Assume you work for a corporation that promotes from within. You start working there as one who takes orders, but eventually must transition to running things. Structures and mechanisms to facilitate this shift will arise naturally.
The human race is just such a corporation. Children can’t run things but must eventually, and so structures and mechanisms for dealing with this arise naturally, where naturally means both “from intrinsic or congenital principles” and “necessarily, but by extrinsic principles, like social and cultural artifacts.”
In the United States, the transition begins in earnest after high school graduation. The graduate has lived till then in societies structured for him – in schools chosen by parents, under a schedule largely outside his control, with many moral choices already constrained by his environment, and with a life with friends largely in situations determined by others. Still, all of these are the landmarks of life, and the rite of passage consists first in removing them. In this sense the rite of passage begins with freedom in the negative sense, i.e. the mere removal of determination and structure. Freedom in this sense has its intoxicating side, but is also a privation, i.e. an evil.
The removal of the moral landmarks is for the child to establish his own, which begins a project that can go well or badly. One should never lose sight that the process is unintelligible except as humanity seeking those who will direct it to its ultimate end. Though the process frequently gets described as “self-discovery” this is to consider it too narrowly. The process is ordered to the common good, and one does violence to others in failing to see it so.
The basic structure of the process is exitus-reditus. The child breaks from the society of which he is part as subject, and re-integrates as ruler of himself and others. There are many ways to do this, some better than others. The Native American spirit quest is better at presenting both the thrill and the danger of the loss of moral landmarks, and has clearer points of separation and re-integration. In pre-industrial societies, men tend to go on spirit quest, whereas women are a sort of anchor in the world left behind, and the main incentive to re-integrate into it quickly. In the contemporary United States we are better at marking the points of exit than at providing clear points of re-entry, hence the complaints about “failure to launch” or “commitment phobia.” A young man leaving high school can easily not re-integrate until his thirties.
Just Thomism 