c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin Press.)

UNDATED _ The Seinfeld Syndrome is more common than Carpal Tunnel and, as with the latter, it arises from the repetitive movements of modern life. Its treatment is spiritual, but organized religion generally misreads it, viewing it as a cluster of moral faults rather than a muffled but anguished cry from the depths of the soul.

Afflicted with what sociologists dub the “New Insecurity,” young people feel hungry even though they live in a world of plenty. They cannot quite find their place or their true voice. In short, a sitcom in which nothing seems to happen, there is no story line, and one-liners substitute for conversations that never concern duty, honor, or any sense that dying to the self out of love or sacrifice might bring them life.

Religious leaders and other professionally righteous find them a target of opportunity for jeremiads against their attitudes and seeming self-absorption.

They accuse them of not being Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation” whose members grew up in the Depression, fought World War II and built American prosperity, all in a modest, dutiful and quiet style.

These adjectives are not applied to today’s young people who might belong to chromosome generations, labeled X and Y by marketeers eager to sell them an identity along with their footwear, clothing, and music.

Their parents wonder whether their children, some wading into and some climbing out of the Rio Grande of Thirtysomething, will ever be tested by Providence, Fate, or Bad Luck, and how they will react to such an ordeal.

These young people are, nonetheless, having a religious experience that is unnamed even though it is obviously a spiritual crisis.

Holy Week is Everyweek for Everyperson and its rhythms are Everybody’s inheritance, including the young people who, lacking an external trial of war or want, bear within themselves a variant of the same human suffering that every generation has experienced. Its mystery has gone largely unrecognized by the faiths that could identify it as a challenge to their spirituality rather than evidence of their surrender to secularity.

Their test may be likened to the uncharted preparation we find in the lives of heroes and prophets and in what are termed Jesus’ “hidden years,” that period when he was also about to turn 30.

When nothing seems to be going on, a destiny is forming for each of today’s young people. Its pain may be found in their lack of ease with all that is easeful. Their unheard question is not “How can I be born again?” but “How can I be born at all and become fully alive?”

Dante speaks of Aeneas, the first half of whose life passed before “he hardened himself to enter alone with the Sybil into hell and search for the soul of his father.” What better describes this puzzled generation’s quest than to find the spirit of their fathers, to learn, as Jesus did, that he had to be about the work of his father?

So Dante, at 35, felt that he had reached a high point in the arch of his life only to find himself “in the middle of the road of life … in a dark wood alone.” There, he tells us, he experienced the crucifixion, death, descent into hell and passage through Purgatory to Paradise before he found his way to serve the world. In Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Stephen Daedalus associated this high noon of his life with crucifixion as well. “Come,” he writes, “I thirst.”

This journey of descent into hell and ascension into heaven is applied in the creed to Jesus who, on the eve of his passion, found himself in the dark wood of Gethsemane, alone, His closest friends asleep with no grasp of how he would shortly complete his work and life.

Young people live in shadows as deep as those of Gethsemane. They are headed, each to a Calvary, as have all men and women before them, and the tests in which they will die a death in order to find the life they now long for.

As uncomprehending as the high priests of another time, many religious leaders call them out of this wood. They should instead meet them there and name for them its redemptive elements. Why do religious leaders so often sleep outside the Garden when their calling, as well as that of the younger generation, can only be found within it?

DEA END KENNEDY