THE GOLDEN CITY
Robert Meyers

One night in 1945 I stepped off a train in a tiny Welsh village and asked directions to the U. S. Army hospital where my uncle was recovering from massive shrapnel wounds. Told that no vehicles would go that way before mid-morning, I decided to sleep there that night and rise early the next day to walk the eight miles.

An eerie fog draped the twisted branches of trees on the hills as I strode briskly along at five the next morning. I found myself in a world of writhing vapors where nothing seemed alive outside my small circle of vision. I remembered how I had already been alternately delighted on my trip by the pastoral charms of the Welsh valleys and fields, and appalled by the grimy ugliness of many of her cities. I remembered the great slag-piles, the blackened coal mining equipment, and the soot-darkened cities that seemed not to have been built with children in mind. I went on to see the uncle, who recovered and came back, as I did, to the United States. But I remembered Wales and the Carnaervonshire hills and great grimy Cardiff and the dirty little coal towns.

So when I read, years later, of a heartbreaking tragedy at Aberfan, a little coal town where a whole generation of children was wiped out in a few minutes, I was more than usually moved. Aberfan must have had some men who recognized the potential danger to her children from the great dark mountain of slag hanging over the town. Some must have spoken to The Company. But it would have cost so much to build a big retaining wall, or to move the pile, or to relocate the school. Apathy and greed decided to take a chance that nothing bad would happen. The rest is known.

One scene from the funeral, verbalized by a witness, remains etched on my mind. When the mass burial rites were ended, the families stood a final minute beside the open graves. Down by one of the lower trenches, a father knelt and pulled something from underneath his overcoat. It was a yellow Teddy Bear, soiled by long use in small hands. Looking around as if fearful that someone might see him, he dropped the Teddy Bear into the open grave and walked quickly away.

Such a tragedy always reminds us, if only briefly, how important our children are. The center of our hopes, the focus of all our dreams of a brighter tomorrow, we so often forget what they mean until they are gone. We miss many things about them, but one of keenest aches comes from our knowledge that now there will be no flesh-and-blood of ours to walk the world as better persons than we were. The hope that springs eternal in our hearts is blighted, the day turns dark.

The Biblical text chosen for that burial service was taken from Zechariah 8. There could have been no more appropriate one found, for the prophet in that place dreams of a Golden City where “the open spaces shall be full of boys and girls playing.”

Zechariah’s vision intrigues me, not least because it is one more in that long series of dreams which the Jewish prophets told in glowing poetry to their people. Keep faith, hold on, they promised, and one day the Golden City will rise from the ruins of Jerusalem and the Golden Age will begin. The mountains will sing with happiness, the trees will clap hands with joy, and the vines will hang heavy with luscious grapes. The whole earth will rest at peace, the lion and the lamb will lie down together, and from all over the world men will turn their heads and hearts hungrily toward Zion and the People of God.

It is a beautiful dream, and it touches my heart more deeply each passing year. It never came to pass, and we suspect that in its full and literal form it never will. Yet once we have been caught up by the dream, we cannot let it go again. It moves us to go on working for a better world, to hope for a city whose spires at least are touched by gold, even if its streets lie yet in shadows. The fact that it has not been fulfilled does not destroy the validity of the dream. It is part of that eternal hopefulness which alone makes human life possible.

Zechariah’s vision reminds me of that marvelous moment in Sean O’Casey’s drama, Red Roses For Me. A poet and dreamer named Ayamonn stands in the slums under a grimy bridge in Dublin when he is suddenly seized by a compelling vision of what the city might become. The stooped men and women around him slowly straighten and their faces become serene and noble as radiant light streams upon them. The city itself is transformed into a magical place of soaring spires and singing towers. On stage, and well produced, this wild and holy dreaming becomes almost unbearably poignant for the audience. What could be, we think, as contrasted with what is!

And once again the age-old dream of paradise, of heaven, of the Golden City, rises from some prophetic heart to make us unhappy with the common streets we walk in. Surely it is part of the Bible’s enduring value that it so often tantalizes us with the Dream. And who knows? Perhaps we shall yet live in beautiful cities where the air is pure and the very streets are filled with laughing children playing safely. The power of a dream is immeasurable and there are architect seers even now who envisage cities where, as Zechariah put it so long ago, even the aged may sit quietly and happily in the streets, staff in hand, unafraid in heart or mind. --- 338 Fairway, Wichita, Ks. 67212