by Lon on January 15, 2009
A great post by Canadian-in-exile and fellow-blogger Jake Belder:
I don’t walk much. It’s not that I don’t like to—quite the opposite, in fact. But I live in the middle of the sprawling suburbia of the Orlando metro area, and I have no motivation to walk around here.
There are a few different reasons. For one, I can walk for a mile here and feel like I haven’t gotten anywhere. Everything still looks the same—the same houses, strip malls, scattered clumps of trees. There’s no variety. It’s monotony, par excellence. It’s boring.
When I still lived in Canada, I used to love walking around the big cities. I would jump at the chance to take a walk through downtown Toronto. At one point before I moved here I had to go for an interview for a visa in Montréal. I drove up with my dad and we spent several hours just walking through the heart of the city.
Even in my hometown of Hamilton I would love to walk around. For a year, a friend of mine from school lived at the corner of Queen and Hess. Within a five minute walk of his house were numerous restaurants, coffee shops, pubs, churches, stores, and a mall. Even in the dead of winter, late at night, we would grab a cup of coffee and just walk the streets. There was life there; people, crowds, talking, laughing. Even the cars driving by felt alive.
That all goes away in suburbia. Walking a suburban street is a profoundly lonely feeling. You are often the sole person on the miles and miles of sidewalk. When there is the occasional dog-walker out there, they only go because the dog needs the walk. And even then, though it is only you and the other person in the middle of a square mile of concrete and cookie-cutter housing, you walk by with your eyes on the sidewalk or off in the opposite direction. Though cars speed past you almost endlessly, for all intents and purposes, they could be unmanned. And when they pass, the silence is louder than the noise. It is cold, heartless, empty, and lonely.
I know it’s easy to harp on the problems of suburbia, but as Christians we need to think about these things because it presents a serious challenge to us as the Church. What do we do with it? Here we see the epitome of this individualized, consumerist, and fragmented culture. When you’re out there alone walking an empty sidewalk, you feel that intensely. We’ve built it because it reflects our society’s values. But in the end we’ve built our own prison, and we willingly lock ourselves up.
Our challenge here as the Church, in principle, is no different than any other place—we are to be the incarnate presence of Jesus Christ and to make His love known to those around us. But how we are going to do this in a place that has hedged itself in with thick stone walls (both figuratively and literally) is the big challenge. For those of us that live in this context, we need to think and pray and get creative.
In Jesus we have all that is needed to build a community of love and hope amidst the emptiness of suburbia. So how can we turn that lonely walk down a concrete strip into something meaningful and alive? It will take a lot of creativity and ingenuity to work with what we have and to infuse life into what seems so lifeless, but it can be done. And this is our challenge.
by Lon on December 2, 2008
(Image from an actual suburb of Toronto)
One of the primary attributes of the suburbs that comes to my mind, (besides cookie-cutter houses, family idols, commuting, and affluence), is isolation.
It could be densely disconnected like in the image above or even in a tightly secure urban condominium, but isolation is still at the heart of suburbia.
In Luke 16:19-31 Jesus tells a parable of a rich man and Lazarus. Some interesting things that I think might have some implications for suburban living
Unlike Lazarus the rich man was nameless throughout the story – maybe because he blended in so well?
No one is in hell here due to doctrine or a disagreement regarding belief statements
We spend more on garbage bags than half of the world does on all goods. Lazarus longed for the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. Could garbage bags be the modern day crumbs?
The rich man built a ‘gate’ to keep people like Lazarus out. We build fences and zoning laws to distance ourselves from people and problems, and people with problems.
A ‘great chasm’ developed where even those who wanted to cross over to the rich man, could not. Maybe the danger of the suburbs is that as we avoid interruptions of those unlike ourselves more, we become increasingly unable to allow anyone in.
To quote Gladiator, “What we do in this life, echoes into eternity”
Could the gates we build not only lock others out, but also lock us in?
In a great role reversal, the rich man finds himself desperately needing Lazarus in the next life. What would it look like for us to come to terms with actually needing those we try to avoid in this life?
Could it be that we can become so isolated in the suburbs, that we no longer see people, as people? The rich man in the parable repeatedly argues with Lazarus in the third person, telling him what to do, as if he was his slave.
You would think someone tormented in the flames of hell wouldn’t be so verbose.
I wonder if suburbia dehumanizes us? We’re known as one person at work over here, and at school over there, and at the club or the church over there, and we become fragmented. No one fully knows who we are.
Maybe that’s why we in turn treat people as work units, assets, or distractions to avoid?
Isolation and building gates isn’t so hard when you’re not quite as important as I am.
by Lon on December 10, 2007
I just recently put down Will & Lisa Samson’s “Justice in the Burbs“. They remind me that
The suburbs in many ways are…
“…an illusion of the American dream – where no one is needy, where there is a chicken in every pot, and a car in every garage…
“… where planned developments control who comes near, and are designed to avoid interruption by anything unpleasant or uncomfortable…”
“… designed to keep people busy and buying more stuff”.
Justice in the Burbs weaves together fictional narrative, personal stories, and reflections from guest authors, to remind us all of the calling in the Scriptures to live justly towards those who are poor, marginalized, and oppressed. I’m so glad they wrote this book, and I’ll be recommending it to many.
I only wish they took it a step further in sharing more of what justice would look like in our own suburban neighborhoods and workplaces, rather than simply partnering with those in ‘urban’ settings. But maybe that’s for another book. I’m just convinced that plenty of injustice occurs right under our own suburban noses.
What really struck a chord with me was how realistically and gently the Samson’s call suburbanites to be a force for social justice in the world. They do so by sharing their struggles and handling objections with grace and recognizing that the journey towards justice is exactly that, a journey.
