Imagination Lost and Regained

Lancaster City is being plagued by an outbreak of shootings and suicides. A good deal of the violence is by young men. A school teacher was murdered last week in her city house in a cold blooded break-in robbery by two young assailants who didn't know her but one lived in her neighborhood. The community is shocked and saddened. A lot of hang-wringing is going on where people are looking for answers.

I have worked with teenagers for close to thirty years and as a result of such in-depth experiences over such a long period of time, often with society's most distressed and troubled kids, I know a thing or two more than the average person about adolescents. I was in a bit of a discussion with a friend, more Liberal than I, on Facebook about remedies to this and I felt as if he somewhat discounted my insight. I don't offer easy solutions but ones that I think are grounded in reality and not idealism. My general point was that fear can be a deterrent to crime. Not the best deterrent mind you, love is, but a deterrent nonetheless. Hope and Fear,

Back in the 1980's, I worked with adjudicated youth at a Reform School near Philadelphia. It kind of frightens me in retrospect that I was given so much responsibility as a 23 year old when I didn't know jack shit. Sixty delinquents and two staff members over the weekend shift. I shudder with fear thinking about it. Half the kids at the school wound up in prison, the other half broke free of the life of crime. And when you are talking about adjudicated youth, that was a pretty impressive stat for the Reform School.

I remember feeling overwhelmed when I thought about the prospects of trying to get the young men to take stock of where there life would wind up if they didn't change their ways. One of the crisis points, there were several in those two years, was when one of my basketball players got killed by a police officer while on a weekend homepass in Philly. Made basketball seems pretty insignificant. I had talked with him and had some laughs at practice the week before he got killed. This tragedy forced me to come face-to-face that my work with these young men was life-and-death. Not some stupid game with a ball and a hoop. I came to see that even though I could not be all things to these kids I could show them that it was possible to positive and strong, to create the paradigm that opened the door of their perception to a better way of life because I don't think many believed that it existed.

I have to wonder if all of this violence is first and foremost a failure of imagination. These young hell-bent men don't have a vision of life to cut through the clouds of adversity. Their worldview is deprived of meaning and empathy.    

I re-read A Christmas Carol over the last couple of days and was struck was again about the visages of the children hiding in the cloak of the Ghost of Christmas Future, the boy Ignorance and the girl Want. In reading more about the life of Charles Dickens, I learned that he had felt this in reference to his own destitute youth in his autobiographical novel David Copperfield:

"I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind." (Wikipedia)
  
I wonder if these violent young men, apparently without conscience, have been warned that they are in danger of eternal Hell, that they have no hope outside of Jesus, that His grace is sufficient for them to kill their sin and not innocent victims. Darwin offers no hope from such a cycle of death and depression. Survive--but why--if death is the ultimate destination. Work backwards from that and see if it offers any real answers for faith, hope, and love.

A pastor (Matthew Ristuccia) of a church where I used to attend in Princeton, New Jersey, has co-written a profound book titled Imagination: Glorifying God with a Neglected Part of Your Mind.  The passage below really explained to me the disassociation that occurs with sin, both what we commit and what is done to us (it is always a case of both within and without):

When we are disassociated within ourselves, is it any wonder that this can work itself outwardly into the lives of others, often disastrously? I myself was a disconnected youth, and even a inconsistent adult to the ways of God, who had little reason to value my own life. When I heard that Christ had died for me, I deduced that to mean that I was valuable. That was not merely a human opinion, it was God Himself who had declared and determined that.

The hope is available for all, but if only they hear. For ignorance is deadly.