Sabbath day musings...

There is a growing phenomenon amongst the men and women of my generation that has become increasingly and disturbingly apparent in recent years—a pervasive and subtly poisonous mindset that seems to be ever more common. Up until the past few months, I’ve been pretty much baffled when it came to trying to deal with or understand what I was encountering, but I was very much aware of the fact that it was there.

What am I referring to? People have labeled this as many different things. A fear of commitment. Personal insecurity. An inability to relate to others. Self-centeredness. Insensitivity. Callousness. Cultural myopia. Narcissism.

It may be all of those things. But what I’ve wondered for several years now is…why? Why is it that young people in THIS generation are floundering through relationships, messing up friendships, and fracturing family ties as if the concepts of human love and lasting trust were recent inventions still in the experimental stages? If marriage has been around for literally hundreds of centuries…why is it that forming and maintaining this relationship has suddenly become an unattainable form of rocket science to men and women of the 21^st century? How is it that such a high percentage of one generation could be incapable of really trusting enough to care…or caring enough to trust?

Last night, I curled up with a book and a cup of tea—still possibly my favorite pastime—to see if someone, somewhere, somehow, had cast some light upon our current perplexing state of relational affairs in the U.S.

The book which thus engrossed me last night was called The Love They Lost: Living with the Legacy of Our Parents’ Divorce, and I picked it out when meandering through the library because I have a number of friends who are the children of divorced parents—and I thought that maybe somehow this mysterious little volume would shed a bit of light on the struggles that children of divorcees face, as well as revealing some of the ways in which their friends can most effectively minister to them as they attempt to wade through the emotional wash of a fractured family situation.

As I read through page after page of first-hand accounts given by the now-adult children of divorced parents, poring over their descriptions of emotional responses and various methods of coping with the pain of their parents’ separation, a lot of things that I’d wondered about began to make a lot more sense. Each chapter was a succession of those “Wow! Are you kidding me?!” moments, where you’re excited by how much sense the new ideas make, but where you also grieve over the fact that you didn’t understand this stuff six or seven years ago…

There were a couple of recurrent themes that surfaced in story after story, though. One was that, when parents separate, there is an almost subconscious assumption of relational stability that is shattered in the minds of their children—and often times, they never recover from this. It’s replaced with an assumption that relationships are meant to be fractured, that trust will inevitably be irreparably broken, and that those upon whom we most depend are not truly dependable. Often, the kids spoke of being unable to face the emotions related to their parents’ divorce—so they simply didn’t. They stuffed it, sometimes not dealing with the depths of the emotional pain until decades later, or maybe not at all. And during those interim years, they simply didn’t allow themselves to feel—because they were afraid to feel, and had decided that numbness was a better option than emotional agony.

Maybe this isn’t really the answer, but it certainly made me wonder—do we live in a society where divorce and the resultant relational transiency has so warped and scarred our view of relationships that people are afraid to really feel, and therefore unable to really trust, and thus, as a result, incapable of forming meaningful, lasting, and healthy emotional ties?

Even for those of us who have grown up in nurturing, mostly-functional nuclear-family homes, the legacy of the skyrocketing divorce rates of our parents’ generation has affected us deeply, because we inevitably sense that there’s a lack of trust and a lack of trustworthiness in the average man or woman from our generation. We’re bombarded with dysfunctionality in the media. We hear about it on every street corner. We see it in the lives of our friends. We’re constantly surrounded by emotionally wounded individuals who are self-sufficient, suspicious, freakishly independent, and relationally isolated. They insist that this is the new normal, that this is “coping,” because they can’t or won’t admit that they don’t know how to be open in a healthy sense, don’t understand what it means to love—and be loved—unconditionally, or accepted for who they are, or nurtured and cared for without being afraid that it won’t last. And so those of us from nuclear two-parent homes begin to wonder if what we experienced in our own families is abnormal—if what everyone ELSE seems to be experiencing is really the way life is? Can we ever hope to repeat what we saw our parents do? Can we ever really find a spouse who shares our view of commitment as a life-long thing—do those people with a functional, healthy understanding of trust and dependability even exist in this new generation? Or is that asking way too much?

Are we creating a self-perpetuating monster? Are we unwittingly setting the next generation up for the same kind of emotional roller-coaster ride that we’ve experienced ourselves? Where does one go to heal from the kind of trauma that two or three or four decades of wrong relational paradigms inflicts on one’s soul? How do you teach someone to trust when the most rudimentary ideas of what trust really IS have been shattered before the kid reached five years of age?

And how do you help someone begin to feel things again—to find themselves, to experience real emotions in a healthy sense—when they’ve coped for years by simply burying their feelings and pretending they don’t exist?

I wish I had the answers. I don’t. And I doubt if it’s that easy anyway. But sometimes…I’ve found that the beginnings of the answers lie within the questions themselves—in the process of asking, the agony of trying to sort things out…in the willingness to wonder why, and how, and when, and where, and what next…