In the two years between high school and college, I spent my time doing a whole number of different interesting things other than going to college. One of the things I did was run a coffee house. It was a Christian coffee house. We did outreach to youth on the streets, offered music, coffee, conversation, some Bible study, that sort of thing. And generally it was a pretty interesting, but not completely filled with dramatic events, but I remember one evening a man came into the coffee house—I say a man, because most of us were a little younger than being called men—he was middle-aged, and he came in. He had tears in his eyes. I had no idea how he had found the coffee house or what had brought him there, but he said the night before he had had this dramatic experience in his hotel room in which a blinding light appeared to him, and he heard a voice which he believed was the voice of God.

The voice was saying to him that it wanted three things. He wanted more of his time, he wanted more of his money, and he wanted especially more of himself. And so he came, for whatever reason he had found us; he came stumbling in wondering: How do I do these things? As I recall, I referred him to an ordained minister; it seemed well over my head, besides the fact of his age, and I wasn’t certain how to begin with him.

But we live in an age that have men like this, men who’ve gone from unbelief to belief, not always with a blinding light—sometimes very slowly, sometimes with a very quiet voice speaking within them. We also live in an age where movement goes in the other direction. People who have gone from belief in God to a position of unbelief. Both happen, and both are real, and are hallmarks of our ages.

Two of my favorite modern Orthodox authors, Metropolitan Anthony Bloom and Fr. Sophrony Sakharov, have a peculiarity in common that make them “work” for me when I read them. Both include in their personal stories their own search for God, including the confession of dealing with modern atheism. I never personally became an atheist—that was a faith journey that I never needed to make. I well understand that someone could come to the point that they felt the need to launch out into their own abyss. I understand, too, the fact that some people are so angry with Christians and other religious sorts that they prefer to have nothing to do with us, or nothing to do with the God they’ve heard about or nothing religious.

Unbelief is not a contradiction of our age; it’s one of its symptoms. When I listen to youth, to my own children, to teenagers today, I hear young people who often prefer not to make strong distinctions between people. When I start speaking that way, they sometimes correct me; they don’t like to hear strong distinctions made. I forget that the experience of television and radio (at least when an adult has has been in charge of the controls), their experience of those things have largely been to listen to talking heads not talking, but yelling at each other. They oftentimes have seen election cycles in this nations in which people were so polarized that they could hardly discuss the subject in a civil manner.

If young people seem to say, “We would simply like to get along,” it may not be that they are “relativists” for whom there is no truth. They have rarely encountered anyone professing truth who wasn’t at the same time bludgeoning someone with it. They’re gun shy, literally. What they would like is a little peace. For my children, probably the most profound experiences, certainly of God, have come as they gathered with other Orthodox kids—either at Orthodox summer camp, or at an All-American Council. In either place the celebration was of a common faith—not an argument.

But I suspect that the age of civility has passed us by. I’m not certain how I would see it coming back. Certain issues are worth arguing about, things like the life of an unborn child. It’s also true that we have religious enemies who have stated world domination as a goal. That doesn’t bode well for a peaceful, quiet future. But it doesn’t mean the end of a genuine search for God. Every age has its torments, every age its challenges, but every age, no matter—every age is in the hands of God whose purposes cannot be not thwarted.

I pray for our children—most especially I pray that they will see enough genuine Christianity that they will persevere in their faith. I know a young man, an Orthodox priest who was a convert to the faith, whose first experience and exposure to Orthodoxy was in a visit with his family to St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai as a young teen. It was seeing something that profoundly Christian, interestingly, that profoundly quiet and peaceful, that God used to touch his heart. I know others, members of my parish, as well as catechumens and inquirers, all of whom told me that their first hunger for Orthodoxy started in a pilgrimage. For several of them, it was in a pilgrimage to the churches and monasteries in a visit to Russia. They saw something that awakened this hunger and drew them to the Church.

America needs its monasteries. It also needs its parishes. It needs parishes, thought, in which what visitors see most of is the actual practice of the Orthodox faith, of people loving and forgiving one another, of yielding their hearts towards God, towards a peace that can only be found in God. Our world needs practicing Orthodox families. It needs people who believe in God and live their lives as if that belief matters.

Christ raised the question this way; in the 18th chapter of Luke, he asked, “Will the Son of Man find faith on the earth when he comes?” We can paraphrase that and say: Will our children find faith on the earth even before he comes? If they do—if they do, it will be most likely because they actually saw it. We cannot give them words alone; we have to give them our lives, the whole of who we are, in such a way that they can see Christ, and then have faith. May God make it so. Glory to God!