Discerning the Angel of Detroit

THE CITY [in Hebrew] is 'iyr or 'iyr re'em. Now this word has several meanings. It is not only the city, but also the Watching Angel, the Vengeance and the Terror ... We must admit that the city is not just a collection of houses with ramparts, but also a spiritual power. I am not saying it is a being. But like an angel it is a power, and what seems prodigious is that its power is on a spiritual plane.
-- The Meaning of the City, by Jacques Ellul

IN THE HOT SUMMER OF 1988 SOMETHING happened in Detroit. A well-financed campaign to legalize and develop casino gambling as the panacea for the city's desperate, ongoing economic crisis was rejected overwhelmingly at the polls. It was one in a series of rebuffs for Mayor Coleman Young's administration.

Oh, yes, there was a hard-working, no-budget countercampaign by neighborhood organizations, and a stiffening in city pulpits -- even in some normally sympatico with the mayor's agenda. But perhaps something more was at work ...

One neighborhood activist who served a token appointment on the mayor's blue-ribbon committee studying the issue offered a minority report of solid arguments and reasons, then groped further, to the brink of something more: "I don't know, I'm not sure how to say this. Detroit is a blue-collar town. Its essential character is just a bad fit for casinos, with their big money and glitz. From an image perspective, it just doesn't work."

What if the city of Detroit, its spirit and identity, was an ally, most unacknowledged, in the fight against the casino invasion? That would be a political (and theological) insight worth pursuing.

Recent exegetical work and theological reflection on the principalities and powers suggests a versatile but coherent New Testament cosmology that recognizes the spiritual dimension of institutions and social structures. One which may be verified in our experience.

As the letter to the church in the city of Colosse implies, these structures are simultaneously material and spiritual, seen and unseen, interior and exterior, earthly and heavenly. They are expressed in two poles of reality as it were. "For in [Christ] all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities -- all things were created through Christ and for Christ" (Colossians 1:16).

It is an interesting exercise in first century "social analysis" to apply these political categories to the city of Detroit:

The throne is the seat of power -- that is, the mayor's office, the council chamber, the Monoogian Mansion where the mayor lives.

Dominion is the realm or territory, even the sphere of influence. Here one thinks first of municipal boundaries, such as Eight Mile Road. But its social and political influence (much diminished these days) in the Tri-County area or the State Capitol should be counted as well. Dominion consists of those places and ways the city's authority penetrates the lives of its people.

The principality, the prince, is the agent-in-role, the ruler-in-office: not Coleman Young, but Mr. Mayor.

Authorities are the range of sanctions and legitimations by which authority is maintained. A longer list comes to mind, from the cops and courts to rituals like election campaigning, press conferences, ground breakings, and photo opportunities; or symbols like the city charter, the seal, those billboards proclaiming city sponsorship at this or that development site, and the mayor's image hung in front offices everywhere, from city clerk to neighborhood police ministation. You can think of more.

The elements are not exhaustive. Among other things they omit economic seats of power such as the auto companies or bank board rooms or the multinational powers of illegal commerce like the drug cartels that open street level "branch offices," each of which has its own spirituality.

Moreover, the political administration and the city as an entity name two very distinct powers. The City of Detroit (which one may look up in the telephone book and with persistence eventually reach) is not the same as Detroit the city. It may presume to speak for the city, but the two voices are not one and the same. It may try to claim the rich history or the spirit of the city, but these are not its own to manipulate or dispose of.

The City as a Spiritual Power
After the Biblical manner of the angels of the nations (portrayed most dramatically in Daniel 10) or the angels of the churches (addressed in the opening chapters of Revelation), I have begun to speak of the "angel of Detroit." The term piques and intrigues. By it I mean what has been called the "actual inner spirituality" of the city. I mean to get at its identity and vocation, its character and personality, its potentiality as well as its fallenness before God.

