ON THE TOWN WITH GEORG SIMMEL:

A SOCIO-RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING OF
URBAN INTERACTION
by Victoria Lee Erickson
VICTORIA LEE ERICKSON is Associate Professor of the
Sociology of Religion (Graduate and Theological Schools),
Associate Professor of Religion (College of Liberal Arts),
and University Chaplain at Drew University.
The connecting possibilities in the city -- bridges and angels, for
example -- make it a liberating place.
Georg Simmel (1858-1918) was a founder of the German
Sociological Association and lived the majority of his life in the city
of Berlin. One area of research to which Simmel frequently returned
was the documenting of how our social, geographical and physical
lives shaped our spiritual lives, and how our spirituality shaped our
social and physical environments. He searched the urban landscape
for the material and spiritual evidence of this interactive
construction of everyday life. When he did not confine himself to a
reporting of physical and sociological realities (data), and ventured
into what he called "the soul" or the "inner life," his critics declared
that he had no evidence for his claims. This sociological attitude still
characterizes much of western sociology and prevents many
religious practitioners from accessing the discipline. Fortunately,
Simmel expanded his ability to reach under the documented facts of
society and culture into the hidden realities that undergirded it; this
skill eventually propelled him to the top of intellectual circles and
preserved him forever as a lion-sized sociological treasure.
Simmel's students went on to found the first department of
sociology at the University of Chicago, a department well known for
its theoretical contributions to the understanding of social
interaction. The early days of the Chicago school of sociology were
characterized by their concern for what is commonly referred to as
the "everyday." Three of Simmel's internationally well known
deliberations on the everyday were on "the bridge and the door" and
"the stranger." A central concept in all three was "unity" and the
process by which humans produce unity or let it escape from their
grasp. In the following, I will suggest a way that religionists might
allow social theorists to assist them in understanding urban
experiences by inviting Simmel to walk with them around New York
City. What would the voice of the urban practitioner sound like if we
allowed Simmel to speak through it; and what would happen if we

asked him, from the grave, to address a material reality such as

urban angels? It may just be that urban ministry is the right
American venue to reclaim the work of a man who believed that
playfulness was required of serious inquiry so that we might all be
saved from what he called the coming formlessness, a kind of chaos
that sends angels back to heaven and humans to nowhere at all.(1)
Michael Kaern's new translation of Simmel's The Bridge and the
Door (1994) provides fresh insight into his epistemology. For
Simmel, truth is relational. He argued that people build society on
everyday relational truths (Karen points out that this is a deeper
insight than "all truths are relative.") Our social and physical
environments reflect each other. Simmel argued this point through
reflections on the "bridge." Our "will to relate," he said, pushes us
into an empathetic mode that bridges our separateness and allows us
to establish processes through which we create one society.(2) This
process, Simmel argued, was like the bridge that overcomes
obstacles by spreading its will through space. The human bridge that
creates society must be firmly anchored and enduring. It must also,
the bridge that transverses a natural divide, "submit to nature and
transcend nature."(3) The perfected physics of the bridge comes
through taking "measurements" so that distance becomes the
unification of separateness.
Bridges are ancient constructions. Early bridges were simple affairs,
like logs, that were strategically placed over obstacles, like rivers.
Humans eventually learned to build more enduring structures. The
early Roman Alcontara Bridge that spans the Tagus River in Spain is
still standing after nearly two thousand years. Many of the ancient
bridges that are still standing were built on solid rock, but the
history of bridge building tells us that the Romans made a lasting
contribution to the method by finding a way to pour cement footings
below the water. In time, Roman methods were impacted by Persian
and Muslim influences which made bridges more artistic and
beautiful to look at. Strength and durability alone are hardly enough
for the human eye.
Whether we are talking about the first century or the twenty-first
century, stone bridges or steel, asthetically pleasing or not, bridges
take years to construct. The human cost is often great. One of the
most notable contributions of the United States to the world history
of bridges was the Brooklyn Bridge, the first great suspension
bridge, that was half again as long as any previous structure. It was
built over fourteen years and used such new engineering techniques
that little was known about the hazards that lurked beneath the
water. Over a hundred workers died constructing what has become
one of the world's most recognized landmarks.
When bridges fail, they fail mainly during construction. Even

