Humans have long identified sacred spaces. They have done this for no ulterior purpose at all. Most people are able to name places and events of intrinsic worth. When we raise a glass or sing a song, we do not ask, "What are we doing this for?"

It is for this very "lack of reason"— that sacred places shed a light on community and civic life. Community, itself a mystery, is created among people who stand together in sacred places, and it can extend to many others who look toward those places from afar. The decay of such places in consciousness seems a feature of "decaying" cities.

Great cities of the past treasured sacred places as basic to their common life. Asian and pre-Columbian cities in America were built as ceremonial centers. They were cosmic in design, exemplifying the axis mundi which joined heaven and earth and underworld, their apertures trained to the movements of the spheres and solar bodies. The classical Greeks and Romans found both the context and the metaphor for fulfilled human life in the city, where the highest human virtues were required and cultivated. Since these virtues included wisdom and justice, required arts of freedom and invention, and could require sacrifice and death, they were touched by the divine. Civic shrines marked places where such qualities had eminently appeared. These places were included in the education of the young for citizenship and public happiness.

To classical cities the Biblical peoples brought their sense of pilgrimage through time to the holy City. God, who was not confined in space or time, had been encountered and wrestled in places and events along the way, and had entered history to create virtues of faith, hope and love. Places of blessed memory became the goal of pilgrimages. People walked together from station to station, finding precedents and a Presence.

Sometimes such places were utterly separate from human hands: glaciers, shaking mountains, living waters, canyons. Sometimes such places were created by events: unplanned encounters for which people took the shoes off their feet because they stood on holy ground, after which they waited to recover or reform their sight, from which they undertook previously unimagined things. Sometimes such places had been built and dedicated. Temples and monuments were erected when possible on the site of an awesome un-built space or over a preceding shrine.

Lovers of the city regularly describe streets and fountains, colonnades and squares as places in which fully valued persons interact in ways which overcome the invidious comparisons of race or class or role, where all are seen to enrich the body politic. The enjoyment of such city places bears witness to a self-transcending character of public life.

Much depends on holding sacred places and public spaces together in consciousness. Where sacred spaces deprecate public places or suggest withdrawal from public life, they lose much of their own power and content. Where public places are swept clear of every expression of the sacred, there may be lost the mystery of freedom on which citizen arts and public good depend. Public discourse is reduced to numbers, expert pronouncements and sound bytes.

Inspiriting moves both ways. Sacred places are more truly sacred by reference to public life, and public places become more truly public by some remembrance of the sacred. Dangers have always been recognized. Private and group sacralities can be used to turn controversies into religious warfare or crusades. Against this there are legal restraints, to which must be added two practical counsels: That space or story sacred to any community, which has thereby been created, be respected by all and profaned by none. That such symbols be distinguished from any public interpretations and proposals which follow and in which prudential differences may be expected.

Needed once again are pilgrimages from place to place of human dwelling, pausing at the sacred notes of each, but not stopping until they arrive at places held by all in common. That is city living.