Friday: The city to which God has sent you

It's been nearly two months now since I've moved to Seattle, a city that has approximately the same population as the entire state I am from. Shortly after arriving here, I found myself living in an intentional community and at the same time began reading a book entitled The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris. Ms. Norris grew up in Honolulu and spent many years living in New York City. She now lives in a town in Western South Dakota that is about 19 times smaller (by population) than the entire Fremont neighborhood . She has spent an exceptional amount of time living in an Abbey in Northern Minnesota as an oblate. While reading her book, this stuck out to me:

A city is a place where the worst and best about humanity come to the fore, where we're forced to be realistic enough to lock our doors even as we rejoice in being able to celebrate the greatest achievements of our culture. The Christian vision of heaven is of a city, the New Jerusalem, and Christian theology suggest that the Godhead itself is a kind of city, a community of three persons, or in the Benedictine Aidan Kavanagh's words, "a collective being, with unity." Kavanagh laments that in contemporary society the city's sacred potential as a symbol of community has been "invested in sovereign individualism, which allows us to retreat into a myopic unworldliness. "[Our] icon is not a city," he writes in On Liturgical Theology, "whether of man or God, but the lone jogger running through suburbia, in order, we are told, to feel good about himself."

Cities remind us that the desire to escape from the problems of other people by fleeing to the suburb, small town, or a monastery for that matter, is an unholy thing, and ultimately self-defeating. We can no more escape from other people than we can escape from ourselves. As Basil the Great wrote to a friend after leaving the city of Caesarea in the fourth century, "I have abandoned my life in the town as the occasion of endless troubles, but I have not managed to get rid of myself." Images of the city are impossible to avoid in the monastic choir, as scripture is full of them. You're reminded, over and over, that in fact you have come here to be a part of the city of the living God, and you're challenged to make something of it. Do you reflect Benedict's belief that "the divine presence is everywhere?" Do you work, as Jeremiah reminds us to do, for the welfare of the city to which God has sent you? Can you say, with Isaiah, "About Zion I will not be silent, about Jerusalem I will not rest, until her integrity shines out like the dawn, and her salvation flames like a torch?"

While I certainly don't think it unholy to live in suburbs, small towns, or monasteries, nor do I think that that the point, for me, Ms. Norris pretty much sums it up and I thought it should be shared.