What do you do with a rebellious teenager?<\/p>\n
Monsignor Guissani\u2013founder of Communion and Liberation says go with the flow.<\/p>\n
Well, he doesn\u2019t say that in so many words, but that\u2019s what he means. In his book The Risk of Education<\/em> he says that for education to be authentic a young person has to examine what he has been given and see if it works.<\/p>\n This is especially true of religious education. In childhood we\u2019re given a whole set of (let\u2019s face it) pretty incredible propositions, prohibitions and principles to live by. The big authority figures dish them out, and we have to eat our vegetables.<\/p>\n In our teenage years we\u2019re facing the big challenge of life. We\u2019ve got to see if the stuff we\u2019ve been given actually works. We\u2019re about to jump out of the airplane, and we\u2019re need to see if the parachute\u2019s packed correctly; so we begin to test what we\u2019ve been given.<\/p>\n The grown ups don\u2019t like this. Because the testing is often expressed negatively they crack down on this \u2018teenaged rebellion.\u2019 Guissani says this is the wrong response.<\/p>\n Instead we have to accompany the young people as they verify the Truth. What\u2019s wrong if they question it? If its true it will stand up to questioning won\u2019t it? Are you chicken? The problem is, too many grownups haven\u2019t really tested the faith for themselves. they\u2019ve settled for the easy way out which is just, \u2018Do as you\u2019re told\u2026obey the rules and you\u2019ll be okay.\u2019<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t good enough. It is not a real engagement with the faith, and young people know that. They actually want a real engagement with the faith. They want to wrestle with the angel. They want to verify the faith. They want to know if it works. Otherwise, why put all their trust in it?<\/p>\n We have to first of all have the experience of living by faith ourselves. Secondly we need to know enough about our faith to provide the answers. Third, we need to be able to admit when we don\u2019t know the answers, and fourth, we need to have the courage and maturity and good humor to encourage them to examine and verify for themselves.<\/p>\n I tried this the other week coming home from Mass. My thirteen year old said, (in a rather stressy way) \u201cWhy do we have to sing all those dumb hymns at Mass?\u201d Her mother reprimanded her for asking a stressy question. Remembering Guissani\u2019s wisdom I jumped in and said, \u201cNo, she\u2019s asking a question about her faith. It\u2019s a good question. The hymns aren\u2019t dumb, they\u2019re just not to your taste. Once you get to know them you\u2019ll probably like them, but you\u2019ll never get to know them if you just sit there thinking how dumb they are and not singing.\u201d<\/p>\n She calmed down and accepted the answer. Most of all she wanted permission to ask the questions, and permission to set out on her own journey of faith. I\u2019d rather have her do that with some hard questions\u2013even questions that I can\u2019t answer, than to have her become a grinning squeaky clean Christian teenager who never does anything wrong, but who also never really does anything right because she\u2019s never really chosen to do what is right from a position of real choice.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What do you do with a rebellious teenager? Monsignor Guissani\u2013founder of Communion and Liberation says go with the flow. Well, he doesn\u2019t say that in so many words, but that\u2019s what he means. In his book The Risk of Education he says that for education to be authentic a young person has to examine what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":557,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n