Guidance for Raging Youth

I hate people, I hate myself

Uncontrolling, red-hot temper

I hate my life--it’s a hidden temple

Lovable sad, caring, and glad

Sunny and friendly and not

Even mad--I guess that’s life

I won’t beat my wife

A bad example not to follow

But shall.

--”Mike,” a high school senior

*

In the sea of Nike-clad feet, cartoon-character T-shirts, and pro-team sports bottles, I began the opening day ritual of handing out a sheet outlining my Creative Writing class standards and expectations.

To keep my students busy, and to give me some insights to their personalities and abilities, I assigned the following writing exercise: “Tell me who you are, in writing, any way you choose.”

What I received from “Mike” was the poem quoted above:

“I hate my life.”

Why, I wondered. What is it about youth that elicits such violent emotions? How can I as an educator help to guide these raging young men and women?

St. Teresa of Avila in her journals stated that when she was a girl she and her brother wanted to join the crusaders in the “country of the Moors, begging our way for the love of God, that we might be there beheaded.” Such is the over-the-top passion of youth, the almost comical disregard of one’s “mortal coil” in the quest to express the spirit.

As we grow older, pain and death seem far less romantic. “Hating our life” turns into desperately hanging on to it, despite its disappointments.

“Mike” finished his assignment and then began to carefully dislodge the metal chain that ran up his nasal passage, through the back of his throat and out his mouth--where it was then strung to a loop in his ear.

On his right sat “Linda,” proudly displaying her nose stud and belly-button ring. Bracing the back wall, “Tony” flexed his tiger-tattooed biceps. The mortification of the flesh was on display for all to see.

I wondered as I recited the rules regarding absences and tardies, the grading system and the course syllabus, if my class might inspire any quests, harness any passions, ignite any internal flames.

Would the offerings of William Shakespeare, John Donne, Joseph Conrad, Sandra Cisneros and Maya Angelou “tattoo” my students with the rich tapestry of humanity, or pierce their hearts with the sword of divine inspiration?

Or would the mundane trappings of daily school attendance simply reinforce their desire to “run away to the country of the Moors,” to be pierced and marked by the crusaders of the underground culture?

What would I--a teacher--or you--a parent, neighbor, priest, pastor or fellow human being--offer these young people in their quest to find the painful passion of being alive in a world full of cleverly packaged temporal pleasures?

Years later, St. Teresa discovered that she needn’t be a martyr to find expression for her spirit, for her passion. Through her life of quiet prayer and meditation, she discovered not how to mortify the body, but how to pierce the soul with eternal light. She learned not to run away from her life, nor to hate her life, but how to find it from within.

Maybe, then, my job is to turn everything inside out--so that my students, instead of swallowing all that our commercial culture pours into them, will learn from the poets, the writers, the inventors, the artists and the visionaries how to drink from the eternal well of the spirit.

Like St. Teresa, they will learn the pleasure of living inward-out. Classrooms are one of the few remaining places where such a draft is offered: passion with a purpose, free and for the taking.