Maturity and Generation: The Spiritual Formation of Our Young People

When we speak of "young people," of whom are we speaking? There is no easy answer, for age simultaneously involves chronological, social and cultural factors. In certain social and cultural contexts, someone thirty-five years old may not be considered young. Likewise, it is often said that women reach maturity before men do. Age is relative. When I turned forty, the "young" monks of my community told me: "say goodbye to life; anything you haven't already done, you never will do." I didn't doubt in the least that they were right. Seven years later, during the Mixed General Meeting of 1990, a European abbess asked me how old I was. With a tone of voice showing nostalgia for younger days that would not return, I said: forty-seven. Her spontaneous reply was: "why, you're only a child!"

The period of time we call youth is characterized by four easily distinguishable aspects within an overall process. We might put them synthetically as follows: the definition of one's own identity as a person, the assimilation of values and the rejection of non-values, the experience of friendship and love as a couple or in a community, and the orientation of one's own vocation and the concrete decisions to act on it.

It is difficult to measure this process in terms of months and years. Many young people coming to our monasteries are at the beginning of this existential journey, others are a little further along, and still others will have completed it to a certain degree. When I speak here of young monks and nuns, therefore, I mean members of our communities between twenty-five and thirty-five, and in some cases, up to forty years of age. We are again faced with the relativity of age when we speak of a forty year old junior as someone who is no longer young, whereas monastically speaking he or she is in fact young.

I am quite aware of the limitations of my anthropological vision, and for several reasons. To mention just one of them, my conception of the human being is predominantly Western. Obviously, the human being as such is the same in all times and places, but does the human being as such really exist? The articulation of a Cistercian anthropology is an urgent task that still awaits an answer. In order to be a true anthropology, it has to be pluri-cultural. Oriental cultures have much to teach us in this regard. My intention is three-fold: to offer a few orientations for formation, to foster a creative dialogue, and perhaps to find pathways different from—though not adverse to—traditional methods.

The Young

Without making any dogmatic claims, I take the liberty of presenting a series of things that characterize the young people coming to our monasteries or already living in them. I am very aware that distinctions need to be made between the youth of the First and Third Worlds. This means between the youth of economically developed societies, which are governed by the rules of modern culture in its state of transition, and the youth of economically underdeveloped societies, which are culturally dependent or have no influence on the rest of the world. Likewise, in order to sharpen our focus, we would have to distinguish between city and rural youth, youth in working, professional or academic situations. In other words, rather than talk of youth, we would have to speak of "youths" in the plural.

Nevertheless, it is easy to discover common traits and colors in today's youth, a phenomenon largely explained by the means of mass communication, global economy, and the tendency toward a world-wide culture. I am also aware that these influences have a different impact on men and women. Moreover, the emergence of women in public life has changed many cultural rules for men...