For instance...

For instance, Richard Eckersley’s (1997) study of young Australian’s perceptions of the future found that their dreams of their future were of a society where less emphasis was placed on the individual, on competition and material wealth and on enjoying ‘the good life’. Instead they desired more focus on community and family, cooperation and the environment. Some expressed their wishes in terms of a greater recognition of the ‘natural’, ‘human’ or ‘spiritual’ aspects of life.

Further, Hugh Mackay (2001) identified this theme when writing about young people. He suggested that their ‘tribal identity’ often meant more to them than their personal identity and claimed that when their experience of family life was one of fragmentation or when their traditional sources of identity were lost or blurred, this generation didn’t retreat into isolation; it connected and searched for a new framework to help them make sense of life in an uncertain world: For some the new framework is spiritual.

For others, it is based on the desire to reconnect with ‘the herd’, so that individuals obtain a stronger sense of identity and of emotional security from re-creating communal connections that simulate the ‘village life’ to which so many Australians aspire (p. 5) .

As well, Maria Harris (Harris & Moran 1998) described the vital element in the spirituality of young people as: … its connectedness, its relational and communal character, which is in contrast to a privatized and individualistic spirituality. The impulse towards connectedness places the practice of justice in a special and privileged place, with justice understood as ‘fidelity to the demands of all our relations’.

Such justice includes not only our relations to other human beings; it includes our relations to the nonhuman universe as well: to the other animals, the trees, the ocean, the earth, and the ozone layer (p. 46). Harris’s focus on connectedness was supported by British researchers Hay and Nye (1998) who discussed the relationality of children’s lives in terms of a ‘relational consciousness’ as the essence of children’s spirituality, that is, the relationship of I-Other, I-Self, I-World and I-God.

Once again, themes of individuality and connectedness underlie these respective theories. Indeed, several years ago I referred to the individual and communal expressions that appeared to be constants in the way young people saw their needs and their futures (de Souza, 2001).