Luisa, one of the two young romantic leads in the musical stage play “The Fantasticks,” cries out in frustration in Act 1, “Please, God, please! Don’t—let—me—be—normal!” Such is adolescence.
Adolescents have a need to reject and rebel. It is part of the process of maturation, loosely known as individuation. This is the process of becoming – and feeling like – an individual, especially an individual independent of one’s parents and family.
Like almost all human developmental processes, the way it is experienced and expressed usually fits nicely along the bell curve. For most people it peaks some time between the ages of 14 and 17. It is a generally miserable experience for everyone involved, but eventually it ends. The adolescent characters of the 1960 Broadway musical “The Fantasticks” illustrates it perfectly, with the consequences drawn with brutal clarity.
The word for this is oikophobia, literally “a fear of one’s home” but often expressed as a tendency to “criticize or reject one’s own culture and praise other cultures.” Most people pass through it as a part of growing up. Some people, however, seem to get caught in it, sometimes for the rest of their lives.
I remember coming to work one morning a few years after my adult conversion with Lenten ashes on my forehead. One of my co-workers stared, and later that morning approached me and said “Ash Wednesday ashes?”
“Yes,” I replied.
”Huh,” he said. “You always seemed too smart to buy into that religious stuff.”
“If it’s good enough for Aquinas and Augustine, it’s good enough for me,” I said. Either this answer satisfied him, or he wasn’t interested enough to pursue the subject further, so he wandered off and I returned to reading the overnight news on the AP wire.
Growing Up Surrounded By Heresy And Children’s Faith
I cannot pretend I did not understand his point of view. I grew up in an area where the Docetic heresy ran rampant. The classic form of this heresy asserts that Jesus was truly God, but not truly man. Some Docetics held that Jesus was an appearance only and was not subject to real suffering or discomfort. Others said Jesus was a separate spirit who essentially took over a human body to do miracles and to teach, but abandoned the body on the cross.
As you can see, this would invalidate our theologies of atonement and salvation. It also makes it easier, in some ways, to dismiss the Gospels as wishful thinking or outright frauds.
What I heard at school or from my acquaintances was unsophisticated Protestantism. They gained their knowledge second hand, from Sunday School and scripture verses learned (more often than not) for rewards in contests. But my restless habits of disputation and dialog were not fertile ground for “capping scripture,” the local term for employing scripture verses as authoritative in an argument.
My adolescence stretched through the second half of the 1960s, when questioning authority was a social given. I grew out of that period’s reflexive rejection of conventional wisdom and historical consensus on everything and anything. But eventually I began to accept that the accumulated human wisdom of countless generations might have something to contribute to the well lived life.
Hungry For A Good Cause
To be fair, the recent success and justice of the Civil Rights movement left plenty of young people hungry for their own righteous cause. And there were any number of preachers, teachers, and demagogues ready to promote their own sense of justice and fairness to anyone who would listen. More than a few of them had good points, if exaggerated priorities.
In the years since then, I have seen such causes attach themselves to what I have learned to refer to as a distaste or even a fear of the ordinary, the normal, or the standard. Eventually I stumbled on the term oikophobia, which seems to capture both the attitude and its origin.
This kind of thinking itself is also characterized as “antinomian.” This is a rejection of normal and ordinary cultural values and the conclusions and practices we draw from them.
Giving Up on Rationale Argument
Today imitating the now classic “Reductio ad Hitlerum” is commonplace. This is the term for giving up on rational argument and substituting the accusation of something being “just like the Nazis” or “Hitlerian.” So now we have the reflexive accusations of racism, classism, homophobia, and other invalidating clichés applied to arguments and positions rather than a measured, serious response.
Resorting to emotion-laden clichés rather applying measured criticism and argument is a sign of emotional investment overriding intellectual processing. And we now live at a time when feeling is sometimes (even often) held to be superior to thinking. It is not a surprise that public dialog is infected with the same weakness.
Our cultural heritage warns us not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. And it affirms that one swallow does not make a spring. It also warns us not to cut off our noses to spite our faces, and not to throw out the champagne with the cork. And absolutely do not scour the Teflon when we wash a pan. But when fear of the ordinary and disdain for the normal take over, cultural wisdom and heritage are often the first thing to go.
Evangelization
Our efforts to bring people into the Church – either for the first time or as a return to something lost – run face first into this human tendency. Certainly there are people who moved away from the church because of their reason and experience taking a secular path. But my sense is that even more move away because of social pressures, or from attachment to new liberties experienced as they leave home to become students. Peer influence, cultural pressure, temptations offered by rejecting elements of the Faith, or even plain boredom and a desire for newness for its own sake, all come into play as well.
Unfortunately, these positions frequently lend themselves to an undeserved sense of superiority to those unsophisticated souls left behind. The unsophisticated souls are those who have not rejected the pedestrian faith of their parents, or their youth, or of the society as a whole.
That superiority, however, is undeserved intellectually or historically. But people are always ready to take as given their superiority to anyone who disagrees with them for whatever reason.
This is not exclusively a modern challenge of course. It has existed as long as parents have had children and societies have had normative values.
Our Best Response
Our best response is to make sure our own faith is solidly grounded, and that we live it out as authentically as possible. Young people view hypocrisy as strongly invalidating behavioral evidence. So we need to practice forbearance when tempted to harsh or angry reactions.
The Faith has gone through trials and periods of rejection before and always come back in a new resurrection. Faith is, after all, central to how we understand redemption and the action of saving Grace. The world and our loved ones are in God’s hands, and it will help us in our efforts if we keep the promises this represents in the forefront of our minds and prayers.
Prayer
Rescue us Lord from the pride that leads us to reject known goods in favor of fads and passing trends. Help us discern real struggles for virtue from passing enthusiasms and current fixations on what is popular and even moving. Lead us to the defense of real virtue and authentic Faith, in the spirit of our fathers and mothers whose examples transcend their own time to reach into ours. Make us doers of the Word and not just hearers, as our Lord advised us. And grant us the humility to always be aware of the differences between our passions and your will. Amen.
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Author: Mark Belanger
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