Striking Out: The Religious Journey of Teenage Boys

Acknowledgments

I especially want to thank the editorial team at Wipf and Stock Publishers for their support along the way, especially K. C. Hanson, editor-in-chief, for his astute editorial observations and suggestions; also Jim Tedrick, managing editor; Christian Amondson, assistant managing editor; Diane Farley, editorial administrator; and Ian Creeger, typesetter. I would also like to express appreciation to James Stock, marketing director, and Raydeen Cuffe, marketing coordinator. My communications with Jeremy Funk, the copyeditor, have been especially welcome, as we came to know one another when he was a student at Princeton Theological Seminary. I knew from my reading of his student papers that the manuscript could not have been entrusted to a more perceptive copy editor.

The various communications I have had with the Wipf and Stock staff as my manuscript was being transformed into a book have reawakened memories of my own experiences in Oregon: first as a fifteen-year-old transplanted Nebraskan making my way through my high school and college years in Portland, then an all-too-brief stint as a thirty-year-old instructor in the Department of Religious Studies at Oregon State University before returning to the University of Chicago, where I had recently completed my doctoral studies.

When I was teenager, I would often hear people mention that so-and-so is a journeyman. It was not said in a disparaging tone but I got the impression that the person was viewed as being rather ordinary. Later, I learned that it refers to a worker who has served an apprenticeship in a particular line of work and is an experienced, reliable worker who is not necessarily brilliant or likely to receive lavish praise. I found that I liked the word and over the course of my own life have personally identified with it. This book is written, therefore, in remembrance of the teenage boy who viewed himself as a journeyman and in recognition of the men and women of all walks of life who are members of this respectable cohort.

Introduction

During the first decade or so of life, the boy who grows up in a Christian home develops a familiarity with his religion. He goes to church with his parents, brothers, and sisters. He watches his parents participate in the church service and to the extent that he is willing and able to do so, he reads and sings along. If the minister presents a children’s sermon, he joins the other children in the front of the church. He goes to classes that are modeled after their classes in school and learns about the Christian faith. When he visits his grandparents he may go to their church and take note of the fact that they do some things differently there. Or if the family moves to a different town or city, he notices differences between the new church and the old one. So he becomes aware that not all churches are the same, but, by and large, there is a certain familiarity with all of them—rows of pews, the minister up at the front, a choir off to the side, and so forth. Over time, he is likely to discover that there are some hymns he likes better than others. He may also like some stories from the Bible better than other stories. But these very preferences tend to reinforce, not undermine, his growing familiarity with his religion.

Things change at some indeterminate point in the second decade of life. The change is likely to be a gradual one, and because it is gradual, it may be imperceptible to him and to others. I believe that the word journey expresses what this change is all about. He begins to view himself as a person who is on a journey, and his religion begins to reflect this perception of himself. The externals of his religious engagements may look the same as he continues to go to church, to attend classes, and so forth, but something is changing inside of him. He is thinking about where his life is heading and his religion is implicated in these thoughts. As he enters high school and is given a chance to choose some of his classes, he begins to reflect more on what his interests are and to compare himself with other boys in this regard. It is a natural extension of these reflections to ponder where he is heading as far as his future employment is concerned.

As he moves into his junior year in high school, he begins (if he has not already done so) to reflect on the fact that he will need to make some plans for what he is going to do after he graduates from high school. He is likely to talk about these plans with other persons, such as a friend, a parent, a school counselor, or an older sibling. This is also the time when the question comes up of whether he is going to go to college and, if so, which one? For some boys the prospect of going to college does not mean leaving home because they assume that they will go to a local college and not live in the dorms. But for most boys these two go together. For them, the image of the journey is literally true. This is also true for those boys who plan to enter the armed services after graduation from high school, or who plan to work in a location other than their own city or town.

The very expectation that teenage boys will leave home soon after they graduate from high school is often reinforced by their parents’ belief, whether directly stated or not, that this is the time when they should leave home. An assumption is deeply rooted in our culture that there is something wrong with a boy who does not want to leave home soon after he graduates from high school. Parents therefore anticipate their son’s departure and may even plan their own lives around it. This is not to say that they necessarily want this to happen (though for some parents their son’s departure does not come soon enough), and many parents know intuitively that they will feel bereft when their son leaves home. Much has been written about the empty nest phenomenon when a parent tries to come to terms emotionally with the fact that all of her or his children have left home. But even if there are younger siblings around and the nest is not empty, the departure of a son can be an emotionally difficult time for a parent. And yet, even these parents tend to feel that the time is right for the son to leave.

