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A MENTOR’S ODYSSEY
Honoring the Stories of our Youths
By Jacob-Joseph Shefa
“The mind is not a vessel
to be filled,
But a fire to be lit."
Plutarch
As teacher and mentor, I have listened to the stories of teenagers, seeking
to discover seeds of purpose within tragic tales. I have been humbled
by the challenges my students face – drugs, poverty, violence, and
families shuttled between prison and homelessness, to name just a few
– and awed by their courage in the face of these challenges.
There is an incandescent seed of purpose that lies at the core of each
human story. The vast disparity between the potential brilliance of that
luminous seed and the tattered classroom in which I meet my students is
both painful and touching. Yet there are moments when these battered temporal
walls seem to dissolve and we enter the boundless domain known as the
ethnosphere, which cultural anthropologist Wade Davis describes as “the
sum total of all thoughts, dreams, ideas, beliefs, myths, intuitions,
and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the
dawn of consciousness.” When students sit in a circle and tell stories
of their lives, I envision us within this ethnosphere, adding to it and
being invisibly aided by the sum total of humanity’s knowledge.
Wisdom implores us on our life’s journey, to stop, and ask: How did
I get here? I’m here because, like many a midlife hero in ancient
myths, I “heard a call.” For a long time, I struggled to discern
the exact message within that call. At first, all I knew was that as I
crossed the threshold of midlife, my own sense of purpose became interwoven
with my ability to connect with and inspire young people as they crossed
their thresholds, from adolescence into adulthood. You could say that
I was being called to become an elder.
Part of the difficulties faced by the students I work with (as well as
part of my own inner torment as a youth, decades ago) has to do with a
disconnection between the world within and without. Educator and philosopher
Joseph Chilton Pearce writes that: “Somewhere around age fourteen
or fifteen a great expectation arises that ‘something tremendous
is supposed to happen’….adolescents sense a secret, unique greatness
in themselves that seeks expression. They gesture toward the heart when
trying to express any of this, a significant clue to the whole affair.”
As a teenager, I never found that correspondence between an aching sense
of inner calling and my outer world. Bereft of guides or mentors, I plunged
headlong into drugs and despair. Now, thirty later, facing small groups
of ten to fifteen students day after day, I feel utterly compelled to
help teenagers discover their sense of purpose.
Yet high school students of today face additional problems to the drugs,
gangs and promiscuous sex that afflicted my teen generation. Now there
are compound mental nemeses; what some have referred to as the “dumbing-down”
of our culture. I see how many of my students, raised on television, addicted
to video games, find it initially very difficult to simply slow down to
a speed at which they might begin to hear the song of their purpose.
Youth psychologist Michael Gurian has written extensively about the effects
of the media on adolescent development. Gurian believes that:
“With the advent of image-creating machines, media, rather than people,
told stories to our children…Over a period of about thirty years,
image-making machines gradually took over the storytelling function, a
function we neglected to realize as sacred and profoundly subtle; especially
in a child’s adolescence…Image making is storytelling and storytelling
is one of the key ways young human beings gain identity.”
In helping students to find their stories, I was entering an ancient form
of relationship in a modern landscape. Mythologist Michael Meade writes
eloquently about the crucial need for elders and mentors in our initiation-less
society. His words give some description to the calling I felt: “As
a man passes through the elders’ gates, his focus shifts from personal
striving and status building to attending to the mysteries at the core
of the community.”
As the breakdowns and inner rearrangements of midlife progressed, I gradually
distilled my passion for working with youth into a program that I called,
Odyssey. The name, Odyssey, signaled my conviction that learning could
be a great and mysterious adventure – an odyssey. Also, in Homer’s
Odyssey, his troubled teenage son, Telemachus, is guided by an elder named,
Mentor (who is actually the goddess of wisdom, Athena, in disguise) –
the origin of the word, ‘mentor’. I knew that mentoring, a genuine
one-to-one connection between student and teacher (or youth and elder)
was an essential key to students’ success. A mentor could help students
to find their stories, and within those stories could be found a portal
to their purpose in life. And by helping students on their Odyssey, I
would finally commence the journey of the second half of my life and the
fulfillment of my own calling.
It would be a program that honored the seed of purpose of each student,
one that offered each child the opportunity to discover the shape and
dimension of that uniqueness. The psychologist Carl Jung counseled modern
humanity to “find your own myth and then live it.” I wanted
to see if I could inspire students to find their own myths, to then speak
them proudly in the presence of peers, and finally, to write them in tales
to share with their community. At the heart of their own myth, I believed
my students would find their seed of purpose.
Such a program seemed an unlikely ‘sell’ in the standards-obsessed
realm of public education. Yet somehow, my desperate pitches to the local
school district struck a chord. These educators recognized that their
students needed something more than mere academics. One principal, surprising
in his frankness, lamented: “What does it matter if they get straight
A’s if they have no sense of purpose in their lives? It’s just
a game.”
