Why Are You Guys All So Messed Up?

I had an uncharacteristically open and frank discussion with my Dad last Sunday, about the whole church upbringing and stuff like that.  It was in a Harvey's.  He asked a question that I think deserves consideration, if not a definitive answer.  I shall attempt the former, as I am uncertain how to properly arrive at the latter.  So, some thoughts:

  I was characteristically mentioning in passing to my Dad how very messed up the lives of various of us Plymouth Brethren people raised by his generation truly are.  And he got exasperated and said:
  "We all grew up in it, too, back in the day.  And we weren't all messed up by it.  Why is everyone nowadays saying they're all so messed up by it?  What's different?"

  Good question.

An Easy, Pat Answer

Here's the easy, pat answer, which may have a certain amount of merit:

  His generation don't know they're messed up.  But they actually really, really are.  

  Most of them seem to have put the Brethren church stuff before their kids, and no doubt as a result, today, the vast majority of these people's kids have little to do with that supposedly successful, helpful and essential religious movement we used to call The Meeting.  In fact, one could go so far as to say that an awful lot of the kids raised by his generation know nothing of God at all, nowadays, and many of them have strained or nonexistent relationships with their parents.  In many cases it's a "You resent me and I'll resent you right back" kind of thing.  A lot of people my age hold the Brethren upbringing against their parents.  A lot of parents have had to take a bunch of it back if they wanted to ever talk to their kids.  You know, parents who beat their daughters with a wire whisk for hiding a pair of jeans or sweatpants in their locker at school so they could break Brethren Girl Rule #1 and actually wear trousers.  Parents who refused to ever visit their college-age son because he'd gotten a television for his dorm room.  Parents who got their daughter kicked out of the Brethren because she was seen having wine with a meal in a restaurant.  Stuff like that.

  I know so many (am related to so many) Brethren-raised people who "turned out" atheist, or who resent or avoid or disrespect and have what could be described as an almost complete lack of relationship with their parents.  This seems almost to be the norm for people my age.  The Brethren churches of my youth seem to have a big hole in them.  A hole shaped like the people my age who used to be there.  I don't know about the younger folks who came after us.  I understand there is a solid population of younger people at some of them nowadays, and that a whole younger generation is, right now, making a go of it, still "in The Meeting."  I wouldn't know how it compares in numbers to Back in the Day.  I wouldn't know how they get by in there now.  Sometimes they tell me it's so much better. They're even allowed, on occasion they say, to go have a look at what's going on in another church, and they don't get kicked out for that or anything.  So long as they don't make a habit of it.  And they call that "free."

Another Answer

Another answer to my Dad's question relates to expectations.  People like my dad expected much less than we do.  They weren't raised to expect much.  And comparatively very little was expected of them.  And they got what they expected.  Because the Meeting system helped them get those things.  We, by contrast, expected more, had more expected of us, and got far less (and oftentimes, bad things) from our own Meeting experience.  And it was a very different kind of Meeting we experienced.

  My dad's homelife was chaotic, poor and shot through with parental mental illness.  All kinds of drama.  And like a whole lot of people, "Meeting" was the structure in his week.  It was what worked.  It got everyone in his family out of bed, bathed, dressed up, and out the door to the Meeting Hall five times a week.  No matter how insane or messed up things got at home, things were "normal" at meeting.  And meeting ticked past like clockwork, five times a week.  It stabilized things. It was always the same. Nothing changed.  Ever.

  And all the good, fun, social stuff was coming from there,.  There were endless youth activities: sleigh rides, hay rides, skates, hymn sings, swimming, sports and all of that.  All your friends were there.  And people like my father just showed up at all of that stuff, and their lives were largely looked after for them.
   There was a basic approach to fashion, rules of thumb for how to speak and comport one's self, and you more or less did it and it worked.  The slightest deviation or variation on what was commonly done were seen as quite scandalous, and this meant rebelling was easy.  Just wearing a "loud shirt" or an odd hat, and you were a rebel.  A bit of one.  Could be fun.  But it wasn't fatal. 

