Family Transformation
The experience of having boys circumcised can be trans-formative for families. On the one hand, it seems healthy for parents to feel some guilt as a result, which is more likely when it is done in the presence of the parents as a communal, ritual initiation into a social and religious structure.
Because the parents, taking part in the actual act on a spiritual level, hear the cries and see the physical reactions of the baby boy, they naturally would hope to empathize with the physical and emotional pain and they can be more concerned about the healing and health of the child, and more responsible.
In this sense, these feelings of going through the experience can help the subsequent relationship, especially in comparison to experiences of families where circumcision is a purely medical procedure, with parents not present to the experience of their child, and not conscious of the overall spiritual, emotional and communal significance of the act.
Surrendering to Growth
Moreover, the feelings of watching a baby boy be circumcised also help as a mechanism of surrender to the bigger reality that this birth is part of a bigger community, the world community of spiritual human beings. It serves as a way to let go of the time when the relationships between mother, father and baby (and others) are untouched and pure.
Daughters who decide to have sex inevitably experience this type of letting go of purity when they stop being virgins, so it seems like female circumcision would not be necessary. From the point of view of westerners, female circumcision is barbaric and cruel. In circumcising males for traditional religious ritual, it helps to consider effects on female children around the world also.
Hospital Circumcision
Circumcision, as practiced from purely a medical standpoint, after hospital births of boys, and where only medical personnel are present, seems to be perhaps more sterile and free of emotion, but also more dehumanizing and useless. Lots of research shows that foreskin removal is no longer needed for cleanliness and health, which were considered for many years to be alternative reasons for the practice.
When a baby is circumcised without prayers or words of blessing being spoken, and without the presence of the parents and other intimate members of a spiritual community, the act loses the value that traditional religious circumcisions offer. That's why the movement against routine, medical, hospital circumcisions makes a lot of sense.
Elizabeth Herman - Elizabeth Herman (Betsy) recently completed a doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition. Her dissertation research investigated possible ...
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