Hope

Hope Co-curricular Lab | Intergenerational Interview

“Brokenness gives way to beauty only through the loving care of the maker who carefully attends to the pieces and sees in them what is beautiful: a vision of the wholeness to come.”

- Laura Miller-Graff (2024)

The readings and refraction for this session address themes of grief, loss, and tragedy by emphasizing possibilities of restoration, healing, and hope. This co-curricular lab is an opportunity to share a reflective conversation on hardship and hope with someone much older than you. Often, those of an older generation possess a wealth of experience and wisdom obtained through navigating difficulties and disappointments across various chapters of their lives. Gaining insight into how someone much older than you has responded to suffering and brokenness may help inform your response to the inevitable challenges to come.

Click here for a PDF version of the Intergenerational Interview co-curricular lab

Guidelines

1. Identify someone from an older generation with whom you feel comfortable sharing a deep and open conversation about hardship and hope. This may be a grandparent, elder family member or friend, former school leader or community mentor, etc. Invite this person to share in a candid conversation about their lived experience through the lens of hardship and hope. 
2. The main question that ought to animate your conversation is, “How can we respond to suffering and brokenness?” You should begin by summarizing one or two of Fujimura’s claims about the practice of Kintsugi and how we may respond to brokenness not by hiding or merely fixing our “fissures,” but by collaborating with God’s restorative work in making something new. You may ask your conversation partner to evaluate the claims and you may wish to offer your evaluation as well. A few additional guiding questions are below. Recall that this interview is not aimed at extracting facts alone, but to connect with another’s response to brokenness. Open-ended questions that encourage storytelling and reflection should be prized over simple or uncomplicated questions.
3. In your commonplace book, beginning on page 232 (or later), summarize your experience, connect it to the text from the Hope session, and apply it to your practice of living well.

Guiding questions:

• When were you challenged to be particularly resilient in the face of difficulty? What did you or others do that helped you respond to this challenge?
• What has given you hope during difficult times? How has your understanding of brokenness or hope evolved or changed throughout your life?
• What role has grief or guilt played in your experience of hardship and hope? What have you learned about yourself or the world through your experience with grief or guilt?
• What has been restored in your life that was previously broken? What was this process of restoration like?
• What role, if any, did your faith serve as a resource in addressing this challenge?
• Do you consider yourself or the world more or less hopeful compared to your youth? Why?