  People like my father met lots of young Brethren people at these gatherings. And when they met Brethren girls they liked the looks of at all, quite often they simply married them.  Within a couple of years.  They expected to have their social and dating needs taken care of by the Meeting, and these needs were indeed met, in the vast majority of cases, and had been successfully being met for generations.  The number of cousins and the shortage of different last names was mute evidence of this.
   My dad drove his car fast, and was considered a bit of a rebel, but he didn't swear or drink or smoke or go to movies or anything. Still, when my mother announced she was dating him, her Brethren foster-parents told her she'd end up pregnant.  Dire warnings.  But she didn't get pregnant until years after they were married.  Because my dad wasn't that kind of boy.  And that wasn't how it was done.

A Much Shorter Road to Adult Success

As far as one's professional life went, there was a whole lot less schooling required to do anything much in my Dad's day.  My Dad started kindergarten (there was no junior kindergarten or preschool), and went up to Grade 13, which was paid for by the government in those days, unlike now, when first year College and University must be paid for by teenagers, and are extremely expensive.  

  He probably could have gotten a decent job just by resting on the laurels of having actually graduated high school, in a time when people who didn't like school could drop out as early as grade 9 (or earlier), just by not showing up.
  Nowadays, we'll send truant officers and harass your parents if you don't show up most of the time, right up until you're old enough to vote.  Even if you are "known to the police."  You can kick up a fuss, you can show up to class high, you can go uptown instead, you can couch surf in neighboring towns.  We will find you and make you show up, no doubt resentfully, to school, where the other kids and teachers will need to put up with your surly spitefulness.  98% of the school's resources will be spent dealing with you and others just like you.  The rest of the kids will suffer.
  "Don't like school?  Perhaps you have emotional issues and/or a learning disability, and need counselling and medication to make you sit in a desk and listen to boring middle-aged people go on about vectors or the Reformation."
  It wasn't like this back then.

  And my dad wanted to be a teacher.  I don't know what gave him that idea.  Neither his parents nor anyone else in his family were terribly academic.  He wasn't terribly academic.  He liked sports.  Maybe sports at school and at Brethren events were such a highlight of his young life, that he wanted that to continue?  A couple of years as a gym teacher and I don't think he ever played a sport or exercised recreationally again.  Like, ever.

  And the thing is, he did his Grade 13, and then he needed one year of Teacher's College, which he did, rooming with a Brethren couple who let him live and eat with them, and the next year he moved up North in Ontario to be the principal/teacher of a small schoolhouse.  I forget if it was a one-room or two-room thing, or whatever.  But he was in charge.  At age 19.  Hard to believe.  He strapped kids almost his age if they lipped him.  This was not exactly my own educational experience.

  And he still went to all the Brethren stuff.  As he said last Sunday, "We did what we wanted. But we didn't have to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol..." 

  (Or go to the movies, or hear live music or attend exhibition sports matches.  Or date nonBrethren girls or try out neighboring churches.)  In other words, they "stayed in" the isolationist Brethren culture, and it worked for them.  They expected it to look after them, and it did.  It didn't throw them under the bus the way it did many of us decades later.  They did not live in constant fear of being kicked out, like we did.  And they weren't kicked out until middle-age or later.

  So, my Dad and his crew "did what they wanted," (and nothing they weren't allowed).  And to have all of that good, workable, Brethren stuff going on, in a time when impressing a teenager with fun wasn't anywhere near as hard as it is today?  Really worked.
  So, for them to also go out and drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes and got to the movies and stuff?  That would have been greedy.  Their expectations were already being totally met.  They'd be okay. Sticking with the System meant it would look after you and you'd be fine, for the rest of your days.

  And Dad went to the Brethren social stuff, and met a girl he liked the looks of (she was hot, and so was he), who he didn't know terribly well, and who had little in common with him (apart from coming from a chaotic homelife, which the Meeting added structure to.)  And they got married, without him really ever technically asking her to.  That stuff just unfolded. A System was in place.  The Meeting was that System, and it worked.  It was structure to those who needed it more than they needed to think and feel for themselves.

