Cities are like people. We think we know them, but we never do, not fully. There is always another side, a shadow city, lurking in the background like the eccentric cousin you studiously avoid at family gatherings. And so it is with me and New York. I thought I knew the city, but it turns out I only knew part of it. I knew the New York of bagels and thrift stores and yoga studios. The New York I am now speeding toward on the Number Two train is a very different New York. Different in precisely what way I can’t say, for I have never visited this New York. Why would I? Reputation, reflected in, and to some extent forged by, movies like Fort Apache, the Bronx, formed a barrier between me and this New York, a barrier as impenetrable as any wall ever built.
Yet here I am, the only white person in a sweltering, crowded subway car, hurtling toward a homeless shelter that will be my home for a while. It’s run by Franciscan friars—the Friars of the Renewal, they call themselves. They are attempting to renew an ancient and honorable path to God.
I’ve long been intrigued by the Franciscans. In India, they were the only ones willing to provide an education to a young orphan I had taken under my wing. Later, back in the United States, I’d occasionally see the friars walking in downtown Washington, DC, with their brown hooded habits, looking like they’d just stepped out of another century. What little else I knew about them I liked: their quixotic spirit; their uncompromised Christianity that takes Jesus’s words, especially the difficult ones, seriously. Not that Franciscans care much for verbiage. As their founder, Saint Francis of Assisi, famously advised: “Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words if necessary.” And so the Franciscans do: owning nothing, feeding and housing the poor, and doing so not in secluded monasteries but in intensely urban settings, the sort of neighborhoods people like me only witness when we take a wrong turn or our car breaks down.
The Franciscan life strikes me as difficult, wholly impractical, and that is precisely why I find it so compelling. What sustains them, I wonder, and might this be the God for me? I sure hope so. My depression has metastasized, spreading from scattered bouts of melancholy to something deeper and more sustained. Again, I wonder if my search for God is making me more depressed, not less. Alan Watts warns of a “karmic reckoning”—that as you dig into your own muck, detritus from your past (past lives too) rises to the surface. A Christian friend told me essentially the same thing, though in more colorful language: “The closer you get to God, the more the devil wants to get you.”
As the train clamors past 125th Street, I take a few deep breaths. I am on edge. Something about that place, the South Bronx, is important to me. The thread of pain began there. My father grew up in the Bronx, dirt-poor. When he was five years old, his father abandoned the family. Then he did the same when I was five years old. I feel like I’m traveling to the heart of some raw, ancestral wound and now, as the father of a five-year-old myself, one that has taken on greater urgency. Ancestry is not destiny, I tell myself, as the train pulls into my station.
Not only am I apprehensive about the South Bronx and what awaits me there, I’m also worried my ignorance might be exposed. Somehow I managed to reach middle age knowing precious little about the Testaments, Old or New. Ignorance of Buddhism is one thing but we are a Christian nation, demographically at the very least, and there’s no excuse for biblical illiteracy.
I arrive in time for evening mass. It’s led by Father Louis. He has a shaved head and grizzly beard. He looks less like a priest and more like a retired member of ZZ Top. Which is not that far from the truth. Father Louis, I’d later learn, is a former saxophone-playing weight-lifting woman-chasing Wall Street executive and owner of a used-car dealership. He was, by his own admission, a very intense man. He has retained that intensity, only now it is channeled into the Gospel.
The chapel is small and simple with wooden floors, none of the gaudy ornamentation found in some Christian houses of worship. Up front, two candles flicker. One of the friars is playing a guitar, and playing it well. “We adore Jesus, like a girlfriend or a mother or a loved one,” says Father Louis. “When you can tap into that love, torrents enter your life because you have opened a valve. Love like that can break down walls.” Fingers to his lips, Italian-style, he adds, “It’s a-nice,” as if he were describing linguine Alfredo and not the divine love of Jesus Christ.
The Franciscans are a Catholic order, and I know nothing of the Catholic mass. Here I am again, among the devout, faking it. When everyone stands, I stand. When they sit, I sit. When they kneel, I kneel. When it comes time to cross ourselves, I fumble, my right hand flailing in various random directions. I must look like I’m having some sort of seizure. No one notices, or they do and are too Christian to say anything. Either way, I am grateful.
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” Father Louis says, quoting Jesus’s words on the cross. “I use that almost daily,” he says, placing a worn leather Bible to his lips. Then he kneels, his bald head glistening. “We ask You to help us, to heal our minds, our bad thoughts, our addictions, our sinful inclinations.” Guilty as always, I squirm slightly in my seat.
Next comes communion. “If you choose, you can come up for a blessing. There’s no pressure,” says Father Louis. I’m not sure about this. I watch others, carefully noting how they approach the altar, drink the wine, then open their mouths to receive the Eucharist. Sure, why not? I can do this. I wait for the right time then walk up to the small altar. Father Louis blesses me with a wave of his arm. I stand there, my mouth open, waiting. Anytime now, Father Louis, anytime now. But something is wrong. His eyes are trying to tell me something, but what? Is there something I’m supposed to do or say? Some password? The awkwardness is almost unbearable. Finally, he lowers his head and whispers, “I can’t give you communion. I’ll explain later.” Then I remember. Only Catholics can receive communion. I should have known that. I slink away, realizing that, once again, I have managed to make a theological ass of myself.
The friary and the homeless shelter are separated by a small, pleasant courtyard. Brother Crispin, a cherubic friar with an intellectual bent, shows me my room in the shelter. It’s on a floor designated for the lay volunteers who work here. The room is not air-conditioned, so I crack the window and fall asleep to the sounds of sirens and angry Spanish, the soundtrack of the South Bronx.
I wake early the next morning and forage for coffee. I find some across the courtyard in the friary and silently give thanks that the Franciscan vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity do not extend to caffeinated beverages. I spot a hooded figure. It’s Father Louis. From this angle, the morning light illuminating his dark, intense eyes, the medieval hood draped over his head, the muscles (still there, evident even under the loose robe), the coiled energy, I can’t help but feel a shock of fear. There’s something satanic about his appearance. I know that’s not fair, but neither can I deny it.
I linger in the kitchen, savoring my coffee like it was mother’s milk. The brothers are making breakfast; there’s a relaxed collegiality here, like a frat house, only with considerably less beer and considerably more prayer. I like the way they call each other “bro.” “Do you want eggs, bro? Thanks, bro.” It’s quite endearing. They don’t call me bro, of course. I’m the outsider, as usual.
Over the centuries, the Franciscan vow of poverty has slipped, and this order, formed only twenty-five years ago, is intent on correcting that. They own nothing. No private bank accounts or credit cards or cellphones or, according to their charter, “popular electric gadgets manufactured simply for amusement and recreation.” No beds, either. They sleep on the floor. The friary has no Internet connection, no TV, no dishwasher, no air-conditioning. All of these things, the Franciscans believe, are obstacles that stand between us and God.
When we’re stripped of everything, what are we? As Pieter the dervish suggested, that is the essential question that all religions attempt to answer. If we were to wake one morning and find we have lost everything—our job, our house, our money, our reputation, our loved ones—would we roll over and die, or would we keep going? What would sustain us? The Franciscans don’t merely entertain that question as some sort of intellectual exercise. They live it.
Their day begins with prayer. That’s when they fill their tanks, as it were, and receive God’s grace. Then they spend the rest of the day giving it away. The Franciscans don’t hoard anything. “Freely ye have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:8). They call themselves “active contemplatives.” They are in perpetual motion; they are needed. The doorbell rings and it might be someone wanting a pair of socks, or salvation. With the friars, it is all the same. It’s all part of their apostolate work. I admire their usefulness, and wish I could be more like that.
