The destiny of the city

I've been reading Kester Brewin's book The Complex Christ (SPCK, 2004) on the recommendation of my friend Huw. For me it has been one of those books which confirm a lot that you had already been thinking about but where someone else instead of you has actually gone and put it all together and said it better than you ever could have done. Plus there are some interesting synergies with Nicholas Mosley's writings including on the actual and metaphorical properties of slime mould!

Anyway, one of the passages that particularly struck me was this about our response to cities:

"Christ approached the city in order to become a part of it, to infect it, to plant some seed within it that he hoped would take root and grow, drawing the city toward its fulfilled state: that of the place of divine and human cohabitation. This is not where our cities are now, but it is where they are destined to go. And for this reason we must not give up on them. Difficult as it is going to be, we must not abandon our cities or barricade ourselves into sanitized parts of them. If we are not going to face their troubles and stay around to improve them, who is? We must learn to appreciate that the very fact that there is pain in our cities is why they are so vital. The city is the place where we are forced to meet with and journey with 'the other': the drunkard, the ayslum seeker, the lonely, the homeless; it is a multicultural melting pot - all of humanity is here. So we must stay and celebrate these things and try to make them work because this is what the destiny of the city is: to be a place where we can all live together."

It reminded me of a great song, on We'll Get Over by The Staple Singers, called The Challenge in which they challenge us to live in the ghetto, bridge the gap between us, and cure hearts of hate. I once wrote a children's story called The Clean-Up King that deals with similar ideas which I may well serialise over several blogs in future.