NEW YORK — The new Whole Foods Market across 97th Street from my apartment on the Upper West Side seems to be having one banner day after another since opening on Aug. 27.
Walking toward the store in recent days has been like swimming upstream against a flow of shoppers carrying the chain’s distinctive brown and green bags. I saw gold balloons, uniformed greeters, company pedicabs giving free rides to the heavy laden, and all 32 checkout stations filled.
Thanks to heavy promotion, I doubt that anyone on Manhattan’s West Side is unaware that a new player has entered the grocery game.
This is how you do it in New York. To make it here, you come on strong. Big advertisements, big brands, big noise, big presence.
Why, then, did Jesus often slip into town and hope not to be noticed? If his word and agenda were so big, why did he consistently ask his disciples not to tell anyone about his actions?
The usual explanation is the so-called “messianic secret,” which postulates that Jesus wanted to keep his identity secret as long as possible, in order to avoid the ministry ending opposition that was sure to arise.
I wonder if there is another explanation. Living in New York for the past two years is showing it to me.
One of New York’s virtues is that it allows anonymity. It is possible to live privately here and yet not feel isolated. Make a few friends, get to know colleagues, smile at shop owners, but otherwise, live in private space. Then come into a public square where hardly anyone recognizes you or notices your attire, attitude or activities.
For many, this kind of privacy can translate into profound loneliness. But if you choose it, such privacy can feel like a victory over superficials and stereotypes. You can be yourself here. You can change here.
No wonder legions of artists, writers and aspiring entrepreneurs come here to discover who they are and what they are made of. In this anonymity, you aren’t pigeonholed for someone else’s convenience.
If your life is changing, this is a great place to live. Whether you are making the passage into a new phase in life, into a new self-awareness, into a new professional identity, you are free in this tolerant and non-pigeonholing culture to explore freely.
That certainly is what New York has meant for me. To judge by my journal entries from two years ago, I am becoming a new person here. Partly because I was ready for it, but also because no one is telling me to stand still, stop dreaming, stay in the box.
I wonder if that is what anonymity meant to Jesus. In Tyre and other places where he sought privacy, he could grow and change. Pressed on all sides to meet other people’s expectations, he could explore freely his evolving sense of himself.
He could move beyond tradition. He could discover God outside his era’s culture wars. He could rethink inherited prejudice, as he did in an encounter with a Gentile woman in Tyre.
He could ignore establishment efforts to box him into convenient stereotypes and to make his word easy and small. He could become a “new creation,” so that he was living the very change-of-mind gospel that he proclaimed.
No wonder his call to humanity was not to build monuments of right opinion and certainty, but to embark on a journey into newness of life.
(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)
