The Sound of Silents, Volume II

I may be odd in this way (I certainly am in other ways!), but generational identity fascinates me. The idea that we are formed by the culture in which we grew up, by the events we lived through, even by the number of people who grew up alongside us, is interesting in both personal and professional ways. A new blog entry entitled Generation X Doesn't Want to Hear It (warning, profanity) essentially expresses what most my fellow Generation Xers have known: we are destined to be forgotten. Either we will be the bridge between huge generations (Boomers and Millennials) or we will be water under the bridge. In many ways, we are the forgotten especially now.  The youngest of us have broken 30 years old and most of us have topped 40 and are no longer the "cool youth demographic" that is often defined as under 35 years old, especially in the church.

We are similar, in many ways, to the generation known as the Silent Generation (born 1925 to 1942). My parents are the youngest members of that generation, born between the Great Depression and World War II and coming of age in the 1950s when underneath the post-war celebration, the tectonic plates of cultural change were beginning to shift and cause the great cultural earthquake of the 1960s. GenXers were born largely from the Silent Generation, born during the sixties with little memory of the turmoil or during the seventies when things were sorting themselves out after the tumult and things like gas lines and pop music were primary memories.

So, what can we learn from (gasp!) our parents in the Silent Generation? Well, first, that they (like we) are/were a diverse lot--George Carlin, Peter, Paul and Mary, Newt Gingrich, Harrison Ford, and John McCain are (or were) of this generation. Wikipedia notes that:

In their book Generations, William Strauss and Neil Howe define this [Silent] generation as an Artist/Adaptive generation. An Artist (or Adaptive) generation is born during a Crisis, spends its rising adult years in a new High, spends midlife in an Awakening, and spends old age in an Unraveling. Artistic leaders have been advocates of fairness and the politics of inclusion, irrepressible in the wake of failure.

If Generation X is similar, we were born during the cultural and economic crisis of the 1960s and 1970s, came of age in the 1980s and 1990s while watching Silicon Valley and technology transform our lives and then saw the dot-com boom and bust and, during our (mostly young-) adulthood, the events of 9/11. By the pattern of the Silents, we are in a state of Awakening and they are in a state of Unraveling.  The legacy of the Silent Generation may be that they kept the country stable long enough for the Boomers to come of age and for the Generation Xers to survive our childhoods.

The other lesson and legacy of our Silent Generation parents is that we inherited the "adaptive" gifts and skill set--we appear to be able to adjust rapidly to changing realities, a skill forged during the technological revolution and the ups and downs of economic and political life. We're not quite the "fix it myself" folks that the Silent Generation are--many of them grew up on farms and learned to make do with the physical resources they had where as we grew up in suburbia and learned to make do with the emotional and mental resources we had.

This is only the beginning of some time I'd love to spend reflecting on lessons that I any my fellow GenXers can learn from those we are generationally (and sometimes literally) our parents. We'll see where that leads!

General Convention, Day Two

Actually, this is the morning of Day Three for me, but that's just because I'm running a little behind in blogging! Day Two was the first full legislative day of General Convention and I made sure to be up in time to hike the 20 minutes to the Convention Center and arrived in plenty of time to pick up my badge that marks me as a registered visitor and admits me to the exposition hall (marketplace), committee hearings, and the visitors gallery in the House of Deputies. Not sure whether the House of Bishops meetings are similarly open, but I might see later today.

My first impressions of General Convention are many--chiefly that it is a huge event! Part of me wonders how a denomination with under two million members ends up with a legislative structure this complex, but I'm here for the experience, not to single-handedly reform the structure of the church. I've also compared it to a face-to-face Facebook experience--I've seen dozens of people I haven't seen in many years. Folks from seminary but also people I've known in my ordained ministry and, of course, the Deputation from Oregon. I even saw my former boss here! In any case, it has been great to see people and connect. It seems almost a shame that there is work to do and most follks have to rush off to a committee hearing or other official business.

Business-wise, I sat in on the Joint Commmittee on Constitution and Canons, which reminded me why I'm not a canon lawyer. I also sat in on the second (late afternoon) session of the House of Deputies. I have two impressions. First, it is very formal, much more formal than even the school board meetings I'm familiar with. Second, some people will vote "no" on anything, even seemingly non-controversial resolutions. Wierd. After the House of Deputies meeting, I attended the Global Economic Forum with a panel discussion that included the Archbishop of Canterbury. Frank Logue, who sat next to me, blogged about the experience better than I could. After that, it was a late dinner with my friend and colleague Nathan (picture two relatively young guys in clergy attire sitting in a burger joint in LA and I'll let you imagination go from there) and the day was over.

So, this morning is the beginning of Day Three. They are doing "Mission Conversations" this morning, which I don't think lend themselves to exciting spectator sport, so I slept in and am slowly getting out of here. I'm going to try to make the mid-day Community Eucharist at 11:30 a.m. Since I have two hours, that should work. Tonight is the GTNG Gathering, so it should be fun to hang out with friends old and new!

This man can speak!

Having come home from a day of interviewing Superintendent candidates for our school district and then, on the way home, briefly checking in at the church, I arrived and flipped on the TV to hear that there was a great amount of reaction to a speech given today by Presidential candidate Barack Obama on race and politics. I was not able to watch the speech when it was given. I didn't even know he was giving it. However, after returning from Evening Prayer at my church, I sat down and watched it on the Obama web site via a YouTube video, specifically this one:



I am a preacher, someone who has grown up as a white heterosexual man, and have just completed anti-racism training where so much of the history and so many of the problems Obama addressed were highlighted. I served a (largely white) church just outside of Philadelphia when I was a Curate just out of seminary. I just spent today interviewing two finalists for a Superintendent position, a white woman and a black woman, who both spoke of issues of diversity in mostly (90%) white Albany, Oregon. With all those experiences, and as a member of Obama's generation, Generation X, I was more than impressed by his speech, I was stunned and struck speechless.

All I could think of when I finished listening to the speech was "Wow. I wish there was a bishop in our church who could speak as clearly to the legacy of colonialism in the Anglican Communion, the fears and frustrations of GLBT people in our church, the despair of an increasingly marginalized mainline church, and the hopes, dreams, and experiences of liberal and conservative alike, in such a way that the polarization of the church that so much mirrors the polarization in the political arena could begin to be healed." What most impressed me about Barack Obama's speech, was that he talked about the fact that "perfecting our union" was not a zero-sum game where one person's dreams come at the expense of another person's dreams, but a way of binding ourselves together in a common purpose that allows everyone to work against the injustices, inequities, and systemic problems in the world. I'm flat out impressed.

I don't really know what else to say, so I won't say anything else, but I'm already thinking of sermon material...