You know, it was always just a place wanting to be loved. (Here it is.)

Now, I know I've ranted about this before, but I do love this city. There are a myriad of reasons that it's just a plce like any other place - if time is always time and place is always place...

But every ordinary view contains within a vista that is ravishing, sprawling with a beauty, or a nobility, or a cast down grandeur,

drove downtown in the rain, nine thirty on a tuesday night

a view of old and new, sublime even where ridiculous: towers, houses, fingers of mountains, blood of lakes and rains, castles rising, manses sprawling, brick and glass together, arcs of light. Our curves, arches, swooping, mesh symphonically with grids and pillars, standing to the sky or stretching along the earth and water.

i want to know, i need to know Your Name

It's a funny place. It makes me talk like a lover, expounding the beauties of the beloved: curves, blushes, the virtues of blemishes, and why you ought to be jealous really. This city, battered and abandoned, has just always wanted to be loved: and it will love you more in return than you can give. Imagine with me a city with a fierce love, loyal to those who love it, to its heroes, and scorning with acid those who spurn it. This is the place. Loved with a fierce love.

every day a page of paper / every night a photograph / a moveable feast

While the Garden was the place given to Eve and Adam, and the City was of Cain's making, here I think I see a foretaste of the End: gardens set in and about the City, the works of the fallen taken up into and redeemed in the End-State Vision: the New City, Jerusalem the Golden. The blood spilled into the steel, the trees and lilacs blooming, bridges spanning the waters, throngs of humanity moving along the streets for work and sport, history in spades, gathered up and built rightly upon the sure foundation at the last. No matter who you are, or where, I ask you, look for the City of God: take up its citizenship, apply on the basis of the cross, live by that resurrection which is the foretaste of the restoration of all things...