Nuns and nones
Iremember my first school-boy crush. She was charming, witty, intelligent. She had the face of an angel and when she corrected me, I knew instinctively it was for the better. I was 6 years old. She was a legend.
Sister Eileen Schneider was my first-grade teacher and an educational stalwart. She was as kind as she was demanding. She was as funny as she was strong. And, oh man, she was happy. That black habit she wore covered a wonderful mind, an endearing soul, and pure joy.
I thought about Sister Eileen when I read the fascinating New York Times article reprinted in this paper titled, “These millennials got new roommates. They’re nuns.” Describing a partnership between agnostic activists and dedicated Sisters of Mercy, the article made me remember my own interactions with nuns and reconsider my thoughts about millennials.
It seems that a few 30-somethings decided they could learn something from people who spend their lives with “total devotion to their cause.” So these millennials approached a convent in the Bay area, Sisters of Mercy, and asked if they could live with them to learn their ways.
Strange though the arrangement seemed at first, it’s not so far-fetched.
One of the most meaningful traditions of my school is to take the seniors to visit the Carmelite Sisters down on 32nd Street. The visit happens in May, right before graduation, and it’s with the sense of giving one final lesson before school is out. The seniors are introduced to women who have forsaken material possessions, who live life simply, and who are, without question, among the happiest individuals they’ll ever meet.
These teenage boys walk through the doors of the monastery and ask first, “Why?” Why did the nuns choose this life? Then, they ask, “What?” What do the nuns receive in return? The lessons are deeply embedded. The nuns sprinkle their answers with words like “calling,” “dedication,” “joy,” and “fun.”
The millennials who joined the sisters in their convents branded their enterprise Nuns and Nones, the latter meaning those with no particular faith. They had big ideas about how to change the world, exact social justice, and make sustainable the big solutions they entertained. Who best to model this for them? The women who’ve been doing it for centuries.
That’s an impressive enterprise. Millennials have been unfairly maligned and stereotyped as lazy, entitled, and narcissistic. Yet, here they are seeking to learn how to live better. In the article, one millennial explains that the nuns “made social change a lifestyle.”
That doesn’t sound narcissistic or lazy.
Today’s millennial parents are certainly different in many regards. In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Jim Sollisch wrote an understanding letter to them. He acknowledged them as the “anxiety generation” and offered a partial reason parenting seems so
difficult now. He wrote, “We had Dr. Spock. You have everybody: an army of friends on social media offering advice, a thousand apps and bloggers and websites, all devoted to making you the perfect parent. In fact, 58 percent of millennial parents report being overwhelmed by all the parenting information out there, according to a Time magazine poll. The result: Every fear, no matter how tiny, gets amplified until it’s all you can hear.” Once we understand the inundation of information and the complexity of it, we understand millennials much better.
One of the millennials visiting the Sisters of Mercy inquired about “wisdom traditions.” She said, “A lot of us in social justice, a lot of the people of our generation, it’s this culture that’s all about forward-moving progress, and that forgets that there’s this cyclical spiral and these really old wisdom traditions that can feed change. It’s less about building anew; it’s more about remembering.” Holy cow. Wisdom traditions.
These folks get that there’s a difference between tradition and inertia. Tradition reflects the roots of a family, an institution, a community, those great practices that make us unique. Inertia does not. Inertia causes us to do something over and over again because thinking takes work and “we’ve always done it this way” sounds like a good excuse, weak though it is.
Millennials aren’t yet finished as a generation. As evidenced by those mentioned in The New York Times, they are doing the work. Many of us don’t like the fact that they’re noncommittal to social norms that are important to older generations. They get married later. They’re less tied to location. They don’t go to church regularly.
But what’s better? The searching agnostic or the false faithful? The waiting groom or the devastating divorce? The great appeal of millennials is that they’re still open to learning about life; they’re still tuned to the glories of exploration that ultimately lead to truth.
They have a magnetic adherence to technology. They are connected. And by exploring wisdom traditions, they are becoming more and more aware that technology and connectedness become better with old-school inclusion of duty, devotion, and dedication to a higher cause.
Because augmenting the new with the old, the cutting edge with the tried and true, we find one thing lasting and pure.
We find joy.