We are hard-wired to belong to someone. There is no greater satisfaction in life than to know there is someone with whom we share every moment of life. It is the beginning of the universal challenge to go beyond the self to include many others. However, the surprise is that most people are soft-wired to belong to a group of people who think and act like themselves. People want to spontaneously fit in and feel at home. The real challenge is to belong to a heterogeneous group where differences are evident but not obstacles to friendship.

Youth see the Church, Synagogue, Mosque, and Temple as homogeneous communities. So it is that when youth come to join a religious community they are told to fit in, to conform, to be clones of the “faithful.” Youth are reticent to belong. They are meant to be seen and “heard.” Youth are raising many issues that religions have not had to face, and failure to respond to them will mean greater and greater alienation for present and future generations. Dialogue is paramount if we are to arrive at a contemporary meaning of faith. Youth react to religious communities that promote the status quo because their hopes are dashed. Youth will remain estranged from a religious community that remains exclusively a community of worship, where piety is the sole criterion of goodness, where change is so slow compared to other communities where injustices are faced head-on, where human rights are upheld, and where an ethical value is chosen over hyper-consumerism.

Religion can no longer be that “good old-time-religion,” a return to the past; it must be a community ever renewing and reforming itself. Religion is required to update itself through dialogue, even when it may seem very uncomfortable. Religious institutions will have to rebuild faith from the bottom-up, from where young women and young men live their lives. Faith in today’s multi-faith world is a golden opportunity to seek new identities to our different faiths while we fully respect our traditions. A new identity welcomes the many different traditions of faith and results in the nurturing and strengthening of one’s own faith. It is when religions celebrate differences that they enrich all faith communities by forging unity through diversity.

Christians, for example, must challenge each Christian community to wrestle with faith. Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until the rise of dawn. He realized the human he was wrestling with was God. Wrestling with God is to wrestle with the texts of the Bible and wrestling with ethical questions raised by young people. It was at the end of the wrestling match that Jacob demands a blessing. The blessing that he receives is a new name, Israel, "for you have struggled with God and with human beings, and have prevailed." It takes courage to await the blessing of a new name, a new identity. Everything new is of God.

God’s primary concern is humanity and since we are made in the image and likeness of God, our concern should not be God, but humanity. Humanity is the focus of our faith. Young women and men do not see the worth of a faith that fails to address the sustainable future of the planet, where environmental destruction continues in the name of progress, when the defense of dogmas is more important than dialogue with other faith traditions, when faith is disconnected from the millennial goals of the United Nations, and from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Many years ago, a friend was disappointed when his son no longer attended church on a regular basis. Then one day his son taught him a very worthwhile lesson. His son was associating with a myriad of young people from a variety of religious backgrounds and those friendships were tearing down the long-standing walls of misunderstanding that had separated them. The lesson that father learned was that if his son were to invite his friends to church, would there be walls that would still separate them?

The walls have come down. Youth will certainly consider any and all invitations to belong to a community of faith where differences are seen as invitations to enrich the meaning of all life and where encountering the other in an honest dialogue (understanding the other as the others understand herself or himself) will be welcomed as the joy of belonging. Encounters with others who are different are moments of celebration.


About the Author;

John Walsh is a Roman Catholic priest, author, editor, regular columnist, former radio talk-show host on CJAD, and lecturer at Concordia University. He is the recipient of multiple awards from the Jewish and Muslim communities and also recipient of the Martin Luther Legacy Award. He shares with a rabbi and an Imam the blog faithblender.com. He obtained a Licentiate in Sacred Theology, a Licentiate in Sacred Scripture (Rome) and a Diploma from Hebrew University (Jerusalem).