While biking along the lake, I may stop in wonder to gaze at the gleaming city skyline ahead of me, until I begin coughing from an unexpected lungful of car exhaust. I stand on the beach to admire the sun rising over the lake, then look at my feet to see old cans and plastic cups washing up to the shore. In the playground at Ray School, kids of every color run and play together with shrieks of laughter. Downtown museum-goers experience the wonder of the arts from all over the world, while outside the museum, folks beg for change for dinner. The newspapers tell us of the violence and murder of the inner-city, and yet we each experience everyday kindnesses, too.
Flowers bloom next to the freeway.
There is beauty and life and kindness in the city that cannot be suppressed, and they seem all the more extraordinary, set as they are, against a backdrop of dirt and pain and violence. And for those of us who look beyond the ugliness, it is Real. I have faith that the city is also Real to God. And yet, in Revelation, John presents an idealized vision of God's transformation of the New Jerusalem, a vision that has little in common with the reality of good and evil intertwined that we know as the city. At first glance, it sounds nothing like the Real city that I know and love, or even a city that I would especially like to inhabit.