What’s the most meaningful rite of passage you’ve experienced?

What’s the most meaningful rite of passage you’ve experienced?

UU World asked readers to tell us about the most meaningful rite of passage they had experienced.

Sonja L. Cohen
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(© EdStock/istockphoto)

© EdStock/istockphoto

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The Rev. David Pyle, district executive of the UUA’s Joseph Priestley District, writes: “Joining the military had both real world and ritual significance. I went to bed one night in the room I had spent my childhood in, and the next night in a barracks room almost a thousand miles away. I then experienced a transformation in my personal identity and sense of purpose. I made a series of commitments to something larger than my own self and interest. And I began on a path that grew my sense of leadership and responsibility. When I came ‘home’ for the first time six months later for Christmas, I was a different person, and it was no longer ‘home’ in the same way it had been. Basic Training marked a clear boundary between the responsibilities I held in childhood, and the new, expanded responsibilities I held as an adult.”

The Rev. Ralph Roberts, who attends Valley Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Chandler, Arizona, writes: “At 13 I realized I was gay and [told] my parents. . . . [M]y mother presented me with a set of bone china. I think she was responding to a sense of the need for a rite of passage. A wedding was probably the most readily accessible ritual form that she could imagine that also tied in to what I had shared with them about who I was and what I wanted for myself as I got older. Lacking some familiar ‘your son is gay’ ritual, my mom fell back on older more familiar rites of passage, and that is how I ended up with the beginnings of a dowry or bride price before I could even drive.”

Other readers mentioned having a croning ceremony, becoming a parent, joining a UU congregation, being ordained, and voting for the first time.

Share your own rite of passage experience. Leave a comment below.

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