One of the first to write about the city in this fashion was Jacques Ellul. Because his book The Meaning of the City was something of a theological companion to his devastating sociological work The Technological Society, but also because Ellul's theology simply goes this way, it is relentlessly pessimistic about the character of the city as a human work and its predatory fallenness as a spiritual power. (One hastens to add that in keeping with his theology, he is also radically hopeful about God's grace, judging the city but adopting it nevertheless as an instrument of grace.)

The idea that the city is at once a human work and a spiritual power is a mystery key to any understanding of the principalities (of which the city may be said, in Ellul's view, to be the very prototype). It is in this regard that Ellul mines the mythic primeval history of Genesis with astonishing results.

Who, do you happen to recall, was the first builder of a city? It was Cain. As a resident of Detroit, whose media monikers notoriously include "Murder City," I find my ears perk up.

Banished to a life of wandering and insecurity, "He built a city and called the name of the city after the name of his son Enoch" (Genesis 4:17). By murder Cain has broken his relationship to humanity, to God, and even to the earth (which received Abel's blood and cried out to the Lord). He has destroyed his home and so sets out to build his own security, the city named Enoch, meaning "initiation" or "dedication." Cain's bold pretension is to construct and dedicate his own new world. Violence is the kernel of alienation by which the brave new city is seeded.

And idolatry. Here we think most readily of the tower of Babel. "And they said to one another, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves'" (Genesis 11:4). The tower, says Ellul, is not the center of the narrative, the city and the name are. The one is the means to the other. But name here means not so much reputation and notoriety as becoming independent, making their own name.

It is now widely understood that naming in Israelite culture has a supreme importance. It signifies dominion. It is a token of spiritual power. The city, then, is not a Promethean act reaching up to God. It is the act of making an identity by making a world, an urban environment, a great city. It is the act of excluding God from creation. It is incipient and express idolatry. So Ellul's radical pessimism.

Here we are at the mystery of works become fallen, of demonic powers. Here is the truth of Enoch and Babel and Babylon and Rome and New York and, alas, even Detroit. Insofar as human beings find meaning and justification and identity in the city, they make its angel a fallen angel.

William Stringfellow used to say that the vocation of the principalities was to praise God and serve human life. I like the image of Detroit singing in the courts of God, not to mention serving its own inhabitants. I know, however, that it suffers blindness, confusion, inflation, and distortion in the fall.

As Jesus approached Jerusalem, he paused to address it. "Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace." (Jerusalem's name means "city of peace," though it suffered a deep confusion and blindness.) "But now they are hid from your eyes. For the days shall come upon you, when your enemies will cast up a bank about you and surround you, and hem you in on every side, and dash you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you; because you did not know the kairos of your visitation" (Luke 19:42-44).

Walter Wink, who has done so much good work in recent years on the powers, points out that each of the pronouns in this passage is singular. Jesus addresses the city as an entity: you. Dare we say he has discerned the angel of Jerusalem and spoken to it? First he names and addresses it, claiming the dominion of the Word of God, then he enters its symbolic center with the strong action at the temple.

Several things strike as noteworthy clues within. One, if we accept the synoptic portrayal of events where this is his first glimpse, Jesus discerns the angel of Jerusalem in Galilee! Perhaps this should not be so surprising. The city's dominion, its sphere of influence spiritual and political and economic, dominated the region. To abide with the poor of Galilee was to feel the weight of the Temple City, to know its true character, because they were beholden to its aristocracy, its obligations, its interests.

In Galilee Jesus felt its influence, as evidenced by his temptations and again later through its intimidations. "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house is forsaken" (Luke 13:34-35).

There is love here. It is the agonized love that causes Jesus to break down in tears, even as he approaches the city to confront and rebuke its power. By such accounts, Jesus loves Jerusalem, longs for it to praise God and serve human life. I don't know if that is prerequisite to discernment, but he does yearn that it should recognize this kairos, this opportunity wherein it might repent and recover its calling before God.

