Roll the clock back to the 1960’s for a moment: The halcyon days of the Boomer rise to glory. Bike-riding through growing suburban developments, baseball and football games, the Beatles, the Stones, a burgeoning problem with drug addiction, the assassination of a President and a major civil rights leader (among others), race riots, and the Vietnam War.
Boomers absorbed it all, conforming and reacting to the politics of their parents. We were convinced that they were pivotal moments and — notwithstanding our mistrust of authority — we refocused the institutions around us, including the church, with a view to giving our pivotal convictions a lasting place in American life. One sociologist, describes us as “the pig in the demographic python.”
Of course, it is now clear in a world that is very different from the one in which we grew up that our vision of things is already losing its hold on our children — never mind the country and the world. That hasn’t discouraged us, of course. We are still tightly in control of the church and the debates still represent the old battle lines drawn in the 60’s. Go to a General Convention or channel surf from Fox to MSNBC and it all sounds the same.
But the smell of mortality is what strikes me. Like a battered old man nursing a grudge, or a dying dog gnawing at an old bone — it’s clear that the issues are the narrow preoccupation of a generation that is losing its grip. And in a decade or so, we Boomers will have largely disappeared from the stage — taking our place among long, gray crowds, complaining that what we thought should be defining isn’t getting any attention at all.
Mortality has its lessons to teach and some of them are not pleasant to contemplate. But, like mortality, they are inescapable:
One, every generation has its contribution to make, but it has its blind spots as well. Some of those surface long before a generation completes its run: The polarized and polarizing character of boomer discourse is a case in point. Lost in the debates, left and right, is the larger well-being of our society and its institutions. Our capacity for moving beyond disagreement to mutual understanding and shared spiritual pilgrimage is in evidence everywhere.
Two, there is a place in generational pilgrimages to build and imagine a new way of doing things, but the enduring mark of a generation lies in its ability to listen. Like individuals, we collectively move through life as well – whether we acknowledge it or not; and like individuals generations pass through stages. The earliest stages are marked by growth, acquisition, and achievement. But the “arc of ambition” as one writer calls it, needs to give way to listening, if the lessons learned are likely to find application and relevance late in life. Across the church I have met younger adults who have underlined our inability as boomers to listen. Some of them are militant. Some of them are already discouraged. Both groups are barometers of our capacity for wisdom.
Three, there is a time and a place to let go. Here, perhaps, we deserve a bit of sympathy. Generational changes have accelerated and the march of generational change is different. Thanks to life in a world where entrepreneurial and broad-based change can be launched by ever-smaller numbers of people, we do not have the same leisure to prepare for changes; and thanks to longer life expectancies, dealing with our mortality is something we can defer. But none of this absolves us of the responsibility to grapple with our mortality — and that grappling with that transition requires more than imagining the world we think that the next generation should want.
Does this mean that I think we should quit trying to be creative, thoughtful, or engaged? No. But if that desire to be engaged is something that is welcome and life-giving, it will be marked by a capacity for self-transcendence, the ability to listen and learn, and the ability to hold life lightly — which is all that we can finally do.