On Humility and Millennials -- and "Importance", or Lack Thereof
At one time we went to church as kids, growing up and learning gradually about what it means to be a human being on God's green earth. It "took" at various times in our childhood, until eventually we came to get enough understanding of the world that we accepted it -- in the case of Christians, by accepting Jesus Christ as our Savior; in the case of other faiths, by a comparable acknowledgement of the tenets of their denomination.
One thing that we did learn is our place in the world. We learned it such that our place here was a gift from God, and we were to make of it what we did. We are all sinners, but we can obtain forgiveness, because there is a Power that can offer it to us if we accept it.
That acceptance comes with a concept that does not exist in three-year-olds, is almost ubiquitous in people over sixty, and is sorely lacking in the young millennial.
I refer, of course, to humility.
It is indeed hard to be humble when you are told you are perfect in every way. I'm not sure that millennials generally understand the notion of humility, because they grew up at a time when children were coddled, given trophies for participation, told they were "special" and given grades they didn't deserve for work they often did not do alone.
So I decided to make it simpler for them. Having not worked to get the grades they actually deserved, I have to dumb down the message of humility to get the point across in language that they could understand. And to them I say this. It is a message that, if you choose to accept it from a 67-year-old hack writer, you will immediately become a lot happier and a lot more popular among people you really need to have admire you:
You are not as important as you think you are.
Got it, people? The world does not revolve around you, and the people who claim to care about what you posted on Facebook, what you had for breakfast, say the same things to about 1,000 other people about what 1,000 other people said they had for breakfast. And those people, instead of working for a living or doing something actually productive, are commenting on your choice of breakfast.
You are not as important as you think you are.
Is it that hard to internalize the notion? It is simply a matter of deciding that humility is a good thing, and while it is good to have a sense of self, it is better also to have an understanding of where that "self" fits into the greater good. There are seven billion or so others of us on earth, and God has a lot of work to do to love that many people at one time, although somehow He manages.
You are not as important as you think you are.
I would love to believe that even coddled 24-year-olds in their seventh year of college, who complain because their campus serves sushi that was "culturally appropriated" (http://uberthoughtsusa.blogspot.com/2015/12/300-suffer-your-sushi-in-silence.html), or who have to throw chairs through windows at Berkeley so they don't have to hear an actual conservative guest speaker, can learn. They can learn that their views are simply one each in a larger humanity. That they could actually be (gasp) wrong. That there is One who put them here, not for the world to revolve around but to be a place for them to participate.
I would take each of them and sit them down. "You are not as important as you think you are", I would say. "That being true, what do you do next? Take a deep breath and contemplate your place in the world. You are not unimportant; you are simply less vital to the world than you have allowed yourself to think. But you are great in the eyes of God who made you."
It will make no difference to them, because no one that age wants to hear anything different from what they "know" to be the case. But it is a message that needs to be said, and to be heard.
Soon, we hope.
Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton