virtue is merely an event. They existed not to dramatize adulthood, but to anchor it. At their best, rites of passage gave boys courage shaped by conscience, strength shaped by service, freedom shaped by responsibility, identity shaped by community, purpose shaped by wisdom, and belonging shaped by story. The Christian tradition does the same. Jesus formed His disciples through experiences that demanded maturity, generosity, and courage a slow initiation into a new way of being human. This is the heart of every meaningful rite: not to impress a boy, but to awaken him.

We are living in a time of profound moral disorientation for young men — confusion about identity, expectation, purpose, and belonging. Rites of passage do not solve everything, but they create a pathway where none may exist. They tell a young man, You are not alone. You are capable of goodness. You are needed. You have responsibility. You are becoming. And perhaps most importantly: We see who you are becoming, and we bless it.

In a world starving for men of depth, tenderness, courage, and moral clarity, rites of passage are not quaint. They are essential. They return young men to themselves. They return them to community. They return them to God.

Through the glass we see

There’s a quiet truth about the soul that we often forget in the noise of our days: what we take in becomes what we see. The images we scroll past, the stories we repeat, the voices that fill our feed: all of them polish or cloud the lens through which we look at the world.

The ancients called this contemplation. To see rightly, however, in our modern age, we often confuse seeing with consuming. We devour content without noticing how it begins to devour us back, reshaping our instincts, dulling our compassion, training our gaze toward cynicism or spectacle.

Richard Rohr suggests that the way we see anything is the way we see everything. I interpret this to mean that our perception is never neutral. Our lens is a moral instrument. It is formed by love or by fear, by humility or by ego. What we see, we slowly become.

The lens as sacrament

Karl Rahner, one of my favourite theologians, proposed that the Christian of the future will be a mystic – or will not exist at all. By this he did not mean that we all must live in cloisters, rather that faith will depend on our ability to see God in all things, not just in churches or in moments of comfort or need.

Rahner’s mysticism is incarnational. He invites us to perceive the divine shimmering in the ordinary, to look at the world through a sacramental lens. The sacrament is not a magical object; it is an awakening of the eye. The bread and wine do not change so much as we are changed in beholding them.

So too with the world. What we choose to watch, read, or listen to either sharpens our sight toward grace or dulls it toward despair. Every image we absorb can become a tiny liturgy, forming us for heaven or numbing us to it.

Reframing the feed

Perhaps, then, the work of faith in this digital age is not only prayer but curation. A kind of spiritual editing.

When Rohr speaks of the contemplative mind, he describes a way of seeing that is patient, non-dual, and deeply attentive. It does not rush to judgment. It notices what is beneath the surface. To cultivate such sight is to resist the algorithms that reward outrage and performative virtue. It is to let silence interrupt the scroll, and wonder interrupt certainty.

Maybe the holiest act today is not to post more, but to perceive better. To ask: does what I read make me kinder? Does what I watch awaken gratitude or greed? Do the voices I follow lead me closer to compassion or to contempt?

The Gospel of Seeing

The Gospels are, at their core, a story of vision. Blind men see. Fishermen recognize the risen Christ not by argument, but by the breaking of bread. Mary Magdalene mistakes Jesus for the gardener until she hears her name and her eyes are opened.

To see rightly is not to have all the facts, but to encounter the truth in flesh and dust. To look at the world and whisper, with Rahner, God is here.

The invitation of Advent and really, of every day that dawns, is to cleanse the lens. To let grace reframe the gaze, resisting cynicism with wonder. To guard with intent what enters the heart through the eyes and ears.

Because faith, like sight, is learned and evolving. And what we see most often, we eventually start to believe.

The path and the shoes

A short reflection

There are times in life when we stand at the edge of a path and feel ready to walk. We’ve studied the map, packed what we think we’ll need, and set out with purpose, perhaps even with a little Louboutin in our stride. At other times, the path appears beneath our feet without warning — rough, uneven, and not of our choosing. We would never have picked it. Yet, somehow, it becomes ours.

The thing about the path is that we do not always have the luxury of choice. But perhaps we do get to choose our shoes.

