A text by Myriam Tonus, columnist
No need to beat around the bush: in my family circle, immediate and more distant, there are not very many of them who declare themselves believers. The young people (most of whom have taken nearly twelve years of religious studies) show no interest in matters of faith; their parents have deserted to the courts; as for the friends of my generation, they are divided between those who have also distanced themselves from the Church and those who wonder what they have done (or not done) to cause the transmission to be so broken down. As for me, I live serenely the fact of being the grandmother who does theology like others do watercolors or Nordic walking. Without really worrying that the young people of the Patro or my own grandchildren (adults) do not know who Pope Francis is or what the Assumption of Mary represents.
It’s because living with young people is fascinating. And it is an almost daily object of wonder. In Little Thumbelina, Michel Serres paid a jubilant and sincere tribute to this generation of girls and boys born when the world left modernity to enter a mutation of which we are perhaps not even really aware yet, we who have just the old world. Admittedly, they jostle us, the younger generations, they dislodge us and we have only one alternative: either to sink into a lament, as vain as it is unfair, about the level which continues to drop, of the addiction to the screens and other modern turpitudes, or to recognize that the future, it is these young people who will carry it. And if we choose the second term of the alternative, we must accompany their anguish of this singularly threatened future… and recognize in our descendants a lucidity and a maturity which exceed, it seems to me, those which we had at their age. Yes, they reinvent everything: romantic relationships, school, work, and it ruffles us.
But they are beautiful people and they show as much generosity and idealism as their elders, a form of disenchantment on top of that. This can be understood, given the heritage they will have to assume. And, yes, spirituality, they know, if we give this word its first meaning: a breath that we receive, which swells the veils and gives us to move forward. Religions do not have a monopoly.
That is to say if a few lines read in my favorite newspaper literally slapped me. A seminarian (1) declares: “When I speak to non-believing friends, I notice that their life lacks meaning. And our role is precisely to bring them back to Jesus, for their good.” Thus, only believers (Catholics?) could make sense of their lives and the role of the priest would be to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. For their own good… So much unconsciousness and feeling of superiority leaves you speechless.
Who are you, seminarian brother, to judge, from the height of a status that you do not even have yet, the quality of a human life that does not share your convictions? Do you realize that it is precisely words and positions of this kind that take away any desire to know more about what faith is? Do you remember that Jesus, when he made himself close to people, contented himself (if I may say so) with awakening the spark of life that they carried within them and that he did not ask them to convert to Judaism? And this again: when I was a religion teacher, 30 years ago, there was already in the duly approved textbook a short enjoyable text which reminded us that to be a believer is not to have “something more”… like we have a wart on our nose!
So, if the future may not be fun for anyone, and especially for young people, I sincerely wish good luck to this seminarian. But I will continue to rejoice just as sincerely to note that, decidedly, the breath (the spirit) blows where it wants and that one knows neither where it comes from nor where it goes. Simply, I continuously perceive its invigorating trace at work in so many of my contemporaries, including those, young or not, who do not need a label to get to work.