Rite or Wrong, It's a Passage

 My brother is so stupid. While watching an old Western many years ago, a cowboy (wearing a white hat) was about to ride through a mountain pass with his Indian sidekick, Falling Feather. As they entered the pass, wild, savage Apaches lined the tops of the hills, ready to rain down a hail of arrows and kill our hero. But they did nothing. I asked my brother, “Why don’t they just kill him?”

“Because,” he explained, “he’s riding with Falling Feather. Indians don’t want to kill their own kind, so he has a ‘right of passage.’” As an eight-year-old kid, I learned something. Years later, when I was in high school, a black friend of mine invited me over to his house after school. We rode into a less-than-salubrious part of town—in fact, I was probably the only white kid with six city blocks. Was I scared? Heck no. I was with my black friend in a black neighborhood, so I had a “right of passage.”

Then one day I saw “rite of passage” in a book. I couldn’t believe I found such a blatant typo in a book. I told my English teacher about my discovery, half-expecting him to write to the publisher, telling them of their gross incompetence, and that I’d get extra credit on my next English paper. Once he explained that “rite of passage” wasn’t a free pass to get to the other side, I felt really stupid. Damn my brother.

But rather, “rite of passage” was something to be endured to gain acceptance into a new realm. And it turns out that it’s more than just being told that discomfort is character-building, like drinking copious amounts of alcohol to become a bona fide sailor.

The phrase actually comes from the French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, who coined rites de passage in 1909 to describe the ceremonies that mark life’s grand transitions—birth, marriage, adulthood, and other moments when society collectively decides you are no longer who you were five minutes ago. Rite, meaning a ceremonial act or formal custom, and Passage is movement from one state or stage to another.

Van Gennep’s big insight was that these moments usually come in three parts: you leave one stage behind, wander through a confusing in-between phase, and emerge with a new title, new responsibilities, and a new outlook on life. Consider a timid farm boy who leaves home, survives some humiliating or painful trial, and comes back changed — no longer merely someone’s child, but a person with a firmer sense of self.

So when we now call some significant change in life a rite of passage, we are borrowing a serious anthropological term to dress up the chaos of becoming a more mature person.

Luckily, I never watched a movie with my brother where a priest comes into the prison to eat the final meal with a death row inmate. I would imagine the priest would be there to offer “last rites,” a general label for the final sacraments or prayers given before death. Where a rite is a formal ceremony and last means the final one before you check out of Hotel Earth. The word rite traces back to the Latin ritus, meaning a religious observance or prescribed ceremony, so last rites literally means the final sacred rituals given to someone nearing death.

My brother’s version would probably be something like “He gets to order whatever he wants for his final meal. That’s his last rights.”