chapter 3

Hsu makes some really good points about the reign of the automobile and its effects on Suburban living.  I definitely share his frustrations, especially with the lack of places to walk and the detrimental effects of the car on community (page 62 describes this well).  Although at the end of the chapter Hsu prescribes walking more and taking the bus as practical steps, these seem to be addressing the symptoms rather than the problems themselves.  How can you walk if there is no place to safely walk and/or no place to walk to?  Also, how can you take the bus if there is no bus that takes you where you are going?  How do we address the geographic issues of suburban layout and its hindrances towards pedestrians and public transportation?

Holy inefficiency - something I definitely need to embrace.  I feel like a lot of my decisions are based around efficiency (Something I realized all the more after being in the Gambia - I'm sure you know what I mean Kaycee).  But love is patient and we are called to wait on God.

Living in Germantown in Philly I feel like I saw a lot of the ways that a community can be completely different because of pedestrian traffic, public transportation, and street culture.  I think those are some of the best things about neighborhoods like that.  You meet people on the street and on buses.  You see interesting things.  You are very aware of your surroundings.  How can we bring these things to the suburbs?

I remember talking to Blake, one of the partners at Jubilee, and he made and interesting point that I thought of while reading this chapter.  As Christians, shouldn't our primary commitment be to our church community?  Most of the time its seems like Christians move from one place to another because of jobs, schools, living costs, or family, and then find a church in the area subsequent to that.  Perhaps moving and deciding where to live should be more determined by our local family of believers.  This is not to say that Christians should never move for these other reasons, but perhaps those are things that should be discerned by both the individual AND the community.

This chapter brought up some really good points about the discipline of stability, which is something I know that I struggle with.  It looks a little different for us in this phase of our lives I think, being in college or recently graduated than it does for someone like Hsu who owns a home, works, and has a family, but I feel like we are called to stillness and stability to some extent as well.  What does this look like for us?  How much exploration, travel, trying new things, and experiencing new places is beneficial to us?  And how much of it is an excuse and a means to run away from things, perhaps even the will of God?  When I look over the past couple years of my life I am somewhat overwhelmed by all of the people and places and feel like I have not really committed whole-heartedly to any of them.  When I look forward to my plans for the rest of this year not much is changing in terms of this whirlwind.  I know that there is an aspect of this season of life that is meant for exploring and getting to know yourself so that you can commit and be more stable in the future, but I also think that this phase of life could be taken advantage of and used as an excuse for an excess of wanderlust (and maybe I am doing this?)  Is this really any different than thinking "this is college, I can go crazy and get drunk every weekend, but I'll be responsible after I graduate?"  I need to wrestle with this.

I've felt really convicted lately by God to be still, and I am not sure what this looks like. Perhaps it means that I need to spend more quiet time with God, or perhaps it means I need to stop running away from Columbia.  I recently read this in Thomas Merton's Seeds of Contemplation, "Fickleness and indecision are signs of self-love.  If you can never make up your mind what God wills for you, but are always veering from one opinion to another, from one practice to another, from one method to another, it may be an indication that you are trying to get around God's will and do your own with a quiet conscience.  As soon as God gets you in one monastery you want to be in another.  As soon as you taste one way of prayer, you want to try another.  You are always making resolutions and breaking them by counter-resolutions.  You ask your confessor questions and do not remember the answers.  Before you finish one book you begin another, and with every book your read you change the whole plan of your interior life.  Soon you will have no interior life at all.  Your whole existence will be a patchwork of confused desires and day-dreams and velleities in which you succeed in nothing except defeating the work of grace: for all this is, is an elaborate subconscious device of your nature to defeat God, Whose work in you soul demands the sacrifice of all that you desire and delight in, and, indeed, of all that you are.  So keep still, and let him do some work."  This same theme of keeping still came up in our bible study this past week as we looked at Jacob wrestling with God and a reference to this in Hosea.  What does it mean for me to keep still in college and in the suburbs?  Am I running away from God?  Am I seeking to change my surroundings rather than seeking transformation where I am?