though we mourn the loss of workers in these failures, there is

always attached to our words a sense of relief that "innocent" lives
were not lost. There is something about the bridge builders that
makes them not innocent of the suffering bridge building entails.
They are supposed to know the dangers and sign up for the task
fully prepared to risk their lives. This may be why humans have
found it necessary to have bridges attended by angels who bear the
light: the building of pure relationality is often done in the dark and
suspended over a void.
Bridges are seen by people as structures requiring the holy. It turns
out that bridges are more than objects. They take on the
characteristics of the divine-human relationship. Human beings are
bridge builders. Bridges themselves take on a quality of the
transcendent. We build bridges to transcend our separations. When
we decide to take on this role, we know what we are doing -- we are
risking our lives for the sake of interconnection. Simmel reminds us
that we are the only one of God's creatures who make paths and
when the paths are interrupted we are the only ones who build
bridges so that the paths continue.(4) What then are we doing when
we build bridges? Simmel would tell us that when we are uniting
what is separated, we are creating relationships.
Most histories of modern urban infrastructure explain the primary
reason for building bridges in economic terms. As we will see
regarding urban life and the stranger, material concerns for wealth
are a significant factor in determining when and where bridges
should be built. But, to reduce our analysis of bridges to the pursuit
of material wealth impoverishes our overall understanding of
urban life.
Our ability to create pathways to relationships comes from within
our mind and from within our hearts. Our minds take the empathy
we have for others and construct a willful ability to feel the other's
inner life, to identify, to empathize. Pastoral agents know that the
mental bridge of empathy we construct between people is an
element essential to urban life. The Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan
Bridge, the George Washington Bridge, and the Verrazano Bridge
connect all New Yorkers with each other and with the outside world.
They also make us responsible to each other in ways we would not
otherwise be obligated. We cannot construct a world without
empathy. Not to empathize is to decide against oneness, society,
wholeness. Just as a canyon without a bridge felt "unforgiving" to
Simmel, the lack of empathy keeps humans separate and is a sign of
an unforgiving heart, a self-centered denial of God, a lack of will for
the survival of another. To put it succinctly, a lack of empathy is a
sign of moral failure. Empathy changes one's inner life. Bridging
happens in everyday life according to the Akan of Ghana, ". . .
because one antelope will blow the dust from the other's eye so that

two antelopes walk together."(5) Or, as Jesus said it, by loving your
neighbor. The mind is capable of bridging the widest gaps for the
sake of survival.
We construct wholeness by interrelating parts even though human
beings do not see or understand the whole of anything, argued
Simmel.(6) Wholeness then is a construction of the mind. To get
wholeness the mind transcends the separateness of the parts.
Bridging as a mental activity is the most common way we use the
word "bridge" in human relations. Society is only possible through
our will to relate. The will to relate creates a path that others can
travel on. . . a path to connectedness, a path to healing. As Simmel
theorized, the purpose of the bridge "exhausts itself when interrelation happens." The bridge has served its purpose when we cross
over it. In making inter-relation visible, the bridge creates enduring
concrete reality. We know that we can cross the bridge again. The
bridge refers to the ultimate -- to something beyond our senses. The
bridge submits to nature but it transcends nature. Simmel argued that
when we step on the bridge we waft between heaven and earth and
eventually through habitual use, we loose our fear of "hovering."
The "strange becomes familiar" to us.
The bridge is a visible sign of direction; it brings us from one finite
point to another. Whether one is going or coming across the bridge
does not really matter. What matters is the unity that is created as
"we spread our will through space."(7) The bridge submits to nature
(it pours its footings on each side of the divide) and it transcends
nature (it creates a path where none existed before). When we walk
across a bridge we feel the nervous reality of it, we know we are
someplace where instinct tells us we should not be, but equally
instinctive is our desire to cross over to the other side.
Historically, the minister who celebrates the Eucharist lifts up the
host for all to see and when breaking the bread/ the body of Christ,
says, "The Fragment." There is an acknowledgment that what is
holy is also broken. Bridges, like people, crumble. Even the children
sing: "London bridge is falling down." There is an awareness that
the unity we seek, the path to each other, the path to God, is visibly
fragile. That is why children and bridges need angels to protect
against the possibility of "slipping through the cracks."
The picture on the following page is typically printed with a lovely
verse taught to Roman Catholic children. Notice the shaky bridge
over which the angel is guarding them. Rules and guides are meant
to be bridges that save us.
Even though we know it is risky business, we would never cross a
bridge that we know would collapse under us. However, like
children, we often disregard the rules and the guides or venture out

