The Meaning of the City

If I had to create a personal shield, crest, or flag I’m pretty sure it would contain a mountain and a city. Maybe this particular city and that particular mountain. After the first hour of a silent retreat in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood last weekend I got up and started to walk, wondering if God could meet me in a new way in the open air. Ten minutes later, past St. Ann’s catholic church and a long stretch of full bloom cherry trees I stopped at Kerry Park, the iconic viewpoint where many photos are taken of the city with Mt. Rainier in the distance.

Seattle and Mt. Rainier, as seen from Kerry Park.

I have a relationship with Seattle in particular, but also with the city in general. I grew up in a small Midwestern Rust Belt city of 250,000, the center of a wheel with spokes reaching to Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Columbus a few hours away. Weekend trips to these larger cities were frequent and easy.

My mom grew up in Chicago and my aunt lived in a row house in the Bridgeport neighborhood. When I was a kid, we’d spend weeks in the summer and many vacations there. I remember sitting in the bowling alley on Emerald Ave. in the middle of the day for my aunt’s league, the gabagool from the butcher, and mostly her house. The wet laundry smell in the basement with the shag carpet, the small enclosed room off the kitchen in back where my cousin made a pillow for Rick Springfield to throw on stage during a concert in the 1980s. I remember peeling the dead skin off my aunt’s back as she baby oiled herself and tanned in the backyard. The fire hydrant became a fountain on the hottest days, every barefoot kid wild in the spray, the same old man who pulled his lawn chair in the middle and sat while the water bloomed around him.

My earliest memories of the city are all in Chicago and all like this. Wonderful in my kid eyes, with no understanding of the undercurrent of racism in my extended Italian family. I didn’t know the tracks and blocks you didn’t cross like they did.

My dad, on the other hand, is a so proudly Jewish in character that I’ve always believed only New York could really contain him. He was such a peculiar resident of Fort Wayne, Indiana, where a few hundred Jewish families lived. He loves the city, to wander and walk all day. He was quick to visit when I spent a college summer in San Francisco and two summers in New York.

But back at Seattle’s Kerry Park, when I see the city where I’ve lived for 15 years, I want to scream. It’s a surprising emotion, and at first feels dramatic, but I kind of go with it. I scream in my head at the city three or four times while tourists shuffle out of buses to take selfies.

In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul talks about giftings, how each of us are wired in the way that we are for a reason. Those characteristics come together with help from the Holy Spirit to serve the church. He lists examples of gifts — healing, wisdom, even performing miracles — and tells us in verse 25, “there is no division in the body ... if one member suffers all suffer together.” I wonder, why do we want to suffer together? Why not consider self-preservation, or at least choose who we want to walk alongside with? We can’t do that with our assigned family of origin, but can’t we gather a chosen family and skip the church’s version of annoying siblings and awkward cousins?

Maybe, but I think a better way to deepen our relationships with others, to help our brothers and sisters live more fully into our identity as Christians in the everyday, is to be a member of a group of broken people that you don’t get to choose. To be confronted with people unlike you, with their own unique gifts, grievances, and points-of-view. In the Christian tradition, each of us are given giftings from God and are called to use them not solely for our own benefit, but to help other people.

A good many of us feel stuck, have imposter’s syndrome, or a whole host of other insecurities that keep us from giving our gifts for another’s benefit. But Paul presents a theology of weakness — we’re told God’s strength is made perfect in our very weaknesses. It’s a beautiful call to live into our gifts, and not hide our imperfections. When we do live honestly, in spite of our fears, it lets God shine through.

There’s a freedom from performance anxiety when we move past the need to control or manage our gifts so they’re comfortable and instead offer them freely and vulnerably to benefit others, as gifts given from God. Even if your gifts are boring, like mine, which have got to include being administrative. Or if they’re hospitality, or prayer, or teaching. This city, especially, needs you and your particular gifts.

At Kerry Park, the Space Needle flanks the center of the viewpoint. An Epcotian symbol of progress in this thriving place, optimistic and vision-casting. But back on the ground, homelessness and addiction are only getting worse, and how to approach the homelessness crisis is more divisive than ever. A family of four has to earn $161,000 a year to officially qualify as middle class in Seattle, or earn $76,000 to simply “scrape by” — and that doesn’t leave room in the budget for a single ice cream cone or cup of coffee.

At the park, after that wave of emotion, I started praying that God will bless this place. But I felt convicted that first I have to love it, accept what it is rather than what I want it to be, and work to make it better.

Here is space for the church to do real, practical work and for each of us to be empowered to claim our gifts to work alongside the many others who serve. That also means being committed to active, regular prayer for Seattle’s flourishing.