ALL RIGHT. EMBOLDENED BY THE LORD, I admit it: I love Detroit. I love that it's a movement town. The home of the sit-down strike. Rich in a history of struggle. Count the left groups and factions that have their official headquarters at this prodigious address. Martin King tried out both his "I Have a Dream" speech and the Vietnam renunciation in Detroit first. They flew.

I love the black majority and even revel in the scandal that it is to the American norm. The '67 riot burns in my high school consciousness like a revelatory moment, a personal and political turning point. Not that de facto segregation doesn't carve up neighborhoods (and churches), but I delight in the wealth of street culture.

There's so much of the South in Detroit's black, and white, community -- family and extended kinship and hospitality and old-fashioned morality. Waves were drawn north by the auto companies, much like the Europeans before who still cluster by culture in neighborhoods. I love the Hispanic barrio on the Southwest side where we live, and the fact that Detroit has the largest Arab population this side of the Middle East.

I love the legacy of Motown soul, the gospel music, and the Detroit jazz within it. I love Tiger Stadium and confess my loyalty to certain of the city's athletic teams.

I love the river. The straits, from which the French name, des troits, is our link with the Great Lakes ecosystem. I love Belle Isle, the huge island park that is the chief recreational resource of the city's poor. There mix the smells of river water and barbecue.

I love the city. And I dread it, too. And sometimes I weep. So, is that prerequisite to discerning the angel of Detroit? Maybe.

In spring 1989 a handful of activists and church people who are engaged in ministry or social struggle in Detroit met for six weeks with this precise project in mind. They committed themselves to bringing the city as an entity into their established spiritual disciplines. To intercede for the city in prayer. To hold it in heart during scripture study. To attend to its spirit in journal keeping.

The immediate concrete project was to write something in the voice of the city or to address the Word to Detroit in this historical moment, much like the Revelation 2 letters, "To the angel of Detroit write this ..." (The latter may seem at first blush pretentious, but no more bold really than a preacher taking the pulpit week after week to speak the Word to a congregation.)

A first question we asked one another concerned geography. Implicitly a question about social location (as Jesus with the Galilean peasantry), it is also a matter of physical place and a stimulus to imagination. John had his Patmos for divining the angel of Rome. Where would we stand to listen for the voice of the city?

By the river at Belle Isle? Above one of the freeway canyons that riddle the city? At Solidarity House, union headquarters? At an empty lot in a devastated neighborhood such as the Cass Corridor? Surrounded by the famous Diego Rivera mural depicting with care and irony industrial Detroit? In Elmwood Cemetery, which retains one of the few plots of original pre-urban terrain?

A FEW YEARS EARLIER, BY VIRTUE of my part in a neighborhood organization, I had represented the community on a development coalition composed elsewise of institutional and corporate types. Their vision and agenda was different from ours. Still, if we met in the neighborhood the reality of food lines and housing needs, the lives of people, were never completely out of sight and mind. But when they took to meeting in a conference room in the heady heights of the Renaissance Center, a downtown megastructure, our community faded literally into the distance and a different spirit presided.

Outside the City-County Building is a large sculpture called The Spirit of Detroit. Its image is reproduced on city letterheads, documents, and building project signs. More than the city seal, it is the official symbol of Detroit. For that reason the spirit has some currency in political discourse. It is claimed and abused and struggled over.

Sometimes dubbed the "green giant," the sculpture was completed in the '50s by an artist known for war memorials and works on a grand scale, such as the world's largest crucifix in the woods of northern Michigan. Inspired by 2 Corinthians 3:17 that "where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty," he set to work. A large figure of humanity, quite male and Scandinavian, holds a golden sphere of the deity in his left hand; and in his right hand, toward which he looks, a nuclear family lifts its arms to heaven.

