On Poverty of Spirit, Or, Why We Live in the City

All prayers assume the great poverty and misery of our fallen nature; they also assume that the Lord is the ever flowing source of every perfection, every blessing; that He is our inexhaustible treasury. Truly, we must have poverty of spirit during prayer and at all times. "Blessed are the poor in spirit" (Matt. 5:3).

St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ

I’ve been asked several times recently why we choose to live in the city rather than in the suburbs or some rural retreat somewhere. Both options are easily accessible from Philly, and we considered both briefly when we were deciding where we should live. In the end, however, we decided it would be better for us to live in the city for a few reasons.

The first is that my husband and I are both city people. My husband is a native New Yorker, and craves the busyness and movement that city life provides. I’m originally from Chicago, and prefer the hustle and bustle of city life as well. I’ve lived in several large cities over the years and enjoy all the things that living in the city offers. I’ve also been married to my husband long enough that he has turned me into a New Yorker in exile, even though I’ve never lived there myself. We like the fact that we can walk out the door and go to a concert, or out to dinner by simply hopping on the bus or in a cab. We like our integrated neighborhood with its corner stores, little restaurants and coffee shops, the small hardware store and various pharmacies, local boutiques and so forth. We like the fact that we know all of our neighbors (our block has a block party every summer, as do many of the blocks in our neighborhood). While there are things that are logistically difficult about living in the city with children, there are equally as many things that are wonderful.

The second reason is that we should not expect a life of ease. A life of ease not only makes us spiritually complacent, but it can starve us of spiritual blessings and removes the impetus to work on our salvation with fear and trembling. I don’t believe that it is necessary to seek out hardship, for life has plenty of hardships without consciously seeking them, but I don’t think that one should always seek the easy road. I say that as someone who started out with lots of high ideals about what parenthood should look like, and have gradually slid toward the middle or sometimes the easiest thing to do, but I also know that we have plenty of other areas where life is trying to make up for it. So when I’m tempted to grumble about the various things about city life in Philadelphia that drive me nuts (unions, anyone?), I try to remind myself that these trials are meant for my own spiritual benefit and that they should push me toward a deeper life of prayer rather than a spirit of anger and complaining. I’m still working on that one.

I recently rewatched one of my favorite movies of all time, Zélary. It is a Czech film that tells the story of a woman living in Prague who falls afoul of the Gestapo during World War II. She works as a courier for the Resistance, but is also training to be a doctor, and suddenly finds herself needing a hiding place. The Czech Resistance decides that the best place to hide her is in a remote village on the eastern border, where life is very traditional and rural. She marries one of the local men there and the rest of the movie is about how she makes her life there, a modern woman at odds with traditional life, and how she reconciles the two. There are many other themes of the movie, but this is the predominate one in my mind. I always come away from that movie feeling that the life depicted in that village is somehow my ideal of life. The village is bound by custom and tradition; there is no electricity, no running water, and housing is rough cabins, but there is a solidarity of spirit and community that appeals so much to me. There is something that seems spiritually healthy to me about the physical privations of pre-modern living. I have lived this way for brief periods and I enjoyed it very much; there is less time to spend on the cultivation of self as so much time is devoted simply to living. The key to that sort of life, however, is that everyone around you must live that way. The community quickly breaks down in the presence of modernity. (I should probably add at this point that my husband and I have flirted with a wide range of extreme ideas, including living off the grid, but have ultimately come back to the middle on many of them).

I know this probably sounds at complete odds with our love of city life. It is and it isn’t. There is part of me that longs for the rural simplicity of their lives, but I also realize that much of what is appealing to me is the sense of community and shared tradition. Were we to move out to the country to farm a plot of land, we would instantly find ourselves completely isolated from everyone we love. In this context, the lure of the city is the lure of community. City communities are not the kind of communities one finds in traditional villages, but they do have a culture and tradition of a sort, and we are still carving out niches within the various diversities available to us here. There is the academic community that my husband is surrounded by (and that I was once surrounded by); my stamping and mommy friends; our wonderful church family, and the small group of Orthodox friends we have in the city that have become a part of our family. We are friendly with all the people on our block. In nice weather, many people sit out on their front steps, ready for conversation and deepening of friendships.

So while living in the city doesn’t provide the sort of distraction from self that living in a pre-modern community does, city living does provide a different sort of distraction in the difficulties that are inherent in urban living. So when I’m overburdened with groceries on my walk home, or struggling with a 32 pound stroller and two young children on the bus (more about the stroller drama in the next post), I try to remind myself not only of the reasons we love living in the city, but also that it is good for my salvation.