Recently, my husband’s heavy-metal band reunited for a couple performances. At the last event, our middle son, 22, showed up with some friends to hear the old man sizzle on stage.
Entering the low-lit atmosphere of Rick’s Bar, I joined the youthful table toward the back. Within minutes, I found myself pulled into deep conversations with these young men, who picked my brain on various moral issues of our day. “Mrs. Salonen, what do you think about…?”
I had to remind myself that these were the same guys I’d accompanied on a school field trip to Valley Fair in eighth grade as a chaperone, and now, here they were, just months from their college graduation, seeking my thoughts.
And I was seeking theirs. It quickly became apparent to me that we have something to offer one another. While I may have wisdom to depart, they have fresh ideas and keen insight on the world of today that they’re entering.
After congratulating my husband for still being able to shred on his guitar decades after we met in concert choir, I bummed a ride from the collegians. “Be safe now,” I said, my “Mom” sensibility still intact as I waved goodbye from my front steps.
Soon afterward, I saw a headline citing a report from The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty: “Support for religious freedom hits highest score ever in the U.S., Gen Z most supportive demographic.” Those recent bar conversations flashed at me.
Despite their varying levels of religious belief, the hunger in those young men to better understand God was authentic; they’d want those conversations to continue.
Then, at the recent Real Presence Radio annual fundraising event in Fargo, keynote speaker Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers affirmed what these young men had demonstrated through sharing about his encounters with youth in his international travels as a Christian speaker.
Young people are asking intelligent questions about God, he said, and wanting real answers, and we can’t hide from our duty of providing them.
The problem, he said, is that they’re too often taught “stuff about Jesus, but they don’t know him, truly.” They are being entertained by vampires and zombies who subsist on blood and flesh, without realizing Jesus’ flesh and blood are available to them at the altar of the Eucharist every day.
And tragically, they don’t know how much God loves them. “They need witnesses to unpack the faith,” Deacon Harold said, noting, “that encounter with Christ changes everything” and can draw them away from the modern-day worship of the “Trinity,” focused on “Me, Myself and I,” into something real.
The truth, he said, will set us, and them, free, away from the slavery of the world. “True freedom is rooted in the obedience of faith,” he said. “When your hopes, desires and dreams are one with God’s will, then you’re truly free. That’s what young people want.”
As their mentors, our job is simply to “throw the seeds,” Deacon Harold emphasized, adding that the Holy Spirit will do the rest.
[For the sake of having a repository for my newspaper columns and articles, I reprint them here, with permission, a week or more after their run date. The preceding ran in The Forum newspaper on Feb. 16, 2025.]
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