Boomer and Millenial III- response to Andrea Palpant Dilley

Boomer and Millennial:

In Conflict or Partnership

Part Three: Response to “Change Wisely Dude”

A blog by Andrea Palpant Dilley

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            This is my third and concluding attempt to write a blog on Boomers and Millennials. In this blog I am responding not so much directly to Andrea Palpant Dilley's blog entitled “Change Wisely Dude." as much as I am seeing a part of my history expressed in what she had to say in her blog.  In essence that was what I have done in all my blogs in response to Andrea Dilley, Kate Schell, and Rachel Held Evans.  It has been one of the more moving experiences I have had for a long time, by trying to interact with these ladies' perspectives.  I hope in my own way I can say something that will allow them and others represented by the words they wrote to know that God is patient and if us older folk among boomers don't understand your experiences, questions, concerns, he does.  In some ways this blog is definitely the most personal of these three, as I use a lot of my own personal relationship with my father to express a viewpoint I have of what some of our millennial brothers and sisters are experiencing.

            I suppose I could write a review of APD’s fine article, but I’m not that great of a reviewer.  I get too mired in my subjective thoughts and feelings about what a blog creates in my heart and soul to keep my poor pathetic unfocused mind to the assigned task of figuring out what the main points and general message of a blog is.  So I will do what seems more like something I am capable of doing.  I read a blog; and something stirs within me I and feel as if a part of my soul has come alive.  Rachel Held Evans’ article did that for me regarding how I think about homosexuals.  I’m a traditionalist.  I believe that homosexual activity is sinful.  But that doesn’t entitle me to belittle such a person or treat them as a joke.  I thought of my college days.  I went down the hall in my dormitory to play Risk.  The guys that played Risk passed a bong around as we each tried to take over the world.  I was the Christian guy on the floor.  No one pressured me to partake.  We were friends.  We had different lifestyles.  If one of them had asked me if I would have minded him to come to church with me, I would have been thrilled.  That is how it is for young millennial Christians, some might be inclined not to believe it sin, but they have gay friends close enough to themselves that even if they do they would like to believe that their gay friends would be welcome to come to visit their church with them.  I realized reading Rachel Held Evans that if we can’t agree on anything else, we should be able to agree that if a gay friend wants to come to church with us, then our churches should welcome that person, treat them respectfully.  If we must speak to them truthfully according to our convictions, we must also deal with them graciously and respectfully as if we belonged to Christ.  Do we boomers understand how much of a hindrance we put in the way of our millennial brothers and sisters when that much cannot be expected from many of our “Bible believing” and “Evangelical” churches?  To many of us boomers gay people are joke material, but to a millennial they are the guys or gals down the hall that have different lifestyle choices but are also friends.  The millennial comes home to their church after a semester at college, having maybe told their friends about how there is so much love in their church; and they walk into a church where they hear jokes and rejection of people described in caricature.  A thought of their friend or friends they thought they would invite to church passes through the millennial believer's mind and they now begin to question if their church really is a place of love at all.

            Then I read Kate Schell’s blogs.  I remembered some of my days.  I think she has things a lot more together than I did, but still she has felt pain about how foolish things she heard taught to her as a child hurt her development.  I read her blogs and remembered things that I had forgotten about from those years she is passing through now, that I experienced long ago.  She had written about matters both of social development and relating science to faith.  I don’t think she is looking for everyone to agree with her, but she is looking for people to understand that she has a lot of things to think over, ponder, and consider.  That is something I think she should be given space to do if she steps through a door of a church and isn’t quite ready to get enthusiastic with everything being taught.  She probably doesn’t need the right argument to set her straight as much as she just needs to know that the people where she goes believes God loves her and wants her best and wants to let her be until things are more clear to her.  I suspect that is what Kate would want from a church.

            The millennial generation seems very unrealistic and demanding to a lot of us older folks.  The Evangelical world isn’t always ready to face their millennial children.  I’ve seen it in a number the faces of Evangelical boomer parents with millennial children.  Their children have stopped going to Church.  They had been taught the Scriptures, often home-schooled, kept from the stumbling blocks of the faith.  What happened?  What went wrong?  Maybe a lot less and sometimes a lot more than either the parent or the young adult son or daughter understands.

