I took this photo this morning from my office. It’s a view to the hole almost-formerly known as Ground Zero, which has been a construction zone for years now. Not everything is being constructed new; some buildings are still being torn down. The damaged Deutsche Bank, (left), is coming down story by story, week by week. The progress is too slow to notice daily, but those coming back after summer vacation will notice another floor gone. And the opposite is true as well: World Trade Center #1 is up to about 25 stories now, but it seems to happen when we’re not looking. And the memorial fountains are slowly starting to take shape.

This is NOT a good neighborhood to live in if you want things tidy. We have long gotten used to orange cones and construction tape, to jackhammers and protective scaffolding over many building entrances, to ambitious tourists trying to get a shot of the guts of the site over or through the fence, and scrapping with the traffic control cops and site monitors about where they are allowed to stand. It won’t end anytime soon.

The same is true of the arena of debate surrounding the neighborhood. Cordoba House (Park51) is the hot topic now —a moderate sufi Muslim community center that is slated to be built a few blocks away. This discussion is anything but moderate, and the amount of disinformation and vitriol being smeared around demands our best effort at mining what religious toleration and reconciliation means, and guarantees that this site will be untidy for many years to come.

But for me this construction zone is a sort of back door icon of God’s action. Every morning during the summer I have said my prayers from the rooftop of my building, which also overlooks this tangle of deconstruction and construction. It looks a lot like my life. So many structures that appeared to be permanent have revealed themselves to be temporary; new things are hinted at but have not yet appeared; in a few places there are definitive signs of purposeful growth. It’s not at all tidy but it’s very much alive. It’s not a good place to expect clean surfaces, but it’s an amazing place to notice vitality.

I’ll be bold enough to expand the image to the church we inhabit: it’s certainly plenty messy right now. Some see decline and some see advance. A lot of things that looked permanent are passing away; some of the bloated sprawl is “right-sizing.” Some things that looked like they had collapsed are re-sprouting in new form. And of course half of the people think the other half are wrong, but somehow they/we have to figure out how do do this thing together. This vital untidiness is going to be with us for a long time so we’d better learn to thrive in it, or move to a quieter suburb.

For my part, I’m loving living in lower Manhattan. There are quieter districts, but none more interesting!