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06.17.01
Sunday

Took the bus through the driving morning rain to Redeemer Presbyterian in the Hunter College Auditorium on the East side, which had been highly recommended to me back home. At first it seemed pretty standard church fare, but then Tim Keller got up to preach. His good publicity is warranted.  He unraveled (and then re-raveled) the story of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah in casual conversational tone, oblivious to his notes, with piercing intellectual insight. His delivery is effortless if not always smooth, deep but not didactic, animated by hand gestures and rises in pitch that do everything to emphasize and nothing to distract or draw unearned attention. 

Keller challenged the standard sermon that says the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son calls us to dutifully follow God no matter how crazy his commands. It’s not that simple. Keller brought up Kierkegaard’s objection that a hearer may go home and kill his son in attempted compliance, and that it was unethical of God to command murder in the first place. The important ingredient to the story, Keller said, is that God required burnt offerings of the finest livestock, and generally neglected the importance ancient society placed on the first-born son, as payment for sin. So Abraham was not completely taken aback by God’s command to sacrifice Isaac (and never would have agreed to it without God’s established sacrificing policies); instead, his pain came from the confusion of how God would resolve the just necessity of the sacrifice and God’s promise to bless the generations through Isaac. 

Abraham went up the mountain not with morbid self-important determination to do something so difficult, but with humble expectation that God would somehow resolve his justice and his grace, a mystery that continues to perplex and overwhelm us today. After all, God’s next command to halt the sacrifice was in part an acknowledgment that only another sacrifice would do, another incident of a beloved, only, long-promised son being place on the wood as an offering, in Christ’s crucifixion. Keller said our natural response is to turn the words God spoke to Abraham back to God: “Now I know that you love me, for you have not withheld your only son from me.”

After the service I left quickly, self-conscious about my shorts and sneakers I had worn in anticipation of continuing my day as a tourist at the Hudson River Park Day. Finding more relentless rain outside the door, I decided to take the subway back to the Borders at the World Trade Center to pick up where I had left off last night. On a whim I got off at Grand Central Terminal and walked around what I consider to be one of the most beautiful places indoors anywhere. I passed one of the many cheesecake booths and felt my mouth melt into drool over strawberry cheesecake, and I indulged myself by buying a piece. At the bookstore I invested in “The Epic of New York City,” one of the best city histories in print, and a thoroughly interesting book on urbanization and the environment in the 20th century, as well as a couple of black-and-white postcards of the sun streaming through the Terminal and the Flatiron building. 

Since I had been thinking earlier that morning about rediscovering church on Sunday - such a fixture in my Grand Rapids routine - in this wholly different place, and, with that, regretting the predictable jargon of the liturgy while celebrating the insight and life re-calibration of the sermon, I suppose my trouble-making in the Times Square subway station was fitting. There was a small Mennonite group singing (badly, I might add) old Gaither-style gospel songs while another member of the group handed out tracts. As I passed him he asked if I would like to know about the gospel. I ignored him at first, then turned around and said that I knew the gospel, what did he have for me? This seemed to stump him, so his reflexes kicked in. “But have you accepted the gospel?” I impatiently said yes and he weakly remarked that some of his other tracts might interest me. I said thanks anyway and kept going. 

What froze this in my mind was that I was holding in my hand that book on urbanization and the environment.  And one of my biases (more condescending than I would like to admit) kicked in: these intrepid evangelists, who to their credit do not lack the courage to go to the bowels of Times Square, are operating on overly simplistic models, as I see it – the same ones that have defined (and degraded, I would argue) American popular religion in the 20th Century. The mind-set is that dramatic, sudden, palpable, inexplicable conversion (a la the apostle Paul) is the norm, perhaps even superior superior to less dramatic methods of conversion. Then you get to these subway singers, who are, politely though in a confrontational way, trying to bring about such dramatic conversions. In this model, I, a longtime (though yet miserably imperfect) disciple, am irrelevant, since I never had such a clouds-parting conversion, nor will have, in all likelihood. My problem with such simplistic evangelism is that disciples – and others who are at least aware of the gospel – far outnumber the potentially struck-from-heaven, and the street corner evangelists are preaching only to a tiny minority.

Back to the book I was holding. Here was a devastating (though fair) description of major global changes in God’s creation, with important implications. And I thought, if Anne Lamott is right (as I and other Reformed writers agree) that “God is implicit in creation,” and that human redemption is one of only three strands, the others being nature and culture, then it is arguably equally or more urgent for me to take to the subways and proselytize about how human lifestyles damage God’s earth. Only in this strange country, ever in love with SUV’s and with a president from the all-but-official party of Christianity who nods at sacrificing long-term environmental health for short-term economic health, could it be perceived as holy to hand out tracts in the subway but simply strange to read the book I was holding, not the other way around. This irked me to no end.