            If there is anything I am grateful for in my life, is that my Dad had fathered me with an expectation that I would become an adult.  You reached a certain point in life and he pretty much took a hands-off approach.  He believed the only way a child became an adult was by letting them be an adult.  He wasn’t a deeply religious man, but part of that is due to an experience.  A blog is not a place to go into it.  But what I want to express is how my relationship with my Dad was at times strained and yet was one of the good things that helped me in that troubled decade when I was in my twenties.  Then I think I will be able to say why I think Andrea Palpant Dilley found solace in the sort of worship she discovered in a church with lots of vestments that never baptizes a child by calling him dude.  She wasn’t in the end looking for a church that was hip, played her style of music, and set up everything for the attraction of twenty year olds.  She was looking, even if she did not know until she found it, for a place described in the words of the poet Czeslaw Milosz whom she quotes for his saying, “The sacred exists and is stronger than all our rebellions.”  It is what Rachel Held Evans argued for when she said how frustrating it was for her to tell an Evangelical church some of the reasons why they weren’t connecting with young people, only for the church leaders to promise to try to jazz up their services or something.  In the end Rachel Held Evans, and Andrea Palpant Dilley and every human being ever to find themselves seemingly in a world without answers wants something that they don’t know they want, and certainly don’t understand how to get from a Dollar Store, a Costco, Wal-Mart, or possibly even from a modern church smorgasbord offering liturgical services at 8, rock n’ roll at 10, and discussion time at 11:30.  Maybe it can be an Evangelical church, and not necessarily the liturgical service I prefer, but Milosz summed it up beautifully and that is what Andrea Palpant Dilley believed her family had discovered when they entered an Anglican Church unlike most of the churches in their experience and felt in their souls at long last, “The sacred exists and is stronger than all our rebellions.”  Andrea Palpant Dilley, a bit older than the millennial generation whose experiences I have been trying to understand had a perspective that might be helpful for both us older boomers and my younger millennial friends.  She told us to not necessarily make radical changes just because twenty something year olds were not coming to their church.  She said:

 “Consider the changes that people go through between age 22 and 32. Consider that some of us in time renew our appreciation for the strengths of a traditional church: historically informed hierarchy that claims accountability at multiple levels, historically informed teaching that leans on theological complexity, and liturgically informed worship that takes a high view of the sacraments and draws on hymns from centuries past.

Some of us want to walk into a cathedral space that reminds us of the small place we inhabit in the great arc of salvation history. We want to meet the Unmoved Mover in an unmoved sanctuary.

So as you change -- or as change is imposed upon you -- keep your historic identity and your ecclesial soul. Fight the urge for perpetual reinvention, and don’t watch the roll book for young adults.”

            That is an important perspective I believe.  I know no twenty-something year old wants to hear that their perspective will change a lot in a few years.  But it will.  I have tried to explain that with some sensitivity in my blogs.  In childhood, we all leaned upon our parents, but the time came for us to become adults and every idea we had been taught as true had to be reconsidered so as to be owned, rejected, or modified as we took our places in lives as adults.  That is no easy task, and there are pains.  There are pains when you feel like you were taught a bogus way of dealing with people that hindered your relationships with others in this thing called life.  People in their twenties often are thinking more in the ideal realm than they imagine.  They know that churches ought to be kind to sinners and so when there are sins being treated in a horribly inept manner by people that should know better they may well leave the church.  But then a lot of times new perspectives take root.  Someone falls in love, gets married, has children and then in the midst of all discover something rooted within themselves that is destructive to everything in that person's life and yet the person keeps failing in their attempt to overcome that fault.  Maybe it is a sexual lust, maybe it is in not being diligent enough to keep a job, making it is in an uncontrolled temper, maybe he just realizes that he has become an incurable gossip who has the disposition of a viper in his tongue.  Slowly he is left with a nagging sense that just because he selected a number of ideals he once imagined he would practice throughout life, it didn’t mean that he was really as noble to live out his ideals as he had thought he was when he selected his ideals at 22 before his ideals were much put to the test.  But now facing difficult days at work, or difficulties in marriage, or looking at a child he feels he is failing he knows no longer where else to look but beyond his own abilities and needs.  He begins to realize that the church down the street is having services.  He knows a few of the people and they seem fairly sincere, but they have their faults, but who doesn’t?  He needs an answer to why he’s failing his children, upsetting his home, endangering his work relationships.  He goes to church.  Maybe then he finds what Milosz and Dilley discovered that the sacred exists and is greater than all our rebellions.  But beyond the sacred being greater than all our rebellions, I would hasten to add that the sacred is greater than all our ideals.  Mark it down!  You can select the most wonderful ideals you can imagine.  You can think you are fortified by the ideals you select.  But when push comes to shove, and you are tired, weary, discouraged, you will find yourself declaring with anger WTF~!!!  You can count on it.

            I know this partly because I went through my twenties and then later came to learn of how my Dad had gone through his twenties.  I want to pass that story along, at least what is useful to be passed along.

