c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

(UNDATED) In the manner of 12-year-olds, a boy awakens at 60 mph and never stops.

Brunch out, home briefly, off to swimming, home briefly, off to youth group, home again. What next? His visiting grandfather is napping in the room he uses for movies. Stymied.

He processes this difficulty and works his way to a rationalization: need more time with Grandpa, time to wake him up. “Time to practice your violin,” his father tells him. Thwarted again. He does his duty to Bach.

Later, there appears a lovely scene: three generations in the living room, reading books, being quiet together. The boy lies on the sofa with author Artemis Fowl and is saddened to learn it is bedtime.

Stymied in one plan, he found his way to a better one. What had seemed difficult proved to contain grace. Does a No always lead to a better Yes? Not always, but often enough that we need to embrace the difficult course as possibly worthy.

My generation gets hammered for the 1960s, as if everything fell apart then and it was our fault. But we were the logical consequence of unresolved dichotomies: between the genial Eisenhower and the vile McCarthy, for example, between prosperity and air-raid drills, between “Mickey Mouse Club” and Little Rock, between “Young Love” and napalm, between Don Larsen pitching a perfect game and Lee Harvey Oswald taking aim.

Like every generation, we were caught between the easy and the difficult. If any balance tipped in the post-war era, it was toward the easy. “Labor-saving” became high praise, and “comfort at any price” became our theology.

Considering what the rest of the world was enduring, we did indeed have it easy. When ease met difficulty, we were led to believe hardship was a mistake. With better planning, we need never suffer. Difficulty was for dopes. Surely some product could vanquish discomfort. Today’s couch potatoes were born long ago.

When African-Americans cried out for justice, their cries were an intrusion, a difficulty that violated easy assumptions. When women became restless behind cultural barriers hastily erected after V-J Day, they threatened a calm that couldn’t withstand examination but did have the virtue of convenience.

The air is rife now with clamor for a “return to family values,” “traditional morality” and “biblical truth.” The clamor claims to be rigorous, manly and righteous. Personally, I think the clamor is a desperate search for an easy way. Life has gotten so complicated and difficult that many dream of a simpler, easier era and imagine a return to it via religion. With jobs evaporating, politics growing vacuous, cities and states collapsing, bodies aging, the world shrinking in size but magnifying in perplexity, and the populace getting more diverse and unruly, the easy course is blame and nostalgia.

Surely someone is at fault. Blame liberals, blame Mexicans, blame Hollywood, blame anyone who seems at fault for causing the supposedly golden 1950s to end.

The dichotomies that produced the 1960s were real, however. They needed to be worked out. We are still paying the price for not making the effort, for escaping instead into consciousness-numbing chemicals, mind-numbing entertainment, religion as scapegoating and government-by-avoidance.

Today has its own difficulties. Rather than blame someone for undermining conventional morality, we need to examine what we thought to be true. Was what passed for morality a generation or two ago stolen from us, or did it die of its own hypocrisy? If religion seems divisive and self-serving, we need to consider why, starting with oneself. If families feel endangered, we need to examine our own marriages and the values we encourage in a marketplace run by predators. Scarce jobs, imploding schools, soul-depleting entertainment, an economy yielding highly selective bounty, politics of fear and flattery _ those difficulties are logical consequences of who we are.

We need to study our difficulties for what they can teach us. Failure is a better tutor than success. Self-examination goes deeper than blame. Jesus taught in parables, not to be obscure, but to honor the complex nature of truth. His teachings were difficult, not because he was throwing down a faux manly gauntlet like today’s smug fundamentalism, but because faith is inherently difficult.

DEA END EHRICH