|
By: Tommy Airey An honest appraisal of how older generations can connect with those from the Millennial generation, yielding and entrusting more to younger adults who are ready to be empowered.  Photo: from left to right--Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann with the women of We The People of Detroit (Debra Taylor, Monica Lewis-Patrick, Ebony McClellan) I’ve been out of the classroom for five years now, but there is still a hole in my heart that can only be filled by Millennials.1 I realize this serves as both strange confession and cultural contradiction. Case in point: at a recent retirement celebration for a fellow colleague, a veteran high school teacher and coach lamented to a small cadre of us huddled around the cash bar, “We are looking at a younger generation of people who think it should just be easy.” A chorus of nods commenced. All of a sudden, I was swimming in a sea of Baby Boomer bobble-heads. The scapegoating of Millennials has reached epidemic proportions. The sky is falling because the snowflakes have landed and melted into their devices. They subsist on pricey avocado toast and refuse to do anything unless it is handed to them. There’s no need for a library card or a driver’s license. Why leave the couch when you’ve got Google and Instagram at your fingertips? It should just be easy. However, now more than ever, young people yearn for elders who are committed to listening and modeling vulnerability, instead of dominating the floor and expecting those with smartphones to get in line. In the realm of intergenerational trust-building, there is a fierce urgency for truth-telling. This must start with transparency. Allow me to locate myself. I am 45. I was born in suburban Southern California a year before Watergate broke and five years before voters in my home state overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure that cut property taxes by more than half. I spent the first 18 years of my adulthood teaching American Government, Economics, and AP World History at the large public high school I graduated from in the early nineties. My wife-partner Lindsay and I have been married for fourteen years and do not have children of our own. We have discerned a vocation of kin-making instead of child-rearing (Mark 3:31-35). This intergenerational “kinnovation” plays out with nephews, house church members, former students, and the twenty-and-thirty-somethings who I met when they were adolescents during my days as an Evangelical Christian youth pastor.2 Eventually, I followed the radical Jesus (and multitudes of Millennials) out of Evangelicalism. However, I remain compelled by the secret that Young Life staff members shared with me in the 90’s: “Kids don’t care how much you know ‘til they know how much you care.” Brilliant. The very best of the Evangelical movement was practicing this idea long before Brené Brown was blowing readers’ minds with the basic thesis that authentic connection can only transcend generational divides when we create judgment-free zones in which everyone feels seen, heard, and valued.3 Our society has changed significantly since I was in high school. Millennials have grown up in a hyper-neoliberal era in which benefits never trickled down. Instead, they inherited cheap devices and expensive tuition. To add insult to injury, it has become conveniently trendy for leaders to isolate the source of dysfunction and distress to within Millennials themselves. Researching this treacherous terrain, one psychotherapist warned that these “sophisticated exercises in blaming the victim” must end.4 Millennials are not bankrupt. They’ve been bankrupted. Sure, my Millennial students were increasingly connected to their iPods, iPads, and iPhones. They instant-messaged; then they texted; then they snap-chatted. However, I was consistently struck by how open-hearted and emotionally expressive they were (and still are in their adulthood). They also maintain an extremely sensitive bullshit radar (usually indicated by eye rolls) put up healthy boundaries. Unfortunately, Boomers and X-ers far too often confuse these with “giving up,” “not following through,” or “fearing commitment.” These young people are the anti-institutional inspiration. They are shunning formal versions of work, faith, family, food, politics, and art—mostly because these official avenues have proven fruitless. Millennials get their gig on because they must. In addition, they are far more open and raw with their struggles with addiction and mental health diagnoses. Their willingness to open up and share their most vulnerable selves instigates the intimacy in community we all crave. I sense that the resentment coming from those of us older than forty stems from shame, a deep insecurity that we didn’t really earn what we have and that we’ll never quite be enough. Neoliberalism has shaped us, too. We have been scripted into thinking we lack intrinsic value. In our era, though, we simply had more privilege and opportunity. So we padded our resumes and groped for legacies. We are long overdue to take inventory of these personal trends. As Nigerian spiritual practitioner Bayo Akomolafe writes, “Our way of responding to the crisis is part of the crisis.”5 A more liberative way forward is to boycott busyness as a badge of honor. Only then will we stop expecting younger folks to play by these rules too. My modest three-fold proposal for intergenerational transformative justice is aimed at those of us over forty. First, let’s covenant ourselves to cease the Millennial-bashing. Our