into uncharted terrain and find ourselves on rickety bridges. I

suspect the reason why there is a dense population of angels under
the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges is so that one or more of them
are free to catch us if we fall through!
The city is also marked by doors with locks. Unlike the bridge,
doors discuss our limitations, Simmel observed that doors shut out
endless possibility.(8) People might come and go continuously but
what happens behind a door is hard to document. Simmel argued
that when we step out of a door, we step out of our limitedness into
limitless possibility. The joy of this feeling disappears when
limitless possibility finds its way in through the door and across the
threshold. That's why we have locks. Locks keep trespassers out.
Locks are not paranoia, they are a practicality. When locks are not
enough, people call the angels in to protect the doors; they install
them prominently to remind others that the protective capacity of the
Holy is near. Urban architecture over the past several decades has
been devastated as the previous generation's heavenly encounters
have all but disappeared. New urban constructions rarely include
any angelic figures -- be they in the form of the lion, the ox, the
eagle, the human face.
Without question, the most powerful angelic image that graces
urban neighborhoods is the face. Such images are reflected in the
countless lives of urban practitioners who help build bridges and
guard the doorways of urban living. For several years I have been
researching urban programs for people-at-risk in the highest crime
neighborhoods of New York, Harrisburg, Cleveland, Indianapolis,
Detroit, Boston, and other U.S. cities. I have met a host of amazing
people who risk their lives every day to claim kids off the streets in
America, to feed the homeless mentally ill, and a host of other social
ministries. I have been told across this country that the bridge to
moral living is a religious one constructed early in childhood. There
is often little permanence, little available rock, on which to build in
inner cities. Poverty, the lack of nutrition, dysfunctional schools,
parents under stress, and the lack of opportunity cause a spiritual
bridge failure to happen early in children's lives. When we do the
work of God we transcend human self-centeredness and provide
pathways that open others up into a wide world of love. The
doorways become safe to cross through once again, and eternity
reappears in material life. People who create bridges for others do so
at their own risk. That is why we call it a vocation. It is our truth
under the sociological data. If one is willing to walk the narrow
ridge with children, urban violence will come to an end as they
anchor themselves of the real rock of life: divine relationships that
they can see and they can feel shape their lives.
The window, Simmel observed, is only "a one directional path for
the eye."(9) We arrest people who look in the wrong direction into

windows or climb in through them. If people obeyed the limitations

of the window, we would not see bars on them. In that doors signal
movement, windows for Simmel referred to relationships between
the inside and the outside. Bars on windows spell out relationships
gone awry. Angels, in their many forms, are imported as
intervention agents into everyday life.
An inner-city pastor told me of his baptismal sermon for his own
daughter. He knew someday his sweet child would ask to walk home
by herself from school. Some young man would certainly be
ritualistically waiting on the street corner listening for the school
bell and an opportunity to shoot her offers of drugs and attention. In
his sermon he prayed that the memory power of her baptism would
protect her when there was no lion to roar.
Walking the streets of New York shooting angel pictures taught us
much about urban religiosity. Angels holding baptismal shells were
strikingly free of bars and grates. Wrapped around a building where
the waters of baptism flowed, was a sense of divine protection of
those living inside, evidenced by an open invitation to see life in the
windows.
Bridges, doors with locks, and windows with bars beg Simmel's
analysis of the stranger.(10) Just as we cannot reduce bridges to their
economic function, we cannot reduce the role of the stranger in
urban life to the character who burns bridges, crosses doorways
uninvited or who throws rocks at windows. The stranger is an
important actor in city life. Most people who choose to live there
enjoy anonymity while they complain about the alienation that
sometimes comes with it. "The economic importance of the
stranger," argued Simmel, was "his appearance everywhere as a
trader." Traders enter and leave markets as they bring in goods and
ideas crafted by others, circulating material and spiritual culture. If
we examine our legal system we find courtrooms favoring urban
locations where it is less likely that judges will be swayed by local
ties. Simmel's pursuit of the details of the stranger's identity was
concerned both with the negative relations of rejection and
distancing and the positive relations these produced: freedom to be a
critic of culture and at the same time its mirror. The stranger who
appears to come from nowhere is actually a product of the
interaction between the insiders. Insiders decide who is acceptable
and who is not to be admitted into their society. In an effort to
understand the reality of this interaction between insiders and
outsiders, the stranger learns how to transcend otherness.
Angels are stranger figures in human life. They appear from
nowhere with messages about inclusion and embrace. They are,
however, divine agents of transcendence who advocate the end of
alienation and separateness. This is why cathedrals are the most