            I can tell you that almost anyone who knew my Dad respected him.  He was a bit stoic, but definitely principled, a hard working farmer, an excellent welder, and a man most of his neighbors admired for a high level of honesty and integrity.  Most anything good in me got started because God gave this man to me as my Dad.  Now my Mom was a bit more difficult.  It took me years to realize that her difficulties likely started when she was still a girl.  She came from a family with two boys and three daughters.  One day the boys went swimming.  One of them evidently got himself in trouble and the other tried to save the brother in trouble.  That is what everyone supposed happened.  The boys drowned that day.  A family that neighbors said was a wonderful family did not ever recover from that day.  It became a dysfunctional family, with two boys lost and gone and three girls sort of growing up in a now wholly dysfunctional family.  Two of the girls had to get married at sixteen, one left school for a few months.  Probably something happened in that scenario that sort of grew worse and worse through a lot of life for my Mom.  We kids knew that if Mom was happy that we better watch out, because it wouldn’t be long before the anger was released.  She never hit me in that anger, but she could scream and you just wanted to be able to disappear.  My Dad may not have been the best thing for her.  He was good for me.  But he was a Stoic and figured there was nothing much he could do to help the situation.  He was principled though and he often said, “If you make a bed, you sleep in it.”

            When I reached my twenties, I had found religion.  I must have been everyone’s pain in the behind.  I had read these prophecy books you used to find in the grocery store aisles and was trying to convince people that the world was about to end.  I can recall coming to believe that one shouldn’t work on the Lord’s Day and refusing to do things my parents wanted me to do on that day.  I had my ideals that I was getting in my radical religious fit.  If I had gotten drunk every weekend I wouldn’t have been as rebellious to my parents as I was with my religious activities that I used to tell them that I had things figured out.  My Dad would on occasion tell me I needed to learn to get along with other people.  It took me a few years to figure that out.  I was a basket case.  But my Dad was committed to letting me be an adult.

            I think I learned in stages that honoring my parents was more important than doing nothing on the Lord’s Day, and so slowly the situation improved a bit.  But I remember coming home after living at college for a year.  Mom’s disposition was still a difficult test.  I still knew that if she was being happy go-lucky to beware of the change about to take place.  But having been away from that for several months during college I no longer could just accept that sort of behavior.  You learn in those kinds of situations to endure what is otherwise unacceptable.  It is the way abused women learn to be conditioned to endure angry men.  But college was a decent place for me, away from the drama.  Then I would come home and things would grow tense and finally the eruption would come.

            My Dad tried to keep the peace as best he could.  He had a perspective of honoring one’s parents.  He never would permit disrespect of our parents, and I never heard a word of disrespect concerning his own parents all the time I grew up.  I knew my Dad was not one for one of his kids to test when it came to his principles.  I remember one of the spankings he gave me that showed how he viewed principles.  We had a chest freezer in our basement, and not far above the chest freezer was an electric box.  Our basement, like a lot of basements was generally a little wet.  I managed to climb up on the chest freezer and discovered that by pulling the handle down I could open the fuse box.  I began playing with the fuses.  Later when some of the electric didn’t work in the house my Dad checked out the box and saw little footprints on top of the freezer made by the youngest most little child in the house.  He asked me if I did it.  I decided to tell him no.  He then explained to me that he knew I did it because I was the only one with little feet like that able to make those prints.  Then he told me, “I am going to spank you.  I am not going to spank you for playing with the fuse box, you didn’t know about that.  You must never again play with that box it could kill you.  Do you understand?”  Then he explained “I am going to spank you for lying to me.  You are not to lie to me.  You are not to lie to anyone else either.”  I weighed the two things together.  He was not spanking me for playing with a fuse box that could kill me, but for lying because lying was wrong.  Somehow it was imprinted on my mind that telling the truth was more important than life itself.  I will not claim that I lived completely according to that ideal, but that was one of my ideals.

            I want you to have that picture in your mind.  Then one day I get really frustrated because my Mom was carrying on, and I just wanted to be gone.  I left the house and went out to my father, who was working in the garden.  I was fit to be tied.  I knew that he did not tolerate his kids disrespecting our parents.  I didn’t care.  I was determined to make my point and told my dad with as much force as I could tempt myself to say to him knowing I was intentionally pushing the envelope, “Dad, sometimes I can’t get along with Mom.”  My Dad maybe paused in his work, or maybe kept on working.  I really don’t recall.  But he never raised his voice, but seemed to take it all in stride and said, “I’ve been married to her thirty-five years, if you figure out how to get along with her let me know.”

            I think I implicitly knew at that moment what that conversation meant.  I was his son, I always would be.  But I was no longer his child.  I was an adult and he was treating me like one.  It made me want to be more like an adult as well.  I think things got a bit better after that.  I sort of figured out that I had to be extra careful with mom and that tended to help things.

