Minneapolis, This Beautiful and Damned Place, I Choose You

But he knows too that he is signifying something by being here, as if here is where he agreed to be when he took his law school diploma and cam home[...]forty-one years ago. He is here to prove "to all whom these presents may come" his willingness to be here.
—Wendell Berry, "Wild Birds," in Wild Birds.

I so much want this to be my ethos. Forces push and pull, but I want choice to be a large part of why I live here, in Minneapolis. This city is a beautiful place. I may never live in a more beautiful place. But I don't want to live here simply because it is comfortable, easy, pretty, or the place I'm at.

I don't want my enjoyment of this place to be a result of selective vision. Minneapolis is not only nice, it's stupid ugly. When I watch the sunset from my window the most distinctive structure is a senior housing high-rise. It is an ugly cement building that look like a bomb bunker misplaced nineteen stories into the sky. Outside my other window a public housing high-rise sticks into the view. At least sis drug treatment facilities are located within a mile of my house. A mile and a half away there is the mental institution.

In the winter it is frigid, and grey. The snowbanks quickly turn black and accumulate trash. In the summer the trash stinks. In all seasons people loaf around, hopeless, aimless, and miserable: often drunk or high. You can't walk half a mile without seeing a pan-handler. It's not uncommon that I find used condoms laying around. Many places you can't sit on the grass without sitting on cigarette buts.

Outside my last house, I saw lot of disturbing things. I've watched moms cuss out their kids, kids their pushing in a stroller. I've heard domestic squabbles end in an endless stream of F-words poured out in the street. I've seen what must have been drug deals right out the front door. And prostitution went down on our back porch.

I see all these faults, and many, many more. I see them, and I still choose this place. Not in spite of all of it. I choose all of this, because it is still worth loving. Because it isn't beyond hope. Because this is where I've been called to be, and where I choose to be.

I want to live this way, love this way. With open eyes, and open arms. Gospel love dares this self-giving. So must I.