common place we find them materialized into forms that remind us

of our moral obligations to one another.

Cathedrals
A quick glance at pictorial representations of any European or
American city prior to the nineteenth century is enough to suggest
that churches once dominated the skylines of urban architecture.
Beginning in the twelfth century in western Europe the urban
environment came to be dominated by the great cathedrals. In North
America, where churches continued to stand above the rest of the
city in depictions of urban life up through the twentieth century
when skyscrapers took over, the cathedral was not a common sight
until the nineteenth century. Now, most North American cities host
one if not more grand cathedral or cathedral-like edifices.
One of the things Simmel noticed in Romanesque and Gothic
cathedrals was the narrowing of the openings as you move toward
the door. The narrow doors guide you into the world onto the right
path.(11) Simmel asked us to think about what we are doing, saying,
and becoming as we walk into constructed spaces. As we enter a
cathedral from the outside, we come into a narrow door opening. As
we enter, the space opens us up to a wide spiritual world that
narrows again as we move to the altar. The end, it turns out, does not
look very different from the beginning. The movement from the
outside to the inside, Simmel argued, is always of a narrowing path
that ends at the altar; for the faithful, it is the only direction that
counts.
The bridge shows us how we unify, how "we create wholeness out
of separation." The door shows us "how we separate what is
together in order to achieve unity." The cathedral offers a place to
give these their full religious experience. The way to understand
such separation in ritual life is through baptism. In baptism, we take
the child or the adult out of society and mark them with a sign that
makes them forever different. As a reminder that baptism comes
first, many cathedrals still have the baptismal font stationed at the
door of the church. When you leave the church you are reminded
that you have been baptized. We expect from the baptized a holiness
that prepares us to live one-for-the-other in the Real City. This new
day in the city seems to require a fiercer set of angels.
One of the recurring images that has greeted us around the bridges,
doors, windows and cathedrals of the city has been of angels. We
also saw that strangers often have been classified and even identified
with angels. As I have meandered through the streets of New York
City over the past several decades, I have been struck by the number
of angels that grace its urban structures. Yet there has been little in

the way of formal research, sociological or otherwise, that treats this

angelic urban presence. Following Simmel's lead in investigating the
common-place experiences of everyday urban life, I want to suggest
a socio-religious way of understanding these urban angels. Angels in
religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (the dominant
religious forces of the last two millennia in the West) are spiritual
beings who, like humanity, are a part of God's creation. Unlike
human beings, angels have no material bodies; nevertheless they are
not unrelated to the material world; rather, they are agents by which
the material creation is brought into relation with God.
Angels are connecting agents of communicative practice. The Greek
word (angelos) from which we derive the English term literally
means "messenger." Angels are not phenomena open to investigation
by physicists, like energy, gamma rays, or quarks. Unlike these
unseen realities, angels are agents of hope and faith, as well as
provocateurs of despair and evil. In other words, they are unseen
moral actors. Angels, these religious traditions tell us, inhabit
creation as members of creation who belong to it and at the same
time relate it (for good as well as for evil) to that which is beyond
creation (or God). Good angels perfect human ecology by teaching
people how to develop a divine imagination; fallen angels destroy
human ecology by leading the imagination astray.
The great religious traditions of the world have not left our cities to
their own devices. Much as strangers from other human cities have
visited and lived among us, so angels -- heavenly visitors -- have
been envisioned in our urban everyday life. In this way material
creation has been spiritualized and spiritual creation materialized.
The resulting cosmological traffic has provided urban life with a
sense of adventure and surety. Religious traditions teach that angels
appear singularly in various forms. But if the need is great, they
come in groups of courage and compassion. They live nested in the
cultural memories passed on from generation to generation across
the centuries, teaching us not to fear the hierarchy of memory that
gives a place of privilege to the truth and beauty expressed by many
who are now dead.
Angels are thus understood to be messengers sent to create
community by connecting what has been separated: people from the
Creator, the present from the past, human beings from one another
in the city. As ministers sent by God, they are interventionists who
enter into interpersonal relations calling for accountability,
repentance, and truth. By materializing angels in stone, paintings,
song, and poetry, human beings in effect return the favor. Such
human representations have an enduring quality to them. Angels
themselves, on the other hand, are often depicted as coming and
going. There is no certainty in their religious appearance. Moreover,
it is not even certain that they are going to be good. There is nothing