Our shoes carry the marks of every place we’ve been. Some are well-worn with faith and friendship, sturdy Doc Martins that have trudged through muddy storms and stood their ground. Others still bear the blisters of loss, disappointment, or change. There are days we lace up determination, Converse-style, ready to take on the world one honest step at a time. Then there are moments when we slip into the elegance of Manolo Blahnik grace, steadying ourselves with beauty, dignity and maybe just a hint of humour at life’s absurdity.

Sometimes we have old favourites that encompass our feet in a warm sense of familiarity. Other times, we find ourselves breaking in new and unyielding leather that confines, restricts, impinges. Yet with time, even those begin to soften if we embrace the grace of persistence.

Whatever the path — rocky or smooth, certain or unknown — it is the shoes that help us walk it. They are our preparation, our prayer, our capacity to forgive and to hope. They are the habits we’ve formed in the quiet moments, the values stitched by those who have loved us into being.

Sometimes grace looks like a new pair of shoes — courage when we are tired, peace when the noise grows loud, compassion when our hearts harden. And sometimes grace is the barefoot walk — the holy ground where all we can do is trust that the One who walks beside us knows the way.

The Ugly Truth

We talk about the pursuit of Truth, of Veritas. When will we admit that Truth rarely comes dressed for dinner parties? It does not arrive ribbon-tied, polished, or polite. Think instead of Jesus on the cross: disfigured, broken, utterly human. Not a sight we would post on our Instagram feed or even on Facebook. And yet this is the greatest Truth of all.

The truth about a person is just as raw. To love is to love, not to curate, edit, or demand. Mel Robbins says it plainly enough: it’s not our job to change someone else. Every person carries ways of being that resonate with us and ways that jar against our sensibilities. Maybe the holier practice is not in reshaping others but in learning to sit with the jarring. Because running off to complain and demanding someone change? That doesn’t transform them, it simply breeds falseness. And falseness is a thin disguise that always wears through.

Jesus warned: take the plank out of your own eye first. Not a metaphor reserved for ‘those other people.’ He meant me. He meant you. We all drag around planks of our own: blind to their weight, yet others can see them clearly. Are we prepared to let Truth confront us? To be humbled by what it reveals? It hurts. But humility grows there, and humility – real humility – is aspirational, a trait worth pursuing with every fibre of our being.

Truth matters and is grounded in fact. Vanity does not and it crumbles under the weight of the cross. Truth endures, scars and all. Truth emerges from our brokenness. Truth is reflected in what we do SO much more than what we say. So ACT for Truth. And leave your fragile hang-ups at home.

As a friend once said, with more wisdom than I can muster:

It is a sad fact that the populous today try to make themselves look good by making other people look bad. They do not achieve anything themselves just mince around in their entitled angry little bubble. Trying to knock down everyone who achieves more than them, which is pretty much ‘everyone’. There is no sense of honour or majesty in those people, they wander around with superior self-importance while their soul shuffles around like a diseased rat.

Truth.

A prayer

Loving God,

We walk through life knowing the world holds illness, loss and struggle. Yet when those shadows touch our own circle, we feel the tremor of our own mortality and the fear of meaning slipping away. Suffering is not just pain but the unravelling of our story. Be with us as we stand beside one another in these unraveled places. May our presence, honesty and love be threads of hope that begin weaving meaning back together.

Amen.

We all want heaven. What are we doing about it?

Aquinas says our true end is happiness in God and that charity gives shape to every other virtue. If that’s true, then everyday life becomes deeply theological: how we answer emails, correct a misunderstanding, or hold a boundary is either training our hearts for heaven or dragging them away. Personal formation is not an add-on; it is the craft of becoming the kind of people who could bear the weight of glory. We often think about carrying a cross but how often do we think of the call to carry that sort of glory?

We taste heaven whenever truth is spoken (preferably kindly) but at least with clarity, forgiveness interrupts a spiral, or the most vulnerable are placed at the centre. We set our compass toward the Beatitudes and let them measure our success: Are the poor blessed here or is it those who are already in possession of so much? Do the peacemakers get room to work? God meets us in the real, not the ideal. God meets us in the mess, in the broken moments, in the alternate views (after all Jesus was pretty alternate in his time to the chief priests and many others). How dangerous is the world if all have to conform to one view, it is the different lenses in life that help us see things we would not see otherwise making us wiser, richer, stronger, kinder.

