c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.)

UNDATED _ To prepare for my 35th high school reunion, I watched the film”American Graffiti”one more time. Different town, same era, same music. This time, I also saw the epilogue that director George Lucas later tagged onto the film.

The film follows a group of boys and girls through a late-summer night in a California town. College looms, adolescence is ending. The epilogue tells what happened to the boys _ one killed in Vietnam, one sells insurance, one gone to Canada to escape the draft.

The epilogue says nothing about the girls. In the end, their stories didn’t matter. Girls were ornaments. Boys had lives.

Thankfully, we’ve since moved beyond that cultural attitude, as we have several others.

Here on the eve of seeing my high school classmates for the first time in 35 years is my list of what we’ve come to grips with in these tumultuous times. This is just my take; I don’t presume to speak for a generation.

1. Women: Thirty-five years ago in Indianapolis, where I went to high school, we didn’t ask the girls where they were going to college. Their lives were on hold until marriage. Girls didn’t have careers.

I understand why the women of my era got so angry. They did have lives. They, too, went through the educational pressure-cooker of post-Sputnik hysteria. They weren’t ornaments. In these 35 years, we have had to rewrite thousands of years of cultural norms about women’s roles. I can’t imagine parents saying to a daughter nowadays,”Just be patient, dear, until some boy picks you off the vine.” 2. Race: Indianapolis wasn’t Selma, Ala. My friends and I didn’t burn crosses or shout racial epithets. Our racism was more subtle. Blacks lived in another world. Our paths crossed in choir. We cheered Cigaree Dunn on the basketball court. Beyond that, nothing. We didn’t see them. We didn’t know them. When the civil rights movement unleashed black anger, it didn’t occur to me that any of my classmates of color might be among the marchers. I remember feeling bold when I roomed with a black in college.

Today, my sons talk about their school friends. Some turn out to be black. It doesn’t occur to them to mention that fact. I am proud of them. I wish my eyes didn’t still see color so clearly.

3. Religion: We were the”mainline”generation. Mainline Catholic, mainline Protestant, mainline Jewish. We went to church or synagogue with our families. It was the high-water mark of institutional religion.

Now many of us are wanderers. We have had to deal with the bankruptcy of traditional religion. Our denominations are shrinking and seem to have only minor messages, mostly about style. Other denominations that do have messages also seem proud and hateful. Boycotting Disney and hounding gays seem a distasteful substitute for acolyte festivals and Easter parades.

So we wander. Faith seems an individual journey. Churches and synagogues that hope to inherit our wealth might be surprised.

4. Marriage: Marriage has proven to be more difficult than we expected. Partly it’s the sea-change in women’s roles and the resulting transformation of male expectations. Partly it’s cultural pressure. Partly it’s an openness that no longer requires failed marriages to stay hidden. Certainly it’s our own frailty.

Whatever the cause, we have had to deal with divorce. We have had to learn the delicate procedures of custody and step-families and how to introduce the person at our side.

Complicating this _ enriching it, in my view _ has been a new openness about homosexuality. Despite the sputtering indignation of right-wing zealots, we have learned that long-term commitments take multiple forms.

5. Mobility: Like the hero in”American Graffiti,”many of us believed having a life meant leaving home. We”went East,”or”went West.”We never stopped moving. Job advancement took us from one suburb to another. We had serial homes, serial friends, no deep roots. Multi-generation villages seem the stuff of fairy tales. Extended family is an e-mail connection, not a kitchen table experience.

The purveyors of nostalgia urge us to yearn for the 1960s. Frankly, I think we inherited some dysfunctional attitudes, which we have spent 35 years discarding.

IR END EHRICH