certain about the evil intentions of those who exercise urban

violence and who often strike at random like terrorists. Theologians
through the ages have insisted that we find such evil in the form of
moral hatred, unholiness, unbelief, inordinate pride, anger, envy, or
revenge even in heavenly places because of fallen angels who once
belonged to heaven and are always seeking ways to return to it.
Because "they shook off goodness" (John Wesley), they cannot
return. Their inability to grasp goodness therefore creates "a rage
that never ends." This rage can only be controlled through a greater
angelic embrace that is empowered by praises directed beyond to
God. For this reason, John Wesley, who was no stranger to the
vicissitudes of eighteenth-century daily urban life, instructed his
followers never to invoke angels. They were only to cry out to God,
and God would in turn send the right angel to speak to them in a
language they would recognize, one who have been divinely trained
and was ready to deliver.
Christians are not to forsake the Church and invocate
angels. If any man therefore, be found to give himself
to this privy idolatry, let him be anathema; because
he hath forsaken our Lord Jesus, the Son of God, and
betaken himself to idolatry.(12)
In the urban architecture I have surveyed, angels represent moments
of transcendence. They are not, however, representations of
transcendence that leave behind the every-day realities of chaotic
urban life. Angels, our religious traditions tell us, are autonomous
moral agents whose engagement takes place at the level of our
various moral, aesthetic, and intellectual spheres of urban life.
Collectively they form a heavenly host or choir, but individually
they act in concert with city councils, neighborhood associations,
local business interests, major financial centers, and apartment
building dwellers. This is why they are the favored representations
of transcendence in the city, for they suggest a multiplicity of
spiritual beings acting on the basis of different intentionalities and
purposes, weaving together a great vision for urban public life out of
trivial and commonplace events of everyday living. They represent
an enduring spiritual affirmation of the kinds of urban practices that
Chase, Crawford, and Kaliski call "quotidian bricolage."(13) The
presence of angels in the urban environment marks sites of
transcendence in the everyday life of connecting, passing, and
entering. . . across a bridge, through a door, into a cathedral.

Cities in Social History

The connecting possibilities in the city make it a liberating place for
many people. The country, towns, and suburbs can be too confining
for some personalities that find comfort in being "lost in a sea of

humanity." The sheer mass of people allows for personal autonomy

and creativity that is often chased out of less dense environments.
What is everybody's business in the country is nobody's business in
the city where people must see everything while averting their eyes.
The amount of stimuli that must be coped with paradoxically causes
the urbanite to limit "surprise" to small amounts while maintaining a
capacity to be surprised by everything. Simmel noticed that the
urban eye must see fast and understand at a glance while walking
among the crowd. The urbanite is often criticized for superficiality
and a seeming inability to be moved by anything, when in fact, he
argued, the horizontal emotional landscape of endless spaces has
been reshaped and pushed vertically into deeper expressions of
specialized passion.(14) The critique of the urbanite from the point
of view of the rural or suburban personality is in fact an historically
predictable criticism. It is the self-critique of humans who have a
vague memory of having left the country for the anonymity of the
polis so that they themselves could participate in something exciting
and pleasurable -- albeit painful and violent. When the urbanite is
charged with having fabricated an identity out of nothing, created
masks, corralled time and intellectuality, broken the balance of
symmetry, and become ambivalent about belonging,(15) rest assured
that it is all true, and that the charges themselves bear a silent and
often unremembered truth.

