The boys always arrive on time for the service on Sunday. They sit together in the south aisle. There are four of them, and two (not related) used to look so much alike that I had trouble telling them apart. They thought this was funny, especially when they came up for a blessing at communion. But they always took it seriously: they never swapped names, though they could have done. Now one of them, thank God, is beginning to grow a moustache. These are our 14-year -olds. One of them has been coming to church all his life. The others are his friends from school. They’re among the boys you may see buzzing around the local estate on their bikes, hoods up, after school lets out. Their parents, for the most part, don’t come to church. That doesn’t seem to bother them. Church is something they do. It’s their thing to do together.
I scribble names and ages on a piece of scrap paper and discover that, of the under-18s who regularly attend church, 17 are boys and 17 are girls. Nine sing in the choir. Are they all here every single week? No, and it’s a good thing too, because they’d never fit in the Sunday School: the younger children’s room downstairs with the little chairs and the framed print of the Lord’s Prayer and the wooden blocks for building Jerusalem, and the one upstairs with the long table and the craft supplies. I’m aware that“ Sunday School” is a wildly old-fashioned term. Never mind. I’m also aware that our adolescents ought, or so I was taught, to stay in the nave with the adult congregation for the whole service. They don’t want to. Every single week the teenagers head off up the south aisle along with the younger children and the parents and toddlers. Then, I am told, they go upstairs and study the Bible together and talk. They talk about cults. They’re interested in cults and the way they work. They all know people who follow the Manosphere even if they don’t; even if they don’t look at porn, they know where to find it. They haven’t been sucked in.
Do the boys confide in me? I’d like to think that they know that they can, and that they would if they needed to. As a matter of fact, though, our conversations are brief, as are the glimpses we get of the boys’ lives. And so it’s easy to form an idea of their lives from popular culture, such as the Netflix series Adolescence which has seized the imagination of the adult population recently, or from our own distant teenage years, or from the scary news. I remember someone I visited not long ago who looked out her window at the high school students just off the bus and heading home in their green uniform tops and was afraid. They were big, they filled up the pavement, and she’d read or heard that they all had knives. My impression is different because I knew these students when they were in primary school, and they know me. Several of them will have been in the crib service, or volunteered tot ake the parts of caterpillars or saints or revolting peasants in school assemblies over the years. They’ve all changed almost past recognition, and so have I, but there’s still a lot of mileage in that “almost”.
Doesn’t everyone who knows teenagers worry about them? Knives, guns, drugs, gangs, county lines, dick pics, child porn, misogyny, the insidious poison of the algorithm showing them other and worse things they might like to view? And then the epidemic of self-harm. There’s more: there’s the world my generation is leaving for them, a world in which we’ve had to take Cory Doctorow’s word “enshittification” and extend its usage across every structure of nature and society.
Wilfred Owen, a poet who spent the best years of his short life meditating on the tragedy of young manhood, wrote a couple of lines in the poem “Strange Meeting” that have stuck with me since I first heard them: “Now men will go content with what we spoiled. / Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.” What I feel for our teenagers is a mixture of affection, admiration, and agonized pity. Most of them are doing the best they can to be kind and decent and to go content with what we spoiled. Some even hope to mend it.
Our 14-year-olds seem to want to come to the parish church on Sunday. They haven’t yet gone looking for one of the places that will guarantee them a male leader, nor, thank God, to one of the kinds of church designed specifically to be appealing to young men. They’ve climbed the tower (risk assessment and safety precautions in place) to celebrate one of their number’s decision to be baptised, and have seen the initials of boys of an earlier century scratched into the lead. They come up for a blessing, as I’ve said, and give their right names. I’m serious, and in that moment they’re completely serious too.