youth are not the problem. They never have been. Second, let’s be confessional. We can stop dropping names and knowledge and then drop the facade we hide behind. Lastly, let’s flip the script and apprentice to the young. This will require deep wells of compassion and curiosity. And may we never forget: these three steps are for our salvation, not theirs. This simple proposal flows from the path of the prophetic Jesus who told as much truth as he possibly could and then told a little more. As elders and mentors, our task in the trust-building process must begin with our own descent (Phil 2:5-11). We are cracked vessels (II Cor 4:7) and the divine can only be perfected in us when we metabolize our own imperfections (II Cor 12:9). We expose our limitations and imperfections. Julian of Norwich wrote, “Before God, our wounds are our glory.” Wounded healing is the only kind of healing possible. However, none of us follows Jesus in a vacuum. More is needed to expand our capacity for healing and wonder. As Akomolafe writes, “Our world is too preposterous to be decided in one neat framework.”6 Behold, an integrated spirituality! Because the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak,7 wisdom from both the 12-step recovery movement and from leaders who decommission whiteness, patriarchy, and heteronormativity have become vital for me in my quest to understand what it means to covenant myself to Jesus, who was shaped by suffering.8 I started to attend Al Anon meetings a few years ago because I was stuck in old, rugged patterns of trying to get love (by any means possible) from those who have no love to give. I am, as they say, addicted to addicts. These beloved recovery circles thrive on a personal inventory model—on the sharing of our experiences, strengths, hopes, pains, and joys. It is the opposite of trying to fix people. The key is that we are all in this together. We live in a society drenched in shame.9 The psychotherapist Gerald May wrote that everyone is “infused by the bondage of addiction and the hope of grace.”10 When addiction is universalized, we can learn to “detach” each and every loved one from the disease they are captive to. The good news is that none of us are solely defined by our addiction. The late Audre Lorde wrote of a desperate need to get out of the “european mode” of formulas and fixing. She prodded readers to the radical potential of feelings—a paradigm shift driven by what she called “our ancient, non-european consciousness.”11 This requires us to delve below the surface tensions of shame, anger, resentment, and fear. My own ancient, non-european consciousness is stranded in a blue-eyed tribal scandal, a Vandal, Celtic, and Saxon scuffle that existed long before this society deemed me “white.” The emotion-based wisdom Lorde described is groaning for me to tap into its genius and beauty.12 In her book Emergent Strategy, Detroit-based community organizer and author adrienne maree brown highlights four reasons that describe(s) why our beloved communities are ailing: We are conflict avoidant, distracted from our goals, overcommitted, and burnt out. To heal, brown embraces a “small is all” mentality, counseling change agents to move at “the speed of trust” and to pursue critical connections instead of critical mass. This requires less prep and more presence. The ideal movement is an inch wide and a mile deep (instead of vice-versa).13 Too many of us elders and mentors are binding our anxiety by laying a burden upon the shoulders of Millennials that is too heavy to bear.14 Richard Rohr famously animates this rarely practiced maturity as “a second half of life journey.” He calls for the development of a “bright sadness” that, for even the most intentional, will not come to fruition until our fifties (at the earliest). In this stage, we drop our assertiveness and need for self-definition.15 Life becomes a dance in which we no longer care about who is watching and stop projecting our pain onto others. I’ve been blessed to be on the receiving end of this “crucified wisdom”16 from Boomer-elders tending to my soul. I think immediately of Cindy who consistently moves beyond accepting my self-care strategies to honoring and promoting them. She also models them herself! I think of Rick who is just about to retire after decades of work as a psychotherapist. He invites me to call or text anytime and listens. Then he shares vulnerably from the entire gamut of his own pain and imperfection. I think of Rose, Denise, Ruth, and Bill who share tears and struggles in our midweek lectio divina circle. I think of the women of the grassroots organization We The People of Detroit who are adamant that young people always have a voice at the table. Because otherwise they will be on the menu. Our prophetic vocation of truth-telling and trust-building is rooted in repudiating policies, not people. Only when we covenant ourselves to composting our own internal shit can we be present to the pain and suffering—and the vulnerable wisdom—that flows from the young people flavoring our spaces. At this moment, is there anything more vital and challenging? Notes:
 Tommy Airey was born and raised on stolen, unceded Acjachemen territory, was transformed by the thin place the Ojibwe, Huron and Odawa called Wawiiatanong and is transitioning to the sacred flow the Molalla and Paiute named Towarnehiooks. Tommy recently released his first book Descending Like a Dove: Adventures in Decolonizing Evangelical Christianity.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
RSS Feed