Christ Walks with the New Gen: What do they search, can Jesus walk with them?

No excitement to go home? Perhaps, motels were shown to be home!

The New Gen wants to be free, celebrating, enjoying food and drinks, and dancing. At times they are left alone, without knowing what to do. Sometime they overwork, and sometime they oversleep. Their trends also involve complexities, struggles and questions. There are also many value providers, and so they live within many forms of value-conflicts. They have questions, because different contexts do make believing difficult. Therefore, they question. There are also entertainments in different forms, sports, adventure, puzzles etc. as to meet their stress patterns. They want to know how their faith can meaningfully be brought to their multi-directional life pattern. When one struggles to live amidst one’s questions and anxieties, how does faith make a difference?

Pope Francis said that one who does not ask questions cannot progress either in knowledge or in faith. Situation of being in questions and doubts is a call to deepen one’s faith through sincere enquiry.

Presence of a Walking Companion

Often what we hear are some moral demands when faced with conflicts.  Even in the midst of complexities one is not looking towards faith only for solutions, but a living presence, that accompanies. The process of acquiring faith is not aimed at a clarity of a piece of knowledge, but it is a journey to realise the presence of the constant living companion, Christ. It is a presence to be within our moments of pain or happiness, moments of active response or dead silence. We know that we are placed in a context of rapid changes and flash mob culture. God does not distance himself from this new situation. His voice, the Word is not pinned somewhere in the past, He is a walking companion, to whom we can belong to, and find at home.  It is hard to identify the voice of God amidst and within loud noise and metal music.  Yet, He does reveal within them.  Faith that we cultivate today needs to emerge in such a way that it might be able to recognise God’s response to our inward cry.

Being Loved

Where we find ourselves rejected and racing strangers, how could we recognise this voice as of love worthy of trust. Sometimes their fragmented relations develop within them an inability to trust. If we are able to realize the presence of the accompanying presence, we also will begin to trust that presence. There one may find the growing experience of being loved, and develop a courage to trust; a courage to be loved against all trust-wounds of unnamed emptiness. There we have an experience of being loved, being accepted, being forgiven, a real home where we can be confidently ourselves. Though within the complexities of life there resounds a voice of ineffable love, “here is my beloved... in whom I am well pleased” (Mt 3:17)

Knowing Our Home

In this process as we gradually develop a heart that has a courage to live, because it has experienced that it has been loved by an everlasting love. This experience opens before us not only the picture of our own life but the meaning of our being in the world. This response differs from a political reaction to a social issue because we are guided by the peace given to us in the affirmation of love not arrogance, and we are guided by hope not anxiety. Perhaps our efforts may be a reaction to some of our own hurts and pain in a provoking conducive occasion. It may further bring hurt rather than healing, though apparently, we worked for justice, peace, and harmony. It is that love which opens itself for justice, harmony and peace. Our stand for justice, harmony and peace would be guided by the sense of belonging the accompanying presence which makes a home to dwell in.

Faith is not a clear definition, it is the trust in a love that absorbs us, and a response to that trust in courage to meet the living situations and its cries with the same love that one has experienced. For the sake of this home experience, a responsible relationship, all other things are formed, the church systems, rites, liturgy, devotions, morals, beliefs and customs… Within themselves they are only facilitating agents.  If these becomes end in themselves, we lose what was really essential, and the above agents will become mere empty vessels, irrelevant and insignificant. That is why the New Gen continue to wander on the way. The New Gen longs to belong, wants to find a love worthy of trust, wants also to find themselves worthy of trust, wants to build a courage to love, looks for opportunities to do deeds of goodness and compassion.