Little boxes on the hillside... thoughts on chapter 2

I came home from St. Mary's this afternoon for spring break.  I went to go visit my friend Sean who lives a couple of blocks away from me, and without thinking, I asked my parents for the car to drive over there.  As I was driving there I realized that it was about the distance that I would walk from my townhouse to Calvert.  Why am I driving?  I'm at home that's just what I do.

This is what scares me about the suburbs.  This is a relatively small example.  But it scares me how easy it is to slip into a suburban ideology and way of life.  I found Lewis's "grey town" that Hsu cites in chapter 2 disturbingly appropriate as he jumped into his exploration of suburban living.  For me, the suburbs are a place where I feel as though I am surrounded by Satan.  That is not to say that they are evil, but they are full of deception and separation (Satan's best skills).  A place and a way of life that feels like mine is not.  It deceives me with its homely comfort and thereby tempts me to fall into the excesses that Christ has called me to resist.  The suburbs are deceptive to many.  Although the suburbs were marketed as "Edens" they may have turned out to be "grey towns."  There is deception because there is the appearance of community, but little to no authentic community, there is the appearance of cleanliness and niceness, but that is because the trash and brokenness have been shipped outside, there is the appearance of a safe place to raise kids and yet the devil is hard at work shaping their minds (check out the quote on page 45-46) and leading them towards death.  What scares me more than raising my kids in a neighborhood with a lot of crime, is raising them in a place where they will grow up self-absorbed and lack empathy.  I see this in myself and the ways Columbia has influenced me and taught me pity rather than empathy.  But empathy is what Jesus is all about.  Empathy is the incarnation, the crucifixion, and the resurrection.  Empathy is what it means to be a part of the church.  Empathy is what it means to love.  How can I raise my kids in a place that stunts that growth?  That is the real danger. There is separation in the suburbs as people are separated from their neighbors, from their families, from people from other socioeconomic classes (and sometimes ethnicities), from their food, from their jobs (long commutes), from their trash, and from their impact on the earth and society around them.  Satan is alive and well in the suburbs.  The church?  Not so much.  Which is what is so intriguing about Hsu's section "In search of Christian Suburbia."  He presents some interesting possibilities, such as the sixplexes and the sustainable suburbs project, some of which sound similar to Jubilee in some ways only in a more suburban setting.  I think these sorts of alternatives to single family living could be very effective ways to live out the gospel in the suburbs, however they would face the danger of falling into the same thing that single family units fall into, becoming self-absorbed.  Family becomes an extension of the self and community can as well.  Especially within such an individualistic context, it would be easy for such a community to be insular and self-serving.  Not reaching out into its surroundings.  But that is a danger in most any setting.  Individualism is really the threat and temptation that a suburban missionary would most have to battle with, as it is so pervasive and easy to fall into, yet pretty much the exact opposite of Christianity.  As someone who was raised in the suburbs the thought of being a missionary there terrifies me.  Not only because I have a lot of suburban anger (as you may have caught onto already), but because I firmly believe that the suburbs would be the most challenging mission field.  It would be so difficult not to backslide into the deception of the culture around you, but also I think it would go something along the lines of "a prophet is never accepted in his/her hometown."  If you go start your weird intentional community experiment in the inner city, you are already weird because you are a white suburbanite choosing to live in the inner city.  Here you are with people just like you, but there are two families living in your single family home.  Your whole street grows things together, shares cars, and prays together.  Pretty soon the neighbors are going to tell their kids not to play on the commie cult street.  The weirdness just got way more intense and acute.   There would be more barriers to break through to get to know your neighbors (not to mention fences).  I think community would look much more radical here because it would be so different from suburban culture and yet in the middle of it.

I'm intrigued, but I am also scared and still bitter towards the 'burbs.

Also, I have to comment on Columbia.  I'm not sure if Hsu has ever been here, but what he describes sounds more like the vision for Columbia than what it is actually like.  It is true that there are diverse housing options in each village and neighborhood of Columbia, but they are still somewhat separate and still only cater to a fairly narrow socioeconomic window.  Columbia is a pricey place to live whether in an apartment or a single family home.  There is definitely poverty in Columbia, but it is pretty well masked for the most part.  Also, I still haven't found this great public transportation to dc and baltimore.

Am I really a suburban Christian?

