God and Wonder: Theology, Imagination, and the Arts

by Jeffrey W. Barbeau

Trees welcome you like monks in a monastery and bid you to lay down your heavy burden.

Eric O. Jacobsen, a pastor in Tacoma, Washington, got his PhD in Theology and the Built Environment (it makes me so happy that one can get a doctorate in that) dug into these issues in a book called Sidewalks in the Kingdom. He writes, “In the Christian imagination, where you live gets equal billing with what you believe. Geography and theology are biblical bedfellows. Everything that the creator God does, and therefore everything that we do, since we are his creatures and can hardly do anything in any other way, is in place.”181 Place matters. Where we live, and how we live there, affects us spiritually and shapes our understanding of what it means to be children of God.

There’s a subdivision near us called Mill Run. By a stroke of good luck, the planners decided to line the streets with silver maples instead of those trees from the pit of Gehenna known as Bradford pears. (Bradford pears, by the way, are an abomination. I’m not using that word flippantly. They were engineered in the 1960s and because they cross-pollinate with every other kind of pear tree, their prolific offspring is destroying forests faster than kudzu. I think of them as a tree version of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. They’re preferred by developers because they’re cheap, they grow fast, and they produce malodorous but pretty white flowers in the spring, which happens to be when most home sales happen. But after the developers leave, the trees require regular pruning, a gust of wind can split them in half, and they’re producing an inhospitable forest of non-native offspring that’s riddled with thorns. Left unchecked, they’ll soon overtake all the lovely oaks, maples, sycamores, and ashes that are native to our part of the world. Take my word for it: they’re awful. If you have one in your yard, for goodness sake, cut it down and spend $25 on a maple at Lowe’s.

And here’s the thing: most American subdivisions are about the size—in population and area—of those little villages so many of us pine for. If I could change one thing about American subdivisions, I’d require them all to have a café, a little grocer selling local produce and baked goods, a coffeehouse, and (because I love hobbits) a village pub. If I couldn’t get all of the above, I’d settle for the pub. Or a used bookstore. Or both. Who wouldn’t want to go for an evening stroll and have a slice of pie at the local baker’s, where you might bump into a neighbor or two whom you haven’t seen for a few days? Everybody in town would want to live in that neighborhood.

My favorite city in the South (excluding Nashville, of course) is Greenville, South Carolina. Right there in the heart of downtown the Reedy River courses noisily between boulders before cascading into one of the most beautiful city parks you can imagine. A suspension bridge made just for walkers spans the falls, and below you see paved footpaths meandering their way down to grassy lawns bordered by all manner of flowers. At the foot of the falls the trail follows the river into the dark embrace of a vale of tall trees, where the ruins of a century-old mill hunker on the banks. If that were all, it wouldn’t be so different from many parks that show off waterfalls: a beautiful destination, but with nothing much to do but look around and maybe have a picnic. But as I said, the river courses right through the center of downtown, and the planners integrated all that natural beauty with the city itself—proving that if it’s wonder you want, you don’t have to drive to it. I’ve joked with my family for years that the true measure of a city’s greatness is the number of park benches it can boast. In that sense, Greenville is a truly great city. Everywhere you walk, someone was thoughtful enough to provide a bench, situated just so, allowing you to take a load off, people-watch, write a poem, or contemplate how glad you are that there’s a coffeehouse a five-minute stroll away. And there aren’t just coffeehouses, either. Clustered around the river you’ll find cafés, bookstores, hotels...