The journey motif is also often the theme of high school graduation ceremonies. The school principal or other invited speaker will typically employ this theme and will use it to invoke the values that the school has sought to instill in the students. Such speeches often conclude with good wishes for the graduates as they embark on their individual journeys.

There is nothing very remarkable, therefore, about the focus of this book on the religious journey of teenage boys. After all, if the boy is on a journey—and there is general agreement among all interested parties, including himself, that this is the case—then it makes perfect sense for us to view the religious dimension of his life in a similar way. In fact, an underlying assumption of this book is that there should be a congruity between the boy’s life and his religion, so if he understands himself to be on a journey we would want him to think of this journey as, in part, a religious journey. But this means that, as far as his religion is concerned, there is likely to be much that is subject to change because his life is changing. It also means that these changes in his religion would reflect his effort to come to terms with the challenges that he experiences and confronts as he ventures out and continues on his journey. In other words, the changes in his religion would serve a good purpose.

Some of these changes will necessarily involve doubts relating to the boy’s earlier religious formation. However, as Gordon W. Allport points out in The Individual and His Religion, not all doubts are the same. Some doubts are primarily reactive and negativistic while other doubts are associated with the genesis of the religious quest. The latter are a reflection of the fact that the boy is growing and maturing and that his religion is a reflection of this growth and maturation.

¹

Since I will be using the image of the journey throughout this book, it is important for us to have a clear idea of what the word means. According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, it has two basic meanings: (1) the act or an instance of traveling from one place to another; and (2) any course or passage from one stage or experience to another.² What is noteworthy about both definitions is the assumption that one is not only leaving a place or stage but also intending to reach another place or stage. One is headed toward a destination and not merely wandering about or going in circles.

The dictionary indicates that the word journey is a derivative of the Latin word diurnum, which means a daily portion. So originally journey implied the distance that one could travel in one day. The word journal, which is also a derivative of the Latin word diurnum, originally meant a daily record of happenings, such as a diary.³ However, in time journey came to mean an act or instance of traveling of an indeterminate duration. It could be a day, but it could also be several days, weeks, months, or even years.

Once its duration became indeterminate, the word journey could be used as a metaphor, to refer, for example, to a mental, psychological or spiritual process, or to a person’s whole life from birth to death. Yet, the idea that the journey has a destination has been retained, and this means that we think of a journey as being intentional and purposeful. One is going somewhere. This also means that journey is understood to be forward-looking. One may occasionally take a glance back to see how far one has traveled, but the basic idea is that one is oriented toward the future, not the past or even the present. In fact, when we think of a person being on a journey, we are inclined to think that being oriented to the present is no better than being oriented to the past. And this is what makes the image of the journey so relevant to the teenage boy, because for the teenage boy the future is clearly predominant in a way that it was not when he was in the first decade of his life. Everyone who is thinking of his best interests—including teachers, parents, other adults, and even his friends—are encouraging him to think about where he is going and to plan ahead. Vocational counselors will sometimes ask a high school boy, Where do you expect to be in five years? When the boy answers, the counselor may say, Then let’s think about what you need to do to get there.

Another interesting thing about the image of the journey is that it can apply to a single individual who is traveling all alone, but it can also apply to a group of individuals who are traveling together. Take, for example, Jesus’s Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37). One of the reasons why the man who was traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho was vulnerable to robbers was that he was traveling alone. If he had been among a group of travelers, it’s doubtful that the robbers would have been able to strip him, beat him, and leave him half-dead. In fact, a single companion traveler may have been enough to dissuade the robbers from attacking him.

Because high school graduation is a time when most teenage boys are thinking about leaving home, there is very much the sense that one is embarking on a journey in the company of others. To be sure, each boy tends to have his own plans for the future and this means that the journeyers are not bound for the same destination. Some are heading toward college, and although they are not planning to attend the same college, they nonetheless share in common the anticipation that for the next four years they will be taking classes, making new acquaintances, making career choices, and so forth. Others are heading toward military service and are anticipating that they will go through a rigorous training process with other recruits and quite possibly discover that the military is the right career for them, or that it has provided training and experience that will be helpful in another profession or occupation. Still others are planning to enter the labor force immediately upon graduation from high school and begin their move up the organizational ladder. Whatever their destination may be, they are very much aware of the fact that others are setting out on the same journey, and that they will necessarily encounter these others as they continue on their journey.