These two chapters have made me begin to reflect on what it means to be a christian in the suburbs and also a missionary to the suburbs. Here are my thoughts:

So I think I am a suburban Christian and that's a term that always makes me cringe. I really feel guilty, selfish, and ineffective because I was raised in the burbs-an incredibly wealthy suburb no less. I discredit my faith a lot because I live in the suburbs-I am surrounded by comfort and have always had all my needs provided for. I don't know what it's like to go hungry or not have clean water or my own bedroom and when I go out of the suburbs I feel guilty because of these provisions.

In the burbs I don't feel wealthy because compared to a lot of my friends my family is not as well off. But just like the author of this book, it wasn't until I left HoCo that I realized how fortunate I was. Like when I would go to Baltimore and hang with homeless people, I finally saw how wealthy I was and tried to hide it. Are we supposed to be ashamed of having comfort and being provided for?

I really feel like a rich kid; and rich kids tend to be discredited for their achievements because they have everything provided for them (whether or not that's true); it's always so much more impressive, at least in America, to go from nothing to something. And after reading the gospels, it seemed like Jesus was calling us to be poor, to give away everything, and follow him; so I just assumed that to follow Jesus you had to be poor or you weren't a dedicated follower. Then I got this twisted mindset where I started judging other suburban Christians who had nice cars, took expensive vacations, and wore trendy clothes. I have been trying to break from my suburban roots ever since.

But reading this book has raised a new possibility for me. Is being a suburban Christian so bad? I mean it makes sense that in order to be a missionary you would have to live in the area that you wanted to witness to. But the idea that you can be a missionary to the suburb befuddles me. When I think of missionary, I think of some one being able to pick up and go to any location to spread the word. But not every one can afford to live in the suburbs so can it really be mission field if you need a certain income level to serve there?

Reading about the burbs and what they really are has made me begin to question about what it means to be a missionary, what a suburban missionary might look like, and if being a missionary to the suburbs is the same as being a missionary in 3rd world countries or in the inner city because it seems so much more comfortable and less sacrificial.

Yeah so these are my thoughts...sorry I'm a little late in sharing!

Chapter 1--- questions, questions, and more questions...

So Hsu asks himself, "Had suburbia been good or bad for me?" This is a question I ask myself quite often. If the answer is "bad" then what do I do now? If the answer is "good" then how do I define the "good" that has resulted from suburbia?

I didn't have the same definition of "suburbia" as what was presented in chapter one. I had never heard the term exburbs. I also thought suburbs were just housing communities outside of big cities. I didn't realize suburbs were really just small towns outside of big cities. If this is the definition of suburbs then what's the difference between a small town in the middle of nowhere and rural america?

Another question that arose--- repeatedly Hsu states that the suburbs are inescapable. If they're inescapable then of course it makes sense that Hsu wouldn't see a need for Christians to return to the cities.

Which brings up another question--- if the Christians started flocking to the cities then wouldn't their money follow? Thus wouldn't a displace of the poor only get worse and worse? I'm still battling this one- any thoughts?

Chapter 1:The Suburban Moment

So I read chapter one and here are some notes/thoughts/questions...

It talked a little bit about the sprawling nature of suburban development as it talked about both the suburbs and cities that were more and more suburban.  Not to say that the suburbs are inherently sinful, but it seems to me that urban/suburban sprawl is a sinful use of land, in that it is using a great deal of resources and space, but not producing for human needs accordingly.  A city is condensed and relies on the surrounding rural area (ideally) for food and resources, while more rural land use may require the use of a lot of land, but that is being used to yield food.  Suburban land use seems to use lots of space just for the hell of it.

What is the difference between gentrification and incarnational urban living (intentional city living)?  How can we be sure to avoid the harmful effects of gentrification?

More than half of U.S. land is either metropolitan or micropolitan.  Depressing.

Why are we OK with the loss of small town life and local culture/economy?

I liked his push to view the metropolitan area as a whole area needing Christ.  This makes sense.

How do you hold onto the missionary impulse (which we need to do as Christians) as you commit to a community or locale (as some would say "settle down")?

The suburbs definitely need the ministry of Jesus, but could the church's best ministry to the suburbs be to work to dissolve them and the "suburban way of life"?