Friends,
For the most part I tell people I grew up in Mendocino, and there’s some truth to that. Mendocino is where I went to school and church, and Mendocino is where I spent all of my allowance money on candy bars and coin-operated video games. My childhood home, however, was in the hills above Little River, a place so small I seldom mention it to those unfamiliar with the Mendocino Coast. My parents built our home on 20 acres, most of which was second-growth redwood forest. My bedroom window looked out over the Albion River watershed, across three ridge lines, to the hills above Ukiah, some forty miles away (it’s no exaggeration to say that Talitha—who grew up in Manhattan—and I grew up as far apart as possible).
For most of my life I’ve associated all things beautiful and wonderful with forests and wild places. To this day I’m never so relaxed as when I’m under the canopy of redwoods, and never so filled with longing as when I smell the scent of a northern Californian river. But I’ve lived in cities for the last 17 years, and during that time something has changed in me. Now I’m able to look at urban landscapes and see beauty. I’m even able to be moved by buildings, fences and delivery vans covered with graffiti. Had you told a younger version of myself that on the cusp of middle age I’d be speaking of the comeliness of vandalism, I’d have thought you were off your rocker, smoking what my childhood neighbors were growing, or both.
Yet it’s true. I’ve learned to find some beauty in gritty urban landscapes. I don’t know if this is because I’ve lowered my aesthetic standards or if something of the Easter story has crept into my vision. If it’s the latter (and I hope it is), then here’s something true about resurrection. Because Christ is risen (all together now: “he is risen indeed!”) beauty can emerge out of degradation, and the very best efforts of humanity to deface our environments can be redeemed. If that’s true, then I pray God will infuse all of humanity’s ugliness with life, so that we will live into the beauty that has been created for us since the beginning of time.
Christ is risen indeed.
Ben
P.S. Here’s an urban landscape I see every weekday morning when I drop my kids off at school:
