“Any life you make up is not a life you will want to live.”

Stanley Hauerwas begins a wonderful lecture in this manner:

“I lecture and write often, but I am not sure how to write to those our society identifies as the young or adolescents. I do not know who you are and I am a bit frightened by that unknown. The last band I knew was U2 and I only knew them because they were the last group introduced to me by my son before he ‘grew up.’ I do not know what you read or what movies you see. So I do not know how to ‘connect’ with you.

“Moreover, I think it is disgusting for an older guy to try to show he can be ‘with it.’ I do not want to be ‘with it.’ I quit teaching freshmen when I taught at the University of Notre Dame. I did so because I simply found it demeaning to try to convince eighteen-year-olds that they ought to take God seriously. Eighteen-year-old people in our society simply lack the resources to take God seriously—by a resource I mean having noticed that before you know it, you are going to be dead.

“Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosopher, has suggested to me that one of the worst things our society does to the young is to tell them that they ought to be happy. MacIntyre thinks if you are happy, particularly when you are young, you are deeply self-deceived. Your appropriate stance is to be miserable. What a terrible time to be young. Shorn of any clear account of what it means to grow up, you are forced to make up your own lives. But you know that any life you make up is not a life you will want to live.”

The lecture is a very nice glimpse of the foothills of the realm of theology as high adventure. If you've never read Hauerwas before, you ought to check this one out.