![]() ![]() A whole mode of being has been lost, a mode of being that in every culture but our own produces a wealth of beauty, and sweeps young people along with its strong tide, into marriage and a world of families. There aren’t any boys singing “Annie Laurie,” nor any Annies for them to sing to. But where, now, is the natural expression of this search for love? There aren’t any boys climbing the mountains to pick edelweiss for their sweethearts. Grace perfects nature but that means there has to be a nature to perfect. Young people should be oriented toward love that is natural. And this is what I specifically want to stress. Third, it implies a divorce of love from the crazy vigor and cheerfulness of youth. They themselves make a society within the larger society. They need not rely upon the ministrations of a secular and soul-withering state. The married couple, open to bearing and raising children, assume wholly new relations to the world around them. It is when the couple will plant orchards whose fruit they themselves will not enjoy-while tasting the fruit that has been made available to them by their parents and grandparents. In a culture where marriage is really treasured, that time is the supreme aim of most people’s lives. Second, it delays, perhaps derails for good, the time when young people will set down roots and integrate themselves into the great passage of the generations. Some of them are bed-hopping some are shacking up some are simply alone. We are not talking about people who are dating during all those years they aren’t. ![]() ![]() First, it is evidence of deep and widespread loneliness. Now that number is less than one in ten (9%)! That is not a good thing. ![]() In 1960-back when Wally Cleaver was wearing a jacket and tie to join other boys and girls at a party, for playing records and eating ice cream and dancing-in that already souring time, almost three out of four Americans aged 24 were married (72%). In our swamp of miserable statistics, let me introduce another that is often overlooked. Just as boys after fifteen years of being hustled from institutional pillar to institutional post no longer know how to make up their own games outdoors, just as girls after fifteen years of the same no longer know how to organize a dance or a social, so now our young people not only refrain from dating and courting-they do not know how to do it. We need desperately to reintroduce young men and young women to the delightfulness of the opposite sex. But we need something else too, something more human and more fundamental. We need theological lectures to counter the regnant nihilism of the schools and the mass media. Yes, we need those frank discussions about contraception. I am aware of the many attempts by responsible Catholic priests and laymen to win the souls of young people, to keep them in the Church, and indeed to make some of them into attractive ambassadors for the Church. Let that serve as shorthand for the absence of all those rites of attraction and conversation, flirting and courting, that used to be passed along from one youthful generation to the next, just as childhood games were once passed along, but are so no longer. It’s been more than ten years since I first noticed something odd about the generally pleasant-and generally Catholic-students at the college where I teach. ![]()
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