Being born and raised in Managua, Nicaragua, meant living in an unusual city. Managua has been called "the city of trees". My neighborhood, while not quite suburban, was very quiet. There was a strong community feel to it.
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| Managua, a city filled with trees |
My street doubled as a soccer or baseball field. We knew everybody in our block and they knew us. There was no downtown, with all the buzz of masses of people trading, thanks to the 1972 earthquake that leveled it. There is instead El Mercado Oriental, a massive outdoor maze-like market that is often dirty, filled with people, and stocked with every imaginable item you'd want to buy.
Managua, being the unusual city that it is, left a thirst in me for dense, booming cities. I wanted to be in a city full of skyscrapers, of people living on top of each other, of countless restaurants going wild with chit chat and endless clinking of dishes and glasses. Museums, theaters, and street performances...I wanted it all.
I wanted to live in the big city.
And then I Moved to The Big City: San Francisco
I moved to the U.S. in 2003. I didn't immediately move to San Francisco, but lived in the suburbs for 6 years before I had a chance to move to the city. I entered as a candidate to the Augustinian religious order, and I moved in with them in San Francisco to study and go through my pre-novitiate.
My first week in the city was one of quiet and enchantment. We had a small but beautiful garden in the back (quite a luxury in that city) where I spent hours reading and contemplating. Classes hadn't started yet, so I had plenty of time to accommodate myself and relax.
Classes started soon, and the hectic-ness of city life caught up to me. I started to notice a strange development: my heart started beating faster. I was more anxious. It was hard to sit still.
Lack of Community
In a city of almost a million, it was easy for me to get lost, unrecognized by the surrounding mass of people and things. It was difficult to make friends. For one, I was more busy than I ever had been in my life. Other people seemed to be busy and uninterested.
Why is this? Why is it that in a place full of people, there is so little community?
According to German sociologist Georg Simmel, in an attempt to protect ourselves from the overwhelming flood of city stimuli, city dwellers develop an indifferent attitude towards our surroundings.
In order to protect ourselves from the massive number of people, noise, billboards and advertisements, all demanding our attention, we have to ignore and turn off most of it in order to be able to function as normal human beings.
The city is a factory of indifference.
What Have I Gained from Living in The City?
One thing that I still enjoy of city living is the culture you can experience in it.
There are endless small coffee shops filled with beard-wielding young adults. There are the indie musicians showing off their unconventional feats and unusual performances in city bars. There are museums, galleries, and symphony halls.
I have gained a lot of what we call "culture." This is, I believe, the main attraction of city life.
But what what I have lost is also monumental. I have become more indifferent to people around me. I have less peace of mind. I have become more angry. I have a lot of anger, for example, for bad drivers, for people bumping into me, for noise in the middle of the night, and more and more I crave alone time in my home with my own entertainment. My home has become the bubble in which I seek refuge from the city.
I also notice how much of an elitist spirit has invaded my heart. I look with disdain at cheap coffee and look with horror at people enjoying a cup of Folgers. I almost hate Starbucks, which seems the coffee of choice of suburbans who lack the knowledge of truly good coffee. I look with disgust at Budweiser while I hold in my hand a local IPA from a micro-brewery.
Whenever I go to the suburbs to visit my family, I notice a slight sense of snobbery in me. I become judgmental of people driving their SUVs everywhere, at how they watch cable TV (don't they know that being cord-cutters is cool now?!), and instead of going to some local, small, cramped Italian bistro, they drive to The Olive Garden and consider it a treat.
The Idolatry of Culture
What city life has given me is the idolatry of culture. It has allowed me to look down on those who don't live in it with disdain and disbelief. I put culture at such a high level in my life that I am willing to give up all peace of mind, and to fill myself with indifference, anger, and snobbery...as long as I have culture.
Whenever I go to the suburbs, however, I feel my heartbeat slow and relax. I don't feel as restless. I am able to rest more. I am beginning to crave more time in the suburbs because of it, despite what I see as a lack of culture. I crave it, even though I judge it.
I realize now that city life has not made me a holier person. It has not made me happier. It has given me culture, but I am not a more 'complete' person because of it.
Mathew 25 and Indifference
Reading Mathew 25, I realize that the most heinous sin is not what we do, but what we don't do. The goats were condemned not for the things they did. Jesus didn't say depart from me because you killed, fornicated, stole, etc...
No. The goats were condemned because they saw Jesus naked, and they didn't clothe Him, hungry and didn't feed Him, in prison and they didn't visit Him. The goats were condemned because of indifference. Maybe, as Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel said, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.
To be honest with you, I'm burned out of city life. The level of stress that it has brought me is slowly wearing me down. I need a break from the city and its demanding culture.
The city is a place of social Darwinism, where I feel I need to constantly compete in order to get ahead and simply be able to afford living in it. It is a never-ending competition, one I have no desire to partake in.
Do I really want to continue in a place that nurtures indifference? Where paying attention to my surrounding requires intentionality, and where I can't do it for long without feeling overwhelmed by stimuli?
I don't know the answer to this question. What I do know now is the existence of my current idolatry of culture, and that if I want to follow Jesus, I need to give it up.
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