In the kitchen, I find Brother Crispin pouring himself a large cup of coffee and digging into a bowl of Happy O’s. He invites me on a tour of the neighborhood, and I accept. We step outside the friary, the heavy wooden door closing behind us with a solid and vaguely foreboding thud. He’s wearing a baseball cap and, in one hand, holding a ceramic coffee mug, these two accessories clashing temporally with his thirteenth-century habit, held in place by a thick rope, just like in Saint Francis’s time. We turn the corner and dip into Ralph’s shoe repair. Ralph has been in the South Bronx forever, been mugged six times, which he conveys by miming a knife to the throat. We say our goodbyes, and walking south on Melrose Avenue, Brother Crispin tells me that Ralph repairs the friars’ sandals for free. It is a favor they gladly accept. The friars have a reputation, richly deserved, for mooching.
They like to tell a joke about this. A Dominican priest walks into a barbershop. After his haircut, he tries to pay, but the barber refuses to accept money from a man of the cloth. The next morning the barber finds a bouquet of flowers at his doorstep. His next customer is a Jesuit. Again, the barber refuses payment. The next morning he finds a bottle of wine at his doorstep. Then a Franciscan friar comes into his shop for a haircut, and again the barber refuses payment. The next morning he finds twenty friars at his doorstep.
The friars never fail to laugh at this joke, though they’ve heard it dozens of times. It’s funny because it’s true. Yes, the Franciscans are tremendous moochers, but they are mooching for God, so all is forgiven.
We walk past a housing project—a dozen high-rise buildings, each identical in size and grimness. Brother Crispin points out the murals on the walls, portraits of young men killed in gang wars. There’s been a recent spike in violence, including a shooting across the street from the friary. He tells me, matter-of-factly, how it is not unusual for families caught on the wrong side of a gang’s wrath to find gasoline poured under the door of their apartment one morning and a note that reads, “Next time we light it.” I can’t imagine living like that, your fate in the hands of unseen, malevolent forces.
The police are out in large numbers, watching the comings and goings from portable cherry-pickers, like the kind used for crowd control at street fairs. They’re wearing dark cop-glasses, and their cop-hands are twitchier than farther downtown. These are hands acutely aware of their exact location in relation to their holstered guns, and the exact number of seconds it would take to cover that distance.
Brother Crispin, like all of the friars, is street-smart. He can identify gang members by their tattoos and clothes the way an expert bird spotter can make out a yellow-rumped warbler from a hundred yards. Despite his thirteenth-century Umbrian outfit, he is very much attuned to the twenty-first-century South Bronx. “I have to have twice the street smarts as everyone else because, well, I’m a guy wearing a dress,” he tells me. The truth is Brother Crispin is savvy and naïve at the same time, a rare combination.
A youngish man, smoking a cigarette and wearing black headphones, sidles up to Brother Crispin. This happens all the time. The habit necessitates a reaction. People, strangers, tell the brothers about their cancer or their kid’s drug problem or some secret regret. The friars are therapists, aid workers, stand-ins for God, walking Rorschach tests.
“Brother, I always go for Christ,” the man tells Brother Crispin, ignoring me. “I was in prison before, but now that I’m out I don’t pray anymore.” He goes on about how he lost his job and his girlfriend is pregnant, the kind of life details you’d normally convey to your closest friend, not a stranger walking down the street. Brother Crispin listens patiently as the man relays his life’s story, before saying simply, “Just pray.”
“I’ll do that,” says the man, who identifies himself as Ramón.
“I’m Brother Crispin.” With that the man chuckles. Sometimes, explains Brother Crispin as we walk away, they laugh because they think he’s saying “Merry Christmas.”
I can’t help but wonder about the encounter. What did he hope to accomplish by speaking with the man, who frankly seemed a bit unhinged?
“We hope we planted a seed. And even if he dies tomorrow, he’ll die knowing he was loved.”
We stop at a pizza place, a bit of a dive, but one of the best, Brother Crispin assures me. We order a couple of slices and I reach for my wallet. When you dine with a friar there is never any doubt about who is paying, no faux protestations: Please, allow me. No, I insist. If you must. None of that nonsense. I like the clarity.
We carry our slices to a table, and I’m about to dive in when Brother Crispin stops me. He needs to say grace first.
“Thank You, Lord, for this bounty.”
I stare at the greasy mushroom slices, and am about to make some snide comment but restrain myself.
He goes on to thank me for my generosity, which makes me blush because it was only a few bucks, nothing really. There is a sweetness to the blessing, a sincerity, that touches me. If nothing else, it forces me to slow down, pause, taste the pizza rather than inhale it, as I usually do.
Brother Crispin has a sizable paunch, which doesn’t seem to jibe with the ascetic lifestyle of a friar. I delicately inquire about that, and he tells me he’s put on forty pounds since taking his vows. “All of that starchy food,” he says, taking another bite.
We walk a few more blocks down Melrose, past storefront churches, their congregations overflowing into the street. People are sitting on folding chairs set up on the sidewalk. Yes, I think, this is an entirely different New York from the one I know. We stop at an ornate church. It looks like it’s been here forever. Brother Crispin is going to his weekly confession. What does he possibly have to confess, I wonder. It is not this man but I who am a “foul stinking lump of sin,” to borrow the colorful words of a fourteenth-century Christian mystic, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. I say as much to Brother Crispin.
“Why don’t you go in?”
“In there? The confession booth?”
“Yes. Why not?”
“But I’m not Catholic. I’m not even Christian.”
“That’s okay. If the priest has a problem with it, he’ll let you know.”
I hesitate. I think of confessionals as dark and shadowy and—I’m not sure where I get this from, the movies perhaps—having something to do with the mob. Yet my array of sins, large and small, weigh heavily on me, and I’m beginning to suspect that the attendant guilt lies at the root of my depression. Yes, I could use some forgiveness. As Paul Tillich says, “Nothing greater can happen to a human being than that he is forgiven.”
And nobody does forgiveness like the Christians. They are number one in their field. Buddhists are not in the forgiveness business, for they believe there is nothing to forgive; no original sin, only bad karma. Jewish forgiveness comes once a year, and at a heavy price: twenty-four hours without food. The New Age movement promises self-forgiveness, and I’ve tried those exercises, talking to myself in the mirror and whatnot, but I always feel silly, and it never works anyway. No, we need forgiveness from God, nothing less will do. Christian forgiveness is complete and unconditional. It comes in the form of grace, a word that shares a common root with “gratis,” as in free. Grace is a gift from God, and everything looks better when it is a gift. Crucially, forgiveness causes repentance and not, as is commonly believed, the other way around.
I glance at the confessional booth, maybe twenty yards away. Why not? If I can whirl like a dervish, meditate with Wayne of Staten Island, I can do this. I tentatively swing open the door and step into the little wooden cubicle. I can make out the profile of a figure shuffling behind a partition. I sense impatience, a bad vibe, and want to flee. But it’s too late. He sees me.
“Forgive me, Father, but I’m not Catholic.”
“Yes, that’s okay,” he says, but his voice betrays unease.
“I’m not even Christian. I’m Jewish.”
“That’s okay, my son, but…”
“Yes, Father?”
“I have to do the mass now. I’m already late. Can you come back in half an hour?”
Waves of relief wash over me. That and, surprisingly, disappointment too. Sure, I say, sure. I’ll come back.
I do not come back. The moment has passed. I was so close, once again seven-eighths-assed. I wonder what would have transpired in that little wooden booth. Can a few words exchanged with some anonymous priest really wash away a lifetime of sin and guilt? Is forgiveness that easy? I’ll never know. I feel like a failure at confessing, which is something else I will need to confess, eventually.
