Suicide, Vaux and Liminality

I borrowed some CD's off Jonny yesterday of four talks by David Tacey. Tacey is a psychologist and theologian who lectures and writes on contemporary spirituality. I've listened to the first two and my mind is buzzing with thoughts and ideas - I woke up at 5 am this morning with my mind still making connections.

The area I am drawn to particularly is his thinking about the high rates of suicide in young people. To understand this tragic phenomena further he spoke with some aboriginal tribal elders about why they thought there were high levels of suicide. Their response was that they perceived a lack of 'rites of passage' within contemporary society and therefore people were unable to transition from childhood to adulthood. In tribal communities it is often the case that there is a significant right of passage that people go through when passing from childhood to adulthood. During this time they become an adult, childhoods dies and adult life is born. It's a time of liminality where communitas is created for a temporary time period. The aboriginal response to the problem of suicide in contemporary society is that people don't know how to transition to adulthood because there are no longer any rights of passage. Rites of passage create space for the child to die and the adult to be born. If the child is not allowed to die there is a danger that it can kill the latent adult.

I am wondering whether emerging churches need to find rites of passage that allow them to grow into adulthood. It maybe that there is a high rate of suicide in emerging churches (such as Vaux) because there are no rights of passage into adulthood. Childhood is exciting, creative, new and dynamic stage but it is a stage which needs to transition into adulthood for its own survival. This is not a criticism but just an observation that rites of passage enable sustainability and that perhaps corporate rites of passage are missing within the emerging church.

Steve Collins was speaking this morning on the blah...tour about Grace. He was saying that in the past Grace didn't know whether they'd still be functioning in a few weeks time, it was a very fragile community. Now they feel as though there is a level of sustainability - they've got their name on the church notice board! and the future is something that they now engage with in a hopeful way, perhaps a move to adulthood has taken place?

I had an interesting on-line conversation with steve taylor about whether the emerging church should be community rather than communitas. Communitas is essentially a period of transition and of liminality, i wonder whether emerging churches are not even in a time of liminality as liminality suggests transition to adulthood...

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Comments

[philjohnson]

Ben

Your observation about rites of passage is valuable. One of the weaknesses of the advent of industrialisation is that as the decades have ensued the role of rites of passage has tended to recede to infant baptism (or baby dedication among evangelicals who do not hold to paedo-baptism), marking one's 21st birthday, and marriage.

In some European cultures where family ties have been based on stronger kinship relations (i.e. not the "nuclear family"), there has been a bit more a cultural emphasis on rites. These have included in Eastern European settings a "naming day" for a child (more important than the actual day one was born), chrismation (reception into membership in the Eastern Orthodox community), confirmation ceremonies and catechism classes, making one's entrance into formal society (ball-dance at age 16) and so forth.

If you consider the widespread interest in English-speaking countries in pagan and wiccan pathways then you'll notice how various rites are celebrated within natural settings (casting a circle on a beach or in a forest), with rites for girls at menstruation, adult women at menopause and post-menopause, and various vision quests as spiritual rites of initiation and transformation.

This Pagan form of alternate spirituality is often understood by scholars to represent an attempt to "re-enchant" the world. Re-enchantment is perceived as a deep heart felt need because non-spiritual explanations of reality in modern times brought about "disenchantment" (the dimunition of spiritual explanations of reality, the receding of "pre-scientific views" in religion, etc).

I feel that emerging church projects worldwide could dialogue with contemporary non-Christian culture on rites of passage. Some critical reflection on the desert and medieval monastics might prove fruitful in one direction ("what has the church thought and done in the past"). But I also feel that if EC communities have face-to-face dialogues with Pagan communities (for example), there would be some interesting points of comparison and contrast on individual and communal transitions.

If we ask "what do neo-pagan rites of passage say back to the church?", that might provide another goad to critical discussion among EC communities about developing rites that link to Scripture and church traditions as well as being contextual for our era.

