Living in Washington, DC for nearly 20 years, I’ve come to love the city’s life. Native Washingtonians are proud of their history and cherish their storied streets even as they change fast. Most of our neighbors have lived on our block for more than half a century. They’ve weathered the warp and woof of many administrations rising to and fading from power, raising their children to work hard, build for better, and visit on Mother’s Day. They are not who our elsewhere friends and family speak of when they snarl and snear about Washington. The political noise and clamor exported through national media tends to drown out any appreciation for the people of the place and the vitality within. Outside the beltway it seems to me that DC is portrayed as nothing but battleground. So the day Dave Hillis and Jonathan Hayden shared with me their concept for a collection of essays from practitioners and public theologians exploring topics of city renewal and a paradigm of play, I was intrigued and electrified. Their seeking of another way to see was like a fresh oxygen tank delivered in a last breath season.

Editing that volume of essays was illuminating and spirit-building. Now, having received copyright assignment from Leadership Foundations, it is my further joy to collaborate with the BitterSweet team to bring it to shelves near and far. It is our hope that the way of seeing, framing, playing that is exposited here will challenge and encourage you. May a change of metaphor light your world and strengthen your heart, for the enduring work is ours yet.

Publisher’s Note: What follows is an excerpt from the introductory chapter written by Dave Hillis. City as Playground—the complete volume—is now available on Amazon and anywhere you buy books.

For thousands of years cities have been the gathering places where human beings sought protection, been exploited, taken chances, brought innovations, and met despair. Nowhere else on Earth have hope and death, love, and spite, promise and catastrophe more closely comingled than in cities.

We’ve run toward, escaped from, navigated through, circumvented, and hidden ourselves within the human city—for good and for ill. But while humans are inclined toward isolation—creating artifices of grandiosity and self, constantly building our little kingdoms of certitude and separation—we are also drawn inexorably toward one another. As Jane Jacobs noted many years ago, “There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.”

Cities promise much and routinely disappoint and we should not be surprised that humanity has always been trying to understand what a city is, why we seek it or avoid it, how to treat it, what it’s for.

Questions loom: Is the city an accident or a necessary evil? Is it a useful means to a preferred end? Should we seize it, conquer it, grit our teeth and bear it? Escape it for a faraway post in the countryside, exchanging the din of car alarms for the companionable chirping of crickets?

All of these options depend on which metaphor you choose to see the city through. Stanley Hauerwas, American theologian and professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School, writes in Resident Aliens:

God’s love of cities has a number of threads that, when woven together, become a tapestry of affection, pathos and beauty for cities that are unrivaled in other sacred scriptures. Beginning with the first city in the Bible, Enoch, that becomes a surrogate protector for its first mayor Cain, to cities of refugee in the book of Numbers, to Jonah’s complicated relationship with the city of Nineveh, to Jesus weeping over the city of Jerusalem, to St. Paul’s urban strategy in Acts, to the book of Revelation’s vision of the heavenly Jerusalem becoming our final destination—all pulse with the energy and desire of a God who understands the gift of cities, what they can be, and how we should dwell in them. The clearest expression of the city as God’s playground occurs in the book of Zechariah. Jerusalem had fallen on hard times and was anything but a playground. The book of Zechariah was written to assist in the rebuilding of the Temple, which had been destroyed by the Babylonians who put them into exile. In the eighth chapter, Zechariah has the audacity to declare the following to the inhabitants of Jerusalem: “Old men and old women will come back to Jerusalem, sit on benches on the streets and spin tales, move around safely with their canes—a good city to grow old in. And boys and girls will fill the public parks, laughing and playing—a good city to grow up in.” (Zechariah 8.4-5; The Message). It was a good city to grow up in because, presciently, Zechariah understood that the two most vulnerable people groups of any city are the very old and the very young. It goes without saying that if those two groups are doing well it means the city herself is functioning as she should. In Zechariah’s vision, the city has literally become a playground.

The idea of seeing the city as God’s playground rather than a battleground changes our perspective in three important ways. They are the “necessary prerequisites for ethics”, noted by Hauerwas, if a positive change is going to be made in the social and spiritual renewal of cities.

The first is theological. Cities, Lewis Mumford argues, have always had a spiritual foundation. God is decidedly a friend of the city. Cities are God’s idea. God delights in her smells, tastes, shape, and people. Understanding this gives us confidence that God is deeply committed to her flourishing. That God is working alongside us rather than against us. That ultimately, since cities are God’s idea, that while the Bible starts with the story of humankind in a garden its final consumption is in a city.

The second is sociological. Martin Luther King Jr. famously stated:

Seeing the city as a playground allows us to see that our fellow citizens are colleagues rather than competitors. They are assets rather than deficits. We can distance ourselves from the contentious world of petty rivalry and cultivate a world of generosity where all wins.

The third is economical. Walter Brueggemann has written widely that the fundamental through-line in the Old Testament is the battle between the scarcity mindset of Pharoah and abundance mindset of the God of Israel. By seeing the city as a playground, we see a world of abundance rather than scarcity and that resources are accessible to all. Money, ideas, practices, and time are considered properties to be shared because there is enough for everyone. When we see the economy this way, we find ourselves more in the habit of giving than taking.

As we consider the idea of the future, whatever else it might be, we know it will be an urban future. 56 percent of the world’s population currently lives in urban areas and 66 percent is expected to live in cities by 2050. Which norms and institutions we create to support this reality will be a choice that will ripple outward to shape social and organizational assumptions far beyond a dense downtown.

As a result, the importance of the way we see our cities cannot be overstated. It will dictate how we approach them, whether we live in them, how we interface with the individuals and institutions that fill them. This will be true for all of us whether we are people of good faith or good will, but there is a particular aspect of seeing the city as God’s playground that Christians need to engage. Father William Lynch S.J. writes:

“The city of man/woman may very well not be Christian; but it cannot do without Christians. It is a life and a community under God which all men/women of good will must work to save—a community of charity for citizens where all men/women can live in a unity whether of scholarship or of economy or of peace. For a Christian to create catacombs rather than to enter into the city would be a terrible mistake.”

What is to prevent Christians from creating “catacombs” rather than to “enter into the city?” It will depend, in the same way it occurred for Reid with Sam, on what we behold. Will we reach for a metaphor that insulates, protects and further divides or one that inspires, prospers, and unites? Denise Levertov beautifully articulates the choice in her poem, City Psalm:

The killings continue, each second

pain and misfortune extend themselves

in the genetic chain, injustice is done knowingly, and the air

bears the dust of decayed hopes,

yet breathing those fumes, walking the thronged

pavements among crippled lives, jackhammers

raging, a parking lot painfully agleam

in the May sun, I have seen

not behind but within, within the

dull grief, blown grit, hideous

concrete facades, another grief, a gleam

as of dew, an abode of mercy,

have heard not behind but within noise

a humming that drifted into a quiet smile.

Nothing was changed, all was revealed otherwise;

not that horror was not, not that killings did not continue,

but that as if transparent all disclosed

an otherness that was blessed, that was bliss.

I saw Paradise in the dust of the street.

Cities will in fact become better if people like us courageously choose to see love them with the wit, will and wisdom that Levertov raises up: Cities As Playgrounds.

Publisher’s Note: City as Playground is now available on Amazon and anywhere you buy books.