The ‘Seekers’ Members Of Generation X On The Lookout For Deep-Rooted, Time-Honored Spirituality

They’ve been called slackers and Xers, the legion of listless twentysomethings who shuffle their directionless way from one coffeehouse to another, nary a goal in mind. They are accused of apathy, disconnection and an inability to commit. Even four years at the same college is for many a daunting leap of faith.

But if the crowds of young adults who have warmed the pews of many churches and synagogues in recent years are any indication, the lost generation may have found religion.

“We are looking for something that’s not vapid or temporary,” said Jeremy Langford, a 26-year-old Catholic and a managing editor at Loyola University Press in Chicago.

“I’m looking for someone who will take me by the hand and say, ‘Why don’t you walk with me awhile, and I’ll take you to the mountaintop and show you the view,’ ” said Langford, who edited “This Man Bernardin.”

“Seekers” is a more fitting description for his generation, Langford said.

The Rev. Bill Caldaroni, 41, pastor of Holy Transfiguration Antiochian Orthodox Church in Wheaton, Ill., agreed.

“They have a thirst for worship and spirituality … mystical things that are not so much cerebral,” Caldaroni said.

Since 1993, two dozen students from nearby Wheaton College have joined Caldaroni’s parish, making a change from evangelical Protestantism to Eastern Orthodoxy. It’s a scenario not particular to Orthodoxy, Caldaroni said.

“There is a sense of despair in that whole generation,” he said. Many young adults find comfort in practices that have old traditions and long histories, like Judaism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, he said.

“Those (traditions) are something rooted,” he said. “They need that.”

Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Judaism have all experienced an increased involvement of people in their 20s and 30s over the past five years, according to religious leaders.

“They really feel somehow cheated, that some of the past has been taken away from them,” said Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman, president of Hebrew Union College, which has campuses in Cincinnati, Los Angeles and New York.

The oldest existing rabbinical seminary in the country, Hebrew Union College is adapting its methods for training rabbis and Jewish laity to meet the changing demands of its students.

Among the innovations is a class offered exclusively over the Internet. A professor posts his lecture, readings and an assignment for cyberstudents across the country. They e-mail him back with their answers and comments.

“By using (the Internet), we can do things that enable people to connect and find their way,” Zimmerman said. In addition to the Internet course offerings, by next year nearly a third of the college’s library holdings will be available on a web site. Some clergy, who have realized that many members of the “Sesame Street” generation are more comfortable in an Internet chat room than a church sanctuary, have embraced the World Wide Web as a means of outreach and discipleship.

Via e-mail, the Rev. John Matusiak, pastor of St. Joseph Orthodox Church in Wheaton, shepherded a university student in Scotland through his chrismation, an Orthodox rite akin to confirmation. Matusiak’s parish has grown exponentially in recent years, mostly due to the addition of Gen-Xers and thirtysomethings, many of whom have started families and want to put down roots.

“They have a real thirst for some sort of permanence,” he said.

“They don’t have their own youth culture. We’ve raised a whole group of children who have appropriated their parent’s culture,” said the 46-year-old Matusiak, who added that his college-age children listen to Janis Joplin and wear tiedyed clothes, fixtures from his own college days.

“(Religion) gives some kind of stability in a culture where they don’t know what is lasting and what is permanent,” he said.

“The backbone of many parishes used to be 25- to 30-year-olds, the same group that people now are wringing their hands over and saying, ‘Where are they?”’ said the Rev. John Cusick, head of young adult ministries for the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago. “They haven’t left. They haven’t gone anywhere,” Cusick said. “Everybody is talking about a spiritual hunger in younger Americans. They’re having a hard time getting that hunger fed.”

Young adults who have found traditional religious paradigms cramped are exploring innovative ways to express their faith.

Hillel, the leading national Jewish campus ministry, recognized this and in 1993 created a team of recent college graduates called the Jewish Campus Service Corps, to reach the traditionally unreachable students.

One-year Service Corps fellows infiltrate elusive Jewish social groups, such as sororities and fraternities, and try to involve the students in Jewish activities.

At Northwestern University three years ago, the corps fellow began hosting a Friday night Shabbat meal in one of the Greek houses. Now many Jewish sorority and fraternity members are active in volunteer projects.

“We don’t want them to be Jewish on our terms; we want them to be Jewish on their terms,” said Julie Lyss, 29, the assistant director of the Hillels of Illinois.

Lyss is a typical seeker. After graduating from a women’s college with a degree in communications, she made a conscious decision to invest her time in her own faith community.

“I feel that it is an absolute expression of my Jewishness,” she said. “Clearly this is something I am passionate about or I wouldn’t be making half the money I could be making.”