Wrapping up the trip
Today we wrap up our New York and Boston trip. We will drive down to the Cape for a drop in at the Snyder compound and then make our way to Logan for a late flight home. (Sleep will be a premium since I will turn around and fly to Dulles tomorrow for a three day consultation on the theme of my sabbatical … Encouraging and equipping the saints for ministry through their vocations, sense of call, and work in the world. To see more about this theme, please visit the Washington institute for faith, vocation and culture.)
The trip has been great for us though we’re missing the home and the dogs, and the kids are missing their friends and comforts of home. Staying in a Gordon College dorm has many advantages but it is a college dorm room, still! Nevertheless a good visit for Grace who was able to meet many fine, caring college community members while here.
All for now.
A whirlwind, hot day
Record heat in New York over these days. We did walk the World Trade Center and 9-11 site last evening. We’ll go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters today and then wrap up our stay here with Mama Mia this evening. Then, on the train to Boston early tomorrow.
New York City With ‘Eyes to See’
Tonight we fly to New York City, landing at JFK at 7 am. Over the next several days, CJ, Grace, Christopher and I will be walking the streets of Manhattan, visiting sights where CJ spent many formative years attending college at Barnard and working at Sullivan and Cromwell in the mergers and acquisitions side of the firm’s practice. Manhattan is the right setting for my wife; it is the city she knows best, whereas I am lost in its immensity.
Although I, too, as a kid from Littleton, Colorado, spent a little more time there than most of my neighborhood friends, and could claim my having been to the top of the Empire State Building (with a small souvenir statue to prove it), New York, like all cities for me at an early age, was dark and foreboding, a veritable Gotham in my imagination. And yet, as besting one another served its purpose as treasured past-time on our suburban street over the long hot summers and days of otherwise boredom, chums Jerry and Joey came right back at me with the word that while New York may be the Empire State and New York City could lay claim with its building to be the crown of empire, Chicago, with its Sears Tower had (at the time) the tallest building in the world. And so, therefore and forever, Chicago was better than New York, hands down.
My aunt and uncle, ‘career’ missionaries that they were, heroes in our family for their service in Ethiopia and the compassionate medical and social work they undertook in rural Orange County, New York when they were forced to leave Ethiopia in the late 1960s, had found a home in the City at a strange and exotic pentecostal outpost on the Island of Manhattan called the Rock Church. My encounters in New York City were limited to the area of brownstones and fun ethnic restaurants adjacent to Central Park, and the area around 62nd and Lexington. And yet the drive into town through Harlem off the George Washington bridge to reach the Rock Church in time to hear the pastor and “Sister Scaremont” probably did more than anything to impress upon me an image of the City that would endure into my college days. That is, I saw the City as a place of immense lostness and brokenness and danger. I saw the City as a place where God and God’s people would be in short supply. I saw church buildings but the vitality of faith shown to me came in a wild package that seemed inclusive in a way, and yet needfully and intentionally removed from the vastness of the surrounding culture. In my mind a suspicion arose, quite clearly, that the City’s towering buildings, fortress-like in their proud extension into the heavens, were designed with the intention to keep God out and the small remnant of the people of God submitted in vassal-like obsequiousness.
What has changed? Yes, something changed for me, after college. I began to live in the city – not New York, but Washington, DC. I began to see the city in a different light and in a different way. Much could be said, but during the year stretching from July 1988 through August 1989, God began a new work in me, and part of that work drew me into a kind of ‘fabric of faithfulness’ (as perhaps Steve Garber would put it) with respect to the city around me.
With maturing eyes, I began to see God’s love for broken, lost and dangerous cities, neighborhoods, people. For instance, there was the White House official from the Reagan administration who was on a spiritual journey to become a Roman Catholic who, somehow, invited me to help with a summer Vacation Bible School in Anacostia, run by the Sisters of Charity there. I remember watching the jump-roping sisters of color from Latin America and the Indian sub-continent playing with the neighborhood children, and our taking a tour of the Basilica near Catholic University. While on that hot van trip, delayed by the usual traffic around the capitol building the little boy sitting next to me saturated his clothes, vinyl bench and, subsequently, me with a copious supply of his own urine. Embarrassed and ashamed, he nonetheless stoically endured the rest of the field trip holding my hand for support.
There were many other groups, like the warm-hearted, intense people of Washington Community Fellowship who sought to incarnate God’s love in a multi-racial (and ecclesial) congregation in the heart of Capitol Hill. From them I learned, mainly through observation, but also, by grace, through participation myself that we are meant to be woven into the tapestry of God’s world. Yes, I would nod in agreement that we are to be salt and light, as our Lord taught us in the Sermon on the Mount, but this would have to begin in me as a measure of “moving to sightedness,” over time, because it did not come naturally to me. Naturally, I would have gladly contented myself to remain aloof and detached, and, sadly, the temptation of nature and all her rootedness remains.
What do we do with the ‘responsibility of knowledge’? How can I show my children a way to love God’s world even as they grow to know the world as a place, like New York City (a sort of “Everyman” city), of brokenness and lostness and danger? I suspect that how CJ and I introduce them to New York City over the next several days will be important. To what exact end, I don’t really know at this point.
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