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Saturday Worship:
"The Reason for Cities" a sermon presented by The Rev. Edward Searl, Unitarian
Church of Hinsdale, IL
[The quotations in the body of this sermon/address are
taken from: "Soul Searching: Does your hometown have a soul? If you can
define the character of your town, maybe you can keep it intact." By Pythia
Peay, Washingtonian as reprinted in Utne Reader, January-February 2001.
Citations from the article appear in bold face.]
 I
have a friend, a member of my Hinsdale congregation -- Hinsdale is fifteen
miles due west of the Chicago Loop in the exurban sprawl known as Chicagoland.
My friend is passionately involved with the Illinois and Michigan Canal Historical
Corridor. The I & M Historical Corridor is innovative public space, connecting
a score of municipalities along its 97 miles from Summit at the edge of Chicago
to LaSalle and the Illinois River. It follows the remnants of the 1840 canal
that joined the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River and led to Chicago's
explosive expansion as the great city of the Midwest.
Last spring my friend invited me to tag along with a few local civic officials
to explore an area along the I & M Canal Historical Corridor known as The
Chicago Portage-one of only two national historic sites in Illinois. It's
pocketed in one of those remnant pieces of Nature known in Chicagoland as
a forest preserve. It's backed by a chemical plant that's perched on
higher ground that leaks noxious chemicals. Numerous times I'd driven past
the site's entrance on Harlem Avenue near I 55 where the Des Plaines River
curves to merge into the Ship and Sanitary Canal and didn't give it much thought.
I'd never even ventured into the parking lot. But at least I was visually
aware of the massive, sharply angled, modern, steel sculpture of Marquette
and Joliet rusting in an empty concrete moat in a forlorn and often litter
strewn parking lot: an odd monument in an unimpressive location best suited
to clandestine assignations and underage drinking.
My friend persuaded me to tag along by his enthusiasm for what he touted
as a really significant place. "Not many person know about this place, but
those who do want to lift it up from neglect. This place has so much meaning
and potential," he'd proselytized. "You've got to see it!"
It was a hot and muggy mid morning. After the small group had assembled and
introductions were made, we walked across a shaggy meadow into the surrounding
woods. Mosquitoes rose from the damp grass to nip any bare skin. Mud from
the deer trail we traced into the woods, adhered to the souls of our shoes.
The woods were scruffy. At first I wasn't seeing/feeling/experiencing what
made this place special- NOT AT ALL!
As we walked, though, the guide made his case, patiently explaining how this
was the area where the natives passing between Des Plaines River running down
from what is now Wisconsin and a VAST swampy area once known as Mud Lake that
gave access to Lake Michigan, portaged their canoes. "You're perched near
the Continental Divide," the guide told us as we approached a curving hummock
that dropped into what appeared to be the dry course of a small river. The
guide plucked a small green spike with a nondescript white flower at its tip.
"Smell it, " he commanded. He passed it around: "Crush its stem. It's nodding
onion. This plant gave Chicago its name. The Native Americans called
it Chicagou, meaning something like what we mean by the words stinking
or odiferous. It was a food that the Natives could always rely
on, even in the worst times. It only grows in well-drained soil. It wouldn't
have grown along the once muddy shores of Lake Michigan. The natives valued
this plant that grows only here and in a few other places around here. This,
my friends, is likely the place where Chicago was born and got its name."
The idea that cities possess a soul was common among the ancients. The
Romans spoke of "genius loci," meaning the special spirit of a place. Indeed,
until the 18th-century Enlightenment, when the sacred was severed from the
secular in Western culture, cities were often built on foundations of myth
and religion, and were thought to be watched over by gods and goddesses, nature
spirits, saints, and angels. Belief in a city' s mysteriously personal character
lives on in the colorful images that arise when we think of certain places:
Los Angeles is the city of angels and dreams of stardom. New Orleans is jazz
and black magic. Boulder is breathtaking mountain views and spiritual exploration.
Boston, founded by austere Puritans, is symbolized by the lowly bean. Even
when they're repeated ad nauseam in travel brochures, these images connect
us with the underground wells of myth that water a city's soul.
As the guide talked and I perspired, swatted mosquitoes, and inhaled from
my fingers the persistent pungency of the nodding onion, I had an unexpected
realization- a flashing moment of complex understanding, a genuine religious
experience: A Southwest Airlines jet that had taken off from Midway Airport
was climbing in the sky overhead. Automobiles and trucks whined along nearby
I 55. A freight train lumbered on the tracks that arched over the Des Plaines
River- a river that drained a great area reaching northward. The Sanitary
and Ship Canal, not far away, the rechanneled Des Plaines River, connected
the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River. And the old route of the mythic
American highway connecting Chicago to Los Angeles, Route 66, ran along a
street only a few hundred yards distant.
