By Kurt Rietema
I’d spent days writing these stories. I agonized over each sentence. I’d observed how my own kids became engrossed in stories read aloud. So, I analyzed the proper amount of detail given to the nuances of character building in young adult fiction. I smirked at my clever turns of phrase, preening at their near perfection. After reading aloud one of the brief, 10-minute, creative rewritings of the story of Nehemiah to the local youth in our leadership development program, I finally looked up from the words I’d written as if I’d stuck the landing like Simone Biles in Rio 2016. It was then I saw them slouched over in their chairs, half of them half-asleep. Sam and Jet* even managed to somehow turn completely around without me noticing, backs turned to me in case I missed the subtlety of their rejection. If you’re looking for personal affirmation in working with teenagers, you’re in the wrong business. Youth ministry will constantly keep you humble.
A hallmark of our youth ministry over the years is that we really don’t attract the “good” kids. Whether it’s in Argentine or in Croc, we’ve always seemed to get the kids whose applications to youth leadership programs are briefly glanced at and summarily filed away. There is always a blemish in the record – grades, behavior, language, dress. We seem to get the summer staffer who has a heart of gold, but is upfront about needing a cigarette around the corner from the church. We get the kids in our afterschool program sent by the school counselor. We get the kids who are unsure about their gender. We get the kids whose parents didn’t bother to sign them up for the free, STEM camps offered by deep-pocketed universities. We get the kids whose grandparents might drag them to church occasionally, but also berate them that they’re going to hell. Which means we end up getting the kids who turn their backs on a god who will happily turn his back on them if they screw up. In short, we get the kids who the world believes aren’t really going places.
It’s probably fair to say that this is both by default and by design. On the kids’ part, I imagine that they pick us not unlike how your great great grandparents courted each other in the mid-19th century, Kansas territory. They didn’t have any other options. For our part, we’re uncomfortable living in a world that only invests in the smart, confident, charming, upwardly-mobile youth. We don’t want anyone left behind and that kind of world leaves boatloads of youth behind. Ordinary kids can be pretty extraordinary if you give them a chance. But what that choice means for us working with second-string kids is that we have to get used to having them turn their backs on us. This summer would be no different.
In 1975, Edward Tronick and his colleagues presented the findings of research they had been conducting on a “still face experiment.” They described a kind of natural, normative attachment between a mother and her child as one in which they gaze lovingly at each other’s faces. There is a kind of dance, a playfulness, a giving and a receiving where each responds and reacts to one another in a loving way. Then, they instructed the mothers to maintain a still face – to not react to the baby’s smiles and bids for connection and to be non-responsive and expressionless. After a few minutes of trying and failing to get its mother to respond, the baby gets deeply agitated and acts out. Then it starts to turn its face and its body away from its non-responsive mother.
After further testing, they found the same kinds of results across a broad cross section of children and infants revealing the deep need that we have for secure connections and attachments. When the mother is playing still face, the child is acting out of sorts, it vies for attention, throws a fit because for her to be fully human is to face one another, to smile and to be smiled at, to laugh and to be laughed at, to love and to be loved. Conversely, when the mother is playing still face, she is acting outside of the way she is supposed to interact with her child. Playing still face makes the mother less than human. It is a turning of one’s back. It is outside of her design, the way things are meant to be. The work of the mother and child is to turn their faces towards one another, to bring their world back into communion with one another, back into equilibrium, back to their center, back into a dance.
It doesn’t require a researcher like Tronick, or even a therapist to dig deeply into the lives of the youth in our summer program to get a sense of the trauma many of them have experienced. Some bear it through the sullen, detached looks on their faces, Some show it through their confusion about their identities. Some reveal it when they act out to get attention. Some display it through cut marks on their arms. And when we finally could gain enough trust to hear a little bit more of their stories, we could see that it wasn’t so much a still face experiment they were undergoing with the adults closest to them as it was a defining feature of those relationships. Turning their backs on the world was a way of shielding themselves from more pain and disappointment.
During the first few weeks of the summer, our staff debriefed the relational dynamics at the end of every day. Why was Niki* acting out like that? How can we tear down the fences between the cliques? How can we get the hardest of them to trust us? After feeling the icy shadows of the kids’ turned backs, one of our summer staffers, Jillian, made it her mission to get on the other side. She played a lot of foosball with a girl who never took off her headphones. She complimented new hair colors and fashion choices. Jillian got in on all of the nuances in the drama of their relationships. She had hard conversations when she spotted things that were concerning. Jillian did all of the things that most of the adults in their lives refused to do – not to return the young people’s still face experiments with a still face of her own, but to subvert them with a smile. With a compliment. With the playfulness, improvisation and giving and receiving of a mother and child turned towards one another.
On the last day of our summer program, I was sitting in Snack Shack KC when everybody came back from the pool. The boys rambled in, wet towels slung over their shoulders like it was any other day, but the girls walked in sobbing, wet from their own tears. That day was not a day like any other day. That day was their last day with Jillian. The tough exteriors, the joyless faces, the backs turned to us and everyone else – they melted and ran down like their mascara, revealing the young girls that were there all along who were just looking for someone to return their smile with a smile, their laugh with a laugh, bringing their world back into the communion.
In the world of Jesus, if there was any agreement on who had turned their back on their own people it was most certainly the tax collectors. Rome controlled the entire economy of first century Palestine through Jews who sold out the interest of their own people for a piece of the pot. The reigning consensus was to treat the tax collectors exactly as they did to everyone else. The backlash was understandable – the tax collectors exploited them to their personal gain. And in turn, the tax collectors hardened to the hate piled on by the people. They were in gridlock. And then in Luke 5, we see Jesus do something different. Instead of turning his back, he turned towards Levi the tax collector, inviting Levi to follow him. So stunned by this act of unexpected hospitality, Levi responds with more generosity, throwing a huge party for all of the social outcasts that would never be among the good, the confident, the charming or the upwardly-mobile. The gridlock was broken. A dance had begun.
Jillian would sometimes wear a t-shirt that said, “I’m sorry if someone misrepresented Jesus to you.” Some of the youth were probably a little annoyed by her t-shirt and annoyed that we talked about Jesus so much this summer. But they probably needed that screen-printed confession more than they realized. They came from families where Jesus was misrepresented as that god who would turn his back on them if they screwed up. But in Jillian, they didn’t see someone who turned her back on them, but rather looked them full in the face – just like Jesus did to a wounded world.
*names changed for privacy
About Kurt Rietema: Kurt is the Senior Director of YF Neighborhood at Youthfront. He holds a Master’s in Global Development and Social Justice from St. John’s University. Kurt is also an adjunct at MidAmerica Nazarene University and at William Jewell College. Kurt and his wife Emily live with their sons, Luke, Perkins and Leo in an under-resourced neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas called Argentine.
