My “Death Metal” Kids: Closet Sacramentalists
like passage through “thin” places and times that makes it possible to
transcend the self and self-satisfied in one’s quest for some Other.
In classic sacramental fashion, they experience the reciprocity of
which the media scholar John Culkin, SJ (1928-1993) was speaking
when, echoing Saint Augustine, he observed: “We become what we
behold. We build our tools and thereafter they build us.”
The energizing quid-pro-quo at the center of my kids’ lives consists in
them giving away great swaths of sound to their frenzied admirers
with little thought of recompense, only to find themselves enriched
by the exchange. It’s a Fraction Rite they perform nightly to the
crackling choir of amps. Something deeply personal and life-out-of-
death-giving is torn asunder in their hands to be shared with friends
and later tokenized in an array of “merch” objects that, despite being
their chief means of revenue, mimic the sacramentals and devotional
items available in the Church’s great pilgrimage sites for ages.
They inhabit a world that is nothing if not “enchanted,” one suffused
with symbolic meaning and revelatory of some hidden truth that lies just
beneath.
There are those within the Catholic fold, I am sure, who would be quick
to exclude my children from any proper celebration of the Church’s
rites for fear the very “edginess” of their appearance might vitiate the
proceeding. It’s true, they straddle the edge of society, stand at its
outskirts, cling to its outermost valences in a way that seems to have
been the special prerogative of young people in modern Western
cultures for decades now.
Like many in their peer group, they are suspicious of those institutions
by which older generations have succeeded in making a regular mess
of the world. This includes the Church, of course, whose fundamental
explanation of the human experience seems so at odds with their own.
An Underlying Openness
Nevertheless, they remain perfect candidates for the kind of gentle re-
evangelization of the baptized Pope Francis has made a hallmark of
his pontificate, especially given their attraction to modes of personal
expression rich in myth and metaphor and more closely aligned with
poetry than with prose.
75