Nature conspired and humankind for millennia had responded, and we were
still responding today. Here was the reason for Chicago. I was standing smack-dab
on it--the pivot of one of the great cities of the world--the Heartland metropolis
of North America. Had I been alone, or less self-conscious, I might have stretched
out my arms and turned circles in the throes of ecstasy, -the miraculous majesty
of a continent' s resources and beneficence converging on the place where
I stood, --an ecstasy of wonder and gratitude, of joyful harmony.
In that unexpected moment of sure religious experience, I imagined I was
filled with the spirit that Ron Engel had identified in his fine book,
Sacred Sands, about the Indiana Dunes that curve around Lake Michigan
to the east of Chicago. In Sacred Sands Ron tells how that area came
to embody/express the spirituality of Chicago. I flashed how Ron had described
that area where the great eco-systems of the North American continent-north
and south, east and west- meet and create successions of miniature ecosystems
contained in a relatively small area. To convey the spiritual significance,
Ron used terms associated with the influential University of Chicago professor
of comparative religions, Mircea Eliade: axis mundi,-the pivot on which
he world turns, a sacred center,-God's navel.
In that moment of religious experience, I also flashed the title of an influential
book, Nature's Metropolis by William Cronon that has helped to recast
contemporary environmental history. Mr. Cronon' s analysis alerted me to the
role that the great riches of the American hinterland-the diverse bounties
of Nature-played in Chicago's evolution into an ever greater and grander city
and how Nature was in turn affected. Thanks to Mr. Cronon's analysis, whenever
I drive into the city I look up to the Art Deco rendition of the ancient goddess
of grain, Ceres, who, claims her dominion over the city from a fitting throne
at the top of the Board of Trade building at the head of La Salle Street in
the heart of the city's financial district. I pay her silent homage-not the
famous gleaming aluminum image, but the forces of Nature she mythologizes.
But does anyone today really care about the souls of our cities? Like
giant urban gods fallen from their pedestals, they lie dying of neglect, buried
beneath asphalt and artless architecture, crushed by the weight of overwhelming
social problems, their inhabitants often blind to the fact that their own
souls are shaped, for better or worse, within the city's larger reality. We
ignore the magic of a place-hidden beyond the real estate deals, the political
squabbles, and numbing commutes-at our own peril.
I embarked on my own quest to uncover the soul of Washington, D.C., as
a way to quell my distress after moving here. It dawned on me recently that
if I can succeed in a city renowned for its hollow-hearted power-mongering
and inside-the-beltway narcissism, then anyone anywhere could do the same.
Chicago didn't happen by chance. Its reason for being is rooted in a tangible
primal reality- in Nature. Its subsequent greatness is secondary to, or conditioned
by, Nature's greatness. What's true for Chicago, I say is true for every city.
Cities result from the seamless reality where Nature and human nature conspire
to serve human ends and each affects the other.
Every city has a primary reason for being that's a matter of Nature-a convergence
of geographic fact. I say with a conviction that comes from first hand experience
of living in a half dozen urban areas, I say with the passion of a dedicated
seeker: SPIRIT resides in the places where cities inevitably take shape. Every
city has its genius loci . This is to say, cities, even before they
are inhabited but certainly after, and surely forever are sacred places. Our
human work in building them, and transforming them, and sustaining them, and
reforming them doubles the holiness- heaping human meaning and purpose on
top of Nature's inherent meaning and purpose.
As you do the work of this conference, never forget that you are engaged
in a religious endeavor. In my estimation, you are giving yourself to a natural
sacredness-however you construe The Source of the sacredness--even
as you acknowledge and seek to make human life more sacred, through your various
Justice activities. You are doing holy work- honoring and expanding
holiness across the land in already sacred places, in particular lives, and
in our common world. The double sacredness of which I speak-Nature's meaning/reality
and human meaning/reality- is your strength and your inspiration; it is also
a vision toward which you strive.
Ironically, commitment to saving the souls of our cities might lead to
greater protection of wilderness. As James Hillman has frequently pointed
out, Americans tend to see their cities as the place where the innocent become
corrupted and where soul is lost, rather than found. He has argued passionately
on behalf of reversing this trend, thus protecting nature from too much human
contact and reanimating our cities from within. For to seek soul only in nature,
or within ourselves, is to miss the wondrous natural creation that is a city-
a convergence of community, commerce, street life, history, nature, geography,
politics, art, and people that offers a perpetually renewing source of life.
We all know what happened to many American cities in the last half century,
particularly in the ' 80s and '90s in the rust belt regions. Factories closed
down forever or moved south. Business headquarters retreated to the suburbs,
where millions of middleclass families had already emigrated. New schools,
malls, and recreational areas rose in the suburbs, too. Left behind were mostly
the underclasses and the unempowered. The urban infrastructure deteriorated
and contributed to a concentration of despair.
