Religion of the open air

Had one of those moments of flow, of synchronicity, of rightness today. I'd taken the students in a Religious Geography of New York class on a short walk through the West Village to Abingdon Square - that's the handout below, tho' the map and picture were on opposite sides of a handbill-sized paper. The map shows our trajectory: I had half the class follow the arrows and the others go the opposite direction, with us all meeting up at Abingdon Square. There we looked at the picture in the handbill, an 1893 "Open Air War Cry" of the Salvation Army (click the pic for detail), and tried to figure out which direction it was facing and which of the buildings remained. "What do you think happened to the cathedral?" I asked coyly. "Burnt down?" No. "Torn down?" Nope. Nothing happened to it - because there never was an actual building! It's the "cathedral of the open air," conjured up by people meeting in and claiming profane public spaces for prayer and proselytizing. (Our reading was Eliade on sacred and profane. Cities are often thought of as profane, with religious sites representing refuges: the Salvation Army was literally on the front lines doing battle with the profane.)

That was fun, but the golden moment was yet to come. I walked back with half the students along 13th Street, where we noticed the Integral Yoga center, the Methodist "Church in the Village" and the beautiful portico - all that's left - of what was the Village Presbyterian Church (which you know). Then, as we waited for the light at Sixth Ave, a student pointed to the sky and asked "What's that?" It was a wire extending diagonally across the Avenue, shining in the sun, which I'd never noticed. "Must be an eruv," I said, and then, "an eruv!!!" (The drawing above is the student's.) And indeed it is, as I learned here, source also of the map at right. (An eruv defines the space within which observant Jews can carry children etc. on the sabbath.)

Now how wondrous this discovery was may not be immediately clear to you. Here are some reasons why:

1) I walk across Sixth Avenue every day, and have for years, and never noticed anything.

2) I tried to find eruv maps for the Religious Geography class in the past but somehow never found this one.

3) It was a student who saw it - confirming in the most splendid way my mantra that the value of the kind of education we offer comes from learning to see through the eyes of everyone in the room, which I'd extended for this class to the claim that we see more of the city if we see it with others.

I set out to teach the class about one kind of invisible religious structure hovering above and challenging profane space (in the past) and, with the help of students, discovered another (in the present!).