Almost Lent?

I apologize in advance for the weird brain-dump to follow.

My cousin Sarah is doing a PhD thesis on something about ecology, something and the archetype of initiation. (Due apologies to Sarah for not being able to remember the whole topic properly.) At Christmas she was telling me about it. It was interesting. That mixed with some things I was reading, working on, and watching that made me think a few perhaps random but seemingly related thoughts.

Part of the deal with the "archetype of initiation" is that at many times, in many cultures, young people went through some kind of initiation rite. Like, the Native American Sun Dance ritual, for instance. Most initiation rituals had some fairly high level of intensity to them - discomfort and pain - but experiencing that and pushing through it lent to healthy individual growth, realization, or sometimes revelation, and in many societies signaled the entry into adulthood.

Although we have many accepted "rites of passage" now in Western culture, I speculate they tend to lack the intensity and perhaps effectiveness of some more traditional versions. We're not really big on discomfort in our society. We try to avoid it. At all costs. We even avoid people who are experiencing it.

I was trying to piece together how ecology fit in, and thought of bit of trivia I heard about forest fires. It is now well understood that forest fires are important to the healthy life-cycle of the forest. The fire clears out death and decay leaving room and fertilizer for new life. I'd heard an example from the 1970's were our collective wisdom on forest fires was that they were bad and should be avoided. If any started they were stopped asap. This, it didn't turn out was good for forests. In one instance a forest fire finally took hold in an area that natural fires hadn't been allowed to burn in for many years. The fire burned so long and so hot that is scalded the earth and new growth won't be possible for decades.

At work I have a poster a colleague gave me that creatively looks as the process necessary for innovation to take place in a team or organization. There was a phase in the fairly complex process that spoke of a sense of "misfit" then "pain" that often proceeded innovation. Something form that connected in my mind to this idea of initiation or need to walk through some kind of uncomfortable process for something good to grow.

Some bit of pain, discomfort, or degeneration is necessary for healthy growth, in individuals as well as ecologies, it seems. Probably it's important in organizational as well as societal systems. In the back of my mind I'm developing a hypothesis that our cultural distaste for discomfort is going to cause some kind of 'total burn out' in western culture unless we get better at adjusting to, understanding and even embracing the pain that comes with shift, and decay. Even in our economies.

My cousin Sarah asked about my faith in connection to this. It was a surprising question, but I was perhaps even more surprised to realize that there was a link. At first baptism came to mind symbolizing death and rebirth. Later as I thought about it, I realized much of Christianity revolves around the need to experience death as a prerequisite to new life. We don't focus so much on the death part in much of western Christianity, but it is clear and ubiquitous in scripture.

I'm not sure where all that came from, or what it means. Perhaps it's because it's almost Lent.