Cities

I love New York! My heart races just thinking of getting off the train in Grand Central Station. I am swept up by the crowds that carry me up the stairs into the massive, yet beautiful terminal and into the throbbing streets outside. I sidestep the frenetic cab catchers to walk toward Fifth Ave. It’s fun to watch the eyes of the Nigerian street hawkers. The pupils of their eyes try to focus at many places at once to concurrently see the potential customer, the ally who signals the coming of the cops and the open case holding the fake Rolodexes. It’s a big game, more or less enjoyed by all.

The ethnic mix of the city energizes me. When visiting Lutheran schools I am lifted up by the beautiful accent of a Jamaican principal in the Bronx. I share workshop memories with the cadre of women teachers from the Philippines. I marvel at the classroom discipline of a Brooklyn school presided over by staff from Belize. I visit with a principal in Staten Island who was born in Pekin, Illinois. His school includes recent arrivals from Beijing, China. I drop in at the oldest Lutheran school in America. It’s in Manhattan. Once again a shift is occurring among the ethnic mix of the community. The waves come and go; German to Chinese to African American to Puerto Rican to Colombian to who knows what next. In Queens Lutheran School I can hear 21 different native languages in one student body. On parents nights interpreters from Korea, China, Honduras, Yugoslavia and Russia facilitate parent-teacher communication. Just a few miles away it seems simpler; it is overwhelmingly Oriental. Only Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese interpreters are necessary.

Within the poly-saturated ethnic mix, unsaturated communities thrive. I’m meeting in an apartment in Harlem with a community group of long time residents. I’m the only white person within miles it seems. This tightly knit group speaks of their care for the students. They tell how neighborhood shopkeepers, hawkers, housewives and police officers all keep their eyes out, ensuring that the school kids make it home or to public transportation. They care deeply about their community and the institutions that enrich it.

The feel is very different in the section of Brooklyn dominated by close knit immigrants from Guyana. To move from there to another school celebration in another part of Brooklyn (Bay Ridge) is like hop-scotching into Italy where the sense of ethnic solidarity is celebrated with entirely different sets of rituals.

The city! It’s full of hope and aspirations, from the newly certified MBA down on Wall Street putting together an IPO, to the recently arrived San Salvadoran hawking peeled oranges on the streets of Washington Heights.

Pick a topic - Food: Four Seasons to street hawkers; Housing: The Trump Tower of midtown Manhattan to the street hot air vent sleepers on the lower East side to the tenements of Brownsville or the burnt out shells of the lower Bronx; Entertainment: Les Miserables to hookers, to cock fights; Salvation: St. Patrick’s Cathedral to St. Peter’s Jazz vespers, to Pentecostal glossalalia to Jamaican voodoo.

I love the city.

I am not alone. The biggest movement of people in the history of the world is underway: a world-wide migration to the city. Millions upon millions are moving from the countryside into Shanghai, Mexico City, Khartoum, Sao Paulo and into city after city, each with a population in excess of 5 million. For the first time in the history of our planet most of the people will never have experienced a season of planting and harvesting, never have seen a sunrise over an open horizon, never have walked a country lane, never have gone to bed without making sure all the doors are locked.

How will the new urbanization affect families and values and the world’s great religions? How will the Christian church transfer its pastoral images, parables and liturgies from the countryside to the curbside?

It’s a great time to be alive and to be part of the challenge of living out a theology as big as the city