Culture at critical mass

I love the city. By which I mean both “The City,” as in any of the cities that I have lived in and many that I have visited; and “the city,” as opposed to “the small town” or “the country.” (But not “The City” as a spinoff of “The Hills.” Can’t say that I’ve ever watched either show.) I just don’t thrive in a small town, and Calgary (at a million people) is just about the smallest place that Colin and I can see ourselves living.

I grew up on a farm, went to school in a small town, and had most of my social life in the city, and the city was where I have always connected and resonated best. Of course, I have a connection to both the farm and the small town, and there are things about both that were very influential during my formative years, but when it comes down to it, cities have always been my personal preference. (In fact, I can remember a family vacation when I was about 14 where I begged my dad not to take the back highways that avoided the cities, because I needed to see a few skyscrapers along the way.)

There’s just something about the convergence of nature, culture, the arts, creativity, technology, innovation, business, busy-ness, vibrancy, dynamism, and diversity that’s exciting and energizing. If God’s greatest creation is mankind, and if our greatest fulfillment and achievements happen when we work in the image of the Creator, then it makes sense that we see God’s creativity and beauty so clearly in the places where it’s shown through the creativity of people. I see God’s fingerprints as much in architecture as I do in mountains. A gorgeous building, an active crowd, street art, a bustling city — these are all things that reinforce my awareness of God’s creativity and greatness, just as much as seeing the majesty of the natural world.

I’ve been reading a great book, Culture Making by Andy Crouch. Seriously. Read this. It’s not just about “culture” in the “arts and culture” sense, nor in the “multiculturalism” sense, but in the sense that culture is what we make of the world around us, in big ways and small.

And this. This is amazing.

Revelation 21:2 [which says, "And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband."] is the last thing a careful reader of Genesis 1-11 [the story of creation beginning with a garden, with people as its cultivators] would expect: in the remade world, the center of God’s creative delight is not a garden but a city. And a city is, almost by definition, a place where culture reaches critical mass — a place where culture eclipses the natural world as the most important feature we must make something of. Somehow the city, the embodiment of concentrated human culture, has been transformed from the site of sin and judgment to the ultimate expression of grace, a gift “coming down out of heaven from God.”

When God walks among redeemed humanity at the end of the Bible’s story, he walks not just on garden paths but also on city streets.

Seriously. How cool is that? Urban life is thought of by some as being immoral, depraved, impersonal, and uncaring; so far from the “homey” ideal of the country, and people strive for a small-town feel in the suburbs, or move out of the city to “get away from it all,” or have their flirtations with the big city before returning to the (smaller) place where they grew up. (I tend to get kind of irritated with the many, many movies and books that have that as a central theme, implying that city = bad.) Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that any of those desires or places to live are bad things. God gave us country as well as city, and people’s passions and desires are all over the place. Not everyone loves the city the way I do, but I just can’t get enough of the fact that God loves the idea of the city enough to redeem it for Heaven.

Nature is beautiful, and nature informs and shapes each individual city in its own unique way, but nature alone is not enough to showcase how great and majestic our God is. That particular showcase takes the interaction of people and our engagement and creation in this vast playground we’ve been given.

I’m working in downtown Calgary right now, and I love it. I’m right off Olympic Plaza, at the end of Stephen Avenue, in an office connected to the Epcor Centre for the Performing Arts. During the summer, especially around lunchtime, this area just swarms with music, vendors, artwork, street performers, food, and people. It’s exhilarating to walk outside at lunchtime and be surrounded by so much, and every time I work downtown after having been away for a while, I’m reminded of how rich it is.

And, of course, the arts are a vital piece of a city. Any vibrant, exciting, growing city has an arts scene; artists are drawn to the communities where they have an abundance of ideas and images to rub up against, be challenged by, and count as inspiration. The arts transform a city — because artists are focused on creation, you find, very often, that a city where art is encouraged is one where growth and renewal happen.

Yesterday, I went on a tour of a hybrid gallery/studio/store that will be opening soon in Inglewood. It’s housed in what used to be a bottle depot, which had turned into a hub of drug activity, prostitution, and violence. The owner of the property has long-term plans to tear down the building and build what will be part of a full block of arts establishments, but that’s still several years away, so instead of tearing down the building now and leaving an empty lot to fester (and attract the same problems as the old building), he’s leasing it at cost (maintenance costs, really) to an arts organization that’s turning it into something creative, affordable, beautiful, and community-driven.

Creativity is, by definition, driven to take back what has been destroyed, whether that’s scrap metal that can be turned into a sculpture or a run-down building that can be reclaimed from the drug dealers.

No, the city isn’t perfect, but neither is anything else. I constantly come back to the fact that we are broken people, living in a broken world, and everything that God created and intended for good has been warped and twisted somehow. The inspiration, community, creativity, and culture of a city sometimes looks like poverty and drug use and overcrowding. Still, that doesn’t mean that God didn’t intend for it to be good, or that he won’t redeem it someday. Do we just give up and retreat to a cabin in the middle of nowhere because things didn’t turn out the way they were supposed to? Well, sin still comes to the cabin in the middle of nowhere.

Still talking about a recreated, re-envisioned city, Crouch goes on to say,

[In heaven, w]orship as we know it — a sacred time set apart to realign our hearts with the knowledge and love of God — will be obsolete. What will take its place?

The most plausible answer, it seems to me, is that our eternal life in God’s recreated world will be the fulfillment of what God originally asked us to do: cultivating and creating in full and lasting relationship with our Creator. This time, of course, we will not just be tending a garden; we will be sustaining the life of a city, a harmonious human society that has developed all the potentialities hidden in the original creation to their fullest. Culture — redeemed, transformed and permeated by the presence of God — will be the activity of eternity.

Of course, all our speculations and interpretations of what heaven will be like are just that — speculation. However, if this is even partly right, then when we see the best that a city can be, we really do see a little bit of heaven on earth. In the middle of our brokenness, there’s redemption, and I don’t think that there’s any better place to see that than in the way that cities and communities rally to reclaim what has been lost. When the force of creativity and culture overwhelms the destruction and dehumanization, it is beauty. Plain and simple. It may not be your ideal place to bask in that beauty, but a city — the place where culture reaches the tipping point and the world is saturated with ideas and creativity and connection — is beautiful. Period.