A Spirituality for the City
A spirituality for the city draws from three strands of our human experience: justice, beauty, and community.
View of Trinity Church NYC from Wall Street
These strands, while they stand alone with integrity, they can also be seen as channels with spiritual potential to carry us beyond our everyday world of experience and connect us to the world of the unseen.
The first strand or channel is the experience of beauty as it is encountered in nature, in music and the arts, as well as in urban design and architecture.
The second strand or channel can be seen in the work of justice, as it strives for the flourishing of all, a right ordering of human life, and a sustainable creation.
The third strand or channel can be seen in the building of community, in the forging of relationships between people imcluding those who may differ from us in their life experience.
For urban dwellers who are followers of a faith tradition these three channels can be understood as not only pointers to a spiritual dimension (the world of the unseen), but joined to spiritual practices such as prayer, meditation, and common worship, can become an essential part of the spiritual architecture of our everyday life in the city.
The channels can also awaken us so that we translate our faith commitment into action— to work for justice, to create beauty, and to build community.
