The Jaded and the Mystery

The Jaded

Leaning beside the slate colored concrete on a wintry morning, I watch about a hundred children pour out of their biweekly CCD class. They range in age from about 6 to 14. Their faces tell a serious story.

I’ve worked with children since I was a child, baby-sitting from the age of 12. I’ve been immersed in the world of children, their culture and their changes all my life. The canard of old people shouting about walking uphill both ways doesn’t mean anything to me. Advertising-administrative utopianism, the lifeblood of our culture, has long lost its ability to shame me for noticing.

So I notice the faces of the children: to smile at their joys, to have sympathy with their burdens.

The six year olds come out with bright smiles on their faces. Their clothes are colorful. They skip. There is light about them.

The eight year olds come out. They walk a little more grudgingly, or they push and shove. Their faces are open books, expressive of every bit of boredom or excitement.

The ten year olds are stony. Their faces are hard, they move rapidly to escape. They are utterly disheveled.

The adolescents dress uniformly in black or grey; camo prints are popular. Why do the gender neutrality advocates worry? The clothes are all alike, only the length of the hair is sometimes different. The eyes are distant, uninterested, hungry for something that was not here. One boy races to the parking lot and says, as I am blown back to the wall in the frenzy of his departure, “That was so ******* boring, I’m never coming here again.”

We know the culture of noise and meaningless has resulted in a profusion of sarcasm and cynicism. That this is taken for granted as a rite of passage for the young is a sign of the disease. This jaded-ness does not seem to find a cure easily. Some of the jaded grow up to seek relief in escalating addictive behaviors to numb the misery; others fill the void through agitation and activism.

Other responses to the great flattening of music, architecture, our vocal tones are nearly unimaginable. We have been making a new way of being human, the jaded consumer, and alternatives to this sort of person are not eagerly promoted by the institutional machines.

It is an ideology whose effects can most painfully be seen in the hopelessness of the young. The confusion and misery is so loud it drowns out even Taylor Swift.

The Catechist

Heaven knows the catechist has, well, heaven, earth, and hell itself to move in their short time with the children. They teach the children whose families are still willing to come, and that number shrinks as the sport leagues grow.

The bitter war between traditionalist and progressive is (sort of) irrelevant here. What is key is that the presentation of Jesus in our cultural catechisms has adopted the style of the friendly and useful magazine man. If not quite the Jesus of the prosperity gospel, still the youth pastors and Christian education programs (for youth and adults alike, alas!) Jesus is code for a moral proposition, an abstraction, a set of rules which are set against a waking life overrun by media, by the digital realm, and endless over-processed over-stimulation.

Jesus the Christ, with all the resonance that knocked St. Paul off his horse, who shatters and resurrects, is a little uncomfortable for the consumer. We are so numbed and battered by our physical environment that our Jesus must be utterly mild. We see nothing of the stars in our daily lives, and the Mystery of heaven becomes so much babble.

It is a life where the nerves are frayed, where the body requires higher doses of the same hormones to feel anything at all. The Christian educator’s task is like a soothing nurse tasked to bring us back to equilibrium. Coloring sheets and platitudes, and lots of pictures of cartoon Jesus. It’s riskless. And when risk goes so does grace.

The energy in Christendom is directed to the issue of relevancy, and it centers around dogmatic disputes. With all this energy sucked elsewhere, it is no wonder that the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd programs, so beautiful, have been shrinking. There is no energy to meet us as we live, to adjust to the realities of these times, to understand the fracturing of our bodies and psyches and families. The administrator’s task is Herculean, and administration is not enough. Programs and good intentions and coloring within the lines are not enough.

God bless those who show up when no one else has; God bless the catechists and the youth pastors and the administrators in their thankless work. But the work will cease if the flattening of the emotional lives of our youth is not met with the beauty, goodness, and truth of the Mystery of the Incarnation.

The children leave the most well-meaning of pastors and catechists to return to a pop culture of such cynicism it would make the Borgias blush. Each adult, in our role as a visible member of the public, should ponder how we can testify to the Gospel Hope through our presence.

It is not guitars or hip-hop, it is not being relevant, it is not even being ancient, which can shine to the child who is, as John Senior wrote so long ago, worse than uneducated, but anti-educated in his own body about his own physical reality. The traditionalist returns to the screen-realm as much as anyone else.

How do we make visible space for the Light of Christ when we are drowning in artificial light, when our bodies do not even know how to sleep?

Could St. Patrick have converted Ireland with paperwork?

The Mystery

So I offer some suggestions to the modern educator, catechist, or caring adult.

Mystery requires conscious acceptance of limits and control. We cannot make space for The Mystery of The Incarnation if our hearts and minds are filled with noise.

To find light, we must accept physical reality. Allow winter to be winter, the dark months to be dark, and seek out God’s stars. Let the mystery of dark and silence and light be present in your home, let them be present in the classroom and at worship.

The mystery of a Church at night - unforgettable to a child. When are they asked to participate in such solemnities? How fast, loud, and in-out are our churches and educational programs? Do we know how to linger in the space?

Do not destroy the language of stained-glass with floodlights. Colored light is a sort of song, and it is one that deeply influences children, who are particularly affected by colors.

Give children space to enter into these mysteries. Slow down, slow down.

Speak ancient prayers, slowly. Speak new prayers, slowly.

Talk about God’s Creation. Where do we see the handiwork of God? What is our relationship to it?

Wrestle with the products of our minds - treat the children as conscious souls, who battle with principalities and powers on their televisions, their games, on their social media. The children have consciences but they are too often drowned by being asked to recite a litany of progressive propaganda, and the life of the Church is an hour or two foreign to “real life” (which takes place in pixels.)

Engage a child’s hands - bring in carpenters and weavers. Our children are dwelling in a synthetic realm where their hands are for scribbling or swiping. The task of true making, which requires slowness and concentration, is in harmony with the space we make for Christ in ourselves. The coloring sheet and the cartoon image, used too often, deplete our capacity to see Man and Woman, to notice what makes life living.

Enter the seasons. Bring the rhythms of land and sun into the classroom. A child perpetually in highly artificial environments is likely to truly feel the mystery of the incarnation at an hour of prayer amidst pine trees and the darkling sky. They become used to gliding over faith as another educational abstraction when their bodies are so highly disengaged as they are in the modern church or classroom.

Show reverence for beauty over convenience. Beauty can take many forms, but it cannot find a home where we do not make space for it. It takes attention to make a home for beauty. We push aside our sin, our laziness, our greed, and work to make space for the hallowing of creation - in our home, our garden, our meals, ourselves. The cheapest and tackiest of things can be made beautiful - if given attention and love. The barest classroom, the grimiest concrete floor can make a home for the Church in the eyes of God and the eyes of a child if the adults bring love and care to it. But they must bring that care.

No child of ten should have a stony face or walk with such bitterness directed to the world. The faces and bodies and voices of too many children testify to the greying of our world - a world with neither dawn nor dusk, no stars nor sunlight. Only the screen. Yet our children and ourselves were not made for artifice, but for Heaven.

Every day presents thousands of ways for us to witness to the Mystery of Christ. Our children’s faces need us to do so.