Providing Chaos Instead of Structure

For me, nothing chaotic ever happened in my homelife.   In fact, nothing much happened at all.  Ever.  That was the point of our home.  It shut everything out and increasingly nothing and no one happened in our house.  It was unplugged from everything.  Quiet and deathy.  No connections were made. No parties.  No trouble.
  Well, apart from stuff the Meeting actually caused. That stuff coloured the place alright. Political infighting.  Silencings. Shunnings.  A division or two.  Where my grandpa had merely mutely taken his kids out to the Meetings, my father was a Key Player in them.  I had to not make him Look Bad. He had to be seen to be obeyed in all things at all times.  If anyone thought he was in any way too lenient in anything at all, he had to stop being lenient about that thing or his "hardcore" reputation would suffer.
  And he eventually got "taken out" by people who didn't like the old-school isolationist teaching he was parroting.  They were ruthless and political, while he was earnest, sensitive and vulnerable.  The Meeting didn't look after him any more.  It made him Enemy Number One for a while there, and punished him in a thousand bitchy ways. And our whole family suffered. 

  This is not the experience of the Meeting that he grew up with.  From the first time I can remember, the Meeting involved what I can only call absolute shit. Chaos.  A sea of gossip.  Eyes everywhere.  Competitive piety.  Passive-aggressive backstabbing and callous reputation assassination.  A thousand little betrayals and infidelities.  Horrible mean-spirted attacks on each other.  By people whose kids often didn't have any connection to God or them, their parents.  By people who were clearly far more interested in fighting over doctrine or power than in connecting with each other or God. They tore each other up, and they tore the whole house down around our ears.

  That didn't only happen in the 1991 division.  The nastiness that resulted in it was building and bubbling and boiling away for my entire childhood.  And the worst thing?  While my father and mother grew up quite ignorant that any of this kind of thing ever went on in the Meeting, I grew up hearing it argued about endlessly in our house since before I can remember.
  We learn things together, as communities.  What was causing them grief and doubt and disillusionment at thirty was something I was experiencing at three.   Just like the stuff I'm struggling to learn, to grow and change toward now, in musty middle age, is the stuff that my seventy year old parents are struggling with too.

"Just Saying No" to Joy

I asked Caryl and Mark about my Dad's question. They had things to say.  Mark pointed toward how "done" the meeting was by the time I was in my twenties.   It really was.  Didn't work any more as a social system.  Worn out.  Out of ideas, and losing all relevance, power and ability to do anything much for anyone much.  An echo of the past, with no one behind the wheel anymore.

  The strain of living the isolationist Meeting Way grew ever more personality crushing. The World Around got more and more vibrant and interesting, as the meeting pulled us the other way and got more and more repressive, more paranoid. Increasingly, its rules and disdain for "the things of the world" got manifestly more hateful, arbitrary and weird.  

  My father grew up in a time when they kids were taught, in the fifties, by men who were still trying to keep the Jazz Age from happening.  You know, loose women, flappers, jazz music, drinking, substance abuse of various kinds.  Darkies dancing with white girls.  Shocking.

  But thirty years later in the eighties, these men hadn't died yet, and they were still trying to stave off the Roaring Twenties their parents had warned them of the dangers in.  And two world wars had changed how The World thought since the Twenties. And the Great Depression and the fifties had too.  There'd been rock and roll, and the sixties, pacifism and a lack of trust in the government.  There'd been the seventies, and the electronics boom of the eighties, and these shrill, prophet of doom Brethren preachers were getting more and more cultish-seeming.  Increasingly, we were being asked to live in ignorance of more and more of the World Around.  Increasingly, it seemed fake to do that, too.  We all knew what we weren't supposed to know.  And we couldn't help but be curious about and like the forbidden stuff our minders knew nothing about at all.