Three small fidelities for the week:

Begin with presence. Before your first activity, conversation, even your first coffee (scary thought I know), sit for a moment with God.

See with preference. In every decision ask, Who benefits? Who is left out? Tilt the table toward the person in your life who is most challenged and challenging.

Bless aloud. Name the good you see in a colleague’s patience, a child’s effort, a loved one’s courage. Heaven grows where gratitude is spoken.

‘Everybody wants to go to heaven’ is not a slogan about later; it is a charge for now. We contemplate and then hand on the fruits. Veritas becomes mercy in motion. In a Jubilee Year of hope as we continue our pilgrimage of life, we apprentice one another in love. And that, is what we are doing about it.

Lifted UP

There is something profoundly human about the Feast of the Assumption. It is a moment that does not draw us away from our humanity, even though at first glance it may seem otherworldly as Mary is taken body and soul into heaven (a concept that challenges the finite human cognition), rather it plunges us into the depths of the gift of life.

Mary is not assumed because she was an angel, flawless and untouched by the struggles of ordinary life. She was a woman of her people: cooking, cleaning, grieving, laughing, enduring whispers of gossip and carrying in her body the daily weariness of work and motherhood. She lived in obscurity, in the small and often unseen corners of Galilee. And yet, it is this woman, the one who said yes in an unremarkable town, whom the Church proclaims is lifted fully into God’s eternal embrace.

For those of us who carry loss, fatigue, or longing, the Assumption offers hope. It reminds us that no part of our lives is wasted in God’s eyes. The ordinary and hidden choices, the yes whispered quietly in faith, the grief we shoulder with love. These are gathered up, honoured, and ultimately transformed.

Mary’s Assumption tells us something more radical still: heaven is not far away. It is not a remote reward at the end of life, but a reality already pressing in on us, already present wherever love takes hold. When Mary is lifted into heaven she becomes for us a signpost, a declaration that our humanity is not destined for decay but for glory.

The Assumption is not only about Mary’s glory. In a way it is also about ours. Mary’s life is a promise of what God intends for all creation: redemption that does not abandon the body but transfigures it. In a culture that often separates the spiritual from the material, the Assumption insists that what we do with our bodies – our gestures of tenderness, the meals we share, the injustices we confront, the hands we extend – matters to God. Our salvation is not an escape from the physical, but a fulfilment of it.

So perhaps today we might ask: what in my own life longs to be lifted up? What might God be drawing into the light, promising not to erase but to transfigure? Like Mary, may we find the courage to say yes to that promise.

The Weight of What Is Gone: A Theology of Loss

There are days when absence barks louder than presence.

Loss is not a chapter we choose, yet it writes itself into the margins of our lives. It is in silence as you enter a space, follow routine, or go to say good morning or good night. We do not invite grief, but she enters anyway, barefoot and solemn, bringing with her a strange kind of wisdom that burns before it blesses.

The theology of loss is not tidy. It is not a doctrine to be memorised or a creed to be recited. It is more like a psalm: part lament, part longing, part protest, wholly holy. It echoes Job’s cry from the ash heap and Mary’s silence beneath the Cross. It finds its centre in a God who does not remain distant from sorrow, but bleeds.

There is no resurrection without Good Friday. No empty tomb without a stone first sealing the dark. And what darkness there can be!

To lose is to become aware that we are not our own.  That all we love, all we are, is gift. And perhaps this is why it hurts so much. For in loss we are reminded that we are creatures of dust and breath, of love and finitude. We ache because we have loved. And we continue to love even when what we love is gone. It is the Holy Saturday of moments, when hope feels buried and God seems silent.

The theology of loss calls us not to deny pain, but to dwell in it honestly, trusting that Christ walks even here. In the shadowed valley, in the empty bed, in the unused lead, and the tail that no longer wags. The Incarnation tells us that God became flesh not just to preach and to heal, but to weep. To lose. To be broken. As people we are made to love and so we are made to grieve.

Loss is a teacher none of us want, yet it reveals a sacred truth: the world is not ours to control. But it is ours to love. And when we love, we risk. The deeper the love, the deeper the grief. But also: the deeper the grace.