Brother Crispin invites me on a journey, a mission of sorts, to Brooklyn. He’s delivering money—eight thousand dollars in cash—to an intermediary who will then dispatch it to Africa where he’s helping build a school. I’m always game for a road trip, especially one that involves large sums of cash and shadowy go-betweens, so I agree. Brother Crispin stuffs the bills into his habit, where they instantly disappear like some sort of magic trick.
The friars have nicknames for each of their battered old cars, donations all of them. We climb into a 1993 Oldsmobile dubbed the Gray Ghost. They used to call it Gray Goose until they discovered that was a brand of vodka and therefore not entirely appropriate for a car of God. The Gray Ghost sports a clergy placard on the front dash, a baby-blue cross dangling from the rearview mirror, and a bumper sticker that reads “Women do regret abortion.” Brother Crispin pulls out of the parking lot then, for no apparent reason, stops.
“Is there a problem?” I ask.
“Lord Jesus, bless us, protect us, in our works and in our attitudes. Thank You for giving us the ability to travel.”
Barely, I think as the Gray Ghost jerks and strains and whines and wheezes, like an old pack mule that should have been retired years ago. It struggles to convey us across the Triboro Bridge. The air conditioner blows hot air over us, so Brother Crispin turns it off and rolls down the windows instead. The plastic cross dances in the warm breeze. Something about this scene—the beat-up car, the sense of divine purpose—seems familiar. Yes, of course: the Blues Brothers. I put on my sunglasses and announce: “We’ve got a full tank of gas, eight thousand in cash, and we’re wearing dark sunglasses. We’re on a mission from God.” I redub the Gray Ghost the God Mobile, and Brother Crispin laughs. I like that about him and his fellow friars. They wear their faith lightly and, like their founder, Saint Francis, don’t take themselves too seriously. (In fact, their vows require cheerfulness on their part.) The test of a good religion, as G. K. Chesterton observed, is whether you can joke about it. This is a good religion.
A mission from God. That becomes a running joke on our ill-fated journey. Whenever we get stuck in traffic or miss a turn or find ourselves hopelessly lost, I declare that all is well because “we’re on a mission from God.” This proves highly effective at defusing the tension—mine, not Brother Crispin’s. He has no tension, at least none I can detect.
“How do you do it? How do you maintain your Franciscan composure in New York traffic?” I ask.
“I just leave it to Christ.”
“But what if someone cuts you off?”
“I hit the brakes.”
“Okay, that makes sense. Besides that, though. What do you do with your anger?”
“I pray for their conversion. Quickly.”
With that, as if by divine providence, someone cuts us off. Brother Crispin leans heavily on the horn. I smile. It’s nice to know that their vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty do not extend to honking. Everyone needs an outlet.
Brother Crispin has heavy bags under his eyes. He only got five hours of sleep; there was some problem at the shelter last night and he had to be up for the morning prayer at six. He’s wiped out, he tells me.
He gets tired. He has bad days. He honks. All of these facts lead to one inevitable conclusion: Brother Crispin is a human being. Just like me, only with fewer possessions and more compassion. So often we see the habit and not the man or woman, as if taking vows somehow makes them less human, not more. We do this, I think, as a form of self-protection. If we see the friars as real people then they are more like us, and if they are more like us it begs the uncomfortable question: Why aren’t we more like them? By sanctifying them we distance ourselves, and thus absolve ourselves of the possibility of such a life.
Brother Crispin speeds past a slow-moving car. The meek may inherit the earth but not, it seems, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. We exit the highway and traverse the Crown Heights neighborhood, passing a clutch of Hasidic Jews wearing fur in the August heat. We miss a turn, again, and need to backtrack. Brother Crispin accomplishes this by making an illegal U-turn, shrugging sheepishly. It’s okay, I say. We’re on a mission from God.
As we turn right onto Atlantic Avenue, our conversation turns sharply theological. “Christianity is filled with contradictions,” he says, pointing to several examples. Strength through meekness. Richness through poverty. Fruitfulness through chastity. Life through death. He’s right, of course. All religions, in fact, contain that element of contradiction, of paradox. Zen koans. The Taoist classic, the Tao te Ching. They all contain seemingly contradictory thoughts. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest and author, goes a step further. Paradox, he argues, is a prerequisite for spiritual truth. “Any ‘common sense’ that doesn’t have a certain paradoxical character deserves to be distrusted,” he says.
Brother Crispin tells me about how he had to expel one of the men from the shelter yesterday. He was back on drugs, and the friars have a strict zero-tolerance policy. So he banished him to the street. It wasn’t easy.
“I thought you guys were nice,” I say.
“We’re not nice. We’re kind.” There is a difference, he assures me. “Jesus told us to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” I’m reminded of the Rinpoche in Kathmandu, who advised, “Wisdom first, then love.” The Franciscans see no need for sequencing, though. Love always contains wisdom, they believe, or as Tolstoy says: “Love cannot be stupid.” Usually, we think of love as an emotion, a blubbering one at that, but that is only one meaning of the word. Love is also a way of being, or as Aldous Huxley posited, a mode of knowledge: “We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love.”
Finally, we arrive at the church in Brooklyn and drop off the cash. Our return trip is no less eventful. After a series of wrong turns, traffic jams, and sundry other mishaps, we arrive back at the friary, exhausted but satisfied, and just in time for dinner.
The men are lined up outside the shelter. They are not allowed to stay in the building during the day. Each is searched and given an alcohol breath test. They shuffle into the cafeteria, where they sit on benches alongside long wooden tables. They display neither enthusiasm nor resistance. They are just here. Most have problems with alcohol and drugs. Many have criminal records, including homicide. Brother Crispin says grace, a short homily. The gist: We need God, we need help. We can’t do this on our own. Then a few announcements. One of the residents (that’s what they call the men, residents) has found a job, and everyone breaks into applause. My presence is mentioned and, unexpectedly, the men applaud for me too. Writer-man, they call me. There will be a movie playing later, I, Robot, and a brief discussion ensues among the friars as to whether it is appropriate or not. (It is.) The food is good and plentiful. The men eat, and talk, but mostly they just eat. Afterward, one of the friars says a short prayer: “Allow us, Lord, to truly relax.” Amen.
The men disperse. Some go to their rooms while others shuffle out to the courtyard where they play dominoes, smoke, gossip. As far as homeless shelters go, this is as good as it gets. No wonder there’s a waiting list to get in.
I spot Father Louis in the courtyard. I am curious about his sudden and mysterious conversion. We carry two plastic chairs to a small clearing next to a tree. It is a bright, moonlit night, the air filled with the clicking of dominoes and the not-infrequent siren. I’m not sure where to begin. More than any of the other friars here, Father Louis displays the conviction of the converted. I find his intensity unnerving. I worry that at any moment he might hug me, or kill me. It could go either way.
Father Louis explains that he had two passions in life: women and weight lifting. The two fed off each other, supported each other. He would work out every day, for at least two hours, and with such intensity that no one got near him. Then in the evenings he’d prowl for his latest conquest. “Women were probably my first god,” he tells me. “And the weights were just a means to get the women. My whole physique was exclusively to attract women. If I could have had three girls a day, I would have done it.”
Then one day, his mother, Italian Catholic, said, “Louis, you must go to Bosnia.”
“Say what, Mom?”
“You must go to Bosnia, to a holy shrine.”
Louis couldn’t have cared less about some shrine in Bosnia, nor could he have cared less about Catholicism. At that point in his life he was, as he puts it, “a practical pagan.” But Louis loved his mom, so he agreed to go to Bosnia—specifically to Medjugorje, a pilgrimage site that has attracted millions of devout Catholics. He tacked on a few days in Rome afterward, figuring that once he fulfilled his Catholic obligation, made his mom happy, he would then party for three straight days. It was a good plan and, like all good plans, destined to fail.
