I was born fifteen years after the Summer of Love, in 1982. I didn't even exist on the same planet with John Lennon, who died two years before I was born, or Bob Marley, who died a year later. In other words, I missed the hippie boat by a long shot. But as I attempt to survey the spiritual landscape of young people today, I realize that landscape is under the shadow of this cultural milieu. The words “the sixties” don't just refer to a time in history to me. Instead, they connote a collective mood, one that was informed by idealism, originality, possibility, and the naïve self-assurance and spiritual curiosity of thousands. A mood that was always just out of reach in my own experience growing up. And just so you know, I'm not one of those credit-card-carrying-Phish-show-attending neo-hippies who are trying to relive the sixties in their own ironic way. But there's no denying the nostalgia, intermixed with cynicism, that the period inspires in me, emotions I couldn't make sense of until this topic came up during a conversation with one of my favorite writers, the philosopher, teacher, and cultural critic Thomas de Zengotita. He said to me, “You not only have to live with the memory, you have to live with endless representations of it, which are diverse enough and rich enough that you can feel nostalgia for a time you never lived through. And that's a very strange position to be in. It makes it very, very hard for you guys to feel like, 'Okay, we can wipe the slate clean and start again.'” As it turns out, I've just got a case of postmodern envy: the envy of anything real.

Don't get me wrong. The question is not whether young people at the beginning of the twenty-first century can re-create the spiritual enthusiasm or cultural revolution of the sixties, but whether these lofty terms can attain new meaning and relevance for those of us born in the age of irony and relentless skepticism. Can we afford to believe in change—again? Can we afford to believe in anything, if what Zengotita called “our ironic defense against the possibility of being duped” has become our most useful asset, an impenetrable method of psychological survival? For a long time now, the answer has been no—and the characterization of Generation X as lacking moral fiber and spiritual ambitions, or ambitions of any kind, is a testament to that. But will the next wave of youth, my own Generation Y, follow in their footsteps, as we have done in so many other ways? Or will we stake new ground? Never before has this question been so critical. In their recent book, The World's Youth, scholars Reed Larson and T.S. Saraswathi write, “In the end the future is in the laps of young people. We are handing the next generation of youth a world rife with serious problems—global warming, looming environmental catastrophes, poverty, numerous international conflicts—just as similarly daunting problems were handed to us. Nothing less than a full mobilization of all young people to higher goals and ideals is required for humankind to make it through the new century.”

As the pressures of the present moment in history become more and more overwhelming to contemplate, our ironic defenses seem increasingly absurd in contrast. Faced with an unprecedented complexity of horrors, nothing could be more frightening than to think of ourselves as the vanguard generation, responsible by default for the future of the human race. In fact, it sounds like a joke. With originality and idealism left as luxuries that young people in the sixties were fortunate enough to enjoy, all we have in our arsenal as the most privileged youth on the planet is irony and a lack of purpose.

However, recently I've wondered if those qualities that characterized young people in the sixties—unabashed idealism, thirst for change, and a willingness to challenge the status quo—can really be gone. Isn't it more like we've stalled, so to speak, in the midst of the postmodern mood—a mood that Zengotita described as, “Hey! Wait a minute. Chill man.” And if these qualities aren't gone, then what is keeping them from reemerging, especially at a time when positive participation and change is so painfully and desperately needed? As Zengotita pointed out to me, “This mood in particular is very hard to overcome—it's like you can't be a virgin again. You know enough history to know how typical it is for human beings to fall into mass delusion and commit horrendous acts. This is what really shaped postmodernism to begin with.” The present mood of hyper-apathy among us has created terrible conditions for spiritual pursuits, to say the least. But perhaps we've reached a breaking point. Recently there has been a deluge of books about young people and spirituality, often written by those chill Gen X'ers themselves. In 2002, Radical Spirit: Spiritual Writings from the Voices of Tomorrow was published, containing testimonies written by, for example, Ocean Robbins, Julia Butterfly Hill, and Stuart Davis. Blue Jean Buddha: Voices of Young Buddhists follows the same anthology-style format, but is written by those who have followed the Buddhist spiritual path. Noah Levine, the 31-year-old author of Dharma Punx, is included in Blue Jean Buddha, as are other young authors like Diana Winston. And then there is an entire genre of Christian literature written by and for young people, including Red Moon Rising: How 24-7 Prayer is Awakening a Generation, and The Rock Cries Out: Finding Eternal Truth in Unlikely Music. Could books such as these be evidence that today's youth are beginning to want or need a larger spiritual context for our lives? I decided to investigate a couple of them and speak with their authors with one purpose in mind: to find out if the mood among us was shifting and, if so, to discover where it was headed.

