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Some days I fantasize about moving my family from our western Chicago suburb to a small town in the western United States, edged by a rambling stream and cradled in the foothills of a mountain range with a romantic name like the Spanish Peaks. There we'd live out our days in simplicity and in natural beauty and with few financial anxieties. Life would be fully aligned. Our frenetic life would slow to a manageable pace, and God would be easier to access.

But I know that what glistens in my mind is a phantasm; I know what small towns are like. I grew up in mostly rural communities whose most notable architectural landmarks were the county courthouse and the Tastee-Freez and whose citizens suffered from poverty and isolation. My high school class numbered 17. At least in the North and South Dakota prairie soil in which I was seeded and sprouted, God did not seem nearer because of the environment. And if beauty and solitude are preliminary to the deeper life, then why does the mountain state region have the highest suicide rate in the United States? What good, then, is creation?

While I esteem the saints throughout Christian History who abandoned the cities to draw close to God, most living in the suburbs and cities can't follow them. A few can, but for most people, family and career choices obviate a more contemplative life. If the get-away-from-it-all model of Christian spirituality is the high road, then most ordinary suburban folk, wedged in cloned subdivisions, can follow Christ only in lowly cul-de-sacs.

While I can't afford to evacuate my family, I occasionally feel a twinge of disease with my comforts. DuPage County, in which I live, ranks in the top 10 percent of counties in America with the highest household income. I'm not completely distracted from how the rest of the world lives. I have noticed the hidden peoples of my white-collar county—the refugees from Zaire and Bosnia, and the Indian and Asian students at the local community college. Yet despite the best the 'burbs have to offer my family—security, options, and efficiency—I find myself restless, always pursuing, always striving, finding less and less fulfillment. I don't seem to need simply another Bible study or another church service to find soul satisfaction. My faith often seems to have no effect on my anxiety.

In the opening paragraphs of The Message in the Bottle, Walker Percy asked:

Why does man feel so sad in the twentieth century?. … Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why do people often feel so bad in good environments that they prefer bad environments?. … Why is it that a man riding a good commuter train from Larchmont to New York, whose needs and drives are satisfied, who has a good home, loving wife and family, good job, who enjoys unprecedented "cultural and recreational facilities," often feels bad without knowing why?

In good environments like mine, many spend their lives paying mortgages for homes in subdivisions with names such as "Klein Creek," "Mill Creek," "Highlands Ranch," and "Pinehurst"—euphemisms for rows of uniform houses of pressboard siding, regardless of square footage, in which stressed-out, tired, weary souls reside.

But the 'burbs are where I live—and I have set about to discover the life Jesus describes at the end of Matthew 11: "Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly" (The Message).

Suburban church consumerism has been lamented for years. Rural churches suffer from consumerism as well, but deeper family ties may prevent some of the extreme forms of church mobility seen in the suburbs. My point throughout this essay is not that the hazards of upper middle class suburbia can't be found elsewhere. But to me, they seem to be intensified in my white-collar community. At any rate, this is the geography in which I find myself, and the examples here naturally arise out of this geography.

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July 2003, Vol. 47, No. 7