A toast to youth

I was not a famously encouraging parent, not a cheerleader, not a vociferous advocate for my children. Not one who jumped up and down in the bleachers and yelled for all the stands to hear, “Great catch, J!” I regret that now.

And when my last child left home for a secular college, I could not even pretend to look gleeful about it because of my view of where colleges are heading. There’s nothing like sending a kid off to university with a rousing, full-throated cheer of … ambivalence.

So what do I do now? I would like to make amends and sound a note of unalloyed enthusiasm as a final send-off from the feathered nest, but my newfound impulse comes at a curious time, when there is culturally less to be joyful about than ever. As that Russian seer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn told a Harvard audience in the 1970s (in far simpler times when only women frequented women’s bathrooms):

“The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?”

I am honing in on an understanding that there is the trajectory of the world, and then there is the trajectory of an individual. There is the future of the planet, and then there is the future of your child, and the two must be kept distinct when considering the subject of encouragement. For if the world is going to hell in a handbasket (a right biblical image based pointedly on Zechariah 5:5-11 and Revelation 17-18), this does not necessarily parallel your child’s stages of “mewling and puking,” “whining,” “shining,” “creeping,” and finally “sighing” (to quote Shakespeare’s As You Like It). Hope and soberness may not be mutually exclusive.

“To the teaching and to the testimony! …” (Isaiah 8:20)

All encouragement must accord with truth, and all truth comes from the Word of God. And so, in my quest for a good and measured word to bequeath to my children, I repaired to Scripture. But just where I expected clarity, I found bafflement instead, the sayings of a wise man to tender progeny, and myself the voyeur, some eavesdropping grasshopper in winter:

“Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes. But know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.

“Remove vexation from your heart, and put away pain from your body, for youth and the dawn of life are vanity” (Ecclesiastes 11:9-10).

What is this? “Rejoice” but “God will bring you into judgment”? Is this a trap? A Faustian bargain? Does the teacher take away with one hand what he gives with the other?

So I mulled it for days, and the more I thought of it the more I liked it. Here is a fortunate young man who is being apprised of all the facts as he sits at the feet of this teacher. Youth is for enjoying the waxing of strength and peak of the senses: fact. But dark days and finally death come for every man: fact. Both must be grasped with intelligence, and choices made accordingly (Psalm 90:12).

In this counsel to a teen there is neither the dour forbiddance of youthful joy nor the permission for a thoughtless abandonment to it. Though “all is vanity,” yet the corollary is not that the young man forfend pleasure and frolicking. He is directed to rejoice, and we must take the words at face value: “Get out of your bedroom and go outside and chase butterflies!”

Is it not possible to say this to a daughter on the cusp of adulthood? May I not find a way to warn of the impending judgments of God while wishing her many happy forays to foreign lands to sample their variety, and imparting a mother’s testimony that joys are best savored in the fear of God and the keeping of His statutes?