I experienced all of this, and more, in my first church, the First Unitarian
Church of Youngstown, Ohio, where I began in 1977. My contract started on
the city's most infamous day, immediately given the moniker of "Black Monday,"
when the heart and soul steel mill, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, of what was
once the world's third largest steel producing district, closed. Within a
few years all major mills had folded. Six years later, when I left Youngstown
for my current church, Youngstown had the highest unemployment in the nation,
nearly 25%; and workers who had the wherewithal headed elsewhere. In those
first six years of my ministry I worked to keep an urban UU church alive that
had nearly destroyed itself a decade earlier; and I worked to maintain a city
that had its traditional economy destroyed, whose population was shrinking.
In many ways, in the sweep of my 25 years of ministry, these were "the best
of times," when circumstances made unmistakable what needed to be done and
even small accomplishments had measurable significance.
Youngstown most definitely had a soul forged in great mills by a host of
East European immigrants and later African Americans from the South. Maybe
more than most other cities, Youngstown had deeply institutionalized but hidden-beneath-the
surface peculiarities-organized crime being the most insidious and corrosive-
that forged its soul. Its soul seeped into my soul; for a least a year after
leaving it remained my instinctive reference.
The soul of a city is as unique as the spirit that "creates" a city in the
first place. A city's soul is a complex evolution that relates to all that
human doing has wrought. Chicago has a soul. I've spent 18 years prowling
its many neighborhoods experiencing its complexity. There's ample meanness
and even evil, side-by side with all the positive accomplishments and culture
to be found here.
By all appearances, American cities seem to be reforming. The decades long
trend of moving out of the city is reversing. Middle class folk are moving
back in-- mid-life, empty-nester, baby boomers as well as young adults fleeing
the sterility of the suburbs. The evidence of this-which is good news for
some and bad news for others-is escalating urban real estate prices across
the country. And those who stayed seem to have found a renewed enthusiasm-
Youngstown being an apt example,--as courageous citizens have rallied to fight
deeply entrenched organized crime.
This renewed interest in the city generally makes this an opportune time
for promoting the spectrum of progressive Justice issues: race, class, ecology,
gender, economy, and more. It's my current experience that cooperative liberal
(if not progressive) faith groups are in the vanguard of reforming the city-perhaps
not so much in the turn-of-the-last-century's aesthetic vision of the City
Beautiful, but in a contemporary variation- the City Just.
All cities have problems, though they are often unacknowledged. While
it' s usually difficult and politically risky to draw attention to shortcomings,
especially in a place that prides itself on being a city that "works," ignoring
them perpetuates a state of soulnessness. In Santa Fe, for example, conflicts
arise between the economic bonanza of tourism and its rich historic, Hispanic
character. The influx of wealthy Anglos purchasing vacation homes has come
at the expense of indigenous residents- the Native Americans and Spanish-who
can no longer afford to live where their grandparents and great-grandparents
lived.
Race, of course, is an issue affecting most American cities. Almost every
person I've talked with in Washington mourns the racial divide between blacks
and whites; some people describe it as a city of "two souls." To drive past
abandoned buildings with the U.S. Capitol looming in the background, to see
how dramatically the pollution-choked Anacostia River contrasts with the cleaner,
suburban Potomac River, is to witness a visible tear in the city's soul.
Volunteering at a shelter for the homeless, throwing yourself into a political
reform movement, getting to know down-and-out neighborhoods, speaking out
about community ills all can help you find the soul of your hometown, as well
as contribute to healing it.
The twentieth century popular philosopher Lewis Mumford remains a favorite
voice of the humanist/naturalist orientation to which I resonate. He had much
to say about the city-its place in history and its possibilities. In his 1938
book, The City, Mr. Mumford waxed mythopoetically about the meaning of the
city. He wrote, "The city is both a physical utility for collective living
and a symbol of those collective purposes and unanimities that arise under
such favoring circumstances. With language itself, it remains [hu]man[kind's]
greatest work of art"
Yes, love the city as a work of art-its natural genius transformed through
human aspiration and striving. More specifically, love your city. Be infused
by the spirit- the convergence of nature and humanity that creates and recreates
it. Explore your city's soul. Be intimate with its malevolence as well as
its glory. Dare to let your soul seep into your city, even as your city' s
soul seeps into you. Do Justice, that the spirit of the city might be honored,
the soul of the city rectified, and perhaps your soul saved for the only end
that matters in our democratic, egalitarian society- for the sake of all the
people in service of all that you hold sacred.
Reported for the web by Deborah
Weiner; formatted for the web by Julie
Albanese.
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