On the one hand, this city and the surrounding communities are light years away from my roots. I grew up in a small industrial city in the mountains of Western, Maryland. It was a city in which extremes of class and condition were everywhere visible. Those of us who lived in the cold-water flats and aging duplexes on the west side of town knew that there were other worlds out there--the mysterious and forbidden world of the African-American ghetto, the solidly middle and lower middle class neighborhoods of the south side and the impressive, sometimes magnificent upper class neighborhoods of what we called the north end. But we also knew that there would be little interaction between those worlds. The African-American community would continue to be isolated and invisible, while those of us who were Caucasian, poor and lower class learned early to stay where we belonged and to make a life within the confines of the world in which we found ourselves.

When I left home at seventeen, I was introduced to a variety of other kinds of communities. There was the mono-cultural world of small-town and rural Ohio; the complexities of the urban world of Chicago; and then a variety of suburban communities around the nation. None of them were like Summit. This city is, without a doubt, the most quietly impressive, the most beautiful place I have ever lived. And I must confess to you that this has been something of a surprise to me.

Growing up in Maryland, I thought I knew about New Jersey. On occasion, the family would scrape together enough money for a brief vacation--often to Atlantic City for a day or two on the boardwalk and swimming in the ocean. We drove, of course, across the southern part of the state, where I learned that New Jersey is flat, and sandy and dusty and studded with scrub pines. On other occasions, when the money was tighter, we spent vacation in Brooklyn, New York, where an aunt and uncle and two cousins lived, and offered us crowded accommodations and a chance to ride the subway and the Staten Island ferry, to visit Times Square and Coney Island. Those trips brought us up the turnpike through the Meadowlands and the oil storage facilities. On those trips I learned that New Jersey was marshy and ugly and filled with noisome fumes. I grew up believing that the "Garden State" looked and smelled like the place where, on the eighth day of creation, they dumped all the debris--everything left over and unused.

So you can see that my encounter with this part of the state, with its hills and mountains, trees and rivers and waterfalls, with its houses and neat lawns, was a pleasant surprise, to say the least. It was not the New Jersey I had expected; it was a New Jersey I did not know existed.

But the appearance of this place is only one element in the surprise I feel. A larger element relates to my surprise at finding myself here. I still feel, as I walk the streets of the city or even park in my own driveway, very much like that youngster who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Hagerstown, Maryland, amid the violence and the poverty and the hopelessness of that community, and I am astounded to find myself here, in this very different world. Sometimes I wonder how long it will be before someone checks my passport, or asks to see my green-card, before people discover who I really am and send me back where I belong. Indeed, I remember that world in which I grew up and I find it difficult to reconstruct the path by which I journeyed from there to here. There are moments, like this one, when I feel that I am an ambassador sent from another place.

On the other hand, there is a hauntingly familiar quality about this place. As I walk the streets, I find myself experiencing a sense of at-homeness which my personal biography does not justify. I know I have never lived in a place like this before, but it feels so powerfully familiar. I puzzled over this recurrent feeling until my son, Stephen, who grew up near Washington, D.C., and who, until recently, worked in the Anacostia region of the nation's capital--one of the most violent, desperate communities in this nation--came to visit us here for the first time--to check up on this place where the old folks had relocated.

One Saturday morning in early Autumn several years ago, I was driving him through the town. We drove down Springfield Avenue, noting the policeman standing on the corner by the bank, talking amiably with a local citizen, the people strolling along the street, pushing children in strollers, the barber pole going around and around, people smiling and greeting each other as they came and went on a dozen nameless errands, and then, turning off Springfield Avenue, we drove through some residential areas. Stephen took all this in saying nothing, undoubtedly contrasting it with the atmosphere of Washington. Then, at last, he turned to me and said, "Good grief, Dad, you've moved to Mayberry!"

Those of you with a long enough memory may recall that Mayberry was the mythical small town in the television situation comedy in which Andy Griffith was cast as the sheriff and Don Knotts was his bumbling deputy--a small town which reflected many of the hopes and dreams of the American people. It was a place where the town drunk jailed himself every Saturday night, a place where the small crises of ordinary people provided the story line, a place where differences were always a matter of simple misunderstanding, a place where no problem was so big or so important it could not be resolved in thirty minutes. My son, seeing the town for the first time, had noticed the resemblance between the quintessential mythic American community which has been celebrated in song and literature and on television for so long, and this real-life community where a kind fate has drawn me.

That was the source of the sense of familiarity I have felt since my first encounter with the area. This was not only Mayberry; it was also the town in which Alice and Jerry, Dick and Jane and all those characters who peopled our earliest readers lived out their little adventures. It was an incarnation of the vision most of us were encouraged to pursue by the culture which shaped us. I have felt at home here, because, in many ways Summit and the surrounding communities have retained some of the innocence of those earlier days, and still incarnate the dream I was taught to dream even as I was being told in a dozen subtle ways that it was someone else's dream.

