Bridging the Generations

Reading:

When I Was Fifteen
Emily Sealy (16) Dea Brayden (44) and Bob Drew (74)

Emily: When I was fifteen everyone had an i-Pod.
Dea: When I was fifteen I played on a record player.
Bob: When I was fifteen radio was really. We listened to “Meet the Boys in the Band” every afternoon.

Bob: When I was fifteen one of the biggest songs was Doris Day singing “Sentimental Journey.”
Dea: When I was fifteen the song I hated the most was “Stairway to Heaven.” It was way overplayed for every high school gym dance.
Emily: When I was fifteen I listened to the Dresden Dolls. One of my favorite songs was “Coin Operated Boy.”

Dea: When I was fifteen we’d call music we liked “far out” or “groovey.”
Emily: When I was fifteen we’d call music we didn’t like “lame” or “whatev’s.”
Bob: It’s been a while. I don’t remember!

Bob: When I was fifteen, the girls wore these long skirts with lots of petticoats underneath made out of crenalin, with a white blouse. The Gibson Girl look. Because it was just after the war, there was lots of material again.
Dea: When I was fifteen I was in a Catholic school. We wore uniforms. I have no idea what fashion was. (briefly describe uniform)
Emily: When I was fifteen “shabby chic” was in. It still is. Kind of the “I just rolled out of bed and put on all the clothes on my floor” kind of look.

Bob: When I was fifteen Harry Truman was president. Several years later I met him and talked with him.
Dea: When I was fifteen Richard Nixon was president. “I was not a crook.”
Emily: When I was fifteen George Bush was re-elected president.

Bob: When I was fifteen the Cold War was beginning. The United Nations was being founded.
Emily: When I was fifteen the Iraq War was in the news.
Dea: When I was fifteen the Vietnam War was in the news. This guy I took piano lessons with came back and ended up in a psychiatric ward.

Bob: When I was fifteen I remember being afraid the gang would go out and I wouldn’t be part of it. What if they forgot to call me?
Emily: When I was fifteen I was afraid of driving and learning to drive. My brother is a bad driver.
Dea: When I was fifteen I was afraid of my mother coming to teach art. I had already had my sister as my Spanish teacher for four years.

Dea: When I was fifteen I wanted to get out of Fairborn, Ohio. It was just a little Podunk town. I wanted to be a pediatric physical therapist since I was 12.
Bob: When I was fifteen I wanted to be a jazz musician. I used to go and listen to big bands at Lakeside and Elitch’s.
Emily: When I was fifteen I wanted to get my braces off, get away from my family and become a world renowned writer. I wanted to fall in love.

Bob: When I was fifteen I read my first really good book. It was the Caine Mutiny. I have been a reader ever since.
Emily: When I was fifteen I went to my first Con. It was a junior high conference. It was a social action conference. That was the time I became the closest to my good church friends. I came back so incredibly moved and wanting to help as many people as I could.
Dea: When I was fifteen I remember when our gym teacher Miss Downing and my geometry teacher left the school to be together. It caused a hullabaloo at the school and I thought it was great. All of a sudden they were gone. It was a very big deal.

Bob: When I was fifteen I wish I had a little more confidence to do things. I was so concerned with what other people would think.
Emily: When I was fifteen I wish I would have been less eager to fit in because I had just come from Devlin where I had six or seven friends where it was so conservative. I went in to school so desperate to be liked. I think being so eager to please made it harder to make friends.
Dea: When I was fifteen I wish I had helped and thanked my mother more. She raised all of us after my father died when I was nine. There were six of us and I was the youngest. When you’re a teenager you’re so self centered.

Dea: Now that I’m 44, there are many times I feel like I’m still 15.
Bob: Now that I’m 74, 15 doesn’t seem so far away.
Emily: Now that I’m 16, I’m practically still 15.

Sermon:

When I was fifteen John Kennedy was our new president. Two years later I was to see him up close in San Antonio the day before he was shot in Dallas. When I was fifteen I thought I’d like to be a scientist or an engineer. Church was an important part of my life. We went to church every Sunday morning and I was active in the youth group that met Sunday evenings. I was beginning to have nagging doubts about what we were told to believe, but when I was fifteen I never talked about them. When I was fifteen I had only been out of Texas once, on a quick trip with family to New Orleans. I had been on a few dates, but every time it took an act of supreme courage to call and ask a girl to a school dance or a movie. I so desperately wanted to be accepted by my peers.

Of course, when I was fifteen I didn’t have all the nifty high tech gadgets I love too much today. I didn’t have a laptop computer. All computers were mainframes like the ones my dad worked on. No one had a cell phone. Long distance calls were expensive and reserved for emergencies. There was no internet and, of course, no e-mail (I haven’t decided if that’s a good thing or a bad thing now that throwing spam in the trash is part of my daily routine). Mostly, when I was fifteen I had no clue about what lay ahead.

