A couple of years ago, another Catholic youth minister despairingly asked me a very fascinating question that just keeps lingering: “Julia, what can we do about the overall lack of imagination in the youth today?”
I think the question emerged from my friend’s brilliant analysis regarding the resistance we encounter when we challenge youth to dream and think beyond the ways of our culture. It’s tough work to try to get teens to think radically about the Gospel. A bizarre fear emerges when we ask for ideas, as if ideas can be right and wrong. Ideas are ideas!
I don’t blame the youth. Our culture convinces children that there are comforts in consumerism through the scripts of television and video games before they can read. We celebrate children who can recite things in a robotic-type manner and seem to shun children who ask hard questions. Fortunately, it’s kind of rare, but I do shudder when I encounter children who don’t know how to do pretend play, but are content with a hand-held video games for entertainment. I wonder if anyone has studied children’s playtime? Specifically, are they playing “house” and “dress-up” less now that they are becoming skilled at using iPads and cellphones?
Sometimes I am a bit frightened. I wonder what this shift in childhood could be doing to our future. Plus, I wonder how a decrease in imagination will influence our church, our Gospel living and our work for building God’s kingdom of peace and justice here and now.
I was recently reminded of this problem- our cultural lack of imagination about the things that matter most- by my friend Brian Terrell when he described his opposition to drones on WBEZ’s WorldView.
Drones are awful and wrong and sinful. Can you believe that young soldiers sit safely in the United States and operate video-game-like controls that are causing bombs to be dropped on villages in entirely different parts of the world?! What are we doing to young minds if they start to think that the horrors of war feel just like video games?!
Drones are evil. We aren’t paying enough attention to them nor discussing their horrors as we should be. I am not an expert on the topic like Brian has come to be, but I do believe that the use of drones around the world right now is not unlike the Nazi led holocaust during WWII. People are silently being killed, people are making up justifications and few people are reacting. Any fuss that will start in the future is actually fuss that will be much too late, kind-of like it was with the holocaust.
Our Gospel mission must be to spread the good news that we can really live a life without weapons, war, violence and inequality. We must be sweating our hearts out, as we serve and dream up new ways of bringing peace to the masses. We must excite and energize the youth with dreams of peace and justice- and then help them realize that our dreams for peace need not be dreams at all! Love is stronger than any type of evil, and it is time for this Truth to set all humanity free.
We can love our way out of the mess we’re in.
After all, dear Christians in the USA, if our country thinks that the justification for drones is that it is the only way we can keep ourselves safe from harm, then it’s time for an entire nation to contemplate the great question of my friend: What can we do about the overall lack of imagination!?
Let’s get busy playing and imagining the world God intended. Amen!
(P.S. By the way, here’s one simple action to try to clean up the mess while we get busy imagining.)