If anything disturbs me about my living in Summit, it is the very seductiveness of this area and its amenities. The tranquility, the beauty, the gentility of this place is like a drug. Walking down the streets, watching people tending their flower-beds, raking their leaves, manicuring their lawns, painting their houses, playing with their children, it requires of me a very real act of will to remember that all around us are people who sleep in train stations and bus stations, if they are lucky, or under bridges and on park benches and in cardboard boxes if they are not, people, especially children who are ill fed, ill clothed, surrounded by violence and shut out of the American dream. Fretting about the burden of our property taxes, it requires of me a very real act of will to remember that world out there, beyond our boundaries, to keep that sea of hopelessness and despair in mind. And when it does intrude upon my consciousness, it is even harder to resist the temptation to believe that we have what we have because we earned it and deserve it, and they suffer because they didn't try hard enough, or weren't smart enough, and so we are justified in erecting physical and psychological barriers around this little enclave to protect what we have and save it from contamination.

In a recent book, entitled SEARCH FOR MEANING, Phillip Berman quotes a young man who works for a brokerage firm in Manhattan. The young man is explaining how he came to work on Wall Street, rather than in a career in social work. It was largely by accident, and he confesses that he really doesn't like the work he is now doing, but he doesn't know how to change. And he goes on to explain that in his business you never make enough money because someone else always makes more. You make a million dollars, he says, but you feel poor because someone else has made two or three million. Living in Summit, I cannot help feeling very much like that young man. To be sure, given my profession you fully realize that I am in no danger of making a million dollars. But I live in one of the wealthiest cities its size in the United States. And often I feel poor, stretched to the limit. And so do many of the other people who live in this town and the surrounding towns. Every year, each one of us--on the average--loses pocket change--in chair cushions, and on the street and wherever--which amounts to more than the average income of millions of people on this globe. We spend more for a suit or a pair of shoes than many people earn in a year of labor. And yet, we feel poor, or at least not wealthy. And what is more, we feel resentful of those whose need calls our affluence into question.

When I think of this disparity, one image comes regularly to my mind. Several years ago, on the day before the state sales tax was to be applied to paper products, I happened to be at an area supermarket. There I saw people piling shopping carts full of paper towels and toilet tissue and wheeling them out to load into the Mercedes or the BMW. People who thought little of buying sweat pants at Bloomingdales were outraged that they would have to pay the state an additional seven cents on the dollar for toilet tissue. This behavior became for me an iconographic image, reminding me that in our affluent community, we still manage to feel poor and put upon. What is more, we have trouble believing that poor people deserve a larger share of the economic resources of the state or the nation. That, I suspect, is what lies behind the comment I've heard from so many people that the problem with redistributing aid to schools is that "those people" won't know how to use "our money" and will waste it.

It is easy for us to forget in Summit and towns like Summit, that for years we have been the beneficiaries of economic policies which have seen a radical redistribution of wealth from the very poor to the very rich. To be sure, most of us do not think of ourselves as being among the very rich, but most of us have held our own or improved our positions while millions of our fellow citizens have begun to slip down the economic ladder. That process was well documented a few years ago in Kevin Phillips' book, THE POLITICS OF RICH AND POOR. No flaming liberal, Phillips uses graphs and charts and statistics to chronicle the massive redistribution of wealth upward which has occurred not only in this country but all across the globe. Reading his book, I found myself wondering how this was allowed to happen. But Phillips explains that it is no great mystery, that in a society in which fewer and fewer people vote, in which the political choice is often between minor and subtle variations on the same conservative theme, in which middle of the road is regularly redefined to mean radical, the balance of power has come to reside in communities like ours, and with people like you and me. And because we think of ourselves as poor, or at least as not wealthy, because we feel stretched to meet the college tuition payments, and the car payments, and the mortgage and the church pledge and the taxes and the club memberships and all the rest, while putting a little something aside for our own retirement, we tend to resent programs which aim at using tax money to aid the poor; we tend to vote our immediate and narrow self-interests and to support policies which will benefit us to some degree and the very rich to a very great degree. We have allowed ourselves to be allied with the super rich against the truly poor. And we have been rewarded with a small portion of the wealth which has trickled up. In the process, we have created a national government which is cynical, and morally bankrupt and cannot respond to any vision more commanding than the pocket-book. What is more, we will never have a better government so long as we insist upon voting with one eye on our tax bills, so long as we insist upon supporting candidates and policies which pander to our fears and appeal to our pocket-books.

It is this, I suppose, more than any thing else, which troubles me about our community. In the beauty and serenity and grace of this place, it is hard to remember that other world, and to feel solidarity with those who inhabit its dreary hopelessness and even harder to realize that in the long run, our interests and their interests are the same.

Some years ago, I read an intriguing sermon topic. A colleague of mine announced that he would be preaching on the topic, "Would God Live in Brooklyn." That caused me to ask the same question about Summit: "Would God Live in Summit, New Jersey?" It occurs to me that in many ways this is God's country. Here amid the rows of neat homes sited in a continuous park-like setting, here among kind, friendly people; here, backed up against the Watchung reservation where the deer stare out at us with wild, gentle eyes, and birds sing and squirrels chatter; here where flowers and shrubs and trees make the city a sylvan refuge, is the ideal home for God. Here there is genuine concern for community, for children, for elders. Here we have organized as peaceful and pleasant a community as any post-industrial society is ever likely to know. And what is more, this is a place of power. We are the kind of people who take civic responsibility seriously, and therefore, we are the kind of people whose support public policies must have if they are to succeed. We are a quietly powerful people. Of course God would live in Summit, New Jersey--provided she could get her mortgage approved.

But in confronting that question, I keep remembering something that my colleague, Edward Frost, once wrote. Edward said,