The Between Fathers and Sons program offers an initiation process for adolescent males situated firmly in a spiritual context. Why? Spiritual transformation is at the heart of an adolescent male’s transition into manhood. In indigenous cultures, initiation into manhood is seen primarily as spiritual transformation. Mircea Eliade, the world-renowned expert on myth and symbolism, writes in his book Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth:

Initiation represents one of the most significant spiritual phenomena in the history of humanity. It is an act that involves not only the religious life of the individual, in the modern meaning of the word “religion”; it involves his entire life. It is through initiation that, in primitive and archaic societies, man becomes what he is and what he should be—a being open to the life of the spirit, hence open to the culture into which he was born. For as we shall soon see, the puberty initiation represents above all the revelation of the sacred—and, for the primitive world, the sacred means not only everything that we now understand by religion, but the whole body of the tribe’s mythological and cultural traditions.

For thousands of years, adolescent males in indigenous cultures have been initiated into the spirit world by their fathers and the older men of their group. During their initiation, the sacred stories and cultural traditions of the tribe which pertain to men, and which were formerly hidden from the boys, are finally revealed to them. Hearing the stories is a sign that they are now regarded by the community as men.

Likewise, contemporary adolescent males need a revelation of the sacred as they make their passage into manhood in a modern industrial culture. The modern adolescent needs his father to guide him to spiritual awareness. Hence participation in this program allows fathers the opportunity to share their spiritual experiences, and to help the adolescent males in the group to grow into spiritually mature men whose lives are grounded in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and whose actions are guided by the ethical principles found in the gospel.

Because authentic masculine rites of passage in western culture are virtually non-existent, and because the bonds between adolescent males and their fathers tend, in general, to be strained or absent, the task for fathers of addressing an adolescent’s need to grow into psychologically and spiritually mature manhood is formidable. This program goes some way toward addressing this need.