Medjugorje was beautiful, stunning, but he couldn’t wait to get to Rome. On his second day in Bosnia, bored during morning mass, Louis found himself killing time by engaging in an intellectual exercise. “So I’m thinking to myself, If Mary is my mother and God is my father, and if Mary is the mother of Jesus and God is also the father, can I consider Jesus my brother? It was, as I said, an intellectual thing.” Louis thought about it for all of six seconds, and never mentioned it to anyone.
Later that day, he joined some other pilgrims on a walk up into the hills to see a church. One of those in the group, a young woman, was a locutionist, someone who supposedly receives interior messages meant for others. “When I heard about this girl’s gift, I am thinking to myself she is just nuts. I mean, hearing voices in her head? She might need some medication.”
Then, at precisely 5:40 p.m., the girl suggested they all kneel and meditate. Louis agreed, though he didn’t know how to meditate so he just kneeled and faked it. After a few minutes, they began to hike again. Louis is taking in the scenic view when the girl pulls him aside and says, “Lou, while we were meditating, Jesus gave me a message for you.”
Louis was skeptical. “I’m thinking, Well, she is probably going to tell me to be holy, you know, go to mass every Sunday. I figured it would be a very generic message that anybody can get anytime.”
Instead, the girl said: “Jesus told me to tell you, ‘Yes, I am your brother and I want to anoint your hands.’”
Louis was floored. She had given him the answer to a question she couldn’t possibly have known he’d asked. “And in that moment, I was infused with this love for Christ, knowing that He was in my head, He was in my brain, He was in my heart. I knew He was real. I knew this was the man I needed to follow the rest of my life.”
Louis continued to Rome, as planned, but went church-hopping instead of bar-hopping. When he returned to Newark, he was a changed man. He sold his businesses, stopped chasing women, and eventually joined the Franciscans. He walked into the friary with all of his possessions: a toothbrush and his saxophone.
“What happened to the old Louis?” I ask.
“The old Louis is dead and buried in a field. That is where he is. When I think about the old Louis, honestly, it is kind of frightening to me because I don’t know who he is. God has taken that lust that was ever-present in my heart and transformed it into a pure love.”
We sit in silence for a moment. I don’t know what to think. I can’t imagine such a dramatic transformation, and I silently question whether it is as complete as Father Louis portrays it. We are never fully born again; some vestige of our former self always remains. What keeps him from slipping into his old ways? Earlier, during one of his sermons, he had hinted at weakness: “A little disorder for me can be like a drug addiction.” Is the old Louis still there, waiting for a chance to reemerge?
I also wonder why my experience in Tokyo wasn’t equally decisive. I had seen the light, so to speak, yet turned away. Why didn’t I make equally dramatic changes in my life? Perhaps it was because I had no context in which to place the experience, no way to connect that soaring moment of unprecedented joy to my everyday, terrestrial life.
“One day, you’re going to make that connection,” Father Louis says when I tell him my Tokyo story. “Jesus gave you a taste of something that might happen to you in the future. He was preparing the future for you.” I have my doubts, God-size doubts, but I keep them to myself. It is late. We say good night, and I walk across the courtyard to the shelter, and my room. I sleep fitfully that night.
The next morning I find a stack of books and videos about Saint Francis, along with a note from Brother Crispin. My Franciscan education. I crack open one of the books and read.
Of all the Christian saints, Francis is probably the closest to Jesus, in his teachings and temperament. Like Jesus, the real Saint Francis is obscured by a fog of fable, hagiography, and tall tales. Which is a shame, because he was remarkable enough without the hyperbole. Francis is often portrayed as a harmless animal lover. He undoubtedly had a deep affinity for nature but to characterize him as only that, as some sort of Doctor Dolittle of Christianity, diminishes him unfairly.
Francis came of age in the early thirteenth century, a time, as biographer Hilarin Felder describes, “marked by ambitious cravings for aggrandizement, by a mad scramble for honors and fame.” In other words, a time much like our own, only with less traffic and more leprosy.
As a young man, Francis fancied himself one of the troubadours, the wandering poets of the time. He was well dressed, a man about town, a playboy. He then changed into a knight’s armor and went off to battle. As a warrior, he was an abject failure, captured by the enemy and held for a year. He was released only after his father paid a large ransom.
Back home in Assisi, he apprenticed in his father’s lucrative cloth business, but his heart wasn’t in it. Then one day, praying alone in a dilapidated church, he heard the voice of Jesus, commanding him, “Francis, go, repair My house, which, as you see, is falling completely in ruin.” So he did, gathering stones and secretly selling some of his father’s finest silk in order to pay for repairs to the church. Not surprisingly, his father was furious. He confined Francis to home, and beat him. When that failed to extinguish his son’s rebellious ways, he took him to court in order to recover the money. At the hearing, Francis announced, in dramatic fashion, “You are no longer my father.” Not only did he disown his father and forfeit his inheritance, for good measure he disrobed right there in the courtroom, practically throwing his clothes at his father.
It was a turning point for Francis. He had reversed his descent. This is how G. K. Chesterton, in his biography of Francis, described his trajectory: “A man going down and down until at some mysterious point he begins to go up and up. We have never gone up like that because we have never gone down like that.” When I read those words, I wondered whether it provided clues to my own melancholy. Is the problem not my depression but, rather, that I am not depressed enough? Might even my melancholy be seven-eighths-assed? Do I need to plummet further in order to reverse my trajectory? It seems like a risky strategy; what guarantee do I have that Chesterton’s “mysterious point” will actually materialize and I won’t simply fall and fall into a bottomless abyss? There is no guarantee, of course, which is why there are so few saints.
Another turning point in Francis’s life came when one day, riding through the Umbrian countryside, he heard the distinctive clapping sound of a leper. In those times, no one was more reviled and feared than lepers. They were required to carry small wooden clappers to warn of their approach. Francis was particularly disgusted by lepers, and would go to great lengths to avoid them. But on this day, in spite of his fear, he dismounted his horse and approached the man. Francis, as Mirabai Starr recounts, “wrapped his cloak tenderly around the man’s bony shoulders. Stunned by his own impulse, Francis looked into the leper’s grateful eyes and, his own eyes welling with tears, kissed the man’s oozing face.”
What to make of this story? Encountering lepers on the street isn’t exactly a common problem these days, but the story, of course, isn’t about leprosy. Francis wanted us to “love the leper within us,” those parts of ourselves too hideous for even our own gaze. Our shadow selves.
Saint Francis was no theologian. He wasn’t even a priest. He was a poet, perhaps the world’s only happy poet, and one who expressed himself mainly through action. He was the first saint to smile. “What else are the Friars but joyous minstrels of God,” he said on his deathbed. That joy continues today, among the Franciscans of the South Bronx. They’re always smiling—more than most people, certainly more than me, despite my boatloads of stuff and “accomplishments.”
If Francis had any theology, it was what Meister Eckehart, the German mystic, called “a spirituality of subtraction.” Francis believed that we must empty ourselves—of possessions, of ideas, of pride—before God can enter our lives. For Francis, poverty represented not enslavement but freedom, for if you possessed nothing then you had nothing to defend. Even knowledge, Francis believed, could prevent God from entering our hearts.
