To Boston and Beyond

where our friend Andrew has been living for the last year or so. He lives in the basement of a two story row house – a one bedroom flat that feels surprisingly spacious. He gave us his bed to sleep on for the weekend.
Sunday we joined him at the Village Church for morning worship. The VC is a plant of Redeemer Pres in – as one might expect – the Village. It was an odd feeling to be in such an unfamiliar place – we felt it as soon as we stepped out of the car that we were the middle class white southern oddballs in Andrew’s neighborhood – and yet VC seemed very Presbyterian and familiar. Andrew has a lot of good friends there, and we meet a few of them. Reed, who edits a website called Metaphilms (for whom you film buffs out there should write: Todd, Josiah, Mesh, etc), studies Media Ecology under Neil Postman at NYU, and along with his lovely wife raises 5 children in the city; Josh and Bonnie, who are studying environmental philosophy and recently married; and Eric and Ana, city planner and nutrition student, respectively.
We had lunch at the Hudson River Park. It was wondrously cool and sunny, and all the men and women were out in their finest, many of them feeling quite affectionate. We walked along the river, paused to watch some trapeze artists, rode the Staten Island Ferry, and took the subway back to Brooklyn, where we shot the breeze while Andrew cooked up some fiery Indian cuisine. Monday morning we had breakfast at Katina’s, a classic NY diner with good omelets and bad coffee.
We talked a lot about community, the difficulties of living in the city (especially as a family), diversity in education, urban ministry, inane thought patterns, and more. Andrew had this idea to get a group of Christians together who wanted to live in the city and create a housing cooperative that owns one house in the city and another somewhere in the country, so that we could share time from place to place, cut costs, learn to love each other, and so on. Whether or not this particular scheme works out, we want to keep thinking of ways we can do this sort of thing, be with our friends, live in community, be good neighbors, and so on.

2. Monday September 1 - Saturday September 6. We moved in with Fred and Evelyn, the friends I made in New Hampshire a few summers ago who have since become our friends. We went from walking on city sidewalks by leaning skyscrapers and tightly packed houses and talking about urban living to munching on homegrown vegetables and homebrewed maple syrup, talking about lessening human impact on the land and composting one’s own fecal matter. Seriously, we got some good ideas for dealing with our waste while we’re in Honduras. Apparently if you use sawdust and hay regularly it really cuts down on the smell. And some say you can use it to fertilize food crops. There’s even this book called “Humanure.”
On Tuesday we celebrated my birthday with David and Lynn, who were my primary source of Christian fellowship two summers ago. They talked a lot about what God was doing in their life – leading them from Virginia to New Hampshire without giving them specifics about what they would be doing there.
We also got a chance to see the Shaker Village at Canterbury, NH. They were a fascinating group of people. I guess we tend to think of pentecostalism as a recent phenomenon, but these folks were speaking in tongues, participating in choreographed dances, receiving revelations, and of course shaking -- all in the 19th century. They lived communally and celibately – like a double monastery. They were quite ingenious with the ways they cooked, gardened, did their laundry, made their furniture, etc. If you ever get a chance to visit a shaker village, we recommend it. There are still 4 Shakers left in Sabbath Day Lake, ME. 2 men in their forties and 2 women in their 70s.
Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island in Maine was as beautiful as I remembered it. We spent two days there traipsing about, enjoying magnificent views, the thunder of the ocean against the rocky shore, the cool breeze off glacial lakes. If we go again, it looks like there are a lot of cheap accommodations outside of Bar Harbor, especially on the mainland. There were some places for as cheap as $35 a night.

3. Saturday September 6 - Tuesday September 9. We drove back to Boston, where Trish and Chris and their 1 year old daughter Claire – friends of Kelly from Honduras – picked us up and took us to their lovely 2nd floor apartment in Waltham (a southern suburb, I think). We ate a fine meal and took a walk through Waltham, talking about how northern big city suburbs differ from southern big city suburbs. Trish and Chris have about anything they want on a daily basis within walking distance. In the south, one usually has to drive 15 minutes on 8 lane highways with stoplights every 40 feet.
Chris is a pastoral care student at Boston College, so we had a lot of interesting conversations about theology, evangelicalism, the values of Christian wealth, and biblical concern for the poor. Did you ever notice that the serpent is never called “Satan” in the Genesis account? I never had. Also, I believed until very recently that men had one less rib than women (since God took one from Adam to make Eve).
Claire is a delight. She is precocious and exceedingly good-natured (even in spite of a fierce diaper rash). And with her red hair, fair skin, and blue eyes, she bears a striking resemblance to Kelly. It was good to see how a young family operates in graduate school. Chris and Trish seem to be doing it quite well.

That was the end of our trip. Though we didn’t really plan it with this in mind, it turned out to be quite a “vision trip” for us: we saw a lot of different ways of life in a very short period – urban, rural, environmentalist, married student, different ways of living out the kingdom. It made us think more seriously about spending time in the future studying in a city, and also studying at a more diverse institution than Covenant Seminary. And it made us realize what a blessing friends are. Acadia was beautiful, but our fondest memories are the times we spent with Andrew, Fred and Evelyn, Chris and Trish and Claire.