Negative, feeble, old-according to our critics, our Western culture is all this and worse. And indeed in a materialist society people are born old. Flesh-and-blood grandfathers and grandmothers are not our problem. True, we have more of them than we used to, so many that they are becoming a special medical study and a new political power. Yet, if all were well, that should be our gain. In a healthy nation Grandmother's smiling wisdom ought to balance Granddaughter's reckless and restless energy; Grandfather's serene detachment should offset the youthful passion of Grandson. But what if there is no deep youthful passion? What if Grandson, in the Army at twenty, complains over the loss of Mum's cooking and the tame desk job? What if Granddaughter, married a year or so, finds beating up cake batter too great a task for her slack muscles and fretful mind? What if the highest ambition of youth is to be safe? – Joy Davidman (Mrs. C. S. Lewis) Smoke on the Mountain
The spirit of adventure is closely tied to the spirit of youth. Jesus, calling us to be as little children, calls us to adventure. And what is adventure except an adventure: the coming of something important and new. But how can something new happen all the time? I mean even crawling into your house through the window will get old after a while. On the other hand, going into a new house is kind of an adventure, even though you usually go in through a door. Maybe you could just hire someone to go in once in a while and move all your stuff around so you wouldn’t be able to find it: hide-and-seek. Or, how about if you were a different person every time you walked through the same door? Sounds sort of Chestertonian.
But I was going to say something about youth.
On the one hand we seem to worship youth and want to extend it. There are those who complain that adolescence has been used to hold back children, to keep us child-like too long. Older people – the only ones who watch the evening news these days -- are bombarded by pharmaceutical commercials that promise all the advantages of youth. We tend to think of ourselves as a youth culture. Generally leftists think of this as a good thing, while conservatives tend to bemoan it as being fickle and unstable.
I wonder, though, if someone did stumble across the fountain of youth, what would we do with it? We seem only to want to look young, not be young. Often our books and films imbue the child character with innate wisdom beyond their years. Children are depicted as mature and more sensible than their elders. In real life, we frequently see parents putting pressure on their offspring to perform and to rack up accomplishments, perhaps either for bragging rights or relive some aspect of childhood vicariously. I’m not sure we understand the purpose of youth any more.
I will now prove that I am officially an old fart...
Back in my day (should I add "sonny" here?), I, and all most all of my contemporaries worked on the farm doing something as soon as we were big enough to carry a bucket of feed or feed a calf. When I was too little to do anything else, my father had me getting hound pups “broke to lead” – taking advantage of the infinite patience of a five-year-old in relation to young animals [insert laugh track]. In the dairy I carried buckets of grain which I dumped into the individual troughs for the cows to eat while they were being milked. Some cows ate faster than others, and I soon learned to accommodate their various habits. In the days before pipeline milkers, I was our pipeline, carrying the freshly filled buckets back to run through the big filtered hopper into the bulk tank. I dumped milk for years before I was tall enough to look over the edge of the hopper and see where the milk was going. I hauled hay in the summer and fed hay in the winter. I cut brush, cut ice, built fence, and wrestled livestock, all while going to school nine months out of the year.
Strange as it may seem, despite the work I know I did, I seemed to have quite a bit of free time, and this was truly free time. I wandered all over the countryside as a pre-teen with knives and firearms, alone except for my faithful stock dog, Penny. I thought nothing of taking off on my bicycle and going a mile or two down the road to visit one of the cousins. We might then take off again across country on our very non-mountain bikes to build a fort – with real axes, to find a tree to climb or a grapevine to try and swing across a creek on. Everything was fine, as long as I was back in time to get the cows in (they might have missed Penny more than me as she was the one who actually found and brought in the occasional straggler) and start milking.
I would guess that degree of physical freedom is close to unimaginable for today’s average ten-year-old who, conversely, is probably a master in World of Warcraft and has soccer practice every afternoon. One of the reasons I enjoy watching something like “Mythbusters”, “Man vs. Wild”, or some of the extreme sports is that it gives me hope that the sense of adventure is not dead in our culture. Even so, to me, it appears to be quite constrained. Parents have to keep an eye on their children constantly for fear they will be abducted, though I think there are fewer stranger abductions than we tend to believe. The Amber Alerts, Code Adams, and Tragedy TV coverage make us much more aware of the ones that do occur. Games – safe, organized games with protective equipment – have replaced the sometimes wild, reckless endeavors we tended to launched.
Ever been hit with a mudball? Ever had a mudball grenade explode next to your head? I might explain that a mudball grenade was created by inserting a firecracker into a mudball, lighting the firecracker, then hurling it at your cousins on the opposite side of the creek. Timing is critical. Short fuses can get ugly. They inevitably had some gravel in them – kind of like shrapnel. I never had an eye put out, but then I wore glasses, and they took a beating a few times, as did the old eardrums. Speaking of games and protective equipment, I well remember when my nephew was trying to learn to throw a curveball. He could throw hard, but his control was less than pinpoint, and they didn’t always break. What I thought was going to be a curve turned out to be a fastball, just high and inside. No helmet. It could explain a lot that happened later.
No, it was not safe, but that’s what youth is for, learning, exploring, finding one’s limits. It’s for looking at old things in a new way – or at least what we thought was a new way.
The truth is, though, you really don’t need to put body parts at risk to see with, as Rick says, eyes made new. Adventures in vision don’t have to be deafening. Daily putting on Christ, putting on the new man, makes everything new. In other words, it doesn't matter so much how we get in the house as who is getting in the house.
Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind -- Romans 12:2
