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| "Pacific
Currents"
by Rev. Dr.
Mary Susan Gast, Conference Minister, May, 2001 YOUTH AT RISK
"Beyond the men came a group of three boys-twelve to fourteen years old. Tough-looking children with tennis shoes that had no laces and jeans that hung low on their hips. They seemed heavy in their big coats, ambling forward like a mob of unruly bear cubs. The men stopped their game a moment to gauge the threat of the children" Back when I was on the national staff of the United Church of Christ one of the women there had a baby. A few weeks after his birth she brought Nicholas over to the office and a group of us took them out to lunch. In the restaurant a number of UCC folks-and some absolute strangers-stopped at our table to cluck and carry on as grown-ups do over newborns who gurgle or sleep contentedly. Nina, the baby's mother, received all this attention graciously but as we turned to our plates she remarked, "This is really great for Nicky now, but what's it going to be like in 12 years when everybody starts looking at him with suspicion and dread? When people cross the street as soon as they see him coming because he's black, young, and male?" Nina's comment pushed all of us to assess our racism-internalized, externalized, and systemic. Our conversation also hassled me into consideration of my attitudes toward young people generally. I began to sidle across the tundra of my comfort zone, taking steps as cautious as if I were calibrating the thickness of the ice cover on a frozen river. Nina's words pressed me to uncover my own dis-ease with young people, to thaw the solidified flow of memory so that it ran off to the raw emotion, supreme frustration, and fitfully controlled violence of my own youth. Violence, frustration, and unfiltered emotion are dangers many adults see, hear, and fear atop the boom box on the shoulder of the grim-faced young man striding along the sidewalk; in the smoky cloud rising above the jostling jam of teenagers at the corner; amid rap lyrics and hiphop; in slouchy clothes, flamboyant hair color and multiple body piercings. And, we might note, it is not necessarily imprudent or outlandish to "gauge the threat of the children." At the same time, young and older people know that we live in an age where "youth at risk" is a redundant statement, and no longer confined to its original reference to risk of dropping out of high school. Risk is everywhere for young people. Sexual exploitation, physical abuse, massacres at school, HIV, early pregnancies, drug use, gang violence, depleted natural resources, eating disorders, the statistical likelihood of prison time for young men of color-all overshadow the hopeful uncertainties of trust and compassion. The shallow values of outward appearances and consumer-consciousness flourish unchecked, like cultural kudzu threatening to choke out our spirits, no matter our age group. And it is up to adults, even the overburdened and the preoccupied, to "gauge the threat TO the children," to the young people. To gauge it, to de-fuse it, to disarm it, to present an alternative to the realities of carnage and neglect. We have unique opportunities in the church. Church is one of the few places where people of all ages regularly get together. Church is one of few places where values are proclaimed that are not "of this world." Church is where all are welcomed with struggles as well as successes, with anxieties as well as accomplishments. "For Jesus Christ is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us." [Ephesians 2: 14] Is "hostility" too strong a word for the gulf between youth and elders? No matter. All dividing walls crumble in the aftershocks of resurrection, leaving us to "bear one another's burdens" as God's people of "all ages, tongues, and races."
~ Mary Susan | ||
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