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The SUV in the driveway, the golden retriever with a red bandana romping with two children in the front yard, the Colorado winter vacations, the bumper sticker with MY DAUGHTER IS AN HONOR ROLL STUDENT AT HUBBLE MIDDLE SCHOOL—those are the dreams of the denizens, like me, of suburbia.

After college and their roaring 20s, many Americans find themselves in a subdivision with a lawn and a mortgage and a couple kids. Hip twentysomethings may mock the suburbs and its bourgeois values, but when their first child arrives the nesting instinct sets in. A neighbor and her husband lived on the north side of Chicago until the kids came; then they moved to a western 'burb for safety and quiet. "I miss the energy of the city," she says five years later. "In fact, when we moved to the suburbs, we had a hard time sleeping at night because the neighborhood was so quiet."

Such deep quiet is how suburbs were originally conceived. The architecture of today's rolling acres of spec houses in farmlands arises in part from the pastoral, bucolic cemeteries on the outskirts of cities in the early part of the 20th century. Whether blue-collar or white-collar, Yankee or Southern, West Coast or East, North Dakota or southern Texas, most 'burbs are arguably organized around the provision of safety and opportunities for children, and neat and tranquil environs for homeowners. Suburbs have grown to dominate the American landscape precisely because, most of the time, they fulfill those promises, in spades. That very success presents challenges for Christians. Naturally, there are exceptions. There are suburbs just as plagued by poverty and crime as inner cities. But in this essay, whenever I refer to the suburbs, I will be speaking to what I know: cozy, safe, homogeneous, fairly affluent suburbia.

In the introduction to Crabgrass Frontier, sociologist Kenneth T. Jackson writes, "[T]he space around us—the physical organization of neighborhoods, roads, yards, houses, and apartments—sets up living patterns that condition our behavior." I grew up in a rural setting and moved as a young adult to the suburbs, and what Jackson observed sociologically, I've concluded must also be true spiritually.

The environment of the suburbs weathers one's soul peculiarly. That is, there is an environmental variable, mostly invisible, that oxidizes the Christian spirit, like the metal of a car in the elements.

The pop artist Jewel, a young woman in her middle 20s whose albums have sold millions, talked several years ago with Rolling Stone magazine about her motivations. She said, "I'm just a person who is honestly trying to live my life and asking, 'How do you be spiritual and live in the world without going to a monastery?'"

Her question rattled around in my brain, for neither can I move to a monastery. I'm stuck in the 'burbs; I don't have easy access to nature (that is, enough cash flow to afford a second house in some rural area), to quiet, to a more contemplative life. Something deep within me yearns for a more spacious spiritual consciousness, a more direct connection to the God of the galaxies. How can I draw close to my Creator in a world of endless strip malls, cookie-cutter houses, ubiquitous vans and sport-utility vehicles, and no space for solitude? A colleague calls the Chicago suburbs "the land of no horizons." Power lines, the dormers on a neighbor's Cape Cod, and mature hardwoods obstruct the full evening's redness in the west. The day's final beauty is always about an hour away. I commute to the country to see the stars.

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July 2003, Vol. 47, No. 7