Tracey Lind’s book is a series of suggestive and episodic meditations on life at edge of the contemporary city, visual images captured in her own photographs, from which she unpacks spiritual and theological meaning. Unlike the ancient Christians who fled their cities to find faith, Tracey Lind stays in the geographical city and discovers God in the homeless, prostitutes, immigrants, and even in graffiti, rundown buildings, and urban garbage. Through the camera lens, interwoven with the insights of spiritual imagination, she moves beyond what St. Augustine called the “City of Man” to the often-elusive City of God. In this grace-filled pilgrimage, she invites others on a journey to see God’s city with her—opening a compassionate and compelling vision of Christian faith that is transcendent and welcoming to all.
The good news of Interrupted by God is that seekers and believers need not imitate their ancient ancestors and flee the geographical city in order to see God and practice faith. And unlike her liberal Protestant forebears, Lind does not envision a God who is indistinguishable from the world and the secular social order. Thus, the spiritually hungry need neither completely forsake nor fully embrace the city. In these pages, God emerges as a God who is both in the world but not of it. Spiritual wholeness—with all its creativity, passion, and imagination—is a pilgrimage of seeing and living into this truth.
In a final flourish of paradox, Lind confesses to being an “evangelical universalist” as she powerfully reclaims a distinctive and loving way of life in and through Jesus Christ. In doing so, she joins her voice with the voices of others who are beginning to proclaim that a new way of being Christian is arising, a way that finds God’s truth in the shadowed edges of light beyond the borders of the city. Lind testifies that God, indeed, is alive—a being of infinite personal, transforming, and challenging love who can be found everywhere and may be known through the intentional exercise of spiritual imagination. Sometimes the most remarkable pilgrimages are simply walking outside the door of one’s own house and seeing the world through the eyes of God’s spirit.
Diana Butler Bass
Alexandria, Virginia
Author of Strength for the Journey: A Pilgrimage of Faith in Community and Broken We Kneel: Reflections on Faith and Citizenship
Preface
Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high!
Come to the edge!
And they came
And he pushed
And they flew.1
—Christopher Logue
The English poet Christopher Logue aptly describes what happened to me one cold January day in a McDonald’s restaurant on Forty-second Street in New York City. I was interrupted by an unfamiliar voice that called out to me from within the depths of my soul. It probed and prodded, provoked and persuaded, pulled and pushed at all that I was and all that I hoped I would become. “Come to the edge,” the voice said. “No, I am afraid.” “Come to edge,” it insisted. So I went to the edge. The voice pushed, I flew, and I’ve been soaring ever since.
As an Episcopal priest and dean of a major urban cathedral, I live at the center of an established church and privileged society. Yet in my very being, as a child of an interfaith marriage, a lesbian, and one who has spent a great deal of time with the homeless, I belong to the edge, to the fringe, to the people who are never certain if, when, or where they fit into the great scheme of things. Staying close to the edge, I see all kinds of things that I couldn’t see if I only lived in the center of safety and privilege.
A journalist once asked me what it is like to live with “double vision.” As a person who lives in the center but is drawn to the borderlands and boundary waters of the margins, I see the truth of life in various shades of grey. There is no black and white. Nothing is absolute, and there is always opportunity for something new to emerge in both the darkness and the light. As St. Paul, a spiritual ancestor whose life and vocation was also interrupted from the edge, once said, “Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12).
Over the years, I have learned to claim the edgy religious, sexual, social, economic, and political paradoxes of my existence and of those whom I have encountered in my daily life and ministry. As a person of faith, I have searched for the good news and truth within those paradoxes. This book is an attempt to speak honestly about the paradoxes that call me from the center to the edge and back again.
The stories and photos I’ve included here illuminate gospel truths and divine revelations from my perspective on the edge of exclusion and embrace. In the introductory chapter, I explore the question of passing or dying for my faith, of claiming or denying the essence of myself. This question, asked of me over three decades ago, was my first interruption from God, and the search for its answer has afforded me frequent glimpses of God from the edge.
In the chapters that follow, I introduce you to Lisa, the homeless Christmas angel; Siah, the infant hope of her ancestors; Mike, the child who understands the wisdom of the wind; Sally who feasts on communion remnants; the Garbage Tree on Ellison Street; Yvonne, the Good Friday interruption; Bacardi, the drunken Christ; and the sisters of mercy who beckon us to the banquet—all of them interruptions of the holy. I explore my desire to light up the world, why I do ashes, how I pray for peace, and the power of a five-dollar bill. I invite you to embrace the darkness, encounter the demolition contractor, remember the power of baptism, climb mountains, cross the great water, love the fallen flower, and keep on singing. I unabashedly describe myself as an Evangelical Universalist who claims Jesus as my way, finds life in the Trinity of love, but believes that the journey with Christ is not the only saving truth. In the closing chapter, I describe what I understand to be the essence of the Gospel in the children’s game of hide-and-go-seek.
In an article for The Witness Magazine, newspaper columnist Ina Hughes wrote, “It is not by accident that all great teachers of every religion used stories to get their message across. You can preach me a sermon, show me a doctrine, recite me a creed—and I might be impressed. But tell me a story, and I will remember.”2 I have been blessed with the gift of many stories. A few of my stories are out of the imagination of my heart and head, but most of them are true stories from real life, usually from intrusions into my daily routine.
A number of years ago, I picked up a camera and went looking for God in my neighborhood. Through my camera lens, I discovered a spiritual discipline for myself. Photography is not my profession, nor is it my hobby. Rather, the making of photographs is for me a form of prayer and meditation. As a raging extrovert, I am usually actively engaged in the world around me. Photography is a way that I distance myself enough to see what is happening. When I examine life through the eye of a camera, I am forced to step back, slow down, concentrate, and become deeply attentive to the situation. Looking through my viewfinder, I can’t allow myself to focus on simply what lies in the middle of the frame; I must