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Coming
of Age Reading [adapted words of Jeanne Nieuwejaar, from The Gift of Faith: Tending the Spiritual Lives of Children, (Boston: Skinner House, 1999)]There is a story of a little girl who asked her parents, as they drove to church one Sunday morning, “What do we get at church?” In response to her parents’ puzzled looks, she said, “At the library we get books; at the bank we get money; at the grocery store we get milk. What do we get at church?” It is the wrong question, of course. We gather not to get, do, or achieve, but simply to be; to be together in particular ways—ways of seeking, celebrating, and supporting; ways of connecting, binding together the fragments of lives into a unified, centered whole, binding together the solitariness of individuals into the strength of community. The binding together is never complete, however. It is an ongoing process. This is what religious community is—process, beingness.
Reading From The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You many house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies, So He loves also the bow that is stable.
Sermon When I was in the eighth grade, there was no one to teach Sunday school for the junior high class in the Presbyterian church my family attended, so the minister decided to pick up the slack. Each week that fall, right after the service, my church friends and I met with Rev. Rutan in his office…an office of wood paneling, comfy furniture, lots of book shelves, and the ever-present aroma of pipe smoke. I remember loving these weekly meetings. In fact, I remember them more than just about anything else I experienced in church as a youth…other than the donuts that my mother bought for us as on Sunday as a reward for going to church in the first place.
Probably my most vivid memory of those classes was the Sunday Rev. Rutan brought in a Bob Dylan record. He played it on his little stereo, and though we didn’t listen to Dylan ourselves (as it was the 80s, most of us were busy listening to Devo, Blondie, or Billy Joel) we nodded our approval that he had an interest in music at all. I don’t know what we expected him to listen to…maybe organ music…but his cool factor rose considerably after playing his record for us.
Last June, when Lori and I sat down to discuss the coming church year, I followed Rev. Rutan’s example and volunteered to participate in this year’s coming of age program. We decided that I would meet with the youth once a month, using a small group ministry-style approach, a discussion format that would allow us to dialogue and get to know one another. I was grateful to be able to set aside this time to be with the youth of our church, to do my part to accompany them on their journey through the coming of age program and I looked forward to becoming better acquainted with them and passing on the gift of presence I had received from my minister when I was young.
When I agreed to these monthly meetings, I imagined all that the youth and I might talk about together. I was sure that in that minister’s study many years ago, my peers and I had offered him lots of questions…challenging questions about faith and life and God…and I looked forward to talking about some of these things with the high schoolers of our church.
My first meeting with the coming of age class took place in November, less than a month after my daughter was born. Right away, I wondered if this had been such a good idea. New parents, I decided, probably shouldn’t spend too much time with high schoolers. By directly experiencing both poles of childhood—infancy at home and teenaged years at church—I was reminded of what Susan and I had gotten ourselves into…the utter and complete surrender of any control we once had in our lives. The energy exhibited by the youth in that first meeting, and many of the meetings to follow, was not all that different from the energy exhibited by my newborn daughter…neither seemed all that interested in anything I had to say.
So mostly I just sat back and listened to them interact.
Lest I sound like I am pouting or feeling sorry for myself, I should point out that I found my meetings with the youth fascinating…fascinating not just because they are an interesting group of people with varied interests, experiences and talents, but because, by listening to their stories I gained re-entry into the world of high school, a world I had rarely visited in the twenty years since I graduated myself.
My monthly meetings with the youth were like walks through the high school hallways of my past. In their faces I saw the faces of people I had gone to school with. In their laughter and their stories, I heard familiar laughter and stories. In their gossipy exchanges about students they had in common, I recalled the soap-opera reports my classmates and I used to share about each other. In their occasional disregard for any kind of structure I tried to apply to our meetings together and their random distrust of and irreverence around ritual, I remembered my own adolescent rebellion against structure and ritual.
Most important for me in getting to know the coming of age class, to be a fly on the wall of their reality once a month, was to remember how difficult high school was most of the time. There was so much uncertainty about everything, so many minefields to navigate, so many misconceptions about what was important…about who was important…about what the future might hold…looking back it’s no wonder so many of us feel like we barely made it through the whole ordeal.
