Those of us who work with teens, teach teens or have teens living in our houses think a lot about…teens.
We can’t stop pondering youth ministry and ministry to youth and what to do with the kids and how to keep the kids engaged and excited and connected.
We’re extremely susceptible to Evangelical Envy.
For so long – longer than we might think- we’ve assumed that the most important thing we can give teens is nothing more or less than even more teens.
We want them to be immersed in a peer group in which faith is cool and not something to laugh at or scoff at or argue with, incessantly and cynically.
It’s older than CYO, it’s older than Don Bosco. Well, maybe older than Don Bosco.
It just makes sense.
Doesn’t it?
“What I’m looking for,” we might say, “is a good, lively Mass full of teens, for my teen. ”
I was sitting at Mass yesterday, thinking about this, when I started wondering, “Do I? Really?”
Instead, I suddenly decided, I want my teen to go to a Mass filled with old people.
I want her to be surrounded by that wisdom and suffering endured and hope maintained.
I want her to contemplate the man who leans so heavily on his cane as he trudges up to Communion, the woman who lovingly pushes her husband’s wheelchair up for the same, the well-dressed, sharp-eyed grandmother in the front, the slightly disheveled, slighty confused old man in the back, the old women who beam at her little brothers, the aging priest who preaches faithfully and does everything just so and hardly ever seems to take a vacation.
Perhaps, as she lives in this, something important will sink in – that God is faithful, that He sustains. All of these people have endured loss,have suffering, have doubted, have been questioned, and face their own end sooner rather than later.
And here they are.
But then..not just old people. I want my teen to have a Mass filled with young parents and little kids and straight-laced young adults and boho, goateed, pierced young adults, and big families and small families and single people and people who speak with all kinds of accents living in all colors of skin bringing all kinds of histories with them, here to this place, all one, turning toward the Lord. One.
It’s good I want that, because that’s exactly where we were yesterday.
Yes, in a couple of years, she’ll go off to college and be surrounded by her peers in a campus ministry, like-minded and on similar journeys. Which will be very good. Very, very good. I hope and pray her experience will do what quality campus ministries have done for young people for years (including me).
But I wouldn’t have wanted her to emerge from that without the memory and knowledge that her Church, this Body of Christ, is way bigger than that particular community ministering to those in that particular station in life, that the Body doesn’t exist to cater to us. We exist to love and serve God and others, others who are different in a Church that often does the farthest thing from pleasing us and our sensibilities.
Above all, the Teacher of peace and Master of unity did not want prayer to be made singly and privately, so that whoever prayed would pray for himself alone. We do not say My Father, who art in heaven or Give me this day my daily bread; nor does each one ask that only his own debt should be forgiven him; nor does he request for himself alone that he may not be led into temptation but delivered from evil. Our prayer is public and common, and when we pray, we pray not for one person but for the whole people, since we, the whole people, are one.
St. Cyprian on the Lord’s Prayer, from today’s Office of Readings.
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