Celestine Cullen OSB, a former headmaster of Glenstal Abbey school, is optimistic about the young people and has simple advice for their frustrated parents.
One of the things that I am sure will most surprise us when evening comes and our work is done, and we are finally freed from the tribulations of time, will be the amount of quite unnecessary worry that we allowed accompany us through life, particularly in relation to those we most cherish and love – our children and grandchildren.
Transfiguration
To-day’s gospel of the Transfiguration is, or should be, a counterbalance to our worries. St Paul says in one of his letters, ‘From heaven comes the saviour we are waiting for, the Lord Jesus Christ, and he will transfigure these bodies of ours into copies of his glorious body. He will do this with the same power with which he can subdue the whole universe.’ We can be transfigured, as Christ was, we can be changed, we can become whole, masters of ourselves; we can grow to full stature as human beings if we believe in Christ, if we trust him, listen to him as the gospel enjoins: ‘This is my Son the Beloved; listen to him’ – accept his claim on our lives, lose our life to him, as he mysteriously asks, in order to find it in following him.
My current task as regional superior sends me shooting around the world. Everywhere I meet worried parents whose children seem to have abandoned the faith of their fathers, think nothing of cohabiting and have, as far as one can see, ceased to pray.
Same old problems
My first reaction is to read them the following document and ask them if it is part of a bishop’s pastoral or the editorial of a Catholic weekly paper. ‘The world is passing through troubled times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for girls, they are forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress.’ (Peter the Hermit 1274 AD).
Their surprise and relief on hearing that it was written 1274 AD highlights an important reality. Our problems are in no way new or unusual. Ireland was in many ways a theocracy for the first fifty years of its existence as an independent republic. It is only now that the cold winds of unbelief have reached our shores. We are now living in the post-theocracy period, fraught with difficulties to be sure, but in some ways a more realistic period and more in keeping with the kind of world in which the gospel was first preached.
Grace of the Spirit
But back to our children. God, being good, can only create good people. There is a seed of goodness buried deep within your children and through the touch of the Spirit, through the formative power of grace, that seed of goodness will eventually triumph. But the process of growth in goodness is a delicate, a difficult and a bewildering one.
It cannot be accelerated. It involves a walking together through the uncertain years of a child’s, an adolescent’s, a young adult’s life when thought is confused, confidence easily undermined and the future full of uncertainty. Edith Stein, a Jewess who converted to Catholicism, became a Carmelite and perished in Auschwitz, and who was recently canonized by Pope John Paul, wrote in the late 1930S: ‘The youngest generation of Germans has passed through so many crises, so many changes, that they cannot understand us any more. But we must try to understand them, and then perhaps we shall be able to help them a little.’ The ball is in our court, not in theirs.
The good gardener
The role we play is that of the gardener. The good gardener rarely panics; he knows that the sun will eventually break through the clouds. There is a tremendous calm and confidence about gardening and about growth, and there should be the same calm and confidence in our approach to our children as they grow, as they struggle to become whole, to create a harmony between the wayward and wounded side of themselves and that seed of goodness buried deep within.
We are not given a full understanding of life, but only the courage to live it. We are not guaranteed the love of our children, but rather strengthened to win and hold it – by an unassailable confidence that they will ultimately win through, that they will bear fruit in due season – when the time is ripe. For some this will be the first or second season – the more exotic the plant the longer the wait – but it will be for all in God’s time, not ours.
The Spirit at work
‘If we only knew the gift of God’ St John says – the great gift of Christianity, not a set of moral imperatives but the presence of the transforming Spirit within ourselves and within our children – we could not, would not worry, but rather wonder at the extraordinary delicacy of the Spirit at work, respecting freedom, accepting rejection, long years in the wilderness, yet finally winning through like the mustard seed: at the time of its sowing in the soil it is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet grows into the biggest shrub of them all.
Yes I am with you, says the Lord, and with your children – until evening comes and our work is done.
Hold firm, hold on, take heart, trust in the Lord – and all shall be well for yourselves, for your children and for your grandchildren.
This article first appeared in Spirituality (July-August 1999), a publication of the Irish Dominicans.
