Being Adolescent/Adolescent Spirituality

...In Adolescent Spirituality, Charles M. Shelton, S.J., a recently ordained priest who has dealt with students in Denver and St...

...It would seem to follow — and here I join my experience to the book's conclu-sionsabout "flow" — that if more adults (parents, teachers, and family friends) would make the necessary sacrifices and enter more often and more deeply into the lives of the young, offering both moral support and a series of increasingly difficult challenges which the young can handle but which tax their skills to the utmost, students would discover that the terms "joy" and "intellectual life" not only belong together but even fit in with a quiet conversation huddled in a basement with a couple of beers...

...Wednesday, "rapping with friends" on the school mall and admiring a graffiti ("Q: Are we not men...

...There is hope, however, for Kathy Tennison who has clear goals and concentrates her attention on developing academic and musical skills...

...to give them an education and a "spirituality" — if not to save them from Bud and the beaches, at least to teach them, without apology, that, while everyone appreciates a cold brew on a hot day, life neither begins nor ends with the popping open of yet another can...

...Meanwhile, Shelton's publishers have served him poorly: the copy editor has allowed him not only to affirm the obvious sometimes ("by self-concept Super means the impressions we have of ourselves...

...When spring and summer burst upon us they leap off rocks and waterfalls into country swimming holes...

...Loyola University Press, $15, 366 pp...

...With whom do they spend their time...

...They might, of course, respond by hanging out'on the street corner and then write obscenities on their questionnaires when the psychologists beep them...

...they talk with their mothers, but spend an average of one-half hour a week with their fathers...

...The social scientists try to help us with these mysteries, if not to solve them, at least to put them in perspective and tell us how much their research confirms or contradicts our own experience...

...Shelton has organized his book like a manual, perhaps for a seminary course, in which he summarizes the developmental theories of a whole string of psychologists — Lawrence Kohlberg's three levels and two stages for each level, William Perry's six positions, to the point where there is scarcely a page not split into lists, steps, and suggestions — some of them rather reasonable, most simply pointed toward dealing with young people at their appropriate level, engaging them in honest dialogue, and urging them to develop a personal friendship with Jesus...

...With this in mind, perhaps some future book on adolescent spirituality will address the asceticism of intellectual rigor, the notion that study is a hard and lonely business to be endured when it cannot be enjoyed, for the sake of some higher, selfless goal...

...At Belmont High a bunch of wise guys in togas break up the senior banquet with a food fight...

...31 percent goes to "maintenance," eating, chores, etc...

...About two percent...

...ADOLESCENT SPIRITUALITY PASTORAL MINISTRY FOR HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE YOUTH Charles M. Shelton, S.J...

...The absolute low for athlete Jerzy Madigan is 10:15 A.M...

...To me, neither book deals adequately with the issue of integrity...

...As the authors observe, it is "startling how little time these teenagers spend in the company of adults...

...If Greg and Ronny and their friends knew that adults who knew them by name and whom they respected were going to hold them responsible on Monday for Seven Storey Mountain or require a five-page science or history paper which would be promptly and critically read and returned by the next class, they might have to actually choose between accepting an academic challenge and hanging out with the gang...

...her low, struggling with a history assignment...

...For those who live or work with the young, Being Adolescent, which focuses on how teenagers spend their time, holds few surprises, but it does offer a good mix of discouraging facts and hopeful advice...

...is sensibly based on Commonweal: 90 writers like Eugene Kennedy, Anthony Kosnick, Charles Curran and Richard McCormick, S.J...

...Good education must strike a balance between coddling students and abandoning them to the record companies, the Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce, and their own capacity for self-destruction...

...So huddled, they would gripe about the teachers who gave them too much work, but they would reserve their ultimate derision for the "guts," those who asked little for the guaranteed B or C, and gave little in return...

...The recorded high points of Gregory Stone's (not his real name, but it should be) week are 10:30 P.M., Friday, "taking a hit off a joint" and 12:15P.M...

...But most important is what either or both of these books can offer us about what the established generation can do to not-so-much ease the transition from adolescence to adulthood — for there is no such thing as painless change — as to make it a real transition where childish behavior, the demand for immediate gratification, is really left behind...

...They almost never speak personally with their teachers...

...A young Ivy League teacher said recently of students he had known, "They lie a lot...

...Shelton's problem areas are the traditional Catholic ones: faith crisis, prayer, sexual morality (where his advice on masturbation and premarital intercourse, etc...

...Finally, they propose a modest, yet challenging, formula for exploiting what they call "flow experiences" that enable us to both respect the feelings of adolescents and, at the same time, pull them into adulthood...

...only occasionally do they transcend the emotions of the moment...

...he himself had previously scrawled...

...Her high-point is playing her violin in the orchestra...

...Of the one-quarter of their waking time that adolescents spend alone, only 22 percent of it is "productive," 16 percent spent in study...