DHARMA PUNX

The first work I turned to was the autobiography Dharma Punx, by Noah Levine. Though at face value this story of a California punk rocker who became a Buddhist seems atypical, it actually points to a larger trend among young people who are increasingly attracted to the Buddhist path. The first generation to discover the ancient tradition at the hands of American teachers, most of them are under the age of thirty, and their numbers have multiplied at such a fast rate in the past decade that they now compose fifty-six percent of all American Buddhists. Dharma Punx has become increasing popular among these new young Buddhists, but it also claims to be the larger story of Generation X.

The book begins when Noah is five years old, sitting under his mother's deck holding a steak knife, listening to his step-dad shouting at his mom, and contemplating suicide. This is the age, Noah writes, that he first knew he wanted to die, started smoking cigarettes, lighting fires, and stealing from both parents and friends. When he was ten, he discovered punk rock and “found [his] place in this fucked up world.” These early chapters of Noah's story resonated with my own experience growing up, as they undoubtedly would with many other Gen X and Y'ers. Our rebellion started prematurely young, with an almost compulsive need to identify with anything different from what we perceived as “normal.” Privileged but dissatisfied, intelligent but short on life experience, our “war” lacked a proper outlet or a consciously articulated purpose. Thus rebellion imploded, resulting in a kind of indulgent self-destruction always aided by drugs and alcohol. At the age of seventeen, Noah landed in juvenile hall after living on the streets as a junkie. There he began to meditate and eventually got sober through AA. After several trips to Asia to visit monasteries and meditation retreats, he became a Buddhist practitioner and teacher.

Fifteen years later, Noah uses Dharma Punx to explore the motivations behind his teenage rebellion; he writes that it was fueled by a hatred for the hypocrisy he perceived in his mother's and father's narcissistic lifestyle and the hippie new-age values they supposedly embodied. His mother was an “addict,” always involved with boyfriends that she met on meditation retreats, and his dad (author Stephen Levine, a famous Buddhist teacher in his own right) was distant, consumed by spiritual pursuits while Noah was growing up. “I totally rejected meditation and all the spiritual shit they built their lives on . . . we saw that peace and love had failed to make any real changes in the world.” Later on, he writes, “I felt that peace was for hippies and that as a punk rocker it had been my duty to fight against those passive, useless people, to foster some real changes. . . .”

Noah writes about his turn to Buddhism as a shift from the outer punk rock rebellion to the inner rebellion against the mind that is the core of the Buddha dharma, a transformation that, in no uncertain terms, saved his life. When I met him in New York, he said, “I knew, for whatever reason, that I had a choice to either take on spiritual practice, or perish.” Considering his former attitudes toward “spiritual shit” and his undying allegiance to the punk rock ethos, there's an irony in the fact that he's now the student of dharma teachers who are both friends and peers of his own father, including Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass, and Sharon Salzberg. Aren't these the same people, as Noah himself claims in Dharma Punx, whose values he was always rebelling against? When I posed this question, he simply said, “I'm not going to hang out with these people all the time, and I don't really want to be like them, because my attitudes are different. But they have this wisdom that I want.”

