Generations
The Builders were my parents.
The boomers my older siblings and cousins.
The Xers my younger siblings and cousins.
The millennials my children.
I watched the boomers reject the tyranny of the builders. All their stupid rules about Sabbath observance, dating, Christian education, the only TRUE church (CRC of course, OPC was OK but a little tight, RCA suspect…), etc.
They broke free. They knew better. They were would be in the world but not of it, but not like their parents. “You say you want a revolution, oh yeah, we all want to change the world…”
So I watch the millennials now, and I’m fascinated.
Formation. Practice. Authority. Discipline. Benedict Option.
Wow.
Yeah. I get it. I lived the Benedict Option. I watched the revolution. I’ve seen “Do your own thing. Everything will be OK.” Now we’re back.
I then tell him of my impressions of a very different Brooklyn, one in which tradition governs every aspect of life, and the calendar and streets themselves are marked by the holy. Perhaps sensing a little naivete in this contrast, Rabbi Novak tells me of a Lutheran pastor he knew who had moved to Brooklyn as a young man and been taken immediately with the lifestyle of its Hasidic Jews. Here were people who took faith seriously! One day, as the pastor was telling his own rabbi (one Abraham Joshua Heschel) about the virtues of such a life, he was interrupted. “Richard, you wouldn’t last a day in one of those neighborhoods. You’d find a way out—or you’d suffocate!”
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