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Saturday, March 8, 2014

I'm going to count the attempt at coming up with a profound statement I just spent twenty minutes doing as my reflection for the purposes of Lent, but I just deleted it.  It was becoming judgmental and stereotyping generations and it just did not bring out a side of me that I appreciate.

If you're wondering about the general thrust, it starts with a comparison I heard in a podcast story about our parents' generation's word for upsetting situations is "appropriate" whereas ours is "awkward."  Which struck me and the storyteller as profound -- appropriate/inappropriate comes with so much shame on both sides, while "awkward" is just a way of acknowledging everyone's feelings.

And as much as you can say anything about an entire generation of people, I think the best thing about our generation is linked to that.  Not moral judgment but acknowledging everyone's experience of the world -- the right to be annoyed and/or feel awkward, the right to be awkward and make things so.

The millenials have a lot of trumped up "problems", most of which seem to me to derive straight from the lack of jobs for us to take rather than any inherent character flaws, but we are primarily concerned with getting everyone out alive.  I mean, look at our science fiction.  We aren't (for the most part) Red Wedding-ing our casts.  We settle down on Earth with the Cylons, we have the Doctor dance in the rain because "Everybody Lives!"

And that's the only way you can be a person of faith -- not by going to that judgment place.  By trying to get the entire world out of this mess alive and well.  You care about everyone's souls, not just your own.