The Blood Lamb Is a Sufficient Sacrifice

Walking with Simmel causes us to challenge too quick a dismissal
of historic everyday theologies that explained violence. Humans at
one time lived in agriculturally based societies that gathered
periodically, usually following the planting and harvesting seasons,
to engage in ritual practices that sought fertility and survival. Many
of our folk dances originate in these festive times when we looked
forward to being together, bathed, wove flowers into our hair, and
anticipated each other. Into these happy moments that we looked
forward to came a critical part of our being together: ritual sacrifice.
It is the naked truth that humans sacrificed each other and their
livestock in exchange for the favors of gods. We taught each other
how to manage our fears by sacrificing our own flesh and blood.
Our fears created the ritual victim.
We humans would come back year after year to dance and to sing on
the blood soaked ground of our victims. As the ritual obligations and
the human community grew, so too did the need to have a priest who
stayed behind and managed the ritual affairs. Markets grew up
around the administration of the sacred site. As the urban center
grew it never lost traces of this history. The city is built on the blood
of our rituals and their victims. We remember, fundamentally from
deep down inside of us, that violence and the city go together. A

murder in the country or in the suburbs "shocks" us, but, we

"expect" violence in the city. Going into the city with a feeling of
safety betrays the nonurbanite's "common sense."
So too is pleasure associated with the city. People like the thrill of
lights, the pace, the ability to be a part of the crowd. Inscribed in our
sociological memory is the joy of being together. The memory of
violence and pleasure are intertwined. Urbanites not only think
differently about safety, urbanites know how to create safe places
inside of each other -- a way of life often unknown by nonurbanites.
The most difficult aspect of urban ministry is violence and pleasure
and how we help our people understand both of them. Judaism
remembers Isaac as the one who was saved from being the victim,
Christianity begins with the experience of Jesus as the victim who
refused to be a victim. Our sacred story tells us that He is the blood
sacrifice to end all blood sacrifices. The faithful teach each other
that they are to never again to pick up the knife or to build a cross.
We are never to think that our ritualized violence comes from God.
God's hand sent an angel to free Isaac from the knife and to
announce the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Our rituals of
violence are the work of our own hands.
So, the faithful tell each other that God wants our rituals to become
like the worship of the angels. The ritual of Christian Eucharist
(Greek for good gifts) from its earliest memory is a bloodless
sacrifice taken from the agricultural offerings of the common people
(bread and wine). God sent Christians into the world to be good
gifts, to be bloodless sacrifices to end all blood sacrifice. The
faithful do this by surrendering themselves, by withdrawing the
power to create a victim. Police chiefs often are praised, and stolen
away from other cities, precisely on this ability to regulate, diffuse,
and dismantle the power to kill. Good ministers are sought after for
the same reasons.
Christians are sent into the heart of violence to labor unrewarded in
this life.(16) We are to celebrate the giving of life and work to end
the taking of life. When we see life threatened, we are to enter into
violence as if we were angels sent by God with messages of peace.
We are to exchange our lives for that of the threatened other.
Believers call this substitution "suffering." Suffering is always
unjust labor. It is rather unjust that angels must leave heaven to
bring justice to the evil projects of humans. This is why tradition
tells us that justice is divine. Because they are especially rare,
tradition reminds us, the names of those who suffer in this exchange
will be remembered forever before God as martyrs. Angels and
martyrs line the pathway to heaven.