The idea is not to borrow or imitate what Pagans necessarily do. Instead, as some people have gravitated to Paganism after a nominal connection with a "failed faith" inside church, then we must ask in what ways has the loss of rites of passage contributed to the reasons why people have drifted on (or do not even think that the church is a place of spirituality). What does the mirror image reflected back at us from Pagans say about the things we have neglected to do?

[Mike R]

Our community is in the process of developing a version of a Rule of Life, after the ancient monastic tradition.

I don't know if this is a step in the right direction, but it feels that way.

[Andrew Dowsett]

Helpful comments, Ben. I think it is worth reflecting on why we have seen things with short life spans in EC to date. In part, I think it is a reaction - and probably a right reaction - to seeing expressions of church that are desperately clinging on, refusing to face death; to the insecurity that tells us that if we start something as a leader it needs to be established forever in order to be a success; a healthy rediscovery of Jesus' organic imagery, of seeds that need to die in order to bear fruit (in this regard, Vaux no longer exists, but it gave birth to lots of other things, and, I'd suggest, still does).

I guess there is a difference between suicide, which is an act of despair and results only in death, and choosing to lay down one's life (or collective life), which is an act of hope and faith and results in new life in cycles.

I think we probably need a mixed economy of things that will last the distance and things that will be only for a short season; of community and communitas...

But I do think that we might need to reflect on developing or rediscover/applying appropriate rites of passage. Good thoughts. Thank you.

[Brad Anderson]

Ben, thanks for your comments, this is an issue I've been thinking about lately as well. This short 'half-life' of EC's is a major gap in Gibbs & Bolger's book, and I think there is some constructive work that can be done in thinking through some of these issues. I appreciate your ideas on rites of passage as well. I hope this discussion will continue.

[Kester]

Thanks for this Ben - great thoughts. Been on holiday, so rather slow on the uptake.

Another perspective might be helpful: the Vaux 'suicide' *was* the right of passage into adulthood. In this sense, for many people to continue going to the same old church doing the same old things is actually the infantile thing, the thing that prevents them from moving into a new phase. This was very much how we saw things. We had to 'kill' it (and I like the suicide tip - very dramatically Vaux!) because unless we did we'd not move on.

BTW, this is no criticism of Grace. Jonny and I had a great chat about that 10 days or so ago, and it's great to see how they have shed various skins and moved on. But for us, Vaux as a public representation was a skin that needed shedding. The spirituality, the community relationships behind that public projection, go on.

Chatting to someone leading another Vx-style group recently (I won't say who) was saying they were contemplating a similar move. Not as a suicide, but precisely as a killing of the infant to allow the adult to grow - which is very much the archetype many rites of passage use.

[Nic]

I’m probably not qualified to say this, having gone AWOL for its last two years, but the Vauxicide was probably more hunger strike than affixi-wank! A case of knowing when to quit– go out gracefully.

I buy the mixed-economy line and my take on Vaux is that it was always going to be contingent. More down the line of Hakim Bey’s TAZ

I think Kes is right, Vaux acted as an escape-vehicle and life raft, an expression of maturity. We took responsibility for our own spiritual well being, as we were dying where we were. A community-in-passage taking care of what was important to us.

However, I also wonder If there wasn’t something more Freudian going on, more to do with patricide. We were pretty dedicated to the playful jamming of authority. In some respects, more a rediscovery of the ‘child’ and ‘play’.

It was interesting that the very last service was a feast, a symbolic potlatch and closure. Although like ‘Monsieur Mangetout’ we should have ‘done’ the equipment, devoured the Macs and projectors.

[Account Deleted]

Interesting post. I have two boys and although only small, the idea of transition to manhood has been floating around my head for ages. Not only that, but I think there is a crisis of manhood: society and Church.

Are not organisations different from people though? There is a slow drift from the initial purpose and they become self serving instead of serving. Having an end stops this and lets something else happen and individuals grow up.

I too am attracted to adopting a 'rule' though can't pursuade anyone else yet. To me this helps in both the above points.