  But in a bad way, the cultish, isolationist, seperationist stuff really worked.  There was no one much "coming in" anymore.  Those walls of "We Are Too Good For Worldly Entertainment" were up.  No one much was "getting saved" and "getting Brethren" any more, where I lived, anyway.  Even many of the Brethren kids never "asked for their place" when they reached their teenage years, avoiding full membership.  Where once you went to Sunday School and Gospel meeting every Sunday, with a genuine expectation that someone "new" might be out, eventually whole decades went by in which pretty much no one "new" was ever out.
  It was like setting up a lemonade stand every Sunday for ten years and never making a single sale.  You had a choice: get a bit discouraged and feel a bit let down and silly, or else feel good about the fact that no one knew how awesome what you were selling was.  No one else knew, only you, which made you one of the most spiritually clued-in people around.  Taking pride in being "our feeble few."  We were the only ones who Knew.

  Nobody much "coming in."  And there were people "going out."  There was a slow trickle of folks leaving.  And while in the lives of Christian youth in other churches, there were modern translations of the bible, Christian rock, charismatic speakers coming in from out of town, new ways of explaining things, new styles of preaching, Christian videos and movies and books, we had none of that.  It was forbidden us, too.  We were anti-change, and growth requires change.  So we didn't grow.  If you don't grow, you die.
  As to image, we had no Christian schools with youth-appealing American Republican, conservative curriculum with a strong anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-liberal bias which painted Christianity in harsh black and white that appealed to people who wanted the whole thing explained once and for all, so they knew what to support.  We had none of that.  It was for other, lesser Christians. It was suspect. Dubious.  Using the Music of This World to sing about Jesus?  They should know better.  Voting? We were not of this world, and not to do that.
  They never fed who we were, only who we weren't.  We were not This World, and we were not Just Another Church.  We were what we were not.  And you can't live on that.

Locked In With Crazy, Old Dudes With A Vendetta Against TV

Increasingly, if you were Brethren, you felt locked into a room that grew ever smaller as the World grew ever more expansive and available and interesting. Eventually you couldn't breathe in there.  You couldn't grow.  Not only was the secular world shut out, but the Christian communities around were locked out too.  By frightened, odd, paranoid people with manifestly closed hearts, odd prejudices against other Christians and mean-spirits.  Hearts two sizes too small.  Christian elitists.  We had to be better. We had to be the only right ones.  By not being stuff.  By not knowing stuff.  By not doing stuff.  Stuff like Christmas, pagan holiday that it was.

  In the fifties, being seen going into a dance hall or pool parlour or movie theatre would have been scandalous.  Well, in the eighties, you could secretly listen to Bryan Adams on your Sony Walkman, or get a VCR and rent movies to secretly watch in your bedroom or basement.  The World had come into people's homes.  The old dudes were frantically, hatefully prophesying the doom of anyone involved in all of this, and clearly nothing as bad as their dire predictions was happening.  Young people were quietly watching Ghostbusters with impunity, and yet the death of their very soul for so doing was predicted weekly.

  The World got more and more colourful, digital, electronic and fun.  The church social stuff paled by comparison and really started to dry up and wither away.  It wasn't even trying terribly hard to be fun.
  Now, if our church had had the kind of "movie night and pizza" dealies that churches do now, they might have gotten somewhere.  But instead, people who had TVs were looked down upon, and sermons after sermon about the evils and error and defilement of the World were what happened inside those halls instead.  Nothing about acceptance.  Nothing convincingly about love, spoken by people we'd believe knew much about the subject.  Unceasing, wildly unsuccessful attempts to inject fear into kids who just weren't afraid.

Shame
They did far better injecting shame.  You paid for the privilege of watching Ghostbusters in the coin of shame.  You didn't really think it was actually bad or wrong or anything, but doing it made you a fraud, in Brethren terms.  You weren't doing Brethrenness up right.  You knew you were cheating.  It hadn't ruined your faith, but it meant you didn't deserve Brethren acceptance, which was earned by sacrificing entertainment on the altar of that insatiable Brethren shame god.
  The real God didn't matter as much.  He just wasn't as scary as the social god-collective, to those who increasingly feared the wives of old Brethren dudes far more, and knew their capricious prejudices far better than His intentions toward us.  You didn't follow the Brethren rules for your own spiritual well-being.  You did it for the Meeting.  Your sacrifice to the System.  When I was in my twenties, I was told I should not go to movies or drink the occasional beer, so as not to "possibly lead younger folk astray."  I was told that Christ had given me liberty so I could sacrifice it to them, for their own reasons.

