Before I could send out an essay about a favorite street in Manhattan, I needed photographs.

On a Sunday morning when I should have been in church, I went out with my camera into a glorious fall day. I passed a caravan of handicapped people being escorted to Central Park by cheerful helpers. At 100th Street and Broadway, I came across a Halloween street carnival, with face painting, games, homemade food, parents sitting with children, and neighbors chatting over apple cobbler.

The scene seemed deeply in touch with faith values like family, friendship, trust, affection and kindness.

Not far away, behind closed doors, were expressions of Christianity’s deep divisions: a Greek Orthodox outpost of Christianity’s ancient East-West schism and an Episcopal remnant of the 19th-century Oxford Movement.

Nearby also is a large synagogue that grew out of tension between German and Polish Jews and concern for social class.

Perhaps you will understand my confusion. I believe in God. My way to God is through Jesus. I am devoting my life to helping faith communities get healthy and do the work that God needs done.

But, on balance, I find myself wondering where we fit in God’s determination to “make all things new” as it says in Revelation. I can’t imagine that God’s “new heaven and new earth” will be found in our incessant bickering, our Babel-like towers of Scriptures, doctrines and stones.

I look at a street carnival filled with joy and love, people helping the less fortunate, and I wonder if many people haven’t already found God’s new world, and we church folk represent the noise they had to escape.

We have wanted to save the world. But we got in our own way, and the world went on without us. New life starts in pain. Now seems to be our time of pain. And therefore, our time of hope.