So we sit with loss not as those without hope, but as those who carry wounds that are being slowly transformed, not erased, but transfigured. Scars remain, but they shine.

And we will see that loss, though cruel and real, is not the final word.

Love is.

Jubilee Hospitality

In this Jubilee year hospitality is about encounter not entertainment. At the table of our encounter we offer belonging, not simply food. It is the offer of a seat at the table that matters most.

In a world addicted to efficiency and exhausted by division, hospitality is an act of resistance. We need to remember we are human beings, not human doings. To slow down, to see, to share. These are countercultural acts. To welcome those who cannot repay you. To invite someone who believes differently. To set the table even when your life feels messy. To bring out your best plates. To pause and celebrate on a weekday that is not your birthday or an anniversary.

To practice Jubilee hospitality is to live as if we truly believe that every human being bears the image of God — even those we are tempted to ignore. It means that the refugee is not a problem to be solved but a guest to be honoured. That the lonely elder is not a statistic but a bearer of wisdom. That the enemy is not outside the bounds of grace.

In the Jubilee, walls fall and doors open. Not just the ones made of bricks, but the ones we build inside ourselves. Hospitality is how we hold space until justice catches up.

Sacred in a shifting world

There’s a strange discomfort that comes with the word tradition these days. It can feel like an anchor, a shackle or a heavy weight at times., depending on who’s holding it. In secular discourse, tradition is often seen as the antithesis of progress – something dusty, rigid, inherited without interrogation. Sometimes, in my Church, it’s weaponised as a shield against uncertainty or as a reason to refuse evolution. I suggest that tradition, rightly understood, is neither nostalgia nor control. It is a living memory. A sacred inheritance. A tether to meaning in a time that so often seems dislocated and disoriented.

Fidelity does not mean stasis. We are called to deepen, to unfold the truth that has been handed down, not merely to parrot it back. If tradition is to mean anything in a Church that still dares to call itself Catholic (universal) then it must remain both rooted and responsive. Aquinas reminds us that veritas (truth) is the conformity of the intellect to reality. But reality shifts. Cultures evolve. Voices once silenced – women, the poor, the marginalised – now rise with a clarity and urgency that simply can no longer be ignored. To pretend that divine truth can only be understood in a single register is not orthodoxy. It is idolatry of the familiar. We are not called to abandon tradition, far from it, but we are called to ask: What do we honour? And what have we enshrined that was never holy to begin with?

Let’s be honest. Some traditions have protected the sacred. Others have protected power. The two are not the same and to name this is not betrayal, it is fidelity to the Gospel. Jesus himself was not a curator of comfort. He was deeply formed in the Jewish tradition, yet radically open to the Spirit’s work beyond it. He healed on the Sabbath. He touched the unclean. He restored dignity before he enforced rules.

In today’s secularised world where individualism is exalted and truth is often reduced to personal opinion, tradition offers something essential: a way of anchoring identity in a reality more enduring than algorithms or passing trends. Yet tradition cannot speak to the modern heart unless it learns to breathe anew. Karl Rahner once warned that “the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not be at all”, a line that feels less like prophecy and more like necessity in our disenchanted age. The task of tradition now is not to retreat into self-preservation, but to open itself to wonder, to mysticism, to silence, to the slow, unfolding work of the Spirit who, as John’s Gospel promises, “will lead you into all truth.” But that kind of openness requires courage. Especially from women. Especially from those on the margins. When we speak of evolving tradition, we are often accused of threatening the foundations.  If the foundations are divine, they will not crumble. And if they do crumble perhaps they were not divine to begin with.

We must learn to distinguish between what is sacred and what is merely familiar. The Incarnation itself (God made flesh) was a scandalous act of tradition’s evolution. The infinite clothed itself in time. The eternal entered history. Tradition is not about preserving the exact form of the jar. It’s about protecting the water within.

So let us honour tradition. Let us light the candles, sing the psalms, receive the sacraments with awe. But let us also make room. Let us not confuse faithfulness with fear. Let us risk reimagining, not because we want to leave the Church behind, but because we believe in her enough to want her whole.

We need tradition. But we also need fire.
We need memory. But we also need prophecy.
And we need the Church – not just as it was, but as it could be.

Because tradition, at its best, is not the silence of the past.
It is the echo of God still speaking.