Three high schools agreed to do a pilot year of the program. The schools
were particularly excited about a writing contest, a key part of Odyssey,
in which students would attempt to articulate their core values in life
– such as hope, love of family, staying true to one’s dream,
and so on. I promised the schools that if students went on an odyssey
of discovery for their own values, not only would writing abilities improve,
but they would also find a greater sense of purpose in their educational
journey.
During the first semester of the pilot year, I remember talking to a young
man named, Juan, who wore pants that were at least four sizes too big,
thus giving him a shapeless, formless quality. Juan walked as if he was
vanishing as he moved through space – beyond self-effacing, into
self annihilation.
During a communication exercise, I asked the class: “If your life
became a book or a movie, what would be the title and how would it end?”
Most of the students responded humorously – except Juan.
“My movie would be called ‘No Way Out’.” The atmosphere
in the class changed, suddenly crystalline in focus. Everyone was called
to attention by the quiet, desperate sincerity in Juan’s voice.
“How does the movie end?” I asked.
“It ends with me shot down in the streets before I’m twenty,”
Juan whispered, putting his head down. Again, no one said a word.
I thanked Juan for having the courage to speak so honestly before his
peers. Then the bell rang and the students, including Juan, dashed out
to their morning break.
As students munched on cinnamon rolls, I went up to Juan and asked to
speak with him. I was determined to at least attempt what youth-worker
Orland Bishop calls a “mentoring moment,” an opportunity seized
in order to magnify the potential of a youth.
“I forgot to mention that you are also the screenwriter of that movie.”
Jose looked up, his attention caught. “You can write a different
ending for your movie.” Juan looked at me, and then ever so slightly,
nodded his head affirmatively.
From that point on, Juan participated more actively in the class. He spoke
with me about the pain and shame of growing up without a father. He worked
on an essay about his painful search for heroes in a dark time. Juan began
to carry himself with greater self respect. Although Juan’s life
was still steeped in violence, he now sought a way out. Juan discovered
that he had something unique to contribute. He participated increasingly
in the class, and even revealed a smile that was two-thirds hard-knocks,
one-third hard-won wisdom.
Michael Meade addresses the haunting notion of what happens to our youth
in the absence of mentors: “In many tribal cultures, it was said
that if the boys were not initiated into manhood, if they were not shaped
by the skills and love of elders, then they would destroy the culture.
If the fires that innately burn inside youths are not intentionally and
lovingly added to the hearth of community, they will burn down the structures
of culture, just to feel the warmth.” Gina was a high school freshman
with a beaming smile behind which lay a monster of self-doubt. In Odyssey
class discussions, she tended to put herself down, calling herself “stupid.”
Each time she did so, I challenged her harsh self-assessments and invited
her, instead, to take note of the intelligence and wit she had already
demonstrated in the class. I pointed out to all the students that oftentimes
what seems to be our own ‘objective’ view of ourselves is actually
the flowering of mental and emotional seeds planted by others in careless
and sometimes cruel moments. These positive reflections provided a compass
point for Gina’s next steps.
Several weeks into the course, students began to develop essays about
their values. Gina’s self-confidence took a nose dive. She was defeated
before she began to write.
“I can’t write – and besides, I don’t have anything
to write about,” she insisted several times. Earlier, I had told
the students that in other programs similar to Odyssey, it was often those
who believed that they “could not write” who had actually won
the contest. Everyone had deeper values, and experiences in life that
had taught them important lessons – it was just a matter of rediscovering
them, and then shaping these discoveries into form.
Finally, with much prodding, Gina decided to write about her father’s
struggle with alcoholism and how she and other family members had refused
to give up on his recovery. She insisted, however, that her essay “was
not going to be good.” When she began to again voice her doubts and
return to calling herself stupid, I took a piece of paper and pen and
wrote “I am stupid” in huge letters, with a diagonal slash through
it. I handed it to Gina.
“Self put-downs,” I semi-joked, “are now forbidden! Whenever
you are tempted to call yourself stupid, look at this page and remind
yourself that it’s against your personal laws. I challenge you to
refuse to call yourself stupid.” Gina beamed, took the page and put
it into the clear cover of her notebook. She said it was a “cool
idea.”
Gina’s essay went through three drafts and each time it got better.
Her story was compelling and she had deftly blended narrative and life
lessons to produce a powerfully unique essay. When she turned in the final
draft, I looked at her and said, “This is really excellent! Do you
remember a few weeks ago, how you were positive you couldn’t do it?
Look what you’ve done, Gina!” She laughed and triumphantly held
up her notebook with the now banished “I am stupid” motto. A
more positive self assessment was beginning to take root.