All Angels Hold Our Souls in Their Hands,

City Angels Just Work Harder at It
Recently, as a group of students rounded a corner in Chinatown with
me, we all stopped: standing stone-still in front of the Church of the
Transfiguration, we were drawn into a holy drama. In front of us and
behind the church wall, there was a beautiful Chinese woman with
her arms stretched up and open. The harder she cried the higher her
hands reached up for the hands of Mary. The arms of this beautiful
statue of the Virgin Mary were open and reaching downward, ready
to grasp the hands of the one in front of her. There in that moment,
we saw the Real City.
When I see women on their knees crying out to Mary, I see them
seeking the tender presence of another mother who can teach them
how to give up their fears. She seems a rather trustworthy teacher,
being such a good example herself.(17) If we look carefully around
the city at the statues women frequent, we find in Mary's open
hands, and at her feet, flowers. When I stand listening to the sobs of
women, I often think that I hear the flutter of the angels who brought
them to the Virgin -- and who are waiting, quietly, to walk back
home with them.
Tom, an urban priest and colleague, summarizes angels this way:
"They protect us, give us strength, and take our fears away so that
we are able to see who we really are." When we see who we really
are, we see our faces, we see face to face with God. Some traditions
call such a "face to face" experience when we see who we really are
"salvation." In the urban setting, salvation comes to us when we see
face to face in the homeless shelters in the basements of synagogues
and churches, or the after school programs for youth. In soup
kitchens, employment centers, affordable day care programs or
summer camping excursions, everyday moments of transcendence
can be found every day. Angels are under the bridges and over the
doorways that these programs represent in collective urban life.
They are behind our discovery of who we really are, nudging us to
be brave and to hold each other's souls in our hands. In the city, we
have to work harder at it.

Urban Angels Bring Flowers and Tough

Assignments
I know my own students fairly well. Most of them are second career
adults and many of them pastors, returning for advanced degrees. I
have not yet met a city pastor who does not have a healthy respect
for the spirit world. The evangelical pastors who ask me to talk
about the city, at the end of a very heavy week of urban exposure,

are, every one of them, ready to take on the demons of the city. They
have been to the South Bronx on the subway, they have fed the
homeless under bridges and they have sung praises in Spanish
Harlem. Their less evangelical counterparts spent most of their
immersion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Barnes and Nobles,
Starbucks, and the cathedrals; they even petted lions that the locals
would never think to distract from their guardianship duties in front
of the New York Public Library. They tend to focus on the more
spectacular aspects of the city. Among visitors, long-distance
partners in ministry, and those who desire to become urban pastors,
activists, and missionaries, there is an almost "natural" inclination to
specialize in the activities of the fallen or the nonfallen.
There is another category of urban practitioners, those who need no
exposure or immersion as they already inhabit the whole story of the
city. For them, the demons and the angels are nestled into a densely
crowed life. Urbanites, the local people, tend to be concerned about
analyzing structures of power and finding new places to bury their
dead. They tend to want to see the whole picture, they are
continually remapping the terrain of complicated hierarchies. They
seem to know that the Devil, the Archangel Michael and the Mayor
all meet regularly for coffee. An encounter with any one of them
alone hardly seems worth the time.
There are important things to do with one's time, like worrying
about other cities and finding people who can tell you plainly what
fear terrorized Lenin into taking the angel statues down from the
roof tops of St. Petersburg. What fear was it that convinced him to
replace the angels with statues of his soldiers -- and himself -- as the
new angelic guardian of the city of Leningrad?

The City Is a Strange Place: Angels Teach

Math There
The cities we live in are often thought of as profanely weird -- as in
too strange to be true. The faithful often speak of the city as if its
redemption is something yet to be accomplished, as if its redemption
has not already come. When the faithful speak of a "Holy City" they
are most often referring to a future city, a city in our imaginations. It
turns out that our sociological attitude about theological
presuppositions makes all the difference in urban practice. How
people think sociologically will shape whether or not they see the
Holy City as the Real City.
Inside the Real City, inside of the soul life of communities, there
exists a natural discourse of complaint and reassurance. It is totally
unclear to most urban mothers and fathers why more angels don't
exist in their neighborhoods. In the city, where children's lives are

all too fragile, urbanites are a bit anxious to bring angels to earth. If
people think that the Holy City is yet to come, they will miss the
angels who are standing right next to them and they will miss the
call of the angels on our lives. If children are crying in the city it is
not because the angels are not there, it is because people are not
there ready to connect our passion and our resources with the child
that needs us. They have not let the angels put the children's hands
in theirs. The Child + The Angel + You = Ministry. God + You + The
Other = Just Relationships. The faithful's interpretation of the Bible
and the people's complaint allow us no room at all to slide out of our
responsibilities to the city.
There is much teaching to be done. The people whose vocation it is
to join the angels in teaching math to inner-city children might
benefit from the companionship of theorists like Georg Simmel.
Theory helps us "size things up at a glance." I encourage urban
practitioners to locate and become familiar with a school of
sociologists who have examined the social realities that shape their
vocational contexts. Schools are helpful, in that what one fish is
blind to, the other sees. And then, I encourage them to swim
between the schools in order to "see things differently." Social
theory is an engine that powers the angelic swiftness that urban
crises require.(18)