  Increasingly, whereas once my Dad's generation hung out pretty much solely with their Brethren friends and relatives, my generation was making friends at school, and in their own towns and neighborhoods.  What would Jesus have thought of that?  So, many Brethren kids had "Meeting friends" and real friends.  Sometimes they tried bringing their real friends out to Meeting stuff.  That seldom worked or lasted.
  And the preaching senior citizens got more and more shrill, Victorian, frantic. and embarrassing.  You couldn't bring a hip, young Back to the Future-looking kid from school out to a Brethren board game and volleyball evening without someone old literally clapping his hand on the young Michael J. Fox wannabe's shoulder and asking in a dire death-voice, "Are you saved, young man?  Do you truly know the Lord Jesus Christ as your very own personal saviour?"  What a wonderful, faithful testimony!

   So you didn't bring your friends out.  And you knew that you were ashamed.  Not of Jesus.  Of the people talking about him, which was worse.
  Something was going amiss with all the "Us vs. The World."  You no longer had to go into a dancehall or pool parlour or movie theatre to learn what you were missing in The World.  It was on billboards, cereal boxes, Happy Meals, t-shirts, lunchboxes and note pads.  You know exactly what everyone but you got to enjoy.   How you gonna keep your kids on the farm once they've seen Chicago?

A Tired Old Horse

And the thing was tired.  Worn out.  The claims of being the Only Game In Town were getting manifestly untrue.  Other churches were doing all sorts of things.  They seemed alive.  The people there actually kinda liked each other.  And they had girls at them, too.
  By the time I showed up at Brethren youth group stuff, when you went to the sings and skates and hay rides and sleigh rides, the Brethren girls weren't "playing."  Weren't having any of it.  Were actively against getting thrown together with Brethren guys.  Dressed up like the frothiest Laura Ashley pinups with the biggest of hairstyles, and then stood in packs and didn't mix with boys much, unless they could trust said boys not to "like" any of them.  They knew that these events had always involved dating, and they were having none of that.  Any girl who might be a target for a specific guy would put buffer girls at each elbow so he couldn't sit with her.  It was all very confusing for us.  Wasn't this System, for which we'd sacrificed our youth, going to take care of us?

  And a whole lot of people were going out drinking at night at bible conferences.  It was something they did with their real friends, after all, and they were trying it out with their "Meeting friends," too.   While there was a comparative lack of social connection happening at the skates and sings and things, there was perhaps a sort of real connection in those stolen moments.  In the adventure.  Almost getting caught.  Sneaking around.  All this was far more exciting than anything else could have been.  

  And those of us who believed?  Who didn't break the rules?  Who'd been sold into Brethren servitude from birth and took that very seriously?  Who feared lest we tarnish our parents' Brethren reputation? Who didn't go out drinking or to strip clubs or movies? We Got Left Out of the Meeting youth social scene.  Entirely.

  It cost us to believe.  If you came out to Meeting, and accepted that it was fake, and played the game, and had a life outside of it, which wasn't too hampered by it, you were relatively unscathed by it.  And you quickly rose in social status and popularity. You were the most relaxed, colouful, thriving people there.  But those of us who are black and white, true believers who don't let ourselves break a single rule we believed in?  It started killing us inside very quickly.  We got pale and drawn and tortured.  And it eventually chewed us up and spat us out.  Sincerity makes the game-players look bad.  And it makes them feel bad too.  They use their status to crush you and never let you forget what you aren't.

  Socially, the Meeting wasn't stepping up to the plate, and it lost the attention of the youth.  It stopped being the fun-bringer and match-maker System, and increasingly became an oppressive system of fearing if anyone caught you having fun.  Especially fun of the kind you were all, mostly, having anyway.  It became manifestly only fake.  A lie.  For so many young people, it didn't work, but you knew that your job was to help make it look like it was working.  Shut up and sing the hymns. Where's your smile?

