Philip Pullman in his young adult fantasy series His Dark Materials introduces the protagonist Lyra Belacqua to the alethiometer, a golden compass-like object that takes its name from the Greek for truth. The alethiometer can allow its user to discern the truth, but only if the user is skilled in its use. As a girl on the cusp of puberty, Lyra displays an extraordinary gift for using the alethiometer. This intuitive ability disappears with a kiss; when Lyra becomes a sexual being, she can no longer see the truth through the alethiometer. She must relearn the discernment, spending countless hours studying and practicing something that once came so easily to her.
Lyra is like all adolescents. The tools that served us well as children suddenly don't work so well when faced with the changes we undergo in our metamorphoses into young adults. The way that we make meaning changes as we change and so what was once familiar and intuitive is alien and difficult. When we approach texts such as the Bible, we approach them with a different compass than we once did and therefore we read them differently.
Take the story of David. As children we tend to focus on David and Goliath, of the small triumphing over the big, of good versus evil, of the role that God can play in children's lives. All of these things are true but teens know that the small doesn't always triumph over the big. They wonder where God is when the big wins out. They ask questions of theodicy because they want to understand how God allows evil to exist, specifically the evil they experience in their own lives. Looking at the whole David story rather than a snippet, teens also wonder about another man that David kills. What about Uriah who David indirectly slays so that he can sleep with his wife? Where does the line of love and lust get drawn in David's life and how can God continue to honour him? Parents may read David's relationship with Absalom through the lens of their own successes and failures at parenting while teens might read it in reverse. Absalom is the rebellious teen who is trying to figure out what he should do in the world. Teens may wonder what is so wrong with that? In all of these teen readings, the truth is stranger than it used to be.
Developmental psychology partly explains this different way of reading. Developmentally, adolescence is a time when we look for intimacy, for our role in the world and for some sort of thought system that can make sense of it all. As Christians we might phrase these three quests as the search for intimacy, vocation and beliefs. Teens want to know and be known intimately by another, whether that other is a lover or God. Finding something to do, something that has value and gives meaning to life is the search for vocation. All relationships and actions must fit together in a semi-coherent set of beliefs that make sense of what the world is about and how it works.
When teens approach the Bible, they do so with these three quests for truth in mind and heart. Children and adults, ministers and scholars all search for different forms of truth in the Bible, forms of truth shaped by who they are developmentally. For instance, adult scholars may approach the Gospels historically, asking, “What did Jesus actually say?” For scholars, the alethiometer would point to the bare historical facts of who, where, what, when and why. For teens the question is, “What do the words of Jesus have to say to me?” The alethiometer points them to subtle personal truths embedded in the text. “I really like this person, but do I really love them?” wonders a teen looking for help. “Can the Bible help me understand what it is to love and be loved in my world?” “I want to know whether I should take academic or applied math because I really want to know what I should do with my life,” says the teen at Bible study. “Can I discern God's will for my life in the Bible?” “How can the Bible make sense of the death of my friend?” inquires a teen at a memorial service. How does the Bible make sense of all of life, both the highs and the lows, the extremes and the mundane?
As teens move out of childhood into adulthood, we have a responsibility as the church to help them relearn how to use the alethiometer. Truth is still there, it is just in a different place.
