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October 13, 2009
Where the Wild Things Are
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.
At an FTE/YTI-sponsored event two weeks ago, Stephen Lewis and Dori Baker of FTE, along with Elizabeth Corrie of YTI, discussed the journeys undertaken by young people through programs like YTI and the congregations that send them forth and receive them home again. Participants sharing stories from their own youth and engaging a “Call Watching” exercise led by Dori had another glimpse of those wild places and the “wild things” that they first saw many years ago…the spacious forests and the oceans “sailed on through nights and days, and in and out of weeks” to shores of places where they, too, discovered themselves for a space to be “kings [and queens] of the wild things.”
One thing that does happen to young people most commonly at this and other seminary programs for high school youth is affirmation. Their perspective is affirmed—and also challenged; in the midst of the Bible, Bonhoeffer, Tutu, King, Ruether and other voices young people learn to find their own. They also discover that thinking outside conventional ideas of church and the spiritual life has been a habit within Christianity since its beginnings, having roots in that other faith tradition well acquainted with the wilderness, Judaism. They even discover hints of their own calling, of what it’s like to come face to face with God and uncover the Original Love that lives at the very center of their heart’s wild places.
But the return of these young people to their congregations invites another question: how will those who have had their adventures be received again by the communities who send them? Will their new thinking cause us to brand them permanently as “wild things” and outside the pale? Or will we see in their faces a reflection of that young face that stood before the congregation at Nazareth and announced “…good tidings to the poor, release to the captives, a year of the Lord’s favor, a day of vindication by our God”? As Dori Baker relates, for congregations encouraging the roots and plants of vocation in their young people (within these Greenhouses of Hope), it’s a process that is “messy, organic, sometimes chaotic.” Their becoming temporarily “too wild” for the safe confines of church and home is not bad news but part of that messy, incarnate process that keeps the Good News good.
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