The Third Week of Advent, Friday

Thoughts on Peace (and a Christmas party appetizer and cocktail)

After five weeks of non-stop coughing, I have finally gone and cracked a rib. Yay. Keep me in your prayers, as I still have much wrapping and decorating and cooking to do (plus a crowd coming on Christmas Eve). Recipes for your gathering are below todays’s essay, as is an audio version for those who have more time for listening then reading (like me!)

Someday, I will write a long essay—or 10—about the city I call home. Perhaps I’ll even write a book about it.. This place certainly merits one. But it’s the week before Christmas, and you and I both are pressed for time, so for now, the most important thing you need to know about Steubenville is that it is not—as some think—a place to escape from the world. Rather, it is a place where the world’s ugly wounded underbelly is exposed for all to see.

Now, my guess is that the average American suburb hides just as much brokenness as this rusty, ragged Appalachian steel town displays. But in the suburbs, that brokenness tends to hide behind well-manicured lawns and newly built houses. Here, it walks down the streets at noon. It looks like prostitutes with missing teeth and old men with fentanyl addictions and 14-year-old boys playing deadly games with stolen guns. The brokenness of this city doesn’t try to disguise itself as pretty or palatable or polite. It just is.

Which is one of the reasons I like living here. I prefer making my home in a place where reality is made so clear. There’s no missing it, no denying it, no shutting your eyes to it. The world—wounded and raw—stands naked before you in Steubenville, begging you for prayers.

Along with all the wounds, though, there is also a tremendous amount of grace here. There are families bursting at the seams with babies; artists making music, throwing pottery, and painting murals; entrepreneurs renovating buildings and brewing fancy coffee; young men and young women talking theology late into the night; mothers and fathers, sitting with the homeless, keeping company with them; grandparents kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament in the early morning hours; and priests and religious sisters walking the streets with their rosaries, praying for us all.

Which is also the world. This too is reality.

Brokenness and beauty, woundedness and grace abide next to each other in this town with a plainness I have seen in few other places. Steubenville is one of the ugliest towns you will ever visit. It’s also one of the most beautiful. Not just in spite of the ugliness. But because of it. Steubenville is beautiful because of how much love this city and its hurting people need. It is, in a sense, all of us, an icon of our broken, vulnerable, needy selves, desperate for a Savior, aching for redemption.

Steubenville is also beautiful, though, because of how many people are striving to be a part of that redemption. Churches across town are filled with men and women working to make something beautiful of this place and their own lives. They care about this town. They care about its people. And because of them, behind all the crumbling buildings and boarded up windows, joy abides.