Like Noah, many of us have grown up with a negative idea about what being “spiritual” means—that you have to become a kind of über-romantic idealist, fundamentally out of touch with the reality of the world. One of the great appeals of Dharma Punx to Gen X and Y'ers may be that it negates this cliché by representing a spiritual ethic and attitude towards life that is decidedly rooted in realism. As Noah writes in the preface, “This is not a fictional tale of romantic suffering or a Hollywood love story. It's about real people, real loss, and genuine spiritual growth.” This realism is in part relayed through Noah's candidness when writing about his life experience, of which nothing is left out. Drugs, spiritual experiences, punk music, sex, despair, or elation—it's all there.

Granted, there are times in the book when his candidness lapses into a kind of confessionalism, weighed down by a tedium of details about his personal life. (“Ondrea offered to make me some food, but I wasn't hungry yet. The burrito I'd eaten for lunch had been more than enough.”) But this tone in Dharma Punx is undoubtedly representative of our entire generation. Our sense of individuality has become the source of greatest meaning and value in our lives, and as a result, we're inclined to be narcissistic. Yet part of what makes his book interesting—and again, a reflection of our generation—is that this extreme self-interest exists simultaneously with an enormous emphasis on the importance of working for the benefit of others.

For the past six years, Noah has dedicated himself to community service programs working with AIDS patients, teaching children and teens the philosophy of the dharma, and traveling to juvenile halls and prisons around the Bay Area in order to “plant the seeds of mindfulness, the greatest gift I could ever give.” Such “socially engaged Buddhism” has become central to the younger generation of Buddhist practitioners, no doubt inspired to some extent by Noah's example. It was this passionate commitment to engaged service in the world—or as Noah phrased it, “finding freedom and then spending the rest of our lives giving it away”—that led me to seek him out in person. What would his perspective be, I wondered, on young people's potential to respond to the world's ominous future?

The night I arrived in New York City to speak with Noah, he was holding a dharma talk in a large art gallery in Soho. He cut a striking figure in his white creepers, signature shaved head, scores of tattoos, and big smile that revealed several gold teeth. Noah is a punk of the old school—you can see it even in his stance. With legs planted wide apart, he looks ever ready to start bending a knee, nodding his head in sync with a furiously fast drum beat, just before he lets loose and joins his comrades by jumping into a throbbing mosh pit. He seemed to emanate sincerity and a feeling of good humor throughout his talk, qualities that were further confirmed for me when we met the following day at his friend's house.

I began by asking what he made of Larson and Saraswathi's quote, where they said, “Nothing less than a full mobilization of young people to higher goals and ideals is required for humankind to make it through the new century.” True to his style in Dharma Punx, Noah replied, “My immediate reaction is, like, wonderful, but it's not going to fucking happen. That's what the Buddha was saying. Everyone's not going to do it. It's too hard. But I have hope. I don't feel totally hopeless. I feel totally committed to that revolution among young people and . . . I don't really see it.” “But do you think that Buddhism is capable of offering solutions to the problems that face us?” I asked him. He paused for a minute and then said, “No. I know it would be much more popular to say, 'We have this tradition that can solve the problems of the world,' but I don't think that's what the Buddha taught. We're here in samsara, and this is a realm of suffering, of ignorance and greed and hatred. It always has been and it always will be. The spiritual tradition of enlightenment, from that perspective, isn't about trying to make samsara into nirvana. It's about personal freedom. That means the best thing we can do is free ourselves from the cycle of death and rebirth.”

RED MOON RISING

Red Moon Rising: How 24-7 Prayer is Awakening a Generation is the darling of Relevant Media Group, Inc., publisher of Relevant magazine. Run entirely by a staff under thirty, Relevant has been attempting to make Christianity worthwhile to young people for whom God has become extraneous. They've also figured out something that many Christian adults, with their crusades against the culture industry, find hard to accept: Generations X and Y personify pop culture; take it away, and we become somewhat incomplete, and very bored. By publishing books like Red Moon Rising that have provocative spiritual subject matter, but also savvy graphic design, Relevant has managed to capture the attention of young people through a fusion of high and low culture. This is an impressive accomplishment, because that fusion is a delicate matter and most young people these days are equipped with bullshit detectors more sensitive than seismometers. But so far, their efforts appear to be working—since its birth one year ago, Relevant magazine's circulation has grown to 70,000.

