Training Hearts, Minds and Hands

If you think it doesn’t matter how we tell our stories of faith to our kids, consider this. The Book of Revelation in the Bible offers an apocalyptic glimpse of one possible future in which people carry the mark of the dominant cultural system in either their heads or their hands. The difference in the two metaphors is nearly self-evident. To be marked in one’s head is to be intellectually or emotionally committed to a way of being. To be marked in one’s hand is to be committed to the embodiment of a way of being, regardless of actual belief in it. It’s quite a brilliant piece of imagery on John the Beloved’s part. With just a few words he encapsulates whole volumes of what it means to endorse in thought or deed a most treacherous system that preys on life itself, like a cancer eating its host alive. I grew up in a denominational tradition that made a lot of this story as diagnostic of those very other than myself. What I’ve come to find is that the power of this story is that it indicts us all.

As an educator, I have worked most of my adult life with Gen-Y babies. Even though for a while only a few years separated me from the my students, there was much that separated me from their generationally unique sense of self. For three things, they knew nothing of a world without personal computing, without the democratization of information or without virtual realities. But there has always been something else which I couldn’t quite put my finger on before now–something quite different, yet strangely familiar. See, I used to think it was simply that theirs was the first American generation to know not just legally but intuitively what it meant for all humans to be created equal. I believed that in them lie the promise to transform our nation, maybe even our world, into that which could “rise up and live out the true meaning of its [life-affirming] creed[s].” And I still do.

But my experience of Ys and, now, Millennials in general has seldom lived up to these lofty pronouncements. That may be in part because, as a teacher, I’m always probing to find a sustainable motivation in my students. Its not enough for me to have simply transmitted the required information. I want to know what students have learned will have meaning for time to come, and I’ve struggle to see that. Sure I’ve taught long enough to have had students come back and tell me that our time together really mattered, but regardless of their choices–many of them extremely commendable–I’ve remained concerned on their behalf. And its only fairly recently that I’ve been able to begin to articulate my perpetual disquiet. What has concerned me about even church-going, socially responsible, generally productive adolescents I’ve watched grow into adulthood is what I’m currently describing as a deep, abiding, albeit enlightened self-interest that seems indifferent to the fundamental hypocrisy between all they “know” and how they often choose to live.

Now that’s heavy. Moreover, it could easily sound like a needlessly cynical, yea even typical, blanket criticism of the next generations–but it’s not. It’s a lament for a way of being in the world that my and my parent’s generations breathed new life into post-WWII and continue now to respirate. Whatever our children are, we raised–are raising–them to be. So if indeed they unconsciously labor to maintain component structures or whole systems of inequity even as those who believe in something different, it can only be because we haven’t bequeathed to them a more beautiful story.

As I remember, similar assessments were made of my own crack-baby, gang banging, high school drop-out, teen parent teeming Gen X.  Neither I nor most of the people I know fell in these categories.  The universality of a description doesn’t always matter.  What matters is that the description inclines us to acknowledge that something is a little off.  Whatever it is, it manifests across all demographics, not just with “those people” over there. One can’t say it’s nothing when kids in my neighborhood who despite historic disadvantages believe in their innate equality, but many of whom then take that truth and the opportunities bought with blood by their predecessors and choose to live in the most morally, intellectually, emotionally and socially impoverished ways. One can’t say it’s nothing when kids of privilege are too convinced of the innate equality of all, but collude uncritically or without sense of agency with a status quo that continues to privilege them over others. And vice-versa. In great irony, this generation has elected the first African-American President of the US and helped sponsor unprecedented disaster relief and social revolutions in foreign lands from their smart phones, yet they have been unable or unmotivated to subdue the corporate dictators and warmongers who exercise ridiculous power over their and others’ lives and politics. In the mist of this cacophony of similar strivings, what seems missing is a story of how and why one might attempt anything other.

My point isn’t to prove my particular description of this generation of young people right. My point is to substantiate the need for more virtue-rich stories. If John the Revelator was anywhere near right, part of the remedy has to be training heart, mind and hand to work in concert with one another. As simplistic as it may sound, story does that. It gets down in us and shapes us from the inside-out in ways that we may only be beginning to be able to articulate.

So I invite you to join me at the Children, Youth and a New Kind of Christianity gathering happening in Washington, DC, next May: where we’ll be sharing more true, more just, more lovely, more–just plain better–tellings of the stories of our faith in the hopes of inspiring a generation that can live up to all its promise. I’ll be collecting many of the stories shared and would love to hear yours–particularly if you disagree with my aforementioned assessment. Some of the best stories come out of divergence. I look forward to seeing you there!