By the time I got back to Columbia it had cleared up again, so after taking a little time to sit and read I took the subway back to Pier 40 and boarded a Circle Line ship for a free ride on the occasion of Hudson River Park Day. Since I had been having trouble orienting myself among the crowded streets, it was instructive to pull out onto the Hudson and survey the island from the West. Again I was struck by what you don’t see on the postcard – in addition to the glistening gems (on this now-sunny day) of the Chrysler Building and Empire State Building, I was faced with rotting boathouses and apartment high rises lining the shoreline. It didn’t entirely look like the world’s leading metropolis. Still, what I couldn’t ignore was just how vast it all is – the skyline stretches the length of  the island, into the horizon; it just keeps going. This isn’t a city as much as a mini-state to itself.
 

06.16.01
Saturday

Saw plenty of Central Park today; luckily I wasn’t wandering aimlessly as I was last Saturday. I began with the late morning walking tour of the Ravine, in which our guide shared her fascination with leaf shapes and such. I tried to match her level of intrigue, succeeding when the topic turned to general history. I didn’t know that Central Park was completely engineered; it wasn’t simply preserved as the city grew. It was basically a junkyard, with hundreds of squatters living on the rocky, dusty ground, until two planners, Olmstead and Veaux, won the city’s design contest. What won it for them was their rustic and classic bridges, as well as their plans to lower the roadways crossing the park to decrease noise. But what you especially appreciate as you walk through almost 150 years later is how the designers bent hills and rocks and crafted waterfalls to shield you – in the Ravine and the Ramble, anyway – from the noise of the city. So you can stand in the thickest parts of the Ravine, trees obscuring all views of the surrounding buildings, gurgling water drowning out the cars, and truly feel as though you’re in the middle of a national park, not Manhattan. 

The second walking tour I took could not be more different in tone. It was one of Bruce Kayton’s Radical Walking Tours series, in which he chronicles the “real” (read: countercultural) history of New York, lobbing zingers at traditional city history that lauds capitalist bullies like Rockefeller and Moses. Kayton’s sometimes snide delivery, that shifts from a deadpan to a sneer when such myths enter the conversation, was jolting to me at first after the proper British woman who led my morning tour and went on and on about leaves. I even bristled as Kayton romanticized the pro-choice protests in city history; I wondered if others found it as abrasive as I did, then realized their glazed faces were due to the heat, not lack of sympathy. This is New York, after all.   

As I adjusted, I listened more comfortably. After all, Kayton is right to point out that many of the city figureheads lauded in the mainstream were responsible for economic injustice in housing and labor, especially earlier in the 20th Century. Not to go all hippie on you, but I too have a habit of romanticizing the 60s (though I wasn't alive yet), since they represented a period of liberated thinking and imagination after the stale discourse and WASP subculture of the postwar era. So I ended up wishing there had been even more counterculture history on Kayton’s tour, especially since I just read a biography of Abbie Hoffman for a history class.

Kayton spent most of the 3 and a half hours on general park history, but there was enough counterculture material to tide me over. He talked about Sheep Meadow, where Hoffman helped organize a huge be-in, where Martin Luther King Jr. first spoke publicly against the Vietnam war (one month before his assassination), and where some of the first major gay rights rallies started. The Great Lawn  has hosted record protests against nuclear power.

But the highlight of the tour is Strawberry Fields, a garden and monument of sorts to John Lennon. Having just seen the Lennon exhibit at the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame this past spring, the site had special resonance. Strawberry Fields is named for the British orphanage where Lennon spent much of his childhood, and the subsequent song he wrote about it. The garden is on the edge of the park, right across Central Park West Street from the Dakota, where Lennon and Yoko Ono lived, and where Lennon was shot. At the Dakota door, and at the “Imagine” mosaic in the garden, fans still sit quietly, almost reverently, in vigil for their quasi-spiritual icon. I admit becoming a little quiet myself, feeling the aura of the place. What froze the time in my mind was seeing David Peel, one of Lennon's good friends who is mentioned in Lennon’s song “New York City.” Lennon's ghost seemed to stride with Peel, still an activist and a rocker, as he walked from the Dakota to Strawberry Fields, trailed by a small troop of students who seem to hope something of Lennon will waft off Peel's shoulders onto them. 