A museum curator whom I asked about the sculpture thought the divine sphere signified "science and the industrial genius of the auto companies." (There is an annual car show called the Spirit of Detroit.) A city government publication avers, "For many it symbolizes the city's new spirit of renaissance and rebuilding." The City Council confers Spirit of Detroit awards on prominent and worthy citizens. But a group of community organizations fighting for neighborhood priorities over downtown development in the city budget calls itself the Save Our Spirit Coalition.

The sculpture itself marks out a kind of public political space. It is the common site of demonstrations against city administration policies. I once saw a coven of witches gather there to invoke Hecate and curse the world's largest trash incinerator being built within city limits.

Most intriguing is a weekly vigil of the Anti-Handgun Association. At the foot of the sculpture they read aloud a small booklet of facts and the stories of victims. It is a kind of meditation, a liturgy really. Included is a modified verse of the black spiritual, "Were you there when each day a child was shot?" But the refrain at the close of each small section is "Spirit of Detroit, save our youth!" I believe the angel of Detroit is being named and addressed in this little event.

On the other hand, as part of a 1988 ad campaign, a gigantic fez cap (you know, with tassels like the Shriners wear) was set upon the statue's head to coincide with the appearance of billboards bearing a similar image and announcing that "Conventions are the Spirit of Detroit." Which is to say again that the spirit of the city is a matter of dispute. It is subject to diverse claims, humiliations, and manipulations.

That dispute and the "conventions-as-the-spirit" claim call to mind that Detroit, like so many other cities (or like the nation for that matter or even the global economy), is a tale of two cities. One is the living city composed of neighborhoods where poor and working people reside, almost entirely in single-family homes. (Until the late '60s, Detroit was the largest homeowning city north of the Mason-Dixon Line. ) The other is the new downtown of government-subsidized megastructures: arenas, the convention center, hotels, commercial space, luxury high-rises, and office buildings, all connected by an elevated railway going in circles. Conventioneers and executives never need set foot on the streets of the city.

IT IS ON THOSE MEGASTRUCTURES that the Young administration is banking and betting. Mortgaging the Block Grant budget, funneling grants to large-scale private development, and hustling tax abatements is the official order of the day.

A five-tower skyscraper, this weird urban stalagmite is the emblem, anchor, and centerpiece of the scheme. Spearheaded by auto money, it was built in the wake of the '67 insurrection. Intended to signify a rising from the ashes, a mock resurrection, it was called the Renaissance Center and intended to make a name for Detroit: Renaissance City.

The influence of the riots is in its bones. It has an imposing and inaccessible structure, literally defensible. Ringed with a concrete embankment, one readily imagines the location of gun turrets.

I used to think of drafting a theological leaflet summarizing Ellul's Babel reflections and distributing it within. But the only time I ever attempted to leaflet there, we were swarmed by plain-clothes private security bearing walkie-talkies and summoning the city cops, who arrived in a flash. (The marketplace at the Renaissance Center as elsewhere is no longer public. It is privately owned. The streets may belong to the people, but the streets are disappearing.)

The RenCen marketplace is a failure by and large. Its three-story shopping mall with an endless series of circular passages is a nightmare to navigate, the reputed "easiest place to get lost in Detroit." It signifies the failed attempt to move the suburbs downtown, to reverse the drain that has been going on since the first shopping mall in the world, Northland, was built in Detroit -- or, more precisely, just outside of it.

Detroit photographers with an eye for the human or the ironic never tire of juxtaposing a glass-strewn lot or the burned shell of a building with the shining towers of the RenCen. The view of one city from the other.

In the decaying neighborhoods, there is a phenomenon that is also a metaphor: brick thievery. An unlicensed dump truck jostles and pulls at the walls of abandoned apartment buildings until the facade collapses. The driver, a maverick subcontractor himself, pays streetpeople day-labor wages to clean and load the bricks into his truck. Neighbors, slow on the uptake, imagine the city has sponsored the demolition. (Indeed 150,000 Detroit homes -- nearly half the total -- have been burned or bulldozed in recent years. And by current count there are more than 15,000 abandoned buildings in the city.)

