Opinion
City of God
By Harry Davidson
There is a perennial tension between the way the systems of the world seem to work, how they function on a day-to-day level, and how we hope they could be in their ideal. How government, education, economic and religious life actually work is without exception contrary to our deepest intuitions of a noble, just and equitable world where our highest ideals rule the day and we rise to our God-given potential collectively as communities, embodying what we all know to be true and good.
When these institutions fail to achieve their ideal we either mourn the loss or become cynical. Far better to mourn; for in mourning there are the seeds of hope for something better. We mourn because we have seen a better way and know it to be possible but for our own weakness and failures. We mourn because there is engraved in the collective psyche of all people, all communities, a vision of cooperation, mutual trust, heroic sacrifice and joyful celebration that lies just below the surface of the broken, dysfunctional ways we experience life together.
We know we can do better. We know we ought to do better. Some of us long and languish for a day to come when this will be so. The more disconnected and fragmented communities become the more we yearn for the good city, the good village, the good life with good people. In many ways we are more fragmented now than ever. The promise of true community echoes all around us. Images flicker in our eyes, mocking us like a house of mirrors. Virtual villages, internet communities; we know the names of the fleeting figures that glow on our television and computer screens, but we do not know the names of our neighbors. So we long and yearn to belong to a good and decent city, a city of refuge. And may we never cease to long and yearn, for in our yearning is our salvation.
If we allow ourselves to slip into cynicism, if we give up on the ideal of the Good, we are lost. We are not lost because we have tried and failed, and now in our disappointment mourn our loss. We will be lost only if we surrender to hopelessness. We are not necessarily called to build the good city; rather, we are called to work for the good, knowing that what we long for in our deep heart is nothing less than the City of God. Until that day come we are to selflessly labor and keep no account of victory or defeat. In the labor itself, in the work of love, there is redemption. And in laboring for the good and true and beautiful we shall find one another, we shall find true community, perhaps even the gates to the City of God.
Harry Davidson was born in Kodiak, raised in Southwest Alaska, and is now a business owner in Anchorage. E-mail: