Julie Barrios’s article, “Spiritual Formation When Google Fails,” offers a thoughtful look at spiritual companionship. As a spiritual director in San Francisco, the author is familiar with the city’s fast-paced culture and with one of its largest groups: millennials. Through the lens of spiritual formation language; orientation, disorientation, and reorientation, Julie Barrios invites us to see how millennials’ transformation to “freedom for desire” shapes their understanding and their experience of God. Millennials, like generations before and after, need help discerning how limitation can become an invitation to deeper freedom and relationship with God. Barrios explores how adapting quickly to change is an assumed reality for this age group.
A pivot occurs when a limitation gives birth to a potential creative possibility that would have never been considered otherwise. It is in discerning these dynamics that you can best help millennials cultivate rich and dynamic relationships with God.
During their childhood and adolescence, millennials were shaped by major events such as the Columbine massacre, the September 11 attacks, and the Great Recession of 2008, just as most in this generation were graduating college and entering the workforce. Known for being constantly plugged into technology by the time they reached adulthood, this generation experienced the transition from real-life relationships to online connections and social networks. These experiences of uncertainty and disruption, coupled with less connection to authentic community, led to an increase in insecurity and anxiety in young people never seen in generations before. It set the stage for what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt observed in his landmark work, The Anxious Generation.
Millennials have seen institutions, industries, and social patterns change quickly. Barrios notes, “This can lead to the vice of impatience but also to the virtue of adaptability.” It can also create the expectation that everything established should be redesigned or improved. Consider, for example, the experience of having children and the industry that has commercialized this most basic human reality. My peers in this generation have experienced incessant access to information about starting a family and raising children. We are constantly marketed products that will make life easier, and we’ve certainly acquired much more than we really need when compared to what our grandparents’ generation had.
This article does an excellent job reminding us about the importance of the “pivot” in the formation process: orientation, disorientation, and reorientation, particularly with this generation, when it comes to the lens of desire. Since Millennials grew up in an ever-changing landscape, they haven’t had the time to learn or cultivate their longings. Barrios says,
It’s difficult to become aware of one’s preferences, joys, and desires when the essentials take up so much space. In contemplative life, we are aware that busyness leads to mindlessness and stunts the capacity for real joy. Real joy is replaced with the saccharine sweets of pop pleasure. In a life filled with busy “essentials,” millennials sink into the abundance of these empty offerings.
The desires of millennials were “controlled, limited, manipulated, coddled, and fanned” far more than any previous generation. Barrios explains that this makes their desert experience of disorientation a confusing one. The stage of disorientation is not pleasant for anyone. We all long for the familiar when stress or crisis comes our way. Like the Israelites, millennials will inevitably long for Egypt. Barrios encourages those who minister to this generation to provide them the manna of grace, compassion, and hope while helping them surrender to the limitations of adulthood.
Barrios offers a case study and explores what coming alongside a young adult who is questioning her career and feels uncertain about the future. As attentive spiritual directors do, she offered space to explore questions, to spark curiosity about longings, and just enough structure to help bring their experience into the presence of God.
“What if joy can be found in something so simple even while the rest of the world is so complex?” This question, spurred from a challenge to do something joyful and completely inconsequential every day, is how Barrios helps millennials reorient to God as they leave the desert and embrace the presence of God in their life.
Giving time and space to these discoveries won’t come naturally at first. This may well lead them to a type of excruciating obedience. They will have to lean into and fill the vast open space that is currently their desert that, when irrigated, plowed, and planted, will become their promised land.
Use the questions and practices below for individual or group reflection:
- The author said, “It’s difficult to become aware of one’s preferences, joys, and desires when the essentials take up so much space.” Do you agree? Was there a time you lost sight of something in a busy season of life? In what ways might you carve out time for solitude to access your longings?
- Read this psalm of reorientation: Psalm 116. “Return to your rest, my soul, for the Lord has been good to you” (verse 7).All Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Take some time to sit quietly in the presence of God and meditate on Psalm 116 or another psalm.
- Try practicing the spiritual discipline of inconsequential joy. Do something joyful and completely inconsequential every day for a week. What things were you drawn to? Did you notice anything about your attitude before or after you practiced the habit?