In a recent issue of Harper’s Magazine, reporter Rich Cohen shares his experiences of spending a week at his alma mater, a high school in suburban Chicago, twenty years after he graduated. Cohen is surprised by the memories his visit brings back…and by his discovery of how little has changed…including himself. He writes:
“The high school hallway, while being a road from here to there, is the field where you run and scurry, and we are all rats when the lights come on, and some doofus is mashed into his girlfriend against the lockers, the lucky [creep]…, and on the last day it’s filled with loose sheets of paper and the dirty gun-smoke casings of spent fireworks. It’s a real place, the same in every school, as changeless and distinct as a casino floor in Vegas. No windows, no horizons, no ins, no outs, just pit bosses, or the gearhead equivalent (his name is Clay, he has red hair and carries a role of dimes in his fist), and players, whole solar systems of kids, matter and antimatter, the losers and short-time winners. No daylight or hint of seasons; time banished. Even in class, the outside world, as seen through the window, is flat and unreal, a crystalline landscape behind a nobleman in an old Dutch paining. To be here as an adult, and as such to be invisible to all but the most unusual kids, is to feel as if you’ve stepped through the wrong door into a party you left in 1985: Ahh, so this is where I left it. “The old nightmare—back in school, two credits short, the gravity of the universe dragging you into its orbit. You’ve imagined returning with your grown-up knowledge, climbing through the ranks, running the joint like a Yankee in Shanghai. But watching these kids, chattering in tight knots of bad will and cold stares, you see it was all a dream: these kids would make a hash of you. The years on the outside have, if anything, made you weaker, more vulnerable to the crushing blow.”[1]
I read this article several meetings into my time with the youth, when I was feeling most inadequate about how we had spent our time together…that the youth had in effect made a hash of me. I had entered into our monthly meetings with the expectation that I might play a role in their transition from youth to adulthood…in their coming of age. But here we were, with only a few sessions left, and I didn’t feel like we had done anything worthwhile together. But the article reminded me that my mission was not to help these young people “come of age” as if I, or anyone else, could do that. Coming of age, as we all eventually learn, is something that happens in its own time, throughout our lives. The process is never complete…in fact, it only gets more layered. The older we get the more memories we have…memories of good times and not so good times…memories of discoveries and losses…memories that remind us that life is not to be controlled, as if we even could control it, but simply lived…appreciated for its challenges as well as its rewards. Coming of age, then, occurs whenever we are able to take those memories of our past and integrate them into the stories of our present…hopefully with a sense of humor and a minimal amount of regret. We come of age, then, whenever we learn something about this life we share, and, in our learning, our disappointment is equaled by our acceptance.
I now believe that my first coming of age memory occurred when I was about five, and in many ways, it set the stage for all the coming of age experiences to follow:
I had just made my bed on my own for the first time, pulling the sheets, blankets and bedspread over the top of my pillow and straightening out the whole mess the best I could. With great pride I called to my mother, who was in the other room, no doubt busy with one of a hundred household chores she did each week. “Mom, look what I did,” I told her. Without batting an eye, and with little emotion and none of the fanfare I assumed I would receive, she said, “Great. Now you can do it every day.” Then she left.
Life is like that. One challenge leads to another, we rarely get the ovation we think we may deserve, and when we most want to celebrate our achievements, we realize they are more mundane than what we may have thought. That’s why community is so important…community where we take the time to honor the transitions in each other’s lives…the places we have been and the places we have yet to see. And that’s why I have come to believe that my time with the youth was not about me helping them to come of age…I was simply there to be a witness to their journeys, to stand with them in compassion and forgiveness and respect. As it turned out, I’m not sure any of the youth moved any closer to “coming of age” by meeting with me. But I know I did, working with them.
Now, when I think back to my junior high Sunday school meetings with Rev. Rutan, I wonder if my peers and I really had asked any meaningful questions of our minister. Did he go home from our weekly meetings wondering if he had accomplished anything worthwhile with the time he spent with us? After all, other than the Bob Dylan record, I don’t actually remember much of what we talked about in Rev. Rutan’s office. However, I do remember feeling comfortable there… it was a place where what I said mattered, a place where I could hear what my peers thought, too. I reminded myself that the most important thing Rev. Rutan offered us in those weekly meetings was not theology or history lessons…I don’t think we would have listened to those anyway. He modeled for us what it means to be in community…he offered us a safe place to be ourselves…and that was enough.
So in honor of Rev. Rutan and all those who spend time with youth, I do have some simple words to share with the coming of age class of 2004, which of course, includes all of us. They are the words of poet Mary Oliver. She writes: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
Closing Words (Ursula K. Le Guin) Walk carefully, well loved one, walk
mindfully, well loved one, Return
with us, return to us,
[1] Rich Cohen, “It’s Not News: What today’s high school journalist is taught,” Harper’s Magazine ( Feb, 2004)
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