I made a remark once, after a typical Chicago scandal, that ”someplace else it might be shocking . . .(but) children here grow up knowing things are rigged and fixed.” After 38 years here I am equally ready to say that Chicago is a city where some virtues have their way, where imaginations can soar, where memories grow rich.
And there are memories. I think back 48 years to the day when, on the way to prep school in Milwaukee, this skinny 14-year-old Nebraskan who`d never seen a metropolis poised his Brownie camera against the window of the old Milwaukee Road train. In my imagining, there must be some spot from which one would get a very first glimpse of Chicago. Somewhere, I thought, the fields must abruptly end and the skyscrapers start. I`m still naive about the limits of Chicago.
Weekends-back then in the `40s-I would hitchhike with my roommate to walk in wonder around the University of Chicago. The ”Great Ideas” beckoned from its towers, as did the ”Great Idea People,” including university guests such as Jacques Maritain and T.S. Eliot, on whom we`d eavesdrop. My imagination was too small for the Great Idea that it would become my vocation some day to teach there.
Ten years after my Brownie didn`t catch a picture, I was back, seminary degree in hand, to help ”save” Chicago through 10 years of pastoral ministry. While working on my doctorate, from 1954 to `56, I served in two suburban churches and filled vacancies in a number of city congregations. I learned what was rigged and what was fixed about people`s lives, as well as what was full of grace and freedom.
Such ministry meant calling in hospitals, appearing in court (”You`re no good as a character witness, Reverend; you preachers find something nice to say about everybody”), crying with the victims of riots, singing with suburbanites, listening to children. One learns to know the city through such a calling.
In 1963 I started becoming ”a University of Chicago theologian,” or merely a ”Chicago” one. St. Augustine talked about ”City of God” and the
”City of Earth.” Here was to be-and will remain-my City of Earth.
Chicago: All the Martys treat it as a village. As we make our way through the mazeways at the Chicago Symphony or Lyric Opera, the Art Institute, fundraisers, fairs and malls, we keep bumping into people we know. Willa Cather, who helps feed my childhood prairie imagination, once said of the flat, spare, state of her writing (and of my birth): ”There is no place to hide in Nebraska.” After a while, one finds there is no place to hide in Chicago, either. I guess I wouldn`t want it otherwise.
Thinking of this city as a village helps make my four locations seem close. Tuesdays I spend near Michigan Avenue at the Park Ridge Center, relating faith to issues of ethics, staying close to the hospital world. By moonlight, I write in the Loop, at the Christian Century, the ecumenical weekly whose editors liked Chicago so much they were always trying to lure religious headquarters here.
Weekly, there`s O`Hare for a quick hop to anywhere, since Chicago is
”halfway to everywhere.” But most days, the locale for work is the University of Chicago. I`ve traveled the equivalent of four times around the world on the Stevenson and Eisenhower Expressways getting there. I won`t leave the university until 3 p.m., March 20, 1998. Retirement hour.
I tell prospective students and dissertation writers alike that Chicago is the place to come to study American religion. A half-dozen major seminaries are a pebble`s throw from my office window and they come equipped with archives, as do scores of denominational headquarters, think tanks, ”new religion” nerve centers and action agencies, all of which attract interesting people who are doing things we historians have to note.
Modernism in religion? It was born, in a way, right under our University of Chicago noses. Fundamentalism? I am halfway through a five-year project directing a team of international experts studying fundamentalism worldwide for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The American version was born here at the Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College. In 1893 at the World`s Parliament of Religions, religionists from around the world brought their wares and hopes to Chicago. They keep coming.
Theologians are supposed to worry about chauvinism and idolatry of place. Chicago inspires little of that, maybe because its athletic teams rarely adopt winning patterns. Meanwhile, there`s no danger of confusing this ”City of Earth” with the ”City of God.” People do too much rigging and fixing here. In 1960 on a visit to Glasgow, in a garden behind a pub, over ale, the locals heard my accent, and one asked, ”If you are a Chicagoan, are you old enough to have known Al Capone?” No, I told him, but I was old enough to know Martin Luther King and some Nobel Prize winners and novelists and physicians and planners and children, all of whom knew about what was ”rigged and fixed.” They simply have not let those boundaries that Chicago sets limit their imaginations or sap their energies.
Survivors will likely get me away from here only at the end, perhaps
(”dust to dust”) as ashes in an urn. Ship it, please, to the city of God, which, I would hope, would not turn out, to a Chicagoan, to be completely unfamiliar. Just unrigged, unfixed and free.