Perhaps that’s why the story of Saint Francis is usually told not as straightforward biography but in a series of parables. Over the centuries, many of these apocryphal tales have emerged. It’s impossible to confirm their veracity; that’s not the point. One story I can’t shake is this one: Francis had congenital eye problems, and by his forties was all but blind. The “cure” back then was to cauterize the eye with a hot iron. Before the procedure, Francis said: “Brother Fire, God made you beautiful and strong and useful. I pray you be courteous with me.” When the red-hot iron was applied to his eye—without anesthesia, of course—Francis didn’t flinch.
Francis was prone to extreme behavior. His life was, as Chesterton put it, “one riot of rash vows”—rash vows that just happened to work out. He was, if nothing else, a great pragmatist. He was interested in results. “Every tree is known by its fruits,” he said. That was essentially William James’s philosophy of pragmatism. James believed that something was “true” if it proved efficacious. “Truth is what works,” he said. Likewise, underneath Francis’s seeming madness lay a deep reservoir of common sense. William James saw these two traits—common sense and a sense of humor—as the same principle, traveling at different speeds. Or, as he put it, “A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.” The Franciscans are wonderful dancers.
I am not, but nonetheless I’ve always had some of that Franciscan zaniness. Growing up, I would punctuate the long, hot Baltimore summers by wearing underwear on my head. Perhaps it was my way of turning the world upside down, like Francis, or maybe I was simply desperate for something, anything, to relieve the oppressive August boredom. Either way, it worked. I felt better, reenergized. Predictably, the neighborhood kids would cry, “Mom, Dad, Eric’s wearing underwear on his head again.” This was always said with a mixture of shock and reassurance, as if my underwear-clad head signaled a passing of the seasons. I also detected covert admiration for my unabashed willingness to make a fool of myself. I imagine the righteous people of thirteenth-century Assisi reacted similarly to young Francis when he, for instance, rolled around in the snow naked. True, Francis was filled with love of God and I was filled with an irascible loopiness. But this is how the religious impulse always begins, with a small act of insanity. Sometimes it leads to sainthood, and sometimes…not. The larger difference, of course, is that Francis converted his insanity into action, something useful, while I never progressed much past wearing underwear on my head. Maybe saints are simply neurotics who somehow manage to transform all that crazy, circular energy into forward momentum.
Sainthood is problematic, though. Saints can inspire but also discourage. We can never achieve what they did, never join them on the pedestal, so why bother? Indeed, nothing has done more to undermine spiritual progress than the pedestal. Sitting high on that loathsome invention, the saint drifts out of view. Unable to imagine ourselves inhabiting the same lofty world as the saint, we reach for the remote and another beer.
“One of the first signs of a saint,” wrote Trappist monk Thomas Merton, “[is] that other people do not know what to make of him.” That is a polite way of putting it. Another way is this: Saints are nuts. Nowhere is the line between saint and madman thinner than in the life of Francis of Assisi. He disrobed in public. He kissed lepers. He talked to animals. He heard voices. He deprived himself of food and water and basic comforts. He described suffering as “perfect joy.” A modern psychiatrist would probably diagnose Francis with borderline personality disorder, possibly psychosis. Yet he was a saint, in spite of himself.
Those three words—in spite of—are the holiest in the English language. As Paul Tillich observes, the answer to every religious question always contains some element of “in spite of.” We are forgiven in spite of our sins. We believe in spite of the lack of evidence. We love our neighbors in spite of their flaws. Or, on a more fundamental level, we get out of bed every morning in spite of the inevitable approach of death. (An act of faith if ever there were one.) There is a huge gap between “because of” and “in spite of,” and in that gap lies the difference between a life of cold reason and a life of faith. Most of the time we operate in because-mode. Banks lend us money because we have good credit histories. Our employer pays our salary because we contribute to the bottom line. Economic life depends entirely on “because.” The religious life, though, operates in “in-spite-of” mode, and so does family life. We love our children not because they are good and successful but in spite of their achievements, or the lack thereof. We love them in spite of their behavior. “In spite of” makes a mockery of cost-benefit analyses. It makes no sense, and that is precisely why we need it.
Sunday mass. A rainy day, and I’m dangerously undercaffeinated. Not a great combination. But here I am. For some reason, I feel obliged. Perhaps it’s my Jewish guilt contorting itself to fit inside a new, Catholic container. Perhaps it’s simply that the mind craves routine, and this happens to be the routine here. Both are plausible theories, but truth be told I actually enjoy the Catholic mass. The words, yes, but mostly the atmosphere. The service is—and I mean this with the utmost respect—a very sensuous experience. It appeals to our senses. The guitar playing, the incense burning, the candles flickering. All ritual contains an element of theater, and that is what I’m witnessing here. Yet I cannot fully enjoy it, for it feels like a betrayal. One of the advantages of catapulting oneself clear of the Judeo-Christian traditions, to the land of Buddhism and other exotic faiths, is that you approach them largely baggage-free. Not so with Christianity. I arrive with excess baggage. What am I, a Jew, albeit a gastronomical one, doing in a church, crossing myself (sort of), taking communion (nearly), and confessing (almost)? Is it possible to betray a faith to which you have not been faithful?
During an intermission, I sneak some lukewarm coffee from the kitchen. Father Louis sees me and looks me in the eye in that quasi-satanic way of his. He tells me that the Sunday mass is the holiest of the holies and that he’s dedicating this mass to me. I know he means it as an honor but it sounds like a threat. Everything he says sounds like a threat. He scares me.
Back in the chapel, we pray. We pray for the pope. We pray for the sick. We pray for the homeless. And we pray for me. Me? I am touched. And also kind of freaked out. In the past, whenever someone said, “I’ll pray for you,” it was always said as a put-down, or at least that’s how I perceived it. My usual reply, spoken or merely thought, was something like, “Yeah, well, you keep your prayers, buddy. I don’t need your stinking prayers.” But this is different. When these people say they’ll pray for me, I can tell they mean it. Spoken sincerely, there are no sweeter words in the English language than “I will pray for you.” Another human being, petitioning a higher power, not on their behalf but yours.
The service ends with Father Louis intoning, “As it was, is now, and will be forever,” and something about that timeless sentiment, its sense of continuity and inevitability, melts away my guilt and my stress, lifts my spirits.
With eastern faiths, one can easily say, “It’s not personal.” These religions operate, as William James put it, on a wholesale, not a retail level. Not so with Christianity. Christ is definitely into retail. For Christians, God is not some vague universal mushiness; no pantheistic fuzziness here. Christianity promises a relationship, a personal relationship, with God, in a way that no other faith does. As one of the friars put it: “It doesn’t get any more personal than one person entering into another. I mean, that’s very profound and that’s very radical.” Jesus was a radical, an extremist, a fact that is often overlooked given Christianity’s mainstream status today. This extremism is either a very good thing or a very bad one, depending on whether you’re ready for that sort of radical commitment. I’m not sure I am. The most radical moment in my life, my Tokyo story, occurred years ago, and as my memory of it fades, I’m starting to wonder if it really happened. Brother Crispin has no such doubts. That sort of thing happens to him all the time. The God moment, he calls it. “It is completely natural and supernatural,” he said. “See, there was this cooperation between you and God in that moment. There was a profound cooperation between what God wants and what you want. And that cooperation is called union of heart. Communion. And when there is communion there is joy. So for that brief moment you experienced a shadow of the communion of people in Heaven.”
I sit there, taking this in. The problem, I realize, is that I am trying to do it all myself, to make something happen. Saint Francis taught that this is impossible. He strived for a “radical dependency.” We are not supposed to do anything. It has all been done for us, by Jesus.
I am struck by a desire to help. Something is driving me to be bigger than myself, to be useful. But the brothers don’t know what to do with me. I have no skills, at least not the kinds that are useful when running a homeless shelter. They ask me to help carry some donated clothes, tied tight in Hefty garbage bags, to a storage room. I do that, and it feels good, but it’s not enough.
