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One of my
favorite things about church is that I get to be with people of all
ages. It’s the only place in my life where I can play with babies,
talk to ten year olds, and chat with the elders all in the same
morning.
There is one age group, though, that I didn’t have much contact with
until just a few years ago, and that group was the teenagers.
There were very few teens in my home congregation in
Baltimore. It seemed like as
soon as the children turned 12 or 13, they stopped coming to
church. We didn’t have a youth group because there were no teens.
Or maybe there were no teens because we didn’t have a youth group.
Anyway, I never got a chance to spend time with them. That didn’t
stop me from having some notions about teenagers. Mostly, I thought
they were pretty much wrapped up in their own world, not concerned
about other people. I thought teens wanted as little contact with
the adult population as possible. And I assumed they had little or
no interest in church or religion.
So several years ago, when a UU Youth group asked me to be the
chaplain at their annual conference in New York, I was a little
nervous. I didn’t know what to expect, and I didn’t know what they
expected from me. The world they lived in seemed so different from
mine.
After we all arrived, we gathered in the small unlit chapel of the
Community Church of New York. We stood in a circle and someone
struck a match to light the chalice.
Someone else began to sing: “Come, come whoever you are…”
We all joined in: “Wandering worshipper, lover of leaving…”
There was no sermon, just some poetry and a gathering ritual where
everyone joined in.
It was the most spirit-filled UU worship I’d attended in a long
time. It was participatory; it was spiritual, joyful and hopeful.
There was a sense of magic and mystery, and a conviction for social
justice.
After worship, they started their meeting. The first thing they did
was to create a covenant. One person wrote quickly on the flipchart
as her peers shouted out ideas:
-Use I statements
-Be on time
-Respect each other’s space
-Step up/step back
Step up/Step
Back…It was the first time I’d heard this phrase.
It means step up, make yourself heard, and step back, make room for
others.
Step up, express your thoughts, and step back, yield to the quiet
ones.
It’s dynamic and lively, flowing and vital; like a dance.
That is how they wanted to relate to each other, and I think it’s
the way they want to relate to the adults in their lives.
That weekend was the start of something important for me and the
ministry I want to offer. Since then, I’ve been more involved with
the teenagers in our movement.
They inspire me and they challenge me, not only about my
misconceptions of youth, but they also challenge my thinking about
our liberal faith.
I have met so many teens who are deeply spiritual, and that
spirituality fuels their passion for justice. I have heard them say
they want adults to be involved in their lives.
But they want a certain kind of adult involvement, one that has a
quality of ‘give-n-take.’ This kind of involvement avoids the
extremes of indoctrination on the one hand, and just letting them
wander in the wilderness without their backpacks on the other.
I hear youth saying, step up, participate, be part of our lives.
Engage with us about spirituality, and step back, make room,
give us space to be who we are becoming.
UU adults have been good at the stepping back half of this dance.
But on the whole, we’re still a little awkward at the stepping up
part. We tend to be better at stepping back/giving space because we
value so much the individual spiritual quest and the freedom to find
our own way.
Our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors bequeathed to us a
tradition of dissent.
They rejected the authority of the Church of Rome. And when they
came to this country, they rejected the authority of the Church of
England. Over and over again we were branded as heretics. But the
word heretic comes from the Greek, meaning “to choose.”
The first great American Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing
urged us not to stamp our minds upon the young, or impose religion
on them in the form of arbitrary rules.
Like many people, I came to this church from a different religion.
And I find Channing’s approach to religious education liberating.
When I was young my parents made me go to Sunday school in the
Presbyterian Church. There, they taught all kinds of things that I
found hard to believe, but I went along.
Until one day I heard something that I couldn’t accept.
That day, we had two visitors to our class. They were a young
married couple; missionaries who were on their way to a far-away
country. They told us that people in Southeast Asia, and
Africa and other countries would
go to hell if we didn’t send missionaries and bibles to teach them
about the one true religion.
This is what it means for adults to stamp their minds on the young.
UU adults have wanted to avoid that at all costs.
You have your own spiritual gifts, and we want you to be free to
develop those gifts.
So we stepped back, giving you room to bloom. For many years, the
prevailing philosophy of UU youth ministry was, “let the young
people do their own thing.” We called it youth empowerment.
Last year, in the YRUU journal called Synapse, two youth[1]
challenged that philosophy. They wrote that “Many adults have
confused empowerment with abandonment… Consequently, YRUU has turned
inwards, attempting to operate without the benefits of a healthy
intergenerational community…without enough adult allies.”
For your parents and adults like me who grew up in the 60’s &
70’s, it’s hard to believe that any teenager would want adult
allies.
When we were teenagers, our rallying cry was, "don’t trust anyone
over 30.” Many of us assume that today’s teens are a lot like
we were when we that age. So when it came to religious education, we
wanted you to be free to explore and search on your own. We didn’t
want to weigh you down with moralizing and heavy-handed tradition.
