Shattered Glass and Better Stories
Walking to the coffee shop this morning, I was moving among the aftermath of the parties we had heard all weekend, the weekend before Halloween.
Discarded pieces of costumes, broken bottles, more liquor boxes than I could count, torn carpets and furniture rubble.
I’ll admit that as a parent, I often think of the foolishness and waste and debauchery while shaking my head. A pastor friend of ours says that now that he’s forty he thinks, “I don’t have a Bible verse for that, but it’s just plain dumb.”
I’m quick to dismiss the generation partying at the end of my street, especially when they displaced immigrant families we loved and keep my kids up at night with thumping bass lines. What a mess, I think. What stupidity.
However this morning, I was struck by the makeshift tabernacle on what was supposed to a basketball court. A tent usually used for weddings that’s now filled each weekend with kids who still have acne drinking gallon challenges. And it made me think of sacred stories.
Researchers on how stories promote or lessen support for terrorism, Kurt Braddock and John Horgan define a story as “any cohesive and coherent account of events with an identifiable beginning, middle, and end about characters engaged in actions that result in questions or conflicts for which answers or resolutions are provided.”
Cohesive and coherent are not words that come to mind when I think about block parties. And yet, I also don’t know that we as a church have provided many answers or resolutions for young adults who hungry for meaning.
If there’s no communion wine, no table of welcome and healing (within and without), young people create their own Eucharist of sorts, sacraments once removed like those of the Whisky Priest in The Power and the Glory.
If the life styles we offer as the Bride of Christ aren’t compelling, others will have to suffice—intimacy with no beginning and no end.
The houses all had signs in the same red and gold over the lintels: “The Beehive,” “The Motherland,” “The Dojo,” “The Barnyard,” “The Chicken Roost”—names that to me speak of a longing for places of rest, identity, teaching, gathering, and collective belonging. Does the church offer these or do young people have to form them like clumsy imitations?
In his book about why we write stories, Christopher Booker summarized 34 years of studying narratives by examining how almost any story fits into one of the following plot lines:
Overcoming the Monster.
Rags to Riches.
The Quest.
Voyage and Return.
Comedy.
Tragedy.
Rebirth.
Where are we offering these plots to young people so they don’t need to seek them in between blackouts?
Are they seeing us as the people of God as overcoming the monsters of sin, violence, racism, greed and selfishness?
Do we appear as those rich with the gifts of God or are we stingy with our time, our joy, our acceptance and welcome?
Have we entered into the way of Jesus in embodied ways enough that we have a quest or voyage that folks would want to join?
Are we willing to laugh at ourselves and be winsome enough to provoke curiosity and connection?
Do we weep with those who weep and speak about Scriptures of deep despair and betrayal? Do we know Jesus as a man of sorrows we’d introduce to our friends?
Finally, does the rebirth we proffer offer anything more than the slipping on of a costume or putting on an identity at a house party? If a generation is looking for transformation, what stories are we writing with our lives?
Yes, I can still wish for the frontal lobes around the block to more fully develop. Yes, I can step around shards of hard seltzers and wish my neighborhood didn’t look like a frat house. However, this week when I look at the remains of pitiful pageants, I want to ask myself and the church at large if we have an alternative worth sharing.