Come evening the truck is gone and the frame shell of the building, more exposed and unsafe than ever, remains standing in a pile of rubble. The bricks go for top dollar in the suburbs where patios, I suppose, get that aged urban character.

Like the suburban boom still going on, downtown development by and large sucks the life, including city-budget priorities, out of the neighborhoods. The new office towers drain the business from the older addresses, leaving empty aging tombs on the marginal skyline.

The most notorious and blatant example of such megadevelopment was the 1980 condemnation and destruction of an entire integrated, ethnic neighborhood of 1,200 homes to build a highly automated Cadillac plant. (Two older General Motors plants, including one just blocks from my house, closed simultaneously for a substantial net-loss in jobs.) In the Poletown neighborhood, arson aided and abetted the project by driving out the resisting residents and making demolition easier.

The Poletown project marked a turning point in recent Detroit history. A friend of mine calls it "the official sanction to devastation."

And it is also the emblem of Detroit's bondage to the auto industry, to principalities and powers that have fed on the city, its human population, and now have grown larger in scale and scope than the city itself. They move capital, exporting jobs south, or south of the border. By that freedom and threat, they blackmail the city for tax abatements and land. No longer, Do you want General Motors, one of the world's largest corporations, in Detroit? But, Do you want Detroit in General Motors?

Growing up here I shared the fascination with the motorcar. My wife still marvels at my unsuppressed enthusiasm for the useless skill of distinguishing a '55 Chevrolet from a '56. The automobile is deeply entangled not merely with the economy, but with the collective psyche of Motor City. Detroit is a ruined shrine to that version of American consumer idolatry.

AT ONE SESSION OF OUR "Discerning the Angel" group, we tried to bring our own unconscious resources, our right brains, as it is said, into the process by forming an image of Detroit's angel in clay. I found myself shaping up a figure crying out in the grip of a gigantic hand.

Was that hand the power of the multinational auto companies? I think perhaps it was. Though it might in equal portion have been the grip of the cocaine powers.

Not many years ago, one citywide drug-dealing organization, Young Boys, Inc., did $400 million of business annually. Today, crack cocaine sales top a billion dollars a year. The market includes a broad range of users, from the auto worker pulling down $35,000 and spending half of it on crack, to members of the permanent underclass being paid, in effect, in crack "rocks" for the goods they've stolen from their neighbors' homes. The average user has a $250 a week habit.

Crack houses vary, too. On one end is the social crack house, like the "blind pig" of Prohibition days with its "tavern culture," diverse and illicit services, ersatz community, and personal interaction. On the other end is the fortified abandoned building where sales are made through a slot in the door. Some set-ups, as suggested, are fencing operations that exchange cocaine for stolen merchandise.

All of them are arsenals full of weapons. And not just handguns. (In Detroit there are already two of these for every man, woman, and child. ) Semi-automatics and Uzis are rife. Enforcers patrol the streets in four-wheel-drive jeeps with tinted glass. Same vehicles and weapons and methods as the Salvadoran death squads, say.

Earlier this year, in a neighborhood on the Northwest side, a wave of crack houses invaded. Now with such invasions comes a simultaneous arrival: a palpable spirit of fear and intimidation. You can almost taste the acrid smell, a shadow of death settling in.

Against the houses and their spirit, residents made repeated police calls but without response. Finally one day the cops made a bust, a buyer coming out. Across the street, an older black woman who had made the call raised her arms and rejoiced, "Thank you, Jesus! Thank you!" Some would say she was unduly and indiscreetly bold.

The next morning an ambulance arrived at her home, summoned by a 911 call. A shooting had been reported. She was dumbfounded; they had been misinformed. She didn't know who had called.

On the following day arrived the "dead wagon," as she calls it, from the nearby funeral home. They had been called to pick up the body.

