By Melanie Wilson
A few years ago, while doing a series of presentations about research by the New England Network for Child, Youth & Family Services on spirituality and youth, I found myself at a conference in San Diego, in front of a room filling up with youth workers. I’d come to talk about what agencies around the country were doing to encourage various forms of spiritual connection in young people, and I’d gotten some folks I’d interviewed for a previous piece of work to join me—-in this case, an energetic Irish nun named Sr. Margaret, and two teenage boys in her agency’s care.
Both boys lived in the agency’s transitional living program, and anyone in the field has met hundreds of kids like them before. Yet I still remember the details of Corey’s story, perhaps because of its almost cinematic quality. Corey had been kicked out of his home in Texas by his fundamentalist Christian parents after he’d finally admitted to them that he was gay. Panicking, and with nowhere to go, he emptied out his bank account and climbed onto a bus headed for Hollywood. He arrived in town late at night and managed to find a seedy motel room. With his cash already running out, things were headed in the worst possible direction. But he got lucky. In the motel room he found a brochure from the local Covenant House, and at Covenant House he found Sr. Margaret, a place to stay, a job, and, eventually, even a tentative reconnection with his parents.
Great story, right? But that’s not the one I wanted to tell here. Here’s my story: Just as I was getting ready to call the workshop in San Diego to order, Sr. Margaret grabbed my hand and whispered that the boys wanted to pray. Spur-of-the-moment prayers clearly came naturally to these three; in any case, it wasn’t exactly a request. I bowed my head. Sr. Margaret began to murmur a prayer asking God for strength as she and the boys prepared to speak. Just then it dawned on me how strange this was going to look to others. Worried, I cracked an eye open, just in time to watch two young women in the front row grab their bags and march out of the room. Their expressions said it all: They had been had. This was some kind of brainwashing religious thing, and they’d stumbled into it, thinking it was legitimate. And they weren’t going to tolerate it for one minute.
I was alarmed at their departure, but the fact is, I understood their point of view. They had no way of knowing that Sr. Margaret’s spiritual agenda, such as it is, is all about the young people she works with—that they decide what to explore (one week it’s Wiccanism, another it’s Baha’i), or even whether they want to explore religion at all. They couldn’t have known that most of what Sr. Margaret does isn’t “religious” at all, in fact: it involves visiting young people in jail, holding memorial services for teenagers who have been killed in gang fighting, and counseling kids in the throes of grief and pain. She organizes AIDS fundraisers, holds the hands of transsexual youth as they transition into their new bodies, and walks with youth as they consider approaching their therapists and caseworkers with truths they have so far disclosed only to her. By walking out, those two youth workers were denying themselves the discovery that, more often than not, this is exactly how “faith-based” looks in our field. And that’s their loss.
Fast forward to late April this year, to a three-day meeting in Indianapolis. This particular gathering had been convened by the National Collaboration for Youth, Search Institute and the Lilly Endowment to talk about whether secular and faith-based youth service providers have anything to share with one another. The mix couldn’t have been more interesting and strange-—together in one room were folks from purely mainstream national and local secular organizations, Christian and Muslim youth ministries, interfaith youth groups, even evangelical groups. We talked and talked, and in the end, we all agreed on one thing: we can’t really talk meaningfully until we get some things straight.
Predictably, the biggest point of confusion surrounded the term spirituality itself. Whose spirituality were we talking about? Was the risk of offending one another too great for us to really have an honest discussion?
We didn’t know. We talked and talked, at times missing each other’s points completely, at times surprising each other with our assumptions and declarations. What we came to, finally, was this, and it made the whole exercise worthwhile: When you strip spirituality out of the religious dogma so often associated with it, it is simply the system of belief that drives each one of us. It’s our understanding of how we’re connected to others, what we owe them and what they owe us. It tells us how we should behave in the world and helps us decide whether our lives have any meaning outside the mere fact of our physical existence.
How a child formulates those beliefs depends on the circumstances of his or her life. In a religious setting, spiritual education will be highly intentional and tend to treat God as the ultimate creator and enforcer of a universal moral code. In secular settings, spiritual development is far less formal, but still embedded to a large degree in the institutions we are all part of, and indeed embedded in our overarching social norms themselves: be nice to others and good to yourself, share, do what is right, follow your heart, give back. This is received wisdom: omnipresent, areligious, and readily embraced by almost everyone.
We are, then, always and everywhere assisting in the spiritual development of young people; it is our natural function as adults to do so, and we couldn’t escape the task even if we wanted to. The spiritual education we give may be more or less intentional and formulaic, religious or entirely secular, but it will always be a central feature of our interaction with youth.
hat said, the distrust between the secular and the faith-based service providers will undoubtedly persist, even though in most cases it is unwarranted. There are far more-—inestimably more—-Sr. Margarets out there than evangelicals whose first aim is to convert. And do the Sr. Margarets have something to share with the secular youth services field? They do, I think. Religious competence with youth is a part of cultural competence; if we don’t talk to religious youth in the way they need to be talked to, we’re failing them. If we don’t give youth structured opportunities to talk about and explore their belief systems—-whatever those systems be—-we’re failing in an even worse way.
And the secular side has something to share with the faith-based side, too, particularly when we are talking about kids at high risk. Whether they’re running a church youth group or a faith-based mentoring program, religious youth workers need to understand and implement the concepts of positive youth development, how to spot indicators of clinical problems such as depression and addiction, how to support healthy sexual development and identity. They need established collaborations with local agencies to whom they can refer troubled young people, and they need to know how to evaluate the impact of their program on the factors that we all agree are important: education, job skills, housing stability, drug use, sexual behavior, and healthy connections with others.
We’re warming, I think, to the notion that we don’t have to reside in opposition camps forever. Toward that end, Search Institute has promised to undertake a first step: crafting a definition of spiritual development that is so fundamental to human development that almost everyone will feel comfortable signing onto it. Perhaps not the hard-bitten religious literalists, nor the stridently secular for whom ‘spiritual’ will never mean anything but religion. But everybody in between, and that’s a lot.
In the end, it’s not so hard. Those two youth workers in San Diego should have stuck around. They would have seen that they’re already doing spiritual work with their youth, but that in their world, it’s just called something different. Naming it, and even growing it a bit, doesn’t have to be so scary.
