THE LOST GENERATION

The Lost Generation is a group of American writers who came of age during World War I and established their literary reputations in the 1920s. The term is also used more generally to refer to the post-World War I generation.

The generation was “lost” in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world and because of its spiritual alienation from a United States that, basking under Pres. Warren G. Harding’s “back to normalcy” policy, seemed to its members to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren. The term embraces Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, and many other writers who made Paris the centre of their literary activities in the 1920s. They were never a literary school.

Gertrude Stein is credited for the term Lost Generation, though Hemingway made it widely known. According to Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964), she had heard it used by a garage owner in France, who dismissively referred to the younger generation as a “génération perdue” (lost generation). In conversation with Hemingway, she turned that label on him and declared, “You are all a lost generation.” He used her remark as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926), a novel that captures the attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living set of disillusioned young expatriates in postwar Paris.[1]

Moses spoke to the people, teaching them the statues and decrees as the Lord commanded. Stating that living them will be evidence that the Lord our God is close to us. “Take care and be earnestly on guard not to forget the things [we have seen, and we know by the generations of faithful remembering] … teach them to your children and your children’s children.” (Dt 4:9)

What is the heart of God’s Law? LOVE. A love so great, that despite the many lost generations between Moses to Jesus, God sent his only Son, not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. To give us an example that a human person can live God’s law. Consider the concrete ways he lived the example for us: flawlessly he loved God and his neighbors so we can be reconciled to our Heavenly Father. He healed, forgave, and reached out to outcasts. Jesus, with perfect obedience, fulfilled his Father’s divine plan by his passion and death, to experience and bring the hope of resurrection to all.

Saints Perpetua and Felicity, whom we commemorate on this day, stand as examples of this faithful remembering.

Let’s not be a “Lost Generation”. As we approach this Eucharistic feast, let our Amen prove to ourselves and the world that we are a generation who fully embraces God’s law of love. We are the generation who, in faithful obedience, reaches beyond our own creature comforts; to feed the poor, comfort the sick, visit the imprisoned, and welcomes the lost and forsaken. We are a generation who will teach these Godly values and virtues to our children and our children’s children.

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[1] Lost Generation by the Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lost-Generation.