Finally, Brother Crispin gives me an assignment. My task is to empty large bottles of shampoo into dozens of smaller, travel-size bottles that can be distributed to the residents. Okay, I can do that. It is time-consuming, tedious work. I keep spilling shampoo everywhere. After an hour, I smell like a cheap beauty salon. And all the while a refrain is playing in my head: Eric is doing a good deed. See what a good person Eric is. This is not the Franciscan way, I know. This is not the way of selfless love. I am not doing this chore for God, not even for the residents of the shelter, I am doing it for me. So I can feel better about myself. Is that so terrible? The men still get their shampoo.
Over lunch one day, I ask Father Rich, a man of slight build and fulsome Old Testament beard, about motivation. Does it matter?
Yes, he says, motivation matters, but “we can’t wait for perfect motivation, or nothing would ever get done.” In this sense, the Franciscans are very much aligned with William James. He believed that emotions stem from actions and not, as is commonly held, the other way around. “I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing,” James said. Likewise, the Franciscans believe that action creates a new reality. “Fake it until you make it,” they are fond of saying, just like James Hopkins in Kathmandu. Or, to put it another way, we act our way into a better way of thinking, rather than thinking our way into a better way of acting. The exact opposite of navel-gazing.
Personally, I have been gazing at my navel for so long it’s a wonder it hasn’t filed a sexual-harassment complaint. Stop staring at me, you pervert. So often in my life I have hesitated, forestalling action until I achieve the requisite state of mental clarity. That clarity, I now realize, may never come, and meanwhile I have forfeited so many experiences. Moreover, those experiences might have created the clarity I so desperately seek. Action precedes belief. “Just do it” is not only a clever marketing slogan. It is a philosophy.
I ask about gratitude. Are the men in the shelter grateful? Not exactly. The friars receive very little in the way of thanks. One brother explains that before coming to the friary he had a very romantic notion of helping the poor. In this fantasy, he’s up in the hills of Bolivia helping the gentle and grateful locals. The fantasy was just that. “That has not been my experience here. Sometimes you get a thank-you, but there is also a lot of ingratitude and a sense of entitlement. That was, and still is, difficult. You find yourself trying to love someone who doesn’t want to be loved.” That would drive me nuts. I don’t know how they sustain it.
Lunch is a leisurely affair, time being, in the Franciscan universe, an infinitely expandable dimension. They have plenty of time for my nagging questions. I want to know how they manage the chastity bit but that seems too invasive a question so instead I ask about another of their vows: poverty. Don’t they miss stuff?
No, we don’t, they tell me. Some of the friars, those young enough to have grown up in the digital age, can still recall what it was like to own a cellphone, to use Facebook. Sometimes they still feel a vibration in their pocket, like a phantom limb, a distant echo of a former life, one that, it turns out, they do not miss. “I had to learn how to pay attention again,” says Brother Angelo, a smiley young friar. He has a steady gaze, and can carry on a conversation without periodically staring at a flashing screen. How refreshing.
I’m trying to wrap my mind around the notion that abject poverty is a source of joy. Brother Crispin calls the notion that stuff can make us happy “the big lie.” Our rampant materialism, he says, is a form of addiction. “People think that things can fill the hole, but really it doesn’t. You just want more of that thing. And you can shove the entire ocean into this hole and still it’s empty.”
Until now, I have viewed the friars’ poverty as a form of self-denial, masochistic almost. But no one forced them to live this way and, as Gandhi observed, “Restraint self-imposed is no compulsion.” For the friars, their material poverty represents freedom. By owning no stuff they are free from having to protect their stuff, free from coveting others’ stuff (or others coveting theirs), free from constantly upgrading their stuff, free from worrying if they have the right stuff, free from finding a place for all of their stuff. Not only stuff. Also experiences. We can be attached to those too, and of this I am guilty. I collect experiences: the perfect meal, the perfect trip, each one more perfect than the last. The collection is never complete, and never will be, as long as I fail to heed the words of Ali ibn Abu Talib, the fourth caliph of Islam: “Asceticism is not that you should not own anything, but that nothing should own you.” Our experiences can own us just as easily as our stuff, although they do take up less closet space.
With no TV or radio or Internet, the friars don’t know much about what is happening in the “real world,” yet they seem to manage just fine. They figure news of anything truly important will eventually reach them. I think of all the time I’ve invested in staying current and “up to speed” and wonder if it was a good investment. I am well versed in the problems of the world but do little about them. The Franciscans know much less but do so much more. In fact, they take a certain perverse pride in being so out of touch. “I’m so far out of the loop, I’m in the loop,” is a favorite line of Father Glenn, one of the order’s founders.
The noon bell rings. I point out that the correct time is twelve forty-five. The friars just shrug as if to say, “What’s forty-five minutes? We’re on Franciscan time.”
The next day they ask me to man the front desk of the shelter. Mainly, this entails monitoring the security cameras and answering the phones. They get the strangest calls.
“Do you have room for two Siamese?” asks one caller.
“Hmm. Do you mean people from Thailand?”
“No, I mean two cats.”
“Sorry, ma’am. We’re not that kind of shelter.”
Apparently, this is a common misunderstanding. For some reason, when you google “Bronx” and “animal shelter” the Franciscan shelter is the first thing that pops up.
The phone again. “Hello. Saint Anthony’s Shelter. Eric speaking. May I help you?”
“I’d like a room for tonight.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but we’re full. If you like I could put your name on the waiting list.”
“What waiting list?”
“It’s this sheet…”
“What? I only get a sheet, not a blanket?”
“No, sir, a sheet of paper. I can put you on the list.”
“I don’t want no waiting list. It’s because I’m Scottish, isn’t it? That’s why you won’t give me a room.”
“No, sir, it’s not. We’re full.”
“You don’t like Scots?”
“I like them just fine.”
“Then why won’t you give me a room?”
At this point, I’m getting uncomfortable and don’t know what to do.
“I told you, sir. We’re full. Even if you were from Mars, we wouldn’t have a room.”
“Oh, now you don’t like Martians, do you?”
“No, sir, as I told you…”
“It’s because I’m white. That’s why you won’t give me a room.”
Now things are really getting uncomfortable. “No, sir, as I said…”
I hear laughter coming from outside the glass-enclosed office. It’s Brother Oisin, an Irish friar, holding a phone. I’ve been played, and played well.
“Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none,” said Emerson. The Franciscans have plenty of edge. They are the merry pranksters of the Christian world. Who says God can’t be fun?
One afternoon, I’m standing at the entrance to the main chapel at the friary. This one is much larger than the small, intimate chapel where mass is normally held. I prefer the smaller one. Architecture is more than a matter of aesthetics. It determines the substance of the service. I’ve never understood the appeal of the grand cathedral or synagogue. I suppose they’re intended to evoke the grandeur of God, to reflect His greatness, but I find it only diminishes me. Houses of worship are supposed to bring us closer to God but most have the opposite effect. It’s especially incongruous that Christianity, the most personal of religions, should hold its services in such impersonal spaces. History explains a lot. When Christianity migrated from the Middle East to Europe in the first century, services moved from small buildings, or simply outdoors, to massive and ornate basilicas. The priests then began to wear vestments to match the formality of the structure. Soon, the services themselves took on a more formal air. Ritual expands to fill the space provided.
