Steve West: Sights and sounds of a city in decline

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, November 29th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next: WORLD commentator Steve West on the sights and sounds of a city in decline, yet not without hope.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: On a recent trip to the Hudson River Valley of New York, my wife and I spent much of our time walking in the nearby countryside in and around the small riverside town where we stayed. Our walks and musings became a meditation on both death and life.

The town in which we were staying had lost its center. An aged train station next door to our hotel was airy and unkempt. Fallen leaves dusted its entrance. The few brick and frame buildings at the town-center were vacant, commerce gone elsewhere. A private residence filled what once was a small brick church. A cemetery spread out around a Catholic Church chapel, a meadow of silent witnesses to the finitude of life.

That first night, I awoke to hear the lullaby rhythm of a passenger train outside our hotel. Like a long, epic poem, its lyric carriages filed slowly by. I imagined the poet-engineer atop its pulsing diesel heart, staring into the void of night, the darkened houses and wooded bluffs to the east; the dark, coursing Hudson River west.

“The end of all things is near,” wrote the Apostle Peter, and in the dead of night, remembering our walk that day about a vacant town, I felt it. And yet reading that verse later, I realized it resonates with hope. Peter doesn’t end there but gives instructions for the last days: Be sober. Watch yourself. Keep loving. Forgive each other. Show hospitality. Don’t grumble. Use your gift to serve. Speak, he says, “as one who speaks oracles of God.”

A new day brought light and life: birdsong at dawn, a cross around a woman’s neck shouting death to death, a meadow whispering flowers, the laughter of a child waiting for a school bus. At some point I showed my wife a just-snapped photo of my hand holding a dandelion blown in a meadow in which we walked, its seeds scattered to the wind.“You know what my favorite thing is about that picture?” I said. “The ring. The wedding band.”

There’s more I treasured: The green field and flowers. The meandering poets’ walk south of Red Hook. The buzzing bee held still in the air, evaluating us. The autumn breeze, the meadow’s fall and rise, the Basset hound lumbering through the life of Rhinebeck–reminders of life going on, not ending.

“All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness,” my wife read from Psalm 25 near the end of our stay. “I like to think of the paths we walked these days with signs saying ‘steadfast love’ and ‘faithfulness,’” she added. She smiled behind her tea cup, and I thought of the trails and country lanes and town streets we walked marked with those signs she imagined, those reassurances for pilgrims.

The end is near. For all those listening in the dark, take heart. Christ moves in the shadows.

I’m Steve West.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.