  But increasingly, Brethren people did not marry other Brethren people, in unprecedented numbers.  There were too many cousins.  Too few last names.  And Brethren youth sometimes betrayed the cause entirely and went to other churches which not only weren't all about shame and isolation and separation and doctrine, but were also actually about feelings and inclusion and relationship and authenticity.  The Meeting had gotten obsolete.  

  As to my Dad not understanding why the Meeting didn't work for us like it worked for him, Mark says "Horses require water, and that the fact that you've ridden a tired horse one quarter of the way into the desert does not automatically imply that he'll make it the rest of the way, or even the next quarter."  For many of us, it didn't.  It bucked us off, kicked us in the head, then rolled over and died.  It wasn't going to carry us for the whole of our life's journey.  We had questions that didn't match their prepared, dusty answers.  The men speaking were increasingly only parroting the words and imitating the vocal inflections of men long dead.  We wanted lives and this simply wasn't allowed.  The whole point was not having one, for God.

 
Divided We Stand
There was a division in 1992, and it took the vast majority of the younger generation with it.  My people.  They left it in droves.  It was partly about people who wanted to use modern translations or various youth-appealing strategies with the teens.  The fact that the men who tried to change the Meeting, and were kicked out as heretics were "active with the youth," and were accused of being open to new strategies and people and authors and ideas is very telling.  And they all left.  And they mostly "took the youth" with them.  Or the youth fell out through that big hole in the bottom of the bag, left by tearing out anything associated with these former role models, who were now disgraced.
  The youth who got "read out of fellowship" during that division mostly ended up dispersed to more fun-friendly, feelings-dealing churches, but an awful lot of them ended up atheists. (This just made "us" look more right to ourselves.  "We feeble few."  But it didn't help us.  Their absence left a gaping wound in us. We never recovered.)

  We'd go out to Meeting stuff, and we'd look around and bemoan who was "left."  We pretty much wept, having seen how the temple in our day couldn't compare to the past glory of Solomon's temple, as it were.  Gone were the giant youth events and huge bible conferences.  We were in our twenties, and who were we going to marry now?  There were mostly just little kids left.  When they grew up, they might all marry each other, but what about us?  What we mostly saw were the leftovers.  Those too unimaginative to have even considered leaving.  People whose faces were too tight and whose eyes didn't look right, parroting Brethren dogma from generations past.  A number of girls whose inbred Brethren heritage was painfully obvious upon their countenances, hearts and minds.

 

Caryl added a whole new thing to the discussion.  She spoke of the prodigal son.  To outright steal her comments and edit them rather aggressively:

Their generation is a different kind of messed up. They don't have a clue how to relationship.  How to be in them.  How to build them. It was the rule- keeping era. It was largely the prodigal son's elder brother's era. 

  We, who came after them, are largely the younger son's era. Both have large distorted views of the Father's love. Which impacts how we father, friend, neighbour, and are. 

   The younger son took off. Messed up and hit bottom. The prodigal son thought of his father and made up a speech he was going to tell him. About not being worthy and how he was willing to be a hired servant, so long as he got to come home again. He really thought his father wouldn't accept him back as a son. He had a major distortion in his thinking, believing that his father's love was conditional. He had the "I'm not worthy" mindset.  As if being worthy earned the love.  He thought "I hate myself. I'm not accepted because I did this. I wasted dad's inheritance, etc". 

  But when he came back, even from afar his father had compassion. He wasn't accepted back because of his speech. He didn't even get to finish it before party plans were in motion. His dad was just happy to have him back at all. His father was thinking about the relationship being able to continue.

  So many from our generation spend a lot of time in this mindset. Self hate, doubt. Not worthy. Too fucked up. We don't realized we aren't accepted because of what we did or didn't do. It's because of what Jesus did. So we spend years carrying an idea about God and his love that hurts us. We feel God might not accept us. Might not love us. Might not care about us.