It’s hot. Latin music wafts in from the sidewalk, mixing with the liturgy, spicing it up. I see Father Louis seated, praying, his head swaying back and forth in the hot air. I notice a nun, a young woman, standing next to me, so I introduce myself. Her name is Caitlin. She has a degree in art history. I ask how she went from art history to the life of a nun and she tells me how she partied in college, “but it wasn’t making me happy. It was self-centered yuckiness. I felt weighted down by my own self-centeredness.” So she joined a convent.
“What is it about Christianity that you find so appealing?” I ask.
“Forgiveness. No other religion can do that. It’s unconditional forgiveness. It’s love.”
I have nothing to add to that, so I resort to my lame habit question: “How do you feel about wearing a habit? Isn’t it hot in the summer?”
“No, I love it,” she says, and seems to mean it. Her hair is covered, of course, and she is not wearing any makeup, but still, I can tell that she is an attractive woman. This makes me uneasy. Religious garb has a strange effect on me. It gets me—how to put this?—interested. It’s a real problem. There was the time I was in Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim region of India, interviewing a woman who was leading one of the many separatist movements there. She was covered from head to toe in a black burkha. All I could see were her eyes, peering through a slit in the niqab, face covering. Now, I’m not usually big on eye contact. As I’ve said, it makes me uncomfortable. But in this case, I could either look her in the eye or stare at a wall of black cloth. So I looked at her eyes, and—whoa!—it was unexpectedly, incredibly intimate. I knew such feelings were wrong, forbidden, and of course that fact only heightened my arousal. I was so flustered I could barely get through my questions. Later I’d learn that my reaction is fairly common. Say what you wish about the male libido, it is remarkably adaptable. It works with what is available. Men in Pakistan have been known to go bonkers over a bare ankle or, should they get incredibly lucky, a stray bra strap. Religion attempts to corral the libido but, it seems, manages only to relocate the object of its attentions. I’m not sure this represents progress.
Why do so many religions frown upon sex, at least for any purpose other than procreation? It is not, as is commonly thought, mere prudishness. Sex is pleasurable—the religious do not deny that—but there are other pleasures out there, they say, and these pleasures are accessible to us only if we redirect our Eros. Sex is not bad, per se, but it is a huge distraction, and like all distractions it exacts a toll. When our minds are preoccupied with the overtly physical act of sex, we are missing something. There is, as an economist would put it, an opportunity cost. Thus, followers of Taoism, the Chinese religion, often abstain from sex in order to preserve their vital energy, or chi. The Franciscans wouldn’t use such terminology, but the idea is the same: They abstain from one pleasure in order to achieve another, higher pleasure. That, at least, is the theory.
So I’m talking to Caitlin, the hot nun, trying desperately not to make eye contact, when another woman, not a nun, approaches, reaching for her purse. She wants to make a donation. I look around for a friar but they’re all busy praying. I try to put her off but she’s insistent. She’s already extracted a bill. “Please, take it,” she says, practically throwing it at me. She has no idea who I am, except that I am talking to a nun so I must be righteous. (If only she knew.) I agree to take her money. Wow, I think, that was the easiest five bucks I ever made. No, that would be wrong, wrong, wrong. I snap out of it. I will give the money to one of the friars. Still, I can’t help but appreciate the generosity this building attracts, and I get a taste of the temptation that men of the cloth must experience every day.
“Are you coming with us on Saturday?” asks one of the friars.
“Sure. Where are you going?”
“To the abortion clinic.”
This makes me uncomfortable, even more than eye contact. I don’t have strong views on abortion, but if forced to claim one, I would have to say I am pro-choice. I don’t know anyone who falls into the other camp, probably for the same reason I had never been to the South Bronx. Our orbits never converge.
We hop in the Gray Ghost. I notice that the dashboard calendar is a month behind. “I’m surprised we have the right year,” says Brother Oisin. We arrive at the clinic and, stepping out of the car, Father Louis asks our small group to huddle. “Know that this is not a physical battle but a spiritual battle. The devil is all over this place.” He then explains where we can stand and not stand. This is very important. “Don’t touch the fence,” says Father Louis. We walk to the front of the clinic, and Father Louis props up a picture of the Virgin Mary on the sidewalk. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to put up a picture of your mother,” he says to the escorts.
The escorts are pro-choicers who are here to ensure the women coming for abortions make it inside safely. They wear T-shirts that read “Escort” and stern expressions that say “Don’t mess with me.” They don’t know what to make of me, standing alongside the friars, observing and taking notes.
Most of the friars quietly recite the rosary, but not Father Louis. He is in everyone’s face. “Ladies, ladies, ladies, you don’t have to do this; follow your conscience,” he says. When a nurse, wearing green scrubs, steps out for a cigarette break, Father Louis says, “Hey, why don’t you work at a real hospital?” He tells one of the escorts, a tough-looking woman, that she’s invited to dinner at the friary. “I’m an organic vegan, so good luck with that,” she snaps back.
I hate confrontation, so I walk around to the back of the clinic where Brothers Crispin and Oisin are quietly praying the rosary. “Holy Mother full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Holy Mother, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell.” This I can handle. But now Father Louis has joined us, and again, he is much more confrontational. He’s talking to one of the escorts, a heavyset woman, but she’s not listening. She’s brought some sort of child’s percussion instrument and is banging it in order to drown out the prayers and protests. She has her back to Father Louis and, at one point, puts out her palm, as if to demarcate her no-go line. Father Louis leans forward and kisses it. “That’s sexual harassment,” she says. “You can get arrested.”
“I’m praying for you,” says Father Louis.
“I don’t want your prayers,” the woman says.
I just stand there, clutching a Styrofoam coffee cup, wanting nothing more than to disappear. Finally, the friars pack up their signs and their rosaries and we climb back into the Gray Ghost. That night, lying in bed, trying to sleep, I hear a Good Humor truck, its childlike refrain clashing with the other, adult sounds of the night. I try to make sense of what transpired that morning at the clinic. I had encountered something that, so far, I have managed to avoid: the nasty, occasionally dangerous, intersection of faith and politics. I admire the Franciscans, but I do not approve of their abortion protests. Does one obviate the other? Or is this just another one of the paradoxes that define religious life?
One day, I tell Brother Crispin about my depression, and he is sympathetic, possibly empathetic too. “You should pray,” he says.
“What? You mean meditate?”
“No, pray. Talk to God.”
“He won’t take my calls.”
“That’s not true. Just pray to God, however you perceive Him.”
Prayer. It never occurred to me. I am not averse to other, more exotic spiritual exercises. I have meditated, masticated, masturbated. I have whirled, prostrated, cogitated, regurgitated, davened, pontificated, reflected, genuflected, and read (God knows I have read). I have not, however, prayed. A guy has to draw the line somewhere.
I don’t know how exactly I have formed my views on prayer, if I could even call them “views.” The fact is I have not given prayer much thought. In the jaded circles in which I travel, prayer, if it is discussed at all, is dismissed as a crutch for the weak and the deluded. It is one thing to watch one’s breath or align one’s chakras and quite another to pray. The word evokes images of a child, kneeling bedside, pleading with God to resurrect a dead cat or supply a certain toy, or perhaps smite a bully. I am above that sort of thing. Or am I?
I’m hearing voices. One belongs to Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel, who no doubt would diagnose me as suffering from a case of “religious bashfulness.” Our prayer life has dried up, he argues, because we fancy ourselves too sophisticated. We need to get over that. Prayer is not for dummies.
No, it’s not, Simone Weil, the French philosopher and Christian mystic, chimes in. Prayer is, at its most basic, simply about paying attention. Prayer is “absolutely unmixed attention.”
True, says Mahatma Gandhi, but prayer also contains an element of self-deception, though not in the way atheists mean. The deception is that God is up there, outside of us. “We for a moment think of God as different from ourselves and pray to him,” Gandhi says. There was nothing childish about Gandhi’s prayers. He did not petition God to alter the material world but, rather, his attitude toward it.