As we heard in this morning’s marvelous reflection on being fifteen by Bob Drew, Dea Brayden and Emily Sealy, the gadgets and styles that are the surface of our lives change rapidly. Much of what is really important remains the same. The uncertainty of being fifteen, the struggle to belong to a group, the insecurities and the potential, are always there. Adolescence is a crazy time, an intense time, an uncertain time, a time of discovery.

Yet when I reflect on what has changed and what endures, I am often struck by change that is deeper and more important than our gadgets, fads and music. So much has changed in the last few generations in the way generations interact, and this changes the very fabric of our lives.

A few generations ago most families were larger. A few generations ago an elderly grandparent was as likely as not to live under the same roof as a a young person. Some of you have heard me cite this statistic before: at the end of the Second World War, when Bob Drew was fifteen, half of American homes had three generations under the roof. Today almost none do; it is a couple of percent and they are almost all recent immigrants. (I am aware of only one JUC household out of more than 400 that spans three generations. On the other hand, we have scores and scores of households that are single person households.) And this is just one indicator of a profound change.

The change is this: we live our lives today with a level of isolation by age that is unprecedented in human experience. This isn’t just demographics, just numbers. This goes to the core of our experience of what it means to be a human being. And because this goes to the core of how we experience our lives, it is an issue of spirituality, a religious issue.

Now, I don’t want to wax too nostalgic about the past. Hey, there was plenty of poverty and racism and violence a couple of generations ago. But on our journey into prosperity and mobility we have lost some important human connections. One of these is the mixing of generations.

When I was fifteen I never went two weeks without seeing my grandmothers. I don’t think I ever went two weeks without seeing aunts and uncles. This gave me a sense of continuity in time, a sense of my place in the passage of the generations, that few of our young people experience. My own children are typical of modern children. For most of their lives they have seen their grandparents and aunts and uncles either a few times a year or every few years.

Imagine the stifling isolation of living without the opportunity to travel, without the opportunity to experience other cultures. Imagine never seeing films or television that exposes us to other cultures. Imagine not being able to read books about life at other times and in other places. The result of such isolation would be devastating. Imagine how narrow our view of the world and of life would be.

Yet look at how we live much of our lives. We spend much of our lives today narrowly isolated from people outside our generation. A year ago Phyllis and I moved into a patio home in Arvada. I believe there is only one other person on our block who is not retired. I know of only one person under 20 living in the whole development. My neighbors are all nice people, but this is a little weird. Yet most of us move through life surrounded by people mostly our age. We go from day care to preschool to school classes to college with a group of people born within a few months of us. We often end up in a nursing home or assisted living situation surrounded by other people in their old age. This kind of isolation by age group has never happened in all of human history until the last few decades.

The price we pay is huge. We lose perspective on what we are experiencing. We become disconnected from time, disconnected from the richness of the experience of others.

Today we celebrate the Coming of Age of a group of our young people and the bridging of young people into the high school group or into the great adventure that follows graduation from high school. In particular, I am thrilled to once again see a group of young people in the coming of age ceremony with their mentors. The relationship between teenager and mentor goes on for a year. It is wonderful.
However, the need to span our generations goes far beyond the needs of adolescents. We all need it, whether we are young adults. To connect with people outside our narrow age group is a spiritual practice that opens us vast realms of human experience.

This is vitally important for us as a congregation. A religious community like ours is one of the few places left — if not the last place — where generations can connect with each other in ways that are deep and meaningful.

We have much in the last six years, including the creation of a coming of age program. We have done more to create fellowship events and venues like chalice circles where generations mix. Our music program offers wonderful opportunities. Half a dozen of our high school youth just became members of our congregation a few weeks ago. We held a special membership class for them. It was terrific to be part of that. I look forward to these young people taking a larger role in our life .
We have done much, yet I think there is far, far more we can do. And it won’t be easy. For we live in a culture that separates us by age. It does it so much that it becomes a habit. In order to create and sustain a multigenerational culture in our religious home, we need to pay attention all the time. We need to reach out all the time. We need to reflect on how we can make all areas of our church life multigenerational. And we have to fight our habits, habits ingrained from the surrounding culture, all the time. This past year I realize how I have far less contact with young people in our congregation simply because my own daughter is off at college and not part of the group. The habits of our culture can so easily trap us.

Deep down we know that we need each other. We know that connections across the generations enrich us all. A church like ours is the last, best hope for intergenerational community. May we continue to strive to create such a place, a place that connects us to memory and to hope, a place that connects us to the deepest longings of the human spirit — whether we are five, fifteen, forty-five or eighty-five.

Without bridges across the generations we lose our connection to the great human journey. Let us build bridges across the generations, bridges that connect us to each other and to all that we hold sacred in life.

Amen.