The young saleswoman's face looked worried as she told me about a shooting in her neighborhood. "A year ago, I was ready to leave Boston for good," she said. "But where would I go? After the bombing in Oklahoma City, there's no city in the world where it's safe to live now!"

Then she leaned forward and told me the real reason she hadn't moved away. A girlfriend had asked her, "Why are you leaving? You should stand up for Boston." Somehow, after that, she just couldn't leave.

But how do you "stand up" for your city? Especially if there's been violence or tragedy? Well, when I visited Oklahoma City recently, I found people who are doing a remarkable job of answering that question.

For one thing, they're determined not to give up on their city. Huge banners on both sides of First United Methodist Church (which was almost totally demolished by the Federal Building blast across the street) proclaim that the church members aren't about to run away in terror. "OUR GOD REIGNS, AND WE WILL REMAIN," the banners say.

And the church members have remained. In the first days after the explosion, they fed hundreds of rescue workers, washed their clothes, and comforted them. They let them use their battered sanctuary as a morgue and their parking lot as a command center.

In the year or so since the bombing, the church members have offered consolation and healing to the thousands of visitors who've come from all over the world to pay tribute to the children, men, and women who were lost. They've built an open-air chapel for them in their parking lot. It's called the Heartland Chapel.

The idea for this little chapel, which directly overlooks the site of the explosion, came from the church's lay leader. He was concerned about the crowds that gravitated to the site every day—sometimes standing in the rain for hours at a time. He felt they needed a place to be quite with their thoughts, and to pray.

At first, the church members planned to pay for the Heartland Chapel themselves. But the Jewish Communities of America and the Islamic Community of America asked if they could join in— and each contributed a third of the expense.

Donna Sisson—who, along with her husband, Frank, is prayer coordinator for the chapel and for First United Methodist Church—told me recently that the project just naturally turned into an ecumenical affair. "When a tragedy like this happens," she says, "you want to bind together. You want to demonstrate the love of God—not just talk about it."

Many other churches responded with the spiritual feeding so crucial during a crisis. Christian Scientists in the Oklahoma City area, for instance, sponsored three public lectures within days after the bombing. The Christian Science Sentinel—Radio Edition prepared a special program that aired in the area, and church members from all over the world contributed to a relief fund. And local members contracted to have comforting Bible verses painted on bus stop benches throughout the city. Above all, they backed up their relief efforts with prayer—and love. Says local spokes-person Bradley Jones, "Whatever we're doing, if it lacks love, it's meaningless."

Maybe this kind of communal caring—a feeling that flows inevitably from faith in the one God and love for all His children—is the way a city best survives adversity. Revenge and vindictiveness won't rebuild a city. Nor will fear or apathy or inconsolable grief. But pure, all-forgiving, neighbor-to-neighbor love can do so much. In fact, it can bring in a whole new vision for a city—a resurrected, spiritual vision.

This is what St. John, author of the book of Revelation in the Bible, discovered almost two thousand years ago on the desolate, rocky island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea (see Rev. 1:9, 10; 21:1–27; 22:1–21). Exiled there by the Romans for preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, John was cut off from friends, family, and church. He probably knew he'd never again see the beloved Jerusalem—the city Christians and Jews had been forced to abandon some twenty years earlier as Roman conquerors ravaged the city.

Yet, just when all must have seemed lost, John had a vision. It was a glorious, prophetic vision that came to him when he was "in the Spirit on the Lord's day." Oddly enough, though, the angel that delivered the vision also brought news of multiplied catastrophes and of "seven vials full of the seven last plagues."

But these dark tidings couldn't diminish the power of the spiritual vision John had. Maybe that's because his vision was so absolutely exalting. It was, after all, a preview of an entirely new Jerusalem, a rebuilt Jerusalem—a "holy city ... coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband."

This New Jerusalem was nothing like the war-torn city John had known. This city was triumphant and free and utterly spiritual. It shone with "the glory of God" and His Christ. And there was no violence or disease or sorrow in it—nothing that "defileth" or "worketh abomination, or maketh a lie."

And there was something else about this New Jerusalem. It was a place where all nations were welcome. People from all over the earth were to find "healing" there—and "the water of life." It was a universal city, energized by the kind of universal love that only God can originate (because God is Love itself!) The kind of love that includes everyone. The kind of love that rests on the assumption that we're all children of one heavenly Father and Mother.

Now, some people might think John's vision is hopelessly utopian, an impossible dream. But if you and I care about the future of humanity, can we afford to say this? Can we afford to say that the ideal of universal love is irrelevant? Certainly people who visit the Heartland Chapel, as my family and I did, realize acutely that universal brotherhood and sisterhood is relevant. It's a living, healing, tangible ideal—even in the shadow of disaster.

The communal caring we saw in Oklahoma City—like the magnificent vision of spiritual community John experienced—has the power to literally transform a city. It plants the seed of a whole "new" city: a new Oklahoma City, a new Boston, a new Moscow, a new Calcutta, a new Tokyo. It brings consolation and healing to people who thought their grief was inconsolable and unhealable. It brings the peace of heaven right here on earth. And it does this, as John depicts, in spite of the most horrendous evidence saying that love can't possibly win out over hate and destructiveness.

Here's what Mary Baker Eddy says about St. John's vision in her commentary on the book of Revelation in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: "The beauty of this text is, that the sum total of human misery, represented by the seven angelic vials full of seven plagues, has full compensation in the law of Love. Note this,—that the very message, or swift-winged thought, which poured forth hatred and torment, brought also the experience which at last lifted the seer to behold the great city, the four equal sides of which were heaven-bestowed and heaven-bestowing" (p. 574).

Frank Sisson wrote a poem called "The Heartland Chapel"—a poem that's given to all visitors who come there. In the poem, the little chapel sends out this urgent call to each of us:

Mr. Sisson surely has it right. The best way for a city to rise from the ashes of catastrophe is for its citizens to draw together in love. The best way they can "stand up for" their city is to get down on their knees and pray.

Mary Metzner Trammell

ISAIAH

Look upon Zion, the city of our solemnities: thine eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tabernacle that shall not be taken down; not one of the stakes thereof shall ever be removed, neither shall any of the cords thereof be broken.

Isaiah 33:20