On a recent airing of The Tonight Show, the high and husky voice of folk-rock singer and song-writer Passenger began crooning out the words to his forthcoming single, “Scare Away the Dark.” The Millennials in the audience probably didn’t realize how accurately Passenger would describe their situation: a generation that is “scared of drowning, and flying and shooters / but we’re all slowly dying in front of computers.”
As a millennial myself, born the same year as Passenger, these words resonated with me and what I know about my generation. We are fearful and pessimistic. We can’t shake the childhood nightmarish memories of black plumes of smoke billowing from the World Trade Center. The recession of 2008 shook our confidence in the world market. The rash of shootings and bombings in schools, at marathons, and on army posts make us despair about the of world in which we raise our children. As Passenger put it, “The TV and papers, they fill us with fear / the icecaps are melting and Al-Qaeda is here.”
But what really scares us is ourselves—our own hollowness and inauthenticity. As Passenger sings, “We wish we were happier, thinner and fitter / We wish we weren’t losers and liars and quitters, / We want something more than just nasty and bitter / We want something real, not just hashtags and twitter.” Our Facebook statuses, tweets, and Instagram photos project only the image we care to present. As the generation that has touted authenticity as the ultimate virtue, we have come to embody the vice we most despise: hypocrisy.
Deep down inside we know that we are fake. What we really need and want, Passenger admits, is “the meaning of life.” But you can be sure that Gangnam-style videos—trivial exercises in stupidity—will get more YouTube views than the true meaning of life.
What solution does Passenger offer? One that is as shaky as his vocal technique: “Feel, feel like you still have a choice / If we all light up, we can scare away the dark.” It’s a kind of modified existentialism: believe, with others, that we can change our dim destiny.
With poignant lyrics, Passenger has put into words the Millennials’ angst: we feel the dull trauma of our hollowness and long for something real. But Passenger’s song describes only the symptoms. For a true diagnosis, we need Scripture. The “real thing” we long for is eternal life (Ecclesiastes 3:11). And the trauma we feel is a mortal wound: sin has separated us from our Maker, rendering us spiritually dead. It is this spiritual deadness—the fact that we are estranged from God—that explains both our inner angst and our outer turmoil.
The solution to this problem is found only in Jesus Christ. Being both God and man, He was the only human who lived the truly authentic existence we Millennials crave. By dying in our place, he offers us what we truly need: to be united with God for eternity (2 Corinthians 5:18-19). When Millennials—and all other age groups—grasp the hopelessness of our spiritual condition, maybe we will begin to see that our symptoms are too deadly to be diverted by money, sex or entertainment—too deadly even to be patched up by morality. When this reality grips us, maybe then many Millennials will say in desperation to Christ, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).
Only the Light of the World can “scare away the dark.”