...Being Adolescent makes a crucial distinction between pleasure, the repeated release of instinctual tensions, and enjoyment, which must grow in order to continue...

...Their daily lives are a continual series of minor frustrations and highs — spats with parents about taking out the garbage, worrying about a meeting with the dean, getting stoned on Saturday night...

...The students in their survey took the most joy not from sex and parties but from creative activity that challenged them...

...and the remaining 29 percent is "productive," school work and jobs...

...but, for the most part, members of this group report themselves as most "intrinsically motivated" when they are "outside the reach of the oppressive regime, when huddled in basements, out in the woods, or gathered in numbers with their fellow-oppressed in the student center or lunchroom...

...One boy observed, "My father would work twenty-four hours a day if he had the energy...

...Hardly anyone knows any one of them well...

...He was not indicting them, but rather, reflecting on their inability to present the same face to their peers, their teachers, and themselves...

...They come home sad-faced from the funerals of their friends who have driven their cars, drunk, at 3:00 A.M...

...into telephone poles, and go roaring off themselves the next Saturday night with a case of Miller in the front seat...

...but also to repeat it...

...Indeed it seems part of the definition of that stage of human development between entering high school and early college that the young strategically evade definition — perhaps because the rest of us have so many good reasons to try to define them: to socialize them — train them in adult behavior patterns so they can be responsible citizens...

...Sunday on the way to church with his parents who, to double his pain, play opera on the radio when he wants rock, and he is hung over from the night before...

...They spend 29 percent with friends, 23 percent with classmates, 27 percent alone and only 19 percent with their families...

...to "capture the teenage market" and sell them stereos and skis and tickets to rock concerts and to the Bahamas, and kegs of Budweiser and Miller, and Izod shirts and yellow pants...

...The problems he addresses are not, on the surface, those of Belmont High — at least not those measured by Csikszentmihalyi and Reed...

...A: We are DEVO...

...But this is not a problem unique to adolescents...

...Kids are always losing arms and legs playing around railroad tracks, yet some of those in Being Adolescent hang from railroad trestles while the trains pass overhead...

...Raymond A. Schreth ALMOST EVERYONE knows some adolescents...

...Her moods are almost as variable as Greg's...

...Until that happens, their feelings are like a soccer ball, kicked back and forth in a series of sudden reversals, with only an occasional score...

...Academic work — combined classroom work and home study — claims a paltry 26 hours a week, compared to 59 for Japan and 50 for Soviet Russia...

...If we are parents or teachers we are tempted to despair not just at how little they learn from us, about cleaning their rooms or handing in term papers on time, but at how little they learn from the experience of one another...

...but, unlike Greg, she integrates "negative feedback" into her experience as motivation for better work...

...Most of their time, 40 percent, is spent in leisure activity, socializing, watching TV, etc...

...The authors have examined their data from several points of view, interviewed many of their subjects in depth (including about one-third in a follow-up study), presented some case studies for analysis, and placed their findings in the context of current research...

...A non-scientific observer of adolescents, an average newspaper reader, might say that the two traits which most distinguish them are their joy and their despair...

...And every college campus has several of its freshman men with their fists and forearms bandaged and in casts, tendons cut and feeling lost, as if no one before them had learned what happens when you punch a mirror or crush a glass mug with your bare hands...

...Or they kill themselves...

...In Being Adolescent—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor of behavior science and education, and Reed Larson, an assistant professor of psychiatry, both at the University of Chicago, gave electronic pagers for one week in May 1978 to seventy-five suburban Chicago high school students (here called Belmont High), and beeped them every forty minutes to have them fill out questionnaires on what they were doing and how they felt about it...

...and social justice...

...Csikszentmihalyi and Larson give us Ronny, the football player who gets "unambiguous feedback about his existence" by (he says) "mauling people, and hurting 'em so they're afraid to come again...

...For less than 40 percent of the class time they pay attention...

...There are some very happy moments with families, usually when they go away on vacation...

...Louis and read widely in developmental psychology and Jesuit spirituality, attempts to apply the compatible principles of these two disciplines to the guidance of Catholic high school and college men and women...

...or so it would seem from 8 February 1985: 89 last year's spate of teenage suicide stories, as if suicide were a medical epidemic like the flu...

...Father Shelton's nameless youths experience doubt in their life of faith until they can make faith a "profound relational commitment," and they strive to avoid "non-growthful behavior," and achieve "personal life stances" that are "life-enhancing...

...but he is happiest visiting his grandmother in a small town who pampers him and leaves him free to take out the local girls...

...and I spotted at least seven printing errors in the first third of the book...

...And they might not...

...Adolescent Spirituality covers some of the same territory as Being Adolescent, like the destructive influence of peer pressure and the relationship between challenge and growth, but these young people seem to inhabit two different worlds, not just religious and secular, but abstract and concrete...