On the other hand, the teenage years are ones in which boys are likely to become aware of the fact that they are individuals. Of course, they always knew this. After all, throughout grade school the fact that each boy is an individual was emphasized in many different ways: if a teacher called on one boy and another boy answered in his stead, he would be reprimanded for speaking out of turn. The issue was not merely that the teacher was interested in eliciting the right answer, but that she wanted to know if the boy she had called on knew the right answer. Also, as a teacher became familiar with her class, she learned about the abilities and liabilities of each of the students, and took their individuality into account as she related to them. Sometimes, of course, she would treat them as a group (All right, class, line up). But more often than not, she would place their individuality ahead of their membership in the group.

So the fact that a teenage boy is an individual is nothing really new. But in the teenage years there is a growing, deepening sense of oneself as a person. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James says that a crab would probably be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it as a crustacean. If it could speak, it would say, I am no such thing. I am myself, myself alone.⁴ Teenage boys can identify with the crab because they are experiencing a growing awareness that I am myself. Many, too, can identify with the crab’s added emphasis, myself alone, because their growing sense of being an individual is accompanied by a growing sense of aloneness despite the fact that they are members of a group.

I want to suggest here that this sense of being myself, myself alone is what makes the journey a religious one. As Allport writes in the concluding section of The Individual and His Religion, titled The Solitary Way: From its early beginnings to the end of the road the religious quest of the individual is solitary. Though he is socially interdependent with others in a thousand ways, yet no one else is able to provide him with the faith he evolves, nor prescribe for him his pact with the cosmos.

⁵

What makes Allport’s use of the word quest significant is that it implies that the religious journey, or that aspect of the boy’s journey that is religious in nature, is not a simple matter of getting to a predetermined destination. The dictionary defines quest as a journey in search or pursuit of something, typically a lofty or noble goal.⁶ Thus, it is precisely the religious aspect of the boy’s journey that introduces an element of uncertainty into what might otherwise be a simple, clearly defined journey from this point to that point. In addition, although the boy is socially interdependent with others in a thousand ways, the religious aspect of his journey is personal, so much so that it is experienced as the solitary way.

Thus, the religious journey is the most personal and therefore solitary. But it is also the most self-encompassing, for the religious sentiment is the portion of personality that arises at the core of the life and is directed toward the infinite, the region of mental life that has the longest-range intentions, and for this reason is capable of conferring marked integration upon personality, engendering meaning and peace in the face of the tragedy and confusion of life. So the very fact that the religious sentiment is that portion of the boy’s personality that arises at the core of the life and is directed toward the infinite makes the word quest an appropriate one, for, as noted, quest implies a search or pursuit of a lofty or noble goal. Much more is involved here than the more immediate questions with which the teenage boy is confronted in his junior year in high school, such as where to go to college, which unit of the armed services to join, whether to seek employment in his home city or town or to go to some other city or town, and so forth. As Allport concludes, A man’s religion is the audacious bid he makes to bind himself to creation and to the Creator and is his ultimate attempt to enlarge and to complete his personality by finding the supreme context in which he rightly belongs.⁷ This is itself rather lofty talk. But the religious sentiment cannot settle for less, and because it cannot settle for less, it is necessarily vulnerable to misjudgments, misunderstandings, and mistakes. This very fact brings me to the primary focus of this book.

The title and subtitle of this book together are Striking Out: The Religious Journey of Teenage Boys. I use the phrase striking out in two senses. The dictionary defines striking out as to begin, advance, or proceed, especially in a new way or direction.⁸ This definition is especially relevant to the teenage boy because he is just beginning his journey from home, and he and others know that he will be proceeding or advancing in a new way or direction. But striking out has another meaning, one that is associated with the game of baseball. As the dictionary puts it, this is an out by a batter charged with three strikes.⁹ This definition has a strong implication of failure, for an out due to being charged with three strikes is worse than an out where the batter at least hits the ball but the ball is caught, or he is