Now these are death threats in the concrete, and sophisticated ones at that, but the older woman was having none of it. She consulted her friend, another senior citizen veteran of the civil rights movement (with which the city is filled) and together they convened a meeting at her church on Rosa Parks Boulevard. "My dreams," one of them later reported, "overtook my fears."

On Friday night next, they met in a storefront, were led in prayer by their Baptist pastor, and there began a slow procession through the community, pausing in front of the known crack houses and singing, "We Shall Overcome." Every third Friday they do it again. And it's catching on in other neighborhoods.

This is an exorcism, dear friends. It is a discernment of the spirit of death and a public rebuke. A refusal of its claim. This is a public liturgy of freedom, for person and community. On a scale at once modest and bold, it is an attempt to set at liberty the neighborhood, indeed the city of Detroit, its angel. Most of us in the angel discernment group have joined them on one occasion or another.

DISCERNMENT OF SPIRITS. Among the so-called charismatic gifts, it is the political sleeper. But how to go about it, this odd and intuitive grace?

In our little group, we did Bible study of Luke, Colossians, Daniel, Cain, and Babel. We heard a poet read glimpses of his loving urban realism. We watched a film and played with clay. We talked and talked about what we love and hate about Detroit and how it is at a historical turning point. But in the end we listened. We found the time, chose geography (I did go to Belle Isle), and sat to listen and write. The most wonderful things came forth.

At our last group session, we read our work to one another. It was nothing less than a liturgical event. More than once we came to tears.

One of these "prophecies" (let's call them that) was a plaintive plea in the city's voice, "Here I am, listen to me now." Weak but not beaten, tired but not driven out. A voice in cries and whispers from the river, the alleys, the boarded homes and closed shops, and the places of power. A voice driven underground, but yearning to be called out and heeded.

Another was confessional and repentant, naming its pulsing heart in neighborhood life, but confessing the temptations of big-ticket development.

One, in the loving voice of the Lord God, chastised the angel for succumbing to the seductions and illusions of material affluence, the appetites that willingly tolerate injustice for the continuing paycheck. And for failing to take on the struggle against the multinational corporations that left Detroit, a losing struggle but one which, if articulated, could have helped save the soul of the city's people.

Yet another was a meditation focused on the sculpture, "A Message to the Spirit of Detroit from the One who was dead but now lives." It called the spirit to attend to its family, especially the children and youth, by turning its eyes to the divine energy that alone can renew.

There were more. I do none of them justice. Were they definitive? No. Were they subjective? Admittedly and necessarily so. But they got at something easily neglected; they pointed to something real. Something in need of healing within and without. Ourselves and our city.

Someone suggested they might well be used as readings to begin a neighborhood meeting. Just so. In such a paraliturgy, could they revive in others what had come alive again in us? Our love for Detroit, its people, its spirit. A realism and a vision. A sense of the times.

In that spirit, I put down here the concluding portions of my own attempt, written and rewritten. May it be a true word to the angel of Detroit:

Die and arise. In your weakness is your hope. You are at an end and a beginning. Recollect your best history and come alive.

You will do this if you set the lives of your people above your own. Attend to the least, the poorest, the homeless. Defend them from the ravages of corporation and economy. In their empowerment is your life.

Cast off your bondages. (This too may feel like dying.) Begin with drugs and guns. Your people pray for this; join them in action. Instead of Murder Capital, become the city of nonviolence. It can be so.

Your industrial heyday has gone to rust. You will not see its like again. Now think small. Encourage the modest, an economy of creativity and self-reliance. Nourish the projects of human scale, the works of community and struggle.

Let your empty lots bloom green; you will find there a hidden economy all its own.

Sit light upon the river, but not as real estate frontage for the rich. Be in right relationship to its life, and through it to the region, to earth itself.

For your sins, enough. Now you have my blessing. Sing to glory and come to life.

Let it be so. Amen.

Bill Wylie-Kellermann is a Sojourners contributing editor.