Helping Youth Grieve

The Good News of Biblical Lament

Yoder

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781498220439
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Suicide, depression, eating disorders, and other mental health illnesses have dramatically increased among adolescents in recent decades. Our American culture demands high levels of success and propagates a "feel good" attitude that denies pain, loss, and failure. Churches contribute to these distressing realities among youth. Our theology associates "being happy" with "true faithfulness" to God, overemphasizing praise and thanksgiving while neglecting lament, even though lament comprises the largest number of Psalms. There is much good in the lives of today's adolescents, but there is also much grief and woundedness. Helping Youth Grieve exposes the warped view of God modeled and taught to our young people. This book portrays a God who yearns to hear the honest cries of our youth, even when that involves blaming God! Spiritual caregivers will discover good news in biblical lament for its role in pastoral care and faith formation of adolescents.

1

Introduction

I was in seventh grade. My father and I were completing chores on our dairy farm when a car came speeding down our lane to let us know that my older brother was in a serious car accident not far from our home. I was stunned and not sure how to respond, but as my father drove my mother and me to the accident site I held back my tears, downplaying my emotions. However, these attempts were not successful as my father heard me sniffle. Rather than suggest that I “be a man” and hold in my tears, he simply said, “Bobby, it’s okay to cry.” In that moment my father gave me permission to express my feelings and fears.

My father modeled that type of emotional expression in other public venues. He led hymns in the churches we attended. Sometimes as he described the story behind the song, he would be overcome by the emotion of it and shed tears in public. Dad would often crack a joke about having too much farm dust in his eyes and that they “were in need of a good washing.” He let his emotions show not to manipulate others, but because his genuine tears caught him off guard. As a child and early adolescent, my father modeled to me that it was indeed okay for men to cry and express their emotions.

A second personal story comes from my first year in college. During Spring Break my friend Jeff died unexpectedly due to an undiagnosed heart problem. We had grown up together and attended the same college. This was the first person close to me who ever died. I remember going to the funeral home expecting to be a source of support to my friends. Instead, I lost it when I approached the casket as the reality of his death sank into me. Lynn, who had been a volunteer youth worker while I was part of the church youth program, simply came and held me in his arms as I wept. That expression of care helped me to stay in the moment of accepting Jeff’s death as I recalled many wonderful memories of him. I would look at Jeff’s body and then bury my face into Lynn’s arms and cry. Then I would look at the casket for a brief time and once again plunge my head into Lynn’s comforting arms. This cycle went on for nearly twenty minutes. Throughout that entire time, I do not recall Lynn ever saying a word. Later when I became a pastor, I relied on that image of pastoral care as a comforting presence when I walked with people in their hurts and losses. Indeed, Lynn enabled me to face the reality of that significant loss and granted me permission to grieve from the depths of my soul.

Two Current Challenging Realities

1. What kind of humans are adolescents being formed into?

The previous stories are shaping moments from my youth, but I am not sure that today’s youth have enough of those types of faith mentors for them to enter into their deep emotions and grieve their raw feelings. Compared to a few decades ago, adolescents today are more likely to commit suicide,1 to suffer from mental heath illnesses such as depression and eating disorders and self-mutilation, and to live in a home whose parent has been remarried due to divorce. Adolescents today face pressures of “growing up” that were not present a few decades ago with the increase of technology and to a society that emphasizes success at an earlier age. Our American culture is one that busies and hurries our young people to unhealthy levels of stress and tiredness.2 Even before our children have reached the onset of adolescence it seems they are “stressed out” due to responsibility, emotional, and information overloads.3 Eighty percent of R-rated movies target underage children, 30 percent of music recordings with explicit content identify teenagers as the market, and 70 percent of “mature” video games are pitched to younger teens.4 All of this is happening as they discover who they are and what they want to do in life while they also live through the developmental changes during junior high, senior high, and young adulthood.

Adolescence is a time when young people struggle for a sense of identity and belonging. Who will they be when they “grow up”? What vocation will they embrace? Whose influential voices will they claim as their loyalty? They will face much change in this relatively short span of years. Personal and societal pressures abound. I believe the statistics in the previous paragraph offer a glimpse of how some adolescents respond to the many pressures and realities they face. Overall, I believe that adult spiritual caregivers need to better prepare and enable young people to encounter all the significant losses they will experience in this relatively short period of time.

Chap Clark, author of Hurt 2.0: Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers, argues that the defining issue for contemporary adolescents, particularly midadolescents, is abandonment.5 He wrote this book hoping to convince people that life is different for high schoolers today compared to thirty years ago, or at any time in history, and that adults who walk with youth must wake up to this new reality. The adult world has systemically abandoned the youth of this generation from both external and internal systems.

Externally, the adult-driven institutions, including schools and churches, are primarily concerned with adult agendas, needs, and dreams.6 In recent decades, our society has moved from “being a relatively stable and cohesive adult community intent on caring for the needs of the young to a free-for-all of independent and fragmented adults seeking their own survival . . . deepening a hole of systemic rejection.”7 Internally, adolescents have suffered from the loss of safe relationships and intimate settings, primarily due to the re-definement of “family” in our culture and an increased divorce rate.8 There has been a shift in the past three decades from when the definition of family was accepted to be “two or more persons related by birth, marriage or adoption who reside in the same household to the current definition of a free-flowing, organic ‘commitment’ between people who love each other.”9

Since youth are abandoned by the adult institutions in their lives, they are forced to deal with pain and fear on their own and therefore have created a “world beneath,” a unique and defended social system. This world exists because they believe they have no choice and are searching for a relationally focused safe home to band together. However, in spite of all this and even though Clark ultimately found a greater chasm in his research between adults and youth than he anticipated, he still suggests that youth want adults and desire genuine, authentic relationships.

Whether or not one completely agrees with Clark’s assessment of adolescent realities, his findings are provocative and should cause us to pause and reflect on the lives of the young people we know. It also seems that the influence of our success-oriented culture and its accompanying stresses has impacted our church ministries and adolescent spiritual caregiving practices. A culture of success offers praise for our accomplishments and denies or downplays our failures. Could it be that in the church we have over-emphasized praise to God to the neglect of truly facing our fears, our doubts, our pains, our struggles, and our weaknesses? Do we think that God does not appreciate those times of vulnerable suffering because we believe this to be a sign of weak faith? In our gathered times of worship, do we over-engage in songs that offer praise to God and neglect truly facing our human frailties? Is such an imbalanced use of praise songs another symptom of an American society that demands success?

Personally, I appreciate and enjoy singing songs that offer praise to God; we can find many wonderful psalms of praise in the Bible. However, I am concerned that if an adolescent population only knows how to pray to God through the genre of praise, then it is in danger of negl...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Theology of Biblical Lament
• 3. Writing Your Own Prayer of Lament
• 4. The Role of Biblical Lament in Pastoral Care of Adolescents
• 5. The Role of Biblical Lament in Faith Formation of Adolescents
• 6. Other Ways to Engage Biblical Lament
• 7. Conclusion
• Bibliography