Lately, I have fretfully watched my two daughters, ages 12 and 13, step into the fast-moving stream of adolescence, a whitewater time when everything changes: bodies, ideas, expectations, feelings. Impossibly, their childhoods are fading from my eyes like a watercolor dream, replaced by hi-def adulthood, which inches ever closer like the bass from a car radio passing in the night. Teen years are an unavoidably awkward time—my babies are simultaneously willowy beauties and clumsy colts, clattering around with fragile, experimental selves even as they sprout out of jeans and shoes with alarming alacrity. Change is exciting, change is scary . . . change is unavoidable. This is not an easy truth.
For instance, in recently cleaning out a linen closet, I came across a tiny gown that one of my girls wore as an infant, and an arrow of longing pierced me to my soul. I brought the worn cloth to my face, hoping to breathe the magical baby powder smell one more time, and in so doing I cursed the passage of time . . . feeling as though I would give a queen’s ransom if I could but hold them as delicate babies in my arms one more time. But then, as I was standing there ridiculously near tears, my oldest daughter appeared. I turned and looked at her (almost eye-level now!) my heart surged with gladness and pride at the wondrous person she is becoming. Why would I ever want to wish this change away? But still, that little baby gown possesses a powerful siren call of nostalgia.
It's hard not to be nostalgic about the Church, too. Wrenching shifts have come so fast in the past decade that it is all too easy to wring hands or point fingers, forgetting in our discomfort that it’s simply Life, refusing to remain the same. But as Theologian George Lindbeck has written:
“We live in a time when Christianity is in the awkwardly intermediate stage of having once been culturally established . . . but is not yet clearly disestablished.”
Amen to that, brother. We ain't what we used to be, and not yet what we might be. And being betwixt and between is, as my kids would say, legit awkward. Awkward, from the Middle English ‘awkeward,’ meaning, “in the wrong direction, or turned the wrong way.”
Well, which way are we supposed to turn? Behind us to hold on to cherished ways, or ahead to a dimly-lit future that holds only God knows what? Did we fail on our watch, squandering the inheritance of our traditions, and therefore we should simply bear down and try to get back on track? Or is this helter-skelter whitewater of change intentionally God’s desire, and therefore we should just stop resisting, screw up our courage, and step out over the abyss of what's next?