The children’s classic by Maurice Sendak is not a bad place to begin when describing the search by young people for their place in the world, for a coming into their own.Like Max, the child-hero of Where the Wild Things Are, young people need places apart to explore the questions they have of life, to try on wild ideas and to begin to mix their thinking with the thinking of the Greats.Like the forest that grows that fateful night in Max’s room, there is a “wild place” inside young people in our congregations that has some affinities with the wilderness spaces that Jesus, Moses, John the Baptist, Hagar and the children of Israel have all trekked.One great intersection with those liminal spaces is the Youth Theological Institute (YTI) at Candler School of Theology, Emory University.Their students—of various faith affiliations, or no affiliation at all—have gathered every summer since 1993 to “try on” the theology that graduate students at Candler spend at least three years grappling with.They also see things and do things—in reading, in worship, in service, in dialogue with others their age and their leaders—that they may not have seen or done in their home churches, or did or saw with different eyes.
I have become a spy in my own congregation. As a part of a research project in partnership with Calling Congregations, I have begun carefully observing our practices and our language for the past 6 months. I’m watching for the ways we invite our people—young and old—into Christian vocation. I have begun to hear the words calling and vocation popping up all over the place. I have no way of knowing whether they are used more frequently than before, but I’m noticing them now.
Every single one of us has a good work to do in life.
This good work not only accomplishes something needed in the world,
but completes something in us.
When it is finished a new work emerges that will help us make green a desert place …
—Elizabeth O’Connor, Cry Pain, Cry Hope
Make green a desert place. Take something barren, lifeless even, and slowly tend it with the right amounts of water, sunlight, and nutrients. Watch life return. In time, green shoots emerge.
Memorial Day weekend was, in our family, more importantly, the occasion of the oldest grandson’s high school commencement. Relatives from both sides traveled from four cities to celebrate, to visit and to reconcile: remarried parents saw each other for only the third time in nearly 25 years. And all was well, thanks be to God. Even the very 18 year-old grandson, nephew and big brother survived the festivities with grace and gratitude.
Our families were tied together long before my sister and her husband were married: we all grew up in the same congregation. We aligned with a tradition known for its strict adherence to one truth and its intolerance for alternative points of view; the truth was, after all, set out in the Bible which anyone could read. (No need for theological education here.) Our particular congregation, however, was renegade and reviled as heretics. We were branded as liberal.