A recent study of teen spirituality[2]
reveals that today’s youth culture is not as chaotic as it was in
the 60’s. Many people have the impression that teens drop out of
their religious congregations. In fact, most of them continue to
attend with their families.
They are not alienated or rebellious about religion. Actually, they
may be more interested in religion than their parents.
For example, the picture on the front of this morning’s order of
service is a YRUU t-shirt logo. Being UU’s and all, we have lots of
diverse opinions about it, but listen to what one youth had to say
in a comment posted on the YRUU website: “[the fish] is a symbol
for Jesus' teachings on community and thankfulness. A fish with the
letters YRUU reflects the…union of revolutionary, modern thought and
ancient Christian ideas of community that UUism embodies.”
Today’s youth seem to be more open to Unitarian Universalist
tradition.
This word, tradition, can be traced back to two different Latin
roots:
"traditum", the heavier of the two, means, "the unchanging
inherited weight and authority of history." "Traditio",
the lighter one, means, "a sense of the living customs of a
community; the ongoing creative dance of ever-evolving meaning and
practice."
The youth are asking us to dance. To step up/step back. Not too
close, but not too far back either. It’s the place in the messy
middle—the space in between.
Teenagers know what it’s like to live in those in-between places,
the space between child and adult.
And UU’s know it too. Our faith gives us no pat answers to life’s
most difficult questions. Nor does it leave us unbound; allowing us
to believe anything we want.
We live our faith in the messy middle where we celebrate and
struggle with life’s complexity.
It would be simple to stamp our beliefs onto the minds of the
young. It would be simple to ignore them, and let them be. But
it’s really hard to do that thing in between. It means handing down
from generation to generation the meaning of ritual, the love of
community bonds, the excitement of spiritual living, and it means
doing this without shackling them to the past.
This is what youth are asking us to do.
The society in which the young people are growing up may not be as
chaotic as the 60’s, but it is more complex. And it cannot be faced
with pat answers or an “anything goes” philosophy. You are
grappling with the big questions that life presents to people on the
threshold.
If we want to interact with you on such questions, we adults are
going to have to step up and speak to you from the deeper spaces of
our lives.
We do that by telling our stories: stories rich in images and
feelings, stories that convey how a life connected to spirit and to
community is a fuller and more satisfying life.
Frankly, we haven’t had much practice in that kind of dance, so
engaging with youth about the deeper spaces of our lives has been
challenging.
In its 2005 report entitled, Engaging our Theological Diversity, the
UUA’s Commission on Appraisal observed, “With rare exceptions,
conversations about beliefs and theology are not regular features of
our congregational life.”
The Commission also interviewed a group of youth, one of whom said,
“the grownups are worried they’ll influence us too much if they
tell us what they believe, but being influenced by other people is
how we figure out what we believe.”
In other words, if young people don’t have anything to push against,
they have a hard time developing their own convictions. One of our
roles is to step up and provide something to push against. But
sometimes, the youth give adults something to push against too.
At last year’s General Assembly, a study/action issue called
“Moral Values for a Pluralistic Society” was on the ballot. A
study/action issue is the first step toward becoming an official
statement or resolution by our association. So it becomes the topic
of denomination-wide conversation and study for the next two years.
There were five issues competing to be the one adopted by the UUA:
issues like women’s rights, affordable housing, peacemaking. The
one on Moral Values, though was a different. Instead of targeting a
specific social justice Issue, it took a step back and asked,
“how might the moral and ethical grounding of Unitarian Universalism
be given greater voice in the public square?”
But the original sponsors of this issue withdrew, and it looked like
it was finished. All of the sudden the youth caucus, about 40 of
them, approached the microphone on the floor of the Ft. Worth
Convention Center. Addressing
hundreds of adult UU’s, they spoke in support of this issue that had
been abandoned by the adult sponsors. Here’s part of what they
said:
“… we have an obligation to present a moral alternative to our
neighbors.
“…It is our responsibility to show an alternative to the
close-minded dogma that now dominates the religious landscape”
…we’ll benefit from recognition (by others) as a morally-bound
religious body.”
The response of the delegates to this youth initiative was
overwhelmingly favorable, and the study action item was adopted.
In stepping up and supporting a stronger voice for UU morality and
ethics, they have placed themselves in the middle of a spiritual
conversation they want to have with adults.
At the same time, they have challenged adults to get clear about our
own moral convictions and to say them out loud.
The particulars of our lives are all so different. Youth and adult
alike need each of those perspectives, because any one alone is too
narrow. As we exchange the particularities of our individual lives,
we discover connections and relationships. We practice the dance.
We step on each other’s toes, we lead when we should follow; we
follow when we should lead. We laugh, we sing. We stop the music.
Then, we begin again, in love.
Come, let us dance!
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