This season of restricted movements and limited action puts me in mind of a sentence I first read nearly twenty years ago. It comes from a little book entitled The Sacred Journey, Frederick Buechner’s 1982 memoir of his childhood and youth during the Great Depression and World War II.
Deep within history, as it gets itself written down in history books and newspapers, in the letters we write and in the diaries we keep, is sacred history, is God’s purpose working itself out in the apparent purposelessness of human history and of our separate histories, is the history in short, of the saving and losing of souls, including our own.
Consider this: The headlines, as they say, have been “writing themselves” for weeks. The time will come when they will be culled for a paragraph or two in the history books of our children’s children. Yet as economies slacken and statistical models are recalibrated to reflect ever bleaker epidemiological projections, God moves among and even uses these things writing in the souls of those around us, especially, I think, our children.
The character of each generation is to some extent marked by the exigencies of the era in which it comes of age. Some of you may recall Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation (1998), a collection of biographical vignettes through which Brokaw argued that the combination of a childhood amid the Great Depression and a young adulthood mobilized by World War II forged, in his words, “the greatest generation any society has ever produced”; those of us with parents or grandparents of that generation may be inclined to agree with his thesis.
Even when the litany of global tribulations for a time abates, a young person’s private suffering may serve to cultivate greatness of soul. Figures as diverse as Theodore Roosevelt, Thérèse of Lisieux, and Winston Churchill each endured sickness, grave injury, or extended convalescence in childhood or youth, without which their character might have lacked some of the temper it evidenced under later strains.
Students, how will your generation define itself in the COVID-19 era? How can you personally call for a high-minded response? Parents, what is the “sacred history” being written right now in your home? What are the stories that your grandchildren will grow up with because you met the time that was given you with courage, resourcefulness, love, and faith?