If you poke around on the internet much, listen to TV news, or social media you can hear people being grumpy about younger generations, especially Millennials and Gen Z.
I don’t see it that way.
Socrates famously said:
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
―
The operative word here was “now”. It implied that things were better “back in his day” when his back didn’t hurt and the days ahead were more in number than those in his past.
This last weekend I spent three days with about 15 younger people and some adults from Trinity Lutheran Church in Lynnwood. The title of the retreat was All God’s Children and we explored Christian motivations for respecting other wisdom traditions and partnering to make the world better.
I started the retreat with a question: What do you see happening in the world?
- The illegal invasion of Ukraine
- People without homes
- The environmental crisis that is now coming on strong
- The Insurrection on January 6th
- Political violence
- Us vs. Them Polarization
- The fact that most Americans agree on many things yet they don’t enact them into law
- Student debt
This is only a sample the kids these days were able to mention without even trying.
Despair about the future among these young people was palpable – not just to me but to each other. They seemed to know each of them was carrying heavy burdens and they treated each other with deep kindness. They also had fun with each other, teased each other, and laughed a lot.
Having led retreats over the years, I also noticed that the songs were different. Fifteen or twenty years ago I saw a lot of Christian triumphalism. The songs this weekend were different. Here is one verse from a song called Oceans:
You call me out upon the waters
The great unknown where feet may fail
And where I find You in the mystery
In oceans deep
My faith will stand
Where my feet may fail….
These students were longing for a tradition and community that can sustain them through the challenges ahead. But they also want a tradition and community that has the wisdom to avoid polarization, not claim exclusive truth, or give in to passivity about the earth and all of life. I told them that their tradition was made for trying times like these.
The grumpy description of Socrates cannot be applied to kids these days, at least not these ones.
Having learned from Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions among others, I taught them that the Abrahamic tradition called a community together around a core value: to be a blessing to the other families/nations/cultures/religions of the world. Blessing means both to speak well of others in public, and to offer other groups the best you have with humility.
They seemed to resonate with this – as it meets their need for community, spiritual practice, and loving public leadership without activating the in-group/out-group dynamic that is tearing our world apart.
Maybe we could all join our younger generations in recognizing the challenges we face and how we need to do that work together. Our feet may fail but there is hope, yet, that we can walk through the oceans deep together with the kids these days.