Red Moon Rising is written by Dave Roberts, a leading UK journalist, and Pete Greig, the founder of a youth movement called 24-7 Prayer. It is the story of how the movement, since its creation five years ago by a bunch of hip Gen X'ers in Europe, has become a worldwide phenomenon, with tens of thousands of participants. It all started with Pete Greig standing on a jut of land in Portugal, surrounded by the ocean and the stars. He writes in the beginning of the book about a vision he had that night: “First my scalp began to tingle and an electric current pulsed down my spine, again and again, physically shaking my body . . . my eyes were open, but I could 'see' with absolute clarity before me the different countries laid out like an atlas. From each one a faceless army of young people rose from the page, crowds of them in every nation awaiting orders.”

Seven years later, in July 1999, Greig visited Hernnhut, Germany. During the eighteenth century, Hernnhut was the site of a nonstop prayer vigil held by Moravian refugees that lasted 125 years. Inspired, 272 years later, Greig planned a weeklong twenty-four-hour-a-day prayer meeting to be held that September in England, Greig's homeland. The meeting started off rocky, but after the first night of constant prayer, “word soon spread that the best slots were the ones in the middle of the night.” He writes, “In that timeless zone, between 2 and 4 AM, there was often an electric sense that you were keeping watch alone with God . . . the momentum grew as people became more immersed in the reality of what meeting God in that room could mean.” Hence, 24-7 Prayer was born. As the movement grew rapidly, Greig realized that this was the army he had envisioned in Portugal years before—an army of young people praying to God on the whole world's behalf.

Today, temporary prayer meetings are held for weeklong increments in up to forty-six different locations worldwide at any given time, from Kentucky to Sweden to South America. There's also an ongoing version, called “boiler rooms,” which serve as pseudo-churches whose doors are open all the time, without exception. On top of that, there is a strong emphasis within the 24-7 Prayer movement on spreading the word of God in the streets. Many of them evangelize in party towns like Ibiza, where there is an incredible concentration of what they call “immoral” behavior going on. And for every seven hours of prayer, a participant is asked to do one hour of community service. 24-7 Prayer's website organizes all of these events—boiler rooms, prayer rooms, evangelistic missions—and it is visited by over two million people every month, a number directly equivalent to those who go to Oprah.com. I find it hard to believe myself, but what this means is that there won't be a week, a day, an hour where someone won't be praying in a prayer room until . . . well, it's anybody's guess. The movement's growth shows no sign of slowing down.

As someone who has hardly ever prayed to God—and even then with little conviction—I had to wonder what it is about the act that ignites such excitement and spiritual passion in these young people. What I gathered from the testimonies of participants in 24-7 Prayer is that prayer leads to a direct communion with God—a communion that transcends denomination or personal history and is therefore capable of uniting everyone who takes part. The authors of Red Moon Rising believe that as more and more of today's youth discover the power of prayer, this collective ongoing communion will ultimately transform the world. “In the prayer room, we pick up God's mannerisms; we grow in His likeness. We actually become the answer to many of our prayers. And of course that's the greatest miracle of all.” Such passages inspired real amazement in me. Here was a movement that resulted in transformation, unabashedly claiming it could save the world by creating a collective force of positivity, and they said so without a trace of the cynicism, doubt, or irony so typically pervasive in the voices of young people.

The book's title, Red Moon Rising, comes from the Old Testament Book of Joel, which prophesies, “The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. And it shall come to pass that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be delivered” (Joel 2:31–32). The authors refer to this passage in their preface: “Such a moon rises over every generation awaiting the one that will finally fulfill the Great Commission, taking the good news of Jesus to every culture and ushering in the kingdom of heaven.” I would be lying if I said I didn't have a hard time relating to these kinds of ideas. Like most in my generation, I too have a built-in defense mechanism against what Zengotita called “the possibility of being duped,” and the idea that the “Great Commission” entails bringing Jesus to every culture in order to ensure their salvation so that they can be delivered at the time of the Apocalypse sounds off an alarm bell in me. But Red Moon Rising's concepts of salvation and intercession raise more important questions that go beyond my mere discomfort with them; weren't they partly the reason Christianity had become so, well, irrelevant to many young people in the first place? And at this stage, weren't they seen as out of touch with the contemporary culture most of us have grown up in?

