A Rite Of Passage: Helping Daughters Reach Their Godly Potential -- By: Amy F. Davis Abdallah

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 27:1 (Winter 2013)
Article: A Rite Of Passage: Helping Daughters Reach Their Godly Potential
Author: Amy F. Davis Abdallah


A Rite Of Passage: Helping Daughters Reach Their Godly Potential

Amy F. Davis Abdallah

Amy F. Davis Abdallah is Assistant Professor of Theology and Bible at Nyack College in Nyack, New York, where she has served on the faculty since 2002. She enjoys taking students on international trips and personally mentoring many. Her publications in the area of rites of passage include her PhD dissertation and the article, “Development and Efficacy of a Rite of Passage for Evangelical Women.”

An honest conversation with a young Christian woman in the United States would reveal the prevalent hurt and fear in her experience as well as her search for meaning and identity. Media and society encourage her to find empowerment in a “Girls Gone Wild” or “Spring Break” rite of passage experience and to allow her peers and the opposite sex to form her meaning and identity. The Christian church negates these ideas, but offers discipleship that is often one-dimensional teaching about following God’s commands. She needs more than that.

So, how do we intentionally empower Christian daughters to become fully the women God created them to be? If their true identity has been exchanged for a lie, extinguished by negative voices or unpleasant experiences, covered by thick shame, or otherwise dismantled, how can it be recovered? And, even if their true identity has not been stolen or lost, how do we intentionally develop the seedling identity in the young? This cannot be accomplished through one-dimensional teaching, but may be facilitated by a Christian rite of passage that refers to her whole being—spiritual, psychological, social, sexual, intellectual, and emotional.1

Though many American Christians are suspicious of ritual and symbol, we return to them at the most important times of life. Graduation is always full of “pomp and circumstance,” special symbolic clothing, “crossing the stage,” and changing the tassel right to left. Even the most nontraditional pastors celebrate a traditional wedding ritual where participants wear distinctive clothing, are physically given to one another, and adorn their left ring fingers with the symbols of that union. And, when life has expired, we find comfort in a ritual that has the same biblical readings of future hope, the flowers and casket, and the line of cars with headlights on, journeying to the place of rest. These are not the “dead rituals” that provoke the ire of American Christians. No, they are meaningful ceremonies that accompany some of the most important rites of passage in life. In fact, “although rituals tend to be conservative, that is, valuing the past and honoring tradition, rituals can also be innovative, that is, training their participants...

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