c. 2008 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ For your next vacation, I recommend the “stay-cation,” exploring where you live.

A warning, however: Be prepared for disruption.

Here in New York, the city offers abundant opportunities for exploration. We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge for pizza and ice cream, took ferries to Staten Island for baseball, enjoyed free concerts in public parks, discovered Coney Island and the Single-A Brooklyn Cyclones, took a “Blues Cruise” around the harbor and saw a Broadway show.

Mostly, we started days slowly, took time for family, and savored small activities like buying fruit from street vendors. You don’t need a high-octane environment like New York for a stay-cation; the virtue lies in seeing where you live more deeply, and the people you love less distractedly.

By experiencing reality, rather than escaping it, I feel more connected to everything around me, both aggravations and delights. Human rudeness, for example, was pervasive. I mean people with no boundaries, who cannot imagine that their needs don’t come first. They talk through concerts, ride bicycles on pedestrian paths, and clog aisles with baby strollers. They bellow into cell phones, push old ladies aside for a subway seat, and foul the air with profanity.

Yet grace and mercy also abounded. I saw people make way for each other, offer guidance to the lost, and extend kindness to children and the infirm. I live among some wonderful people.

The rudeness reminded me that grace and mercy are learned behaviors and, if no one is teaching children to be polite or affirming self-sacrifice as a worthy ethic, we will have drivers feeling entitled to mow down pedestrians.

I saw so much bad parenting. Weak parents who allow children to run families. Overly-solicitous parents who protect their children from the scrapes and boredom that are essential for growing up. Helicopter parents who live through their children in what a local columnist called the “affluenza” of “co-dependence.” Brutal parents who slap their children around. It is no wonder that educators wish they could build fences around schools _ to keep the parents out.

At a Broadway revue of songs and dances from musicals, I heard the edge in “Some Enchanted Evening” and the sadness in “Summertime.” Pathos hit deeply in “He Had a Good Day,” from “Working.” A male nurse sang of caring for an elderly man whose children pay him no attention. A nanny sang of devoting her days to a 5-year-old boy who’s ignored by career-minded parents. “We do the work that no one wants to do,” they sang.

The harbor cruise took us between Wall Street and Ellis Island. Huge and glittering Wall Street, where the bright and capable make extravagant salaries managing wealth that someone else produced, where an entire existence can be focused on one goal: “I want to be rich.” Not far away, Ellis Island is a quiet reminder that we are an immigrant nation, built by people trying to escape the very decadence and arrogance now shaping American life. Out here was a nobler dream: “I want to be free.”

That’s the kind of disruption that can accompany a stay-cation. When you see home more deeply, you see beauty, grace and charm; but you also see greed, arrogance and laziness. Things look different when you see them as they are.

(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.)

KRE/PH END EHRICH600 words

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