Hugo Schwyzer

It’s 5:48AM Pacific Time, and I’ve been up for nearly three hours. I’m in Miami International (the appropriately acronymed MIA), which may be the worst major airport in America. I’ll be home, Lord willin’, in time for my night class. It will be a very long day.

We spent this past weekend at a Passover gathering with the Kabbalah Centre International here in Florida. I’m happy to report that the number of practicing Christians participating in Kabbalah Centre events continues to grow each year; I had many conversations over the past few days about the ways in which faith in Christ and the study of this ancient practice intersect. (An old post about the compatibility of Christianity and Kabbalah is here.)

I’ve been working with the teens in the Kabbalah Centre, continuing a role I’ve been honored to play in several different churches. And Saturday afternoon, before the first Seder began, we gathered about a dozen of them by the pool on a warm Florida afternoon for some conversation. The story of the Passover is multi-layered; it is a historic remembrance of the Hebrew people’s escape from slavery in Egypt — and much more. During this afternoon chat, we talked about our own “personal Egypts” and what we each longed to overcome. Passover is a reminder of the possiblity for both collective redemption and individual transformation. Focusing in on the latter, we asked each of the teens to share a little bit about what they wanted to “pass over and out of” this year.

It was a normal enough session, save for the fact that we were all in bathing suits. I remembered the last time I led a youth group discussion in a beach setting, several years ago. The discomfort and awkwardness was palpable then, and it was present on Saturday as well. So I gently steered the conversation right to that difficult place.

When I was a teen, I told the kids on Saturday, I suffered from a condition I called FUSS: “Fat, Ugly, Slow, and Stupid.” I was convinced I was physically unattractive, clumsy, and, despite a superficial dexterity with words, not very bright. No matter how often I heard “But Hugo, you look fine!” or “Hugo, you’re really smart”, I never quite believed it, not for long. Like so many teens, I craved compliments even as I discounted each and every one that I received. It took me a very long time to overcome those “praise junkie” issues. It took just as long to let go of the fear of FUSS. The road to self-acceptance, even self-love, proved to be a very long one in my case.

Sitting there in my board shorts and flip flops (in the shade, mind you; I’ve had enough skin cancer already), I told them a brief story about my own adolescent discomfort with being at the beach or the pool. “When I was a teen”, I said, “I hated going to the beach with other people. I worried so much about how my body would look in swimming trunks. I felt fat and incredibly pasty, and whenever I went in the water or sprawled on a towel around other people, I was convinced that they were all making fun of me, my soft stomach, and my pale skin. One of the hardest things about being a teen was feeling that my body didn’t fit the ideal I saw all around me. And I know that some of you are feeling that same way right now. So I want to open it up to talk about this a bit. Can any of you identify with this feeling of ‘feeling anxious’ at the beach?”

It’s a dangerous question to ask, and I usually wait until I’ve got a good feel for the kids I’m working with before throwing out a body image topic like this one. But I was relieved to see that the topic was exactly the right one for Saturday afternoon. These kids had been getting lectures all day about the importance of overcoming the ego and sharing with others. These are spiritually mature young people whose families have raised them around the Kabbalah Centre. But there is no reliable prophylaxis against that nearly universal feeling of not fitting in, of feeling that nothing quite “looks like it should” in a bathing suit. Some well-meaning adults, including youth workers, shy away from talking about self-image issues in group settings for fear of triggering more body dysmorphia. That’s not an unrealistic concern. But at the same time, when you’ve got a dozen kids in bikinis and shorts sitting around a poolside table — many of them in a constant state of fidgeting, tugging, and adjusting — it’s absurd to try and ignore the “elephant in the room” that is this colossal anxiety. Far better to name it openly, if for no other purpose than to remind the kids that they are not alone in their awkwardness.

If there’s one thing most of us do too much of, especially when we’re young, it’s comparing how we feel on the inside to how those around us look on the outside. As cliched as that sounds, it’s a vital truism that can’t be repeated to young people often enough. Teenagers, I’ve found, never fail to be awed and bewildered by confessions of anxiety or self-loathing from the very people to whom they compare themselves. In a safe atmosphere of mutual trust, hearing other people’s revelations of body dysmorphia can be exhilarating. But the youth leaders who are guiding this kind of conversation have to be aware that simply allowing everyone who is struggling with their “beach awkwardness” to share isn’t enough. It’s vital to remember that from a youth minister’s standpoint, naming the problem without also pointing towards a viable, healthy coping mechanism is cheap and irresponsible.

I don’t have a solution to the awkwardness of adolescence. I know that the “modesty” solution doesn’t work. As anyone who has worked with teens in these sorts of settings can tell you, body dysmorphia is not automatically alleviated by removing the body from public display. At the same time, it’s obvious that the cultural expectation that both men and women will “show some skin” at the beach or pool can exacerbate already poor self-image issues. In the end, there’s no quick fix that youth ministry or group therapy can offer. Still, recognizing that body anxiety is to some extent universal, even inevitable, can be revelatory. It’s a reminder that simply having a flat stomach or a great tan or hard muscles is not enough to engender self-confidence. So much of adolescence is characterized by envy, after all; to hear the object of that envy confess his or her own worries viscerally drives home the point that there is no physical solution to what is a cultural, psychological, and spiritual problem. Grasping that truth isn’t enough to end the self-absorbed worry, but it is the first step on the road towards liberation.

When I first started doing youth ministry many years ago, I had delusions of grandeur. If I could just find the right words, or the right questions to ask, I thought, I could “fix” all of the problems that my adolescent charges had. Teachers, pastors, and doctors are notoriously vulnerable to Messiah complexes; I admit that it took me a long time to work through that sense that I had a unique power to “heal”. Fortunately, I’m (almost) entirely over that now. My job is not to be Christ but to point to Him. In the end, it was service to others that alleviated once and (mostly) for all the sense of FUSS. The hope that we offered the kids was not just the promise that they would “grow out of” their discomfort in their own skin. The promise we gave as youth leaders was the promise I’ve found to be true — that first, in recognizing the universality of self-loathing we find reassurance that we are not alone, and second, that in spiritual service to others we escape the prison of our own unhappy self-absorption. I’m blessed enough to have seen that escape in my own life and in the lives of many with whom I’ve worked.

But these words are not magic formulas. In the meantime, the pain of so many teenagers and young adults is very, very real. And sometimes, there’s nothing else to be done save to name the problem, honor its power, and love those who are struggling. And after our talk on Saturday, I took my scarred, pasty, ageing body in its loud Hawaiian shorts and flung it into the pool with as much unself-conscious abandon as I could muster.