Our tour wasn’t complete without a stop at the Lake, made famous by dozens of movies including It Could Happen To You. Old Manhattan highrises peer over the water, housing such residents as John Madden, Alec Baldwin and Maury Povich. We tromped through the Ramble, and Kayton again insisted that Central Park’s reputation for crime is distorted by sparse incidents; the NYPD has a station in the park, and it’s the safest precinct in the department. Still, Kayton granted, he wouldn’t walk through the park alone at midnight.
 

06.12.01
Tuesday

After a slow day at work my suitemate and I went to the Times Square discount ticket booth and bought tickets for “Stones In His Pockets” for half the face value. We ate at a sensible little place on Eighth that served an impressively packed platter and salad for seven bucks. It was the first time since I’ve been here that I stopped before the food was gone instead of remaining a little hungry afterward

“Stones” was playing at the old, intimate Golden on 45th, an establishment suited for one-and two-actor shows. “Stones” stars just two men, the brilliant and versatile Irish actors Sean Campion and Conlenth Hill. The two play fifteen very distinct characters among them, transforming abruptly and skillfully as instantly as the lights change. Sure, the characters are a little clichéd – the down-on-his-luck, vulgarly funny nobody; the ditzy, torturously self-conscious film beauty; the nonsensically barking director; the passionate, good-hearted but uphill-climbing protagonist – but the fact that two men play them all (including the women), and play them well, is startling. My fiancé saw the show in London this past winter, and recommended it to me as Campion and Hill made their Broadway debut. 

Afterwards I got my first glimpse of Times Square at night – since I’d been avoiding going out if when I couldn’t find a suitemate to go with me, I’d only seen the city during the day – and that’s when I did feel that I was in a postcard.  As soon as we stepped outside the theater on 45th I could see the white glow around the corner, as though a cloud had landed on the pavement. By the time we stepped onto Broadway, our eyeballs strained from the overload of lit billboards, giant TV screens and neon signs, the mass of which has made the block so famous. 

We continued to Rockefeller Center, which, bathed in NBC’s floodlights, looks like a ghost against the black sky. My suitemate had to run an errand at the Time Life Building where he interns, so he gave me a tour of Time magazine. The floor was quiet, with green carpet and walls that made it feel dark even though the lights were on. Still, seeing all the framed covers hanging on every bare space along the walls, all the Americana of the last 30 years captured in these rectangles – presidents, musicians, special reports on drugs and gender roles - was a venture into recent American history I found especially satisfying after my courses on the subject (and trip to the Rock ‘n roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland) this past year. 

It was the first real hazy and muggy day since I’ve been here. Luckily, I finally figured out how to operate my room’s air conditioner, so hopefully I’ll sleep better tonight. 
 

06.11.01
Monday

My first ever entrance to Sports Illustrated magazine was hardly auspicious. In a classic Monday morning daze, I charged out of the elevator on the wrong floor and followed some SI people through the glass doors. Since the layout on the 2nd floor is identical to SI For Kids on the 4th, I realized my error only when I couldn’t find my office in the second row of cubicles. Luckily, I was the only one who realized this, and I darted out without notice as quickly as I had come in.

More formally, the other interns and I were brought to the 2nd floor for a tour of the SI library this afternoon. A windowless storage room stuffed with shelves of media guides, magazines, record books, and literally thousands of brick-red folders filled with now-brown newspaper clippings, arranged by topic – I could spend days there. Then, back outside among the cream-colored walls, I met some of the editors – surprisingly calm, reserved folks given the high traffic speeding around their offices. This much they knew about the week’s issue: the cover would feature Ray Bourque, who on Saturday lifted the Stanley Cup over his head for the first time after a 22-year career. 

What hit me a little bit as I toured the magazine I’ve read religiously for years, and what hit me a lot as I walked through Times Square this morning on my way to work, is how I can’t get it to sink in that this is New York because of its proximity and accessibility.  The way I’m programmed, New York is supposed to be a distant, fantasy land; a postcard, not a place; a vacation, not somewhere to live and work. And to carve out a daily routine here, where sidewalks are sidewalks and buildings are buildings, and where tourist icons are becoming routine, is therefore disorienting.  It’s too familiar and ordinary to be New York City. The blandness of my orange-lit dorm room with gouges in the walls doesn’t match the glistening postcard pictures I stuffed in my bag on the way here, and so I don’t believe I’m here, except at times when the realization pricks me. 

I was thinking of this on my morning walk, glancing up at Dianne Sawyer hosting Good Morning America from her perch in the ABC studio jutting out over Times Square, and again this evening as I ate at the Times Square McDonalds just up the road on Broadway.  As I write this, and as I detail my day to my family back home, where the routines I know so well continue uninterrupted, I continue to disbelieve the words as they appear on the screen. They look fantastical again; they don’t match the reality of what my day meant to me. It sounds like another place.

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