When I finally had the opportunity to interview Greig and Roberts, I asked them. “How do you respond to young people who have grown up with a postmodern worldview, and who would see the 24-7 Prayer movement as regressive?” Greig replied, “I understand the cynicism towards institutional and oppressive religious structures. But I am forced to conclude that the gospel is as dangerous and dazzling in the twenty-first century as it was for a first-century leper, St. Francis of Assisi, or Martin Luther King. Surely the keys to our future lie buried in the rich soil of the past.” “But,” I had to ask, “do you really think Christianity is the only way to respond to the trials of the twenty-first century, despite the fact that it is a two-thousand-year-old tradition, and that such an attitude would be viewed as fundamentalist by many in our generation?” Responding rhetorically, Roberts said, “Where are we going to discover a philosophy for the twenty-first century? Will it be a brand-new insight from a new source? I am not convinced that there are new insights to be found, nor that any generation would have the perspective and intellectual depth to fully evaluate such claims.”

THE MORNING OF OUR LIVES

What does it take to create change, to shift a mood? Zengotita said to me, “You can't force a historical moment into existence. The talent is always there, and there are just some moments where things start to swim into focus. But if the moment's not right, you can strain and strain and you're not going to lay an egg. When it's ready to happen, then it will start happening.” If ever there was a right or ready moment, it's now. Tired of irony, hungry for the real, young people are poised on the brink of change, our quiescent potential beginning to stir restlessly. Can these two books help us to manifest it? Can they aid in this gargantuan task?

I think Noah Levine spoke for many of us when he honestly proclaimed during our interview, “When I look at the world, I don't see an easy solution. So I feel like I'm happy working one-on-one. Do I feel I can inspire a generation, or save the world? . . . I don't have those sorts of goals really.” Indeed, Dharma Punx will speak to those of us who are moved by his brand of compassionate realism. But as our future grows darker, it may be crucial that we make the effort to reevaluate what we're actually capable of.

Where Dharma Punx refuses to go, Red Moon Rising blazes forth. In many ways, it looks like the solution we may be waiting for: the 24-7 Prayer movement has indeed transcended young people's postmodern condition by awakening a positive force inspired by the Divine and creating a collective movement among the young mobilized under one goal. But is the goal of our generation as a whole really to usher in the return of Jesus? In the twenty-first century, it's not salvation we're concerned with, but how to respond to the world conditions we're facing. And these may indeed require new insights, and new solutions.

Shortly after I finished reading these books, a friend told me I should speak with the youth leader Ocean Robbins. I knew that Ocean had started the nonprofit Youth for Environmental Sanity (YES!) when he was only sixteen years old, and had been an activist nearly all his thirty-two years. But as he wrote in Radical Spirit, he also puts enormous emphasis on the importance of having a spiritual foundation in life. When we spoke together I asked Ocean what this spiritual foundation could look like for young people in this day and age. He replied, “I think that the gap between the beauty of what's possible and the pain of what's taking place is where our challenge lies. It's our call to action. Living a spiritual life today means living by the awareness of both the world as it is and the infinite possibility of humanity.” In many ways, the question of how to respond to the future is a matter of how squarely our generation can stand in this “gap” that Ocean describes.

In the face of such a challenge, we could resort to our hyper-apathy, our habitually ironic defense mechanisms, no matter how unbearable they've become. But I can't help but think how ironic it is that the most rebellious thing we could do is believe that things can change, that new original possibilities are available to us if we aspire to manifest them. As the vanguard generation, faced with the potential for untold devastation, we have to.