Nathaniel Popkin
June 13, 2007

A while back, when wisteria and tulips were vying for our attention, B Love posted a picture of a woman in front of Pennsylvania Hospital apparently praying at the feet of the statue of William Penn. The day it appeared I kept looking at the photograph -- which ostensibly was about the colors of spring's mid-Atlantic palate -- and I kept thinking about its meaning. Of course it's not at all certain that she was praying to William Penn (or if she was, if it was for a serious reason) and yet there in the photo she is in the hospital garden with her back to us, her arms quite clearly resting on the chains that protect the flowers and the statue, and her back is arched as if she is looking up to solicit help. Penn, in the form erected for him by the sculptor John Bacon the elder, is looking down. He appears to be answering.

It's a curious thing to see a person in the Quaker City praying in public. With eyes on an inner-light, our defining religion eschews the ritual of open prayer but also the use of icons. (the historian Steve Conn, in his wise Metropolitan Philadelphia, says that despite a history of pluralism, Philadelphia, more than other American city, is tied to a particular religion.) More curious, William Penn, in a religion without priests, was a scholar and erector of doctrine. He is also, in effect, the great Quaker icon. He's the founder of the greatest secular experiment in the world -- and the man who ushered in the Pennsylvania Enlightenment -- and therefore our first secular saint.

I bring this up because on Saturday, after dropping my daughter at a sleep-over on Westview Street in West Mount Airy, I took Isaak, my son, over to the Wissahickon. We entered the woods from Park Drive and walked along the path until we encountered Mom Rinker's Rock. Isaak, who takes his cues from stories involving pirates, insisted on calling it Marooner's Rock. He quickly climbed to the top and made some shouts and growls that somehow were to conjure Captain Hook and Peter Pan. I walked around until I could see the visage of Penn amidst the trees. He's there, I shouted, and Isaak climbed down. Can we go up? he wondered (he calls John Bacon the elder's PA Hospital statue "the wizard" so you can understand his enthusiasm). We followed the obvious path and then shimmied a bit across the Germantown schist until we stood at the Founder's feet. And there it was, carved in the plinth of Herman Kirn's sculpture: TOLERATION. The only offering was a worn wooden heart-shaped flag circa 1976. It was muggy but the air was fragrant, moist and charged with minerals, and I couldn't take my eyes off the word. Isaak, now bored, started down, and left alone I did something almost impossibly uncharacteristic: I put my fingers to my lips, stared across the gorge, and then placed them on the letters of the word.

It was a prayer, I suppose, that Penn's vision would endure; that our grappling with the singular cause of plurality would make us a better people. In the first chapter of his book, Conn gives us a beautiful exegesis on Philadelphia and "the echoes of William Penn." By discussing his own experience in Cedar Park, he makes that word, toleration -- tolerance, in modern parlance -- meaningful. He says we uniquely carry forth the principle: in a world of many Samarras, we hold in our hand -- as Penn in the hospital statue displaying his charter -- a possible other way. If this is messianic, then it makes sense why standing atop the gorge, I was so moved. But I think more than the purely idealistic hope that Philadelphia can prove meaningful to the wider world, my religious experience was something about self-identity. I had made a pilgrimage -- and in so doing a confirmation; an act of love. Steve Conn and Richard de Wyngaert, the owner of Headhouse Books on Second Street in Queen Village, were nice enough to ask me to join them for an event Friday night at 7. Steve will read from Metropolitan Philadelphia, which Buzz Bissinger says, "makes the best case for the city I have read in a very long time." I'll read from Song of the City. I encourage you to come and join us in a discussion afterward. It should be great fun -- only one thing -- I can't promise it will be a sacred experience.



–Nathaniel Popkin
nathaniel.popkin@gmail.com