Notes
1. [Back to text] See Bauman Zygmut, Postmodern Ethics (London:
Blackwell Publishers, 1993).
2. [Back to text] Michael Kaern, "Georg Simmel's 'The Bridge and
the Door,' " Qualitative Sociology 17, no. 4 (1994): 407.
3. [Back to text] Ibid., 409.
4. [Back to text] Ibid., 408-9.
5. [Back to text] As told by Professor Akintude Akinade, Highpoint
University, N.C.
6. [Back to text] Kaern, "Georg Simmel's 'The Bridge and the
Door,' " 402.
7. [Back to text] Georg Simmel, "The Bridge and the Door."
Qualitative Sociology 17, no. 4 (1994): 412. Translated with notes
by Michael Kaern.
8. [Back to text] Kaern, "Georg Simmel's 'The Bridge and the

Door,' " 410-11.

9. [Back to text] Ibid., 410.
10. [Back to text] See Donald N. Levine, ed. On Individuality and
Social Forms: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1971).
11. [Back to text] Georg Simmel, Essays on Religion (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1997).
12. [Back to text] John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley (Grand
Rapids: Baker Books, 1958), 10:105.
13. [Back to text] John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John
Kaliski, Everyday Urbanism (New York: Conacelli Press,
1999), 174.
14. [Back to text] Kenneth M. Brody, "Simmel as a Critic of
Metropolitan Culture," Wisconsin Sociologist 19, no. 4 (1982): 7583.
15. [Back to text] Ibid., 78.
16. [Back to text] Charles Williams, The Decent of the Dove: A
History of the Holy Spirit in the Church, introduction by W. H.
Auden (New York: Living Age Books/Meridian, 1956).
17. [Back to text] Martin Luther claimed that the spirit that is
unwilling to suffer for others, through the ultimate sacrifice of the
body, cannot sing The Magnificat. An unwillingness to suffer and to
be in the depths is an unwillingness to be with God and to do the
work of God. The spirit that points to her/ him/itself as exalted agent
cannot sing either. Had Mary exalted herself, Luther writes, ". . . she
would have fallen like Lucifer. . ." Luther goes on to observe that
Mary had never expected news like this -- much less from an angel.
However, hers was the response that the angels are sent to pull out
of us. When the news came, Mary knew what she had to do: she
ennobled the angelic message as the Word of the Lord. Someone had
to have taught her how to believe the angelic message and how to
act. Luther never does tell the princes how to teach the raging beasts
how to listen to the "tender Mother of God." (Luther's own lack of
compassion for Jews does make one wonder how hard he had to
work to ignore what must have been a host of angels trying to get
his attention.) Luther's Works (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing
House, 1955-86), 21:287-355.
18. [Back to text] Simmel, Essays on Religion, 1997. See also the
following works by George Simmel: The Sociology of Georg

Simmel (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950); Conflict and the Web of
Group Affiliations (New York: Free Press, 1955; Sociology of
Religion (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959); Georg Simmel:
The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays (New York:
Teachers College Press, 1968); On Individuality and Social Forms
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); Essays on
Interpretation in Social Sciences (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1980); Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality and Love
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
Photo credits: DSIE Douglas Steven Irvin-Erickson, photographer
NYPL public domain photos from the Picture Collection of the
Branch Libraries of the New York Public Library.
A thank you to the NYPL librarians, to Dale T. Irvin and Tony
Carnes for early critique, to Joe Farias for pushing me to define the
difference between dead myths and living mythic realities, and to
Chris Troy and Boston's urban angels. Any lack of insight is truly
my own.
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Source: Cross Currents, Spring 2001, Vol. 51, No 1.