The value of a program such as Odyssey, and my own sense of growing in
purpose as a mentor came together vividly when a group of senior students
worked on the creation a personal ‘shield of power’. While most
of the students confidently used words and symbols to fill out the sections
of the shield that had to do with life’s turning points and their
vision of the future, one student, Norman, sat frozen. In the first classes,
Norman spoke through a sort of veil of hair which he combed directly over
his eyes. It was hard to hear his words as they struggled to penetrate
the veil. Gradually though, he had developed more confidence in front
of his peers. However, when now asked to draw a symbol or write a vision
of his future, Norman was totally stuck.
“I don’t see anything. There’s nothing there. I don’t
know if I’ll even be alive!” There were tears in his eyes –
tears that I could see now that his hair had been combed a bit back.
“Could you just draw a seed – a seed that represents your hope
for a future?” I pleaded. “Maybe the picture will fill out later,
from the seed.”
Norman actually thought about this for a long time. I simply sat beside
him as he struggled to find the seed. Finally, Norman picked up his pen
and began to draw a small, but definite circle. Underneath, he wrote ‘Seed
of My Future’.
Norman’s life was scarred by acute violence and poverty. He lived
partly on the streets, partly at home. He had been on and off drugs for
three years. Yet in the class, he had begun to discover a power inside
himself which told him that his life could actually flower into accomplishment.
In boldly planting the seed of imagination for a better future, he chose
to believe in an eventual harvest of purpose. Wounds such as those Norman
struggled to emerge from can become gateways to rebirth. Michael Meade
believes that:
“Seen through the eye of initiation the scars of initial woundedness
and of life-changing events turn out to be the openings to imagination
and the heartfelt experiences of life. When these experiences are contained
in art, in poetry, story, song, and dance, the limits of the individual
and of time are shed, and the timeless territory of the heart and the
imagination opens.”
As I’ve begun to find my own voice as an elder and mentor, I have
been haunted by the notion of what could happen to our youth in the absence
of mentors. What society without true elders – or even struggling,
beginning elders like me – has ever flourished?
“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” wrote poet Muriel
Rukeyser. I have told fragments of the stories of three teenagers I met
during Odyssey’s pilot year. Yet there were dozens upon dozens of
other stories, each precious, bearing seeds of redemption and purpose
within, that I could have told: of the senior who witnessed his mother
shot to death by a relative; or the freshman who was in the room when
her father committed suicide; the straight-A freshman who wrestled with
suicidal thoughts and cutting herself; or all the students who “disappeared”
into Juvenile Hall at various times throughout the year. Their stories
were often tragic, yet again and again I witnessed these students take
firm hold of the threads of purpose within their tales, reenacting the
ancient, regenerative myth of the Phoenix bird.
My job is to listen, to nurture and to celebrate the stories of our youth.
The students have inspired me to shape what began as an ephemeral call
into a step-by-step journey; an odyssey. In setting sail on my mentor’s
odyssey, I beckon to my students to board their craft, as in ancient times,
did Telemachus, son of Odysseus. Ultimately, this journey of education
becomes an odyssey of the soul’s journey. As educator and writer
Rachael Kessler tells us: "The connection among souls is ultimately
what education is about. There is no single right way to do it, no blueprint.
But there are paths to the soul of students that are open to every teacher,
in every classroom, in every school. All we need is the courage to walk
these paths with our students."
I have listened to the stories of teenagers. As mentor, I have been called
to assist in the discovery and birth of purpose in young people. However
impossible the task seems, perhaps this is helping the world, for what
is needed more than the palpable sense of human purpose, sparking from
one life to another, growing in warmth and power across the generations?
Most important of all, my work with teens has disabused me of one of my
most cherished notions – perhaps one of the most cherished notions
of the western world: that I had “my” purpose, “my”
unique, separate and individual purpose. In stripping me of this illusion,
I discovered a greater truth: My purpose is not just to be found inside
some spiritual inner realm. It is somehow mysteriously interwoven with
the growth of my students. It is this flash of spiritual light, expanding,
arcing across the generations, flame to flame, that inspires us all on
the odyssey of human purpose.
Works Cited
1. Davis, Wade. Interviewed in UTNE Reader, Winter, 2004.
2. Gurian, Michael. A Fine Young Man: What Parents, Mentors, and Educators
Can Do to Shape Adolescent Boys into Exceptional Men. J.P. Tarcher, 1999.
3. Kessler, Rachael. The Soul of Education: Helping Students Find Connection,
Compassion, and Character at School. ASCD, 2000.
4. Meade, Michael. Men and the Water of Life: Initiation and the Tempering
of Men. Harper San Francisco. 1993.
5. Pearce, Joseph Chilton. Evolution’s End: Claiming the Potential
of Our Intelligence. Harper-Collins, 1992.
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