After Jack gets the goose that laid the golden egg, he goes into another room, for he has heard emanating from out of that room a beautiful sound, like a chorus of gods and goddesses. When he gets to the room he finds a magic harp. It’s playing of its own accord the most beautiful music that moves and mesmerizes Jack’s spirit. Through the music, for a moment, he peers into his own soul.
The magic harp and spiritual life
Part of what boys learn from their three families during adolescence is spiritual connection to a sense of the divine. The sense of the divine gives them a lifelong grasp of themselves as spiritually grounded beings who belong in the great circle of life, beings who have a purpose and higher authority. In myths and fairy tales, music is often the symbol of spiritual connection. In Jack and the Beanstalk, it touches Jack as spirit and divinity.
Many boys feel spiritually connected to some mysterious world through music itself. Every generation has its spiritually challenging music. We often speak of a generation’s music representing the “soul” of that generation. From Bob Dylan to Led Zeppelin to Bruce Springsteen, the musical artists with spiritual depths sing spiritual themes—even common themes like love and loss, but in a way that embraces mystery and “moves the soul”—and even if that theme comes out as R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.” Spirituality is not religion, though it includes it. Religion or religious music is not the only way to feel spiritual connection. Elton John’s song, The Circle of Life, from The Lion King, is deeply spiritual, though not religious.
What, exactly, do we mean by “spiritual”? Spirituality is about connection of the self to the mystery. To experience spiritual connection, we must know ourselves at least enough to be unafraid of mystery. To truly know the mysteries of the world, we must never completely lose ourselves.
When we parent, mentor, and educate boys, especially adolescent boys, in spiritual growth, we are not trying to get them into cults, nor forcing our religion down their throats. We are showing them a magic harp and letting them hear, in its music, what they will. If we have helped them develop a strong enough self, they won’t fear the mysteries of the music. They’ll become spiritual men.
Practically speaking, the more adolescent youths spend time in nature, the more many of them will hear magic harps. The natural world, for all cultures, has been the longest-lived, most mysterious church. A boy who is parented and mentored to feel connected to all the mysteries of nature has a greater chance of becoming a spiritually responsible and dedicated man.
Church, synagogue, youth groups, church services in juvenile detention centers, all of these, under the leadership of spiritual adults, become places where some boys hear a magic harp.
If we want our boys to grow into spiritual men, our home must be a place of some ritual and some prayer. This is not to say that an atheistic home is by definition an antispiritual place. I am acquainted with an atheistic family that has dinner table arguments and discussions about God and grace and spirit that would put other homes to shame. That family is deeply spiritual in its own way.
When a mother and father disagree on religion, it can turn a boy off to spirituality. Before having children, it’s very important mom and dad develop a “spiritual plan” for raising their kids.
Boys often learn spirituality from a mentor, but not a father. That’s just the way it is sometimes between a father and son. Fathers, if they are having no luck with sons, need to get out of the way and subtly help the boys find someone else to assist them. Boys learn a great deal of spirituality from moms before puberty but, for many boys, mom’s insistence that they go to church provokes only boredom and rancor. Here fathers and mentors need to steer the boy into spiritual growth during adolescence.
A boy who leaves adolescence without knowing that prayer is an essential component to living leaves adolescence emptier than he needs to be. A boy who leaves adolescence without being on a path toward God (however he and his community define God—whether Buddha, Shiva, YHWH, Jesus, Allah, or another), lacks the ability to nurture his own growing spirit.
Jack finds the magic harp and puts it under his arm. Just as he leaves the room the harp calls out, “Help, master, help!” Jack stuffs the harp under his coat, silencing it, and hides in a third room. In that room he sees a beautiful maiden. As happens in fairy tales, the two immediately fall in love. The magic harp gets free and cries out again for its master. Jack hears lumbering footsteps. The whole castle shakes.
Jack and the maiden start out of her room. Running down a dark corridor toward them is a huge Giant. “What are you doing with my goose, my harp, and my maiden?” the Giant yells. He attacks. Jack and his new friend run, carrying the treasures with them. They run across the cloud and down the beanstalk, the Giant following. As they near the bottom of the beanstalk, Jack yells for his mother to bring him the ax. She does and he chops the beanstalk down. The Giant, who hasn’t made it all the way down yet, falls to his death.
With his treasures, Jack builds a new house for himself and his wife, and a new house for his mother. The neighbors and friends come around to admire what Jack has done. Jack takes the Giant’s belt off the Giant’s waist and puts it on the mantel in his new home. When the community is done admiring Jack’s work with the Giant, a work party assembles and Jack and the party cart the Giant to a graveyard.
And everyone lives happily ever after.
Facing the shadow
In all the versions of this tale, including the shorter one I told, Jack’s journey through initiation includes a confrontation with what is called “the shadow” in myths and fairy tales. This shadow character—a Giant in this tale, Ursula the sea-witch in Disney’s The Little Mermaid, Scar in The Lion King, the villain in thousands of Hollywood action films—represents that part of each of us that is shadowy, destructive, hurtful. Every boy drags a shadow behind him. Every boy, during his initiation into manhood, learns to confront that shadow.
This confrontation is where parents, elders, and educators find their greatest challenge. When boys “act out,” we could say the “giant is rising up in them.” When they act irresponsibly—driving dangerously, caring not at all if they get a girl pregnant, mouthing off disrespectfully, destroying property, committing crime—they are exercising the shadow, crying out for direction, discipline, and leadership. It’s essential to say here that every boy must learn—by experience, education, parenting, and mentoring—how to discipline himself, how to discipline the shadow.
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