The older brother mindset was focused on doing right. and when his brother came back, he said "Look (didn't even call him Father) I've done all this. I've done everything right. I didn't leave the meeting. I didn't sleep with Sarah. And yet I never got a fatted calf. I didn't get a party."

  And this son has a very distorted view of the father and his love too. The father goes to this son and entreats him, begs him to come celebrate. BEGS. "Come in to the party!"

  And he won't.  He doesn't get his father's love either. This older brother doesn't think he needs a savior. His morality is his savior.  The rule-following.  The duty and obedience and work.  His morality is what he thinks wins his father's love. He misses out so much relationally with his father. He does the formulas. He does his time. 

  But then he gets angry. Like we do today when we are like this: 'God I served you, why won't you heal my damn knee?' 'God I did all this for you, and you didn't give me that job'  

  This son told his father what he should do. He felt he had a say in how his father did things. He felt justified remote-controlling his father.
  And he missed his father's heart. That he wasn't loved based on his dutiful ways. He thought his father loved him and accepted him based on doing good stuff and not doing bad stuff. The younger one felt unloved and unaccepted based on the bad stuff he had done. 

  The older brother probably said shit like this to his little brother: 'I knew you'd be back.  'You're such a loser. You spent all your money, now you'll never turn into anything.'

  And the younger brother probably thought 'I am a loser. I do suck. I am wicked.'

  And today the church has a lot of older brothers in it. People who only want people who have "earned it" to get God's grace.

  Our parents had a distorted view of God's love. So we didn't feel it. We didn't know grace. We didn't see them enjoy Christ. Christ was a burden.  Rules. We didn't see them at the party the father prepared, celebrating. They didn't celebrate things.  They warned and regretted and feared and scolded.

  They were in 'older brother mode,' needing to feel like they were following the rules in order to believe they were loved. 

  And more of our generation were in younger brother mode, and got the disrespect that the grace-free, conditional love view of relating gets you. And the two modes suck. Because they hurt our celebrating. They paint God right up ugly. I've been in both these brothers' mindsets many times over. When we have a distorted view of our identity, our acceptance, and what love is.  We don't turn out well at all. 

  So, for our parents' generation we couldn't handle the bar that their older brother mindsets gave us.  The rules were still there, and the life, the warmth, the acceptance, the celebration was gone.   So a lot of us 'went to the pigs' and others of us became older brother minded, mean-spirited, judgmental and ignorant of how grace or love or relating or celebrating even work.

Very few of us went in to celebrate. 

Did The Meeting Work For Our Parents?

Our parents are lonely.  They have no friends and precious few hobbies.  Their lives are so empty.  So many people they once knew have left the Meeting and they never see them anymore, even if they live up the road.  They attend tiny Brethren gatherings, and many of those don't bother to even do Sunday School or gospel anymore.  The lemonade stands are closed.  The Meeting is a place for them to remember, and to mourn, and to be dutiful and faithful and steadfast, breaking bread there until they die.

  And there are some "young guys."  You know, like, fifty year olds.  They are vocal.  They have kids who don't talk to them, but they run youth events anyway.  They'll tell you all about the Rapture, Creation, Daniel, Revelation, whatever.  What they can't do is connect. Relate.  Be humans talking to other humans.  And they smile, and are "gracious," and spout doctrine, but they're obviously lonely and bored.  Muted.  Dead inside.  With dark secrets.  And they don't know what to do about it.  Often they shoulder some kind of "cause" to rail against ceaselessly.  To aspire to some kind of zealotry.  Abortion or homosexuality are pet causes to tilt against.  Or modern translations of the bible.  Or any doctrine that's different from Brethren.

  I don't know what the younger Brethren generation can do. It looks to me, from my much-removed vantage point, like they're repeatedly asked to sacrifice knowledge and relation with a God who likes and gets and works with them, to simply "Being Meeting" instead.  They believe in a Bully god, and don't know how to reach out expecting grace unless they feel worthy.  They believe we "live in days of ruin" and they expect God to ruin their lives if they "let Him in" too much.  First, that's not Him. Second, He's "in" already.  But what are they to do?
  Going to Africa seems to be a better and better idea for them.