            You see when you are twenty-something you come to realize that you didn’t have everything like it ought to be.  None of us did.  The more I have learned of families, of churches, of nations, of work situations, there is dysfunctional behavior everywhere.  When you are twenty-something you begin to select the ideals you hope will enable you to overcome the weaknesses you had to deal with as a result of the dysfunctional things that hindered your life.  That is something important for every twenty-something to do.  That is something important for every fifty and sixty-something year old to remember about twenty-something year olds.  I have one more story to tell you about my Dad and me.

            Over the years, we heard rumors that my Dad’s Dad had a severe temper.  There was a rumor that he had beaten his daughter when she was sixteen for reading a book when she was supposed to be sleeping.  After the beating she ran off to Chicago where as a sixteen year old she did what she had to do to live, and then she did what she had to do to live above the needy level.  My Dad never told us anything to believe the stories.  At least one story was as bad as the one that caused his daughter, my Dad’s sister to leave home.  These were rumors.  My Dad ended up dying with prostate cancer.  He was in his final weeks.  I was at his bedside.  He said to me, “I hope I was not too hard on you.  I’m sorry if I was.”  I had never thought that.  He was there for me throughout the years, if he was not the best father in the world, he was the father that I still believe was the best for me.  I assured him that he was not too hard on me.  Then he said those words that let me know that he had once been twenty-something.  He said to me, “I always promised myself I would not be like my Dad was to us.”

            I am not sure what all Andrea Palpant Dilley found in her Anglican church in Austin.  I know what I have found in mine.  I believe it can be found in churches also that are not Anglican, and there are some Anglican churches you might never find it in.  God has been dealing with twenty-year olds for several thousands of years, maybe longer if the Bible’s creation account is figurative rather than strictly literal.  Whatever, he is patient.  He knows that a lot of people have suffered because there is a lot wrong in life.  The Bible calls it sin, evil, wrongdoing.  It isn’t a joke because wherever there is sin someone gets wounded.  Most of us when we are twenty-something year-olds are nursing some wounds from getting wounded.  We come up with our ideals imagining we will be so much better.  But then comes the testing times and we discover that we have our faults as well and some of our faults are a whole lot deeper than skin deep.  I am not sure what Andrea Dilley likes about her Anglican church.  I like among other things that after we have sung the first hymn we are invited for a moment to join a prayer that speaks to the fact that we are sinners.  In the prayer, we acknowledge in our hearts before God that we have done things we ought not to have done, and have failed to do things we ought to have done.  No one is there to pressure you to ask if you really prayed that prayer with your heart.  Life is confusing enough without trying to evaluate what I have done and not done from my heart.  The truth is even whether or not I have prayed with my heart, my failures even in prayer what I ought to have prayed, what I should not have prayed that all fits into the same prayer of confession. Did I pray with my heart?  I hope so, but I am sure my prayer was not without its faults.  I am grateful for a space at the beginning of a worship service to tell God through a simple profound common prayer that I know that I have sinned and hurt others even as others have sinned and hurt me.  It clears the air.  The priest commissioned to represent Christ in accordance with the Gospel declares the forgiveness of God based on God’s loving-kindness and based on how Christ has died for our sins.  That is all done before our second hymn.  It takes just a few moments and everything is between you and God even though the entire parish takes part in that part of the worship.  The same words are prayed by one person for the whole church, and you in your pew pray in your spirit unto God and cannot know what another is praying in their heart any more than they can know what you are praying.  Again I am not saying this doesn’t happen in other churches.  I am saying I am grateful for that experience in my church.  I am grateful that in a more perfect manner than even my Dad did with me, a church is God’s instrument for dealing with the sins that have bruised us and in dealing with the sins by which we have bruised others.  There is plenty of room for a twenty-some year-old to learn that God understands if they have questions, wounds, and hurts.  Amazingly a nearly sixty year old guy can find that same room he needs.  But especially to you who are twenty-something, struggling with questions, find a place where you can sit down, be silent, and know that He is God for He understands the space you need to think and he knows how to nudge you regarding how the time for thinking has become the time for action.  Sin is a reality.  It is a bummer.  But the greater truth is: “The sacred exists and it is greater than all our rebellions” and it is even greater than all our ideals that will fail us when we hurt others as we are wounded by others.

      Andrea Palpant Dilley discovered the one thing that would be my prayer for every millennial and for every boomer and for every soul in between and on the outside.  May it be that in your seeking you discover what Milosz meant when saying "The sacred exists and it is greater than all our rebellions."  It is greater also than all our ideals and all our pains.