teenagers, transcendence, THE BEACH
the things on my mind as we enter June
For a number of reasons, teenagers have been on my mind this week.
A) I have a very cool one; her band played Radiohead’s “No Surprises” at the school talent show last week and she was floating, she’s starting a job at a local tea shop today, everything is everything, it’s beautiful.
B) I’m creating devotional and Bible study material for the teenagers at my church to use on their summer trips, and feeling gobsmacked by the task. (The middle schoolers, on a regional service project, will study the book of James – if you have any favorite resources, please share! More below on the highschool situation.)
C) The devastating statistics about teen mental health shared on Ezra Klein’s podcast this month:
“Between 2011 and 2021, the number of teens and young adults with clinical depression more than doubled… And the suicide rate for 10 to 14-year-olds — 10 to 14-year-olds, think about how young that is — it tripled, and it nearly quadrupled for girls.
A C.D.C. survey found that in 2021, almost 60 percent of high school girls experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year, and nearly 25 percent made a suicide plan.”
Over two episodes, Klein interviews psychologist Jean Twenge and clinical psychologist Lisa Damour (whose books I’ve found helpful for many years), trying to trace the lines of relationship among smartphones, social media, pandemic lockdown, and this mental health crisis. The numbers are troubling, but the research is helpful. My main takeaways were to prioritize sleep (no screens/phones in bedrooms after about 8:30pm has been our practice, and will continue to be), minimize but not forbid phones and social media (we have strong parental controls and a no-privacy policy), prioritize low-key IRL hangs for our kids and their friends, and approach stresses and challenges as normal not catastrophic.1 And to stay tuned in and present myself.
D) Lisa Miller’s The Spiritual Child looks at the latest brain science and concludes
“the most important and untold story about adolescent pain in our culture is that underlying the most prevalent forms of suffering lies a fundamentally spiritual struggle. This precept is especially critical in our understanding of adolescent spiritual development. Adolescence is a time of spiritual awakening: a crucial window of engaging with spiritual reality…
and a growing body of scientific literature about adolescent development shows that spirituality is the most robust protective factor against the big three dangers of adolescence: depression, substance abuse, and risk taking… The totality of recent, cutting-edge research paints a definitive and unambiguous picture: the adolescent brain is a spiritual brain, primed for development and responsive to the protective benefits of personal spirituality.”
All this to say: This summer I’m taking a bunch of anxious agnostic teenagers to the beach, and my mind is whirling trying to figure out how to help make neural connections between the frontal lobe, where they’re telling the stories of their experiences, and the parietal and occipital lobes, where transcendence is perceived: to help them tune in to beauty and justice and meaning and the reality of a loving God at the center of it all. Given the statistics and the research, the stakes feel high.
My church’s highschool summer experience this year is called Blue Theology: at the Duke Marine Labs in Beaufort, NC, we’ll give a week to experiential learning, service projects, and contemplative practice with God's marine creation.
And as I’ve been beginning to shape the parts of the trip that I have responsibility for – some of the Bible study and contemplative practice, some of the policies around phone use and free time - one thing that’s become clear to me is that while I hope for these kids to experience transcendence (which feels pretty given, when you’re on the coast), I also hope they gain an expanded sense of kinship, of their relation to each other and to the rest of creation. When depression beckons, what keeps us tethered to the world and to transcendent meaning is a sense of connection; one thing we can do this summer is practice new ways of sensing those connections2, new ways of seeing and listening and tasting and smelling and touching, all of which leads to love.
I want them to delight in the wildness of creation, like God does. Dr. Ellen Davis, discussing God’s lecture to Job in chapters 40-42, sees God as one has an aesthetic preference for pizzazz:
“God’s involvement with the world expresses itself in huge, unapologetic delight in a creation whose outstanding quality is quite simply magnificence: power and freedom on a scale that is bewildering and terrifying. The great symbols of that magnificence are, of course, Leviathan and Behemoth. From a human perspective, they are monstrous aberrations: an overblown crocodile and a customized hippo. Modern commentators often compare them to ancient Near Eastern chaos monsters, the troublemakers in the universe, who must be destroyed in order to make the world habitable for decent creatures like us. But that is hardly how God sees these big guys. They are, it seems, the top of the creation line, and God speaks of them with intense pride. Behemoth, God tells Job, is “the best thing I ever did” (40:19); and every one of Leviathan’s scales was set in place with the same exquisite care (41:15-17) that fashioned Job in the womb.”3
I hope that as they see God’s creative impulse toward diversity for diversity’s sake, they adopt the same ethic; and I hope they see their own bewildering and terrifying and huge and monstrous emotions and questions and loves as gifts, they way God does. I suspect this God, who delights in wildness, also delights in teenagers, and their high highs and low lows, their heightened capacity for joy and grief, their sudden attunedness to wonder and transcendence. They astound us just as sea creatures do, foreign and familiar all at once: they are a gift and an invitation.
Transcendence and kinship and love — Who am I kidding? I want it for myself, as much as for them. To that end: my current reading list, which I say is about informing the trip but is probably mostly for forming me:
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler
Touching This Leviathan by Peter Wayne Moe
Swimming to Antartica: Tales of a Long Distance Swimmer by Lynne Cox
What would you add?
Three Things:
This Sunday is Trinity Sunday. Mike Higton, who is Professor of Theology and Ministry at the University of Durham, explained the Trinity in a sermon using only words of one syllable a few years ago. I commend it to you.
Possibly my favorite episode of 60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s is this one about “Stay (I Missed You)” by Lisa Loeb and if you are a cat-eye-glasses and doc martens Xennial/Oregon Trail Generationer like me, you may also delight in it.
The Literature Clock (want to know what time it is? let a book tell you)
Let me know what you’re loving, too—
Where Goodness Still Grows is available wherever books are sold. My first book, Dangerous Territory, has a second edition coming out this fall; read more here and contribute to the audiobook campaign!
Damour: “help that young person use the incident of distress as a training ground for figuring out how to manage distress well and not be scared of it and cope with it effectively.”
to practice “making kin in lines of inventive connection” is how Donna Haraway would say it :-)
You’re doing the Lord’s work, definitely!
I think teens have a spiritual side, and I believe most are searching for a sense of purpose. I guess connecting the two is the challenge!
Blessed kids, I would say. At home and at the beach.