The Faithful Departed—2006

Eternal rest grant unto them...

As we prepare to turn the corner on a new year, it is customary to look back and remember important figures who have died over the previous twelve months. Generally speaking these end-of-the-year memorials involve a laundry list of some well-known person's accomplishments. Rather than duplicate those efforts, we asked our writers to reflect on the spiritual impact that someone who passed away in 2006 had upon them personally.

From a comic book artist and an urban activist to a decrepit rock club, the following reflections demonstrate just how powerfully alive the sense of the sacred can be in the most unexpected people and places.

While most of our subjects had no explicit religious connections, their ability to touch souls deeply—testified to in the essays below—is beyond doubt.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,
And let perpetual light shine upon them,
May the souls of the faithful departed,

Through the mercy of God, rest in peace,
Amen.

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Jane Jacobs

The Secular Prophet of American Cities

1916-2006

by Eileen Markey

When Jane Jacobs, the 20th Century urban activist and pro-city theorist died in May at the age of 89, we lost a secular prophet. Reading Jacobs' landmark resistance to modern city planning methods, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was one of the seminal experiences of my college years.  It was an academic experience, but also a spiritual one.

Jacobs' work trumpeted the city not as a problem to be solved but as a life-affirming manifestation of creativity. A city allowed to function properly has a soul, she argued. Her work resonated with me, a bookish suburbanite transformed into an urban studies major at Fordham University in the Bronx. The book put into words that awe the living city ignited in me. This place was hawking and swirling and booming in a dozen languages, and it was great. There was life here and life abundant.

Christ in All His Disguises

Consider the difference between the neighborhood in which I now live— where a hodgepodge of pedestrian-centered, independently-owned shops and high density housing initiates dozens of informal sidewalk encounters with Christ in all his disguises—and the sense of dislocated ennui, the loneliness, engendered by the ex-urban big box parking lot. It is the difference between being a linked-in part of the Body of Christ and being an atom adrift in what Jacobs called Noplace. To me it is the difference between life and death. 

This living city has always seemed to me a basically religious, Incarnational, notion. Or maybe the Hindu god Shiva is a better example. Shiva's regenerative dance keeps the earth spinning. It is the very disquiet of a city that is holy. In it we live and move and have our being, our very presence giving testament to and creating a new organism.

Jacobs defended the deep sense of place, the human naturalness of the urban environment against post-war planners who wanted to rationalize the city, to make it as orderly and dead as Levittown. In the forty years since she wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, vast tracts of America have been consumed by the atomizing soul-lessness of suburban sprawl. Jacobs' book was and is a pro-city primary text, a bible for small-scale, organic development and mixed-use planning.

Genesis

But beyond the critique of anti-urban conformity and corseting of public space, I have always read The Death and Life of Great American Cities as a spiritual classic.

It argued that a city is so much more than the sum of its parts. Not merely a collection of business zones and high-density housing and cultural districts, but a living being, incessantly rebirthing itself. Jacobs' understanding of the power of the urban environment seemed to echo that under- appreciated early Genesis verse: "God saw it all and it was good." Before the fall and the imposition of law there was activity and it was good.

If God became human and dwelt amongst us, surely he lived here, jostling with strangers on the subway, nodding at neighbors on the corner, running into the bodega a dozen times a day. Christ didn't come so that we would be lonely and in our cars, did he? A city is a creative project, one made by our uniqueness. It is at least as sacred as a mountain top or a virgin forest.  

An Optimistic Endeavor

What is holy is the implicit faith in living with difference that cities demand of their residents. Cities are at root an optimistic endeavor, operating as they do from the belief that we are better off together.

Americans have always been uneasy with cities. From Thomas Jefferson's pastoralism to the exurban McMansion, American consciousness has been about getting out of cities. The sources of this distrust are manifold and may be rooted in fear of disorder and miscegenation. But cities also clash with the American pioneer myth. Instead of my home, my fortress, my individual stake in the wilderness, city living is a communal exercise. We have shared sidewalks, not private driveways; public buses, not personal SUVs; neighborhood parks, not gated backyards.

We live in communion, a daily manifestation of Eucharist.

We Are Linked

Sure, the guy rattling my windows with his booming bass at 2 a.m. may not have gotten the memo about shared destiny, but even deciding how to deal him is evidence that we are linked.

Responding to the idea that high density was by definition undesirable, Jacobs wrote,

On the other hand, people gathered in large concentrations of city size and density can be considered a positive good, in the faith that they are desirable because they are the source of immense vitality, and because they do represent, in small geographic compass, a great and exuberant richness of differences and possibilities, many of these differences unique and unpredictable and all the more valuable because they are.

–pages 220-222 Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs

Jacobs' analysis of the social physics of urban life was essentially spiritual. Her text posits that so many disparate ions going about their tasks do so together. We need each other. We are engaged in the creation of a living energy.

A less sentimental person might argue that it is just the subway we feel coursing beneath our feet, but I think it is the soul of the city.

I wish Jane Jacobs had lived on my block.

Eileen Markey is a freelance writer in the Bronx.

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Mary Luke Tobin, SL

The Only American Woman Invited to Participate at Vatican II

1908-2006

by James Martin, SJ

On August 24, in the motherhouse of the Sisters of Loretto, in Nerinx, Kentucky, one of the towering leaders of the Catholic church died.  She was 98.  Though Mary Luke Tobin, S.L., led a life described by superlatives, she may best be remembered as one of only 15 women, and the only American woman, to be invited to participate in the Second Vatican Council.

In article published in the Nov. 1, 1986 issue of America, the Catholic weekly, Sister Tobin noted that at the close of the second session of Vatican II, Cardinal Leo Jozef Suenens of Belgium pointedly asked his fellow bishops this question: "Why are we even discussing the reality of the church when half the church is not even represented here?" 

That query, as well as further insights that if women were invited as official auditors (or “listeners”) they should play a role in the committees formulating the documents, led to Sister Tobin's historic work.  At the time head of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organizing group of American sisters, she contributed to the commission that drafted the revolutionary documents Gaudium et Spes and Lumen Gentium.  Only two other women would serve on such commissions. 

The rest of her life was full, varied and exciting.  She led the way to update religious life, advocated for peace and justice, and worked tirelessly in the world of ecumenism.  Her autobiography, published in 1981, was aptly titled: Hope is an Open Door. 

Mary Luke Tobin, S.L., passed through church doors previously closed to women and helped to open them for those who followed—women and men alike, both halves of the church. 

James Martin is a Jesuit priest and author of My Life with the Saints.  

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