The loudest voice of all belongs to Martin Gardner, the words plucked from his wonderful book The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener. (Like all great books, readers swear it was written just for them.)
“Are you one of those dabblers in Eastern religions who likes to sit in a lotus position and meditate on a mantra, or on om, or on nothing?”
Yes, Martin, I am. How did you know?
“Let me recommend a more ancient practice. Try meditating about God. Say something to God. Give thanks for something. Ask for forgiveness for something. Ask for something you desire, remembering that God knows better than you whether you should have it or not.”
But I can’t pray. I feel silly.
“What can you lose? You might discover that at the heart of those old religious traditions, buried under the blood and balderdash, was something that gave them vitality, that held and still holds the allegiance of millions. You might discover that you have something in common with these believers after all.”
The voices quiet. I return to my room and sit on the edge of my bed. I shut out the chorus of sirens, the airplanes overhead, the cries of “I’m gonna kill you, motherfucker,” and I pray. What exactly transpired? Nothing spectacular, nothing that men and women haven’t done for centuries. Beyond that, I’d rather not talk about it. It is personal.
I need a break. All of this asceticism and do-goodery is getting to me. I need to scratch my various materialistic itches, reconnect with my innate selfishness, and now. After morning prayers, I slip away, unnoticed, and hop on the Number Two train, feeling exhilarated and guilty in equal measure. At first, I’m the only white person on the train, but as we head south, that changes. We’re like a giant MTA snowball, gathering whiteness until, when we finally reach Soho, virtually all color has been drained from the subway car.
I surface on Spring Street and am immediately overwhelmed. So much stuff! Trendy, minimalist stuff, trying so very hard to camouflage its stuff-ness, but stuff it is. I didn’t realize how much my time with the Franciscans had recalibrated my tolerance for stuff. I am also struck by how self-conscious everyone is, how much of their mannerisms are a kind of performance, the sidewalk their stage. I feel like I have just arrived from the thirteenth century, which in a way I have. I am out of touch, out of step, literally. I get in people’s way. I’m not keeping up. I’m moving at Franciscan speed, which it turns out is considerably slower than Soho speed.
I also notice how little people notice—anything. Everyone is twitchy, thumbing their iPhones, minds elsewhere. No doubt these hipsters, these younger versions of me, would consider the friars of the South Bronx hopelessly out of touch with the “real world.” Yet I wonder: Who are the ones out of touch? The friars, unlike the denizens of Soho, are fully present. They know how to linger. They know how to look someone in the eye without silently calculating their social score. The materialism of Soho is particularly insidious because it is trying so hard to look like it is not. Army surplus bags that sell for five hundred dollars. Cargo pants that cost enough to feed the entire homeless shelter for a week.
I feel the urge to walk. Walking can be a deeply religious exercise. Whether it’s Christian pilgrims walking the stations of the cross in Jerusalem; or a Buddhist monk, eyes closed, immersed in a walking meditation; or Muslims walking round and round the Kaaba in Mecca. Thomas Huxley, inventor of the word “agnostic,” considered his mountain jaunts “the equivalent of churchgoing.” Thoreau called his early-morning walks “a blessing for the whole day.” The travel writer Bruce Chatwin took this sentiment a step further. Walking is not a path to God, it is God. “If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other God.”
I like the way that sounds. So I walk. I walk north on Broadway, then angle west to Fifth Avenue. I keep walking. I walk past Steve Forbes, the billionaire, getting into his limousine. I walk past a beggar, and think: What would Saint Francis do? I know what he would do. He would disrobe right there on the street, as in fact he did in Assisi, and give all of his clothes to the beggar, then embrace him and apologize that he didn’t have more to give. This is why I am not a saint. (One of the many reasons, actually.) But I do hand over a couple of dollars. As I walk away, the man says, “Thanks. This will help with my Viagra.”
I walk and walk. My legs are tired, my mind shedding thoughts like Saint Francis sloughing his fine silk clothes. By Times Square I have stopped thinking entirely, and yet I still walk, all the way to 86th Street, where I board a northbound train. When I finally arrive at the friary, I am exhausted but content. I feel as if I have come home.
I’ve grown tired of shelter cuisine. I want to go out to dinner but am intimidated by the South Bronx at night, so I invite two of the friars to join me. They are my protection. I recruit Brothers Angelo and Joseph. They don’t put up much resistance. I suspect they’re looking forward to a change of pace.
We make it only one block before encountering Jose. Jose is excited. Jose is agitated. Jose is drunk. He is a friendly drunk, but I sense the energy could pivot on a dime into something more ominous. I step back a few feet and let the brothers take the lead. They listen, for Jose has something very important to say—oh boy, it is so important but he can’t quite get it out, owing to his inebriation. Jose glares at me. He senses my impatience. I know this because he says, “You’re impatient, man.” Nooo, Jose, I’m not. I’m just hungry (which is true). The brothers, though, are the pinnacle of patience. They stand there and listen to Jose while I slip down the hill and wait for them. Finally, Jose moves on, and the friars join me. How did you do it? I ask.
“We told him it would be rude to keep our friend waiting.”
That was wise; they appealed to Jose’s noble sense, allowed him to lift himself a bit higher. I learned my lesson, though. Never travel with a friar if you are in a hurry. Another lesson: Never turn to friars for dining advice. They don’t have a clue. They eat out rarely and have, after all, taken a vow of poverty. These are not foodies. We wander aimlessly as the streets grow dark, and finally settle on a Mexican restaurant that, though two blocks from the friary, comes as a revelation to them. It’s a nice place, the real thing. The neighborhood has been steadily improving in recent years. If it gets much better the friars may have to move to someplace worse, where they are needed more. They engage in a sort of reverse urban flight, always staying one step ahead of niceness.
We sit down and, over the guacamole and chips, they say grace, blessing not only the avocado but me, their benefactor. Once again, I like the way they say this sincerely, not by rote. But I have ulterior motives, as I so often do. I still don’t know how to help. I still think of myself in the third person. Eric is helping the needy. Eric is a regular Mother Teresa. What is the right frame of mind? I still don’t get it.
“If you do it for yourself, that’s good,” says Brother Joseph. “That’s better than not helping at all. If you do it for the men you’re helping, that’s better. But if you do it for God, that is the best. Mother Teresa says, ‘When you serve a person, especially a poor person, you serve God.’”
That is a very Christian idea, but not only Christian. All religions, to various extents and in various ways, preach altruism, but it is never simply about one human being helping another. The good deed is always part of some larger scheme. A Muslim who helps his fellow man is submitting to God’s will. A Jew is engaging in tikkun haolam, repairing the world. A Buddhist is generating positive karma. Does any of this matter? Are Christians, for instance, in a way using the people they are helping in order to serve God? If so, does it diminish their good deeds, or magnify them? I silently ponder this while stabbing a tortilla chip into the guacamole.
Our quesadillas arrive, and they are good. Then we walk, and that is good too. When we arrive at the friary, my stomach is heavy with quesadilla, my heart heavy with regret. This is not good. Why did I eat so much? I confess my quesadilla regret to Brother Angelo, who says, “When in doubt, be thankful.” What an unexpected response. When in doubt be thankful. When I’m in doubt I worry, or spin my wheels, or resort to default sadness. Why not be thankful? The opposite of gratitude is entitlement, and that is a sure path to misery. Who says the universe owes me anything? I am here, aren’t I? Why isn’t that enough?
The next morning, I sleep through the morning prayers, and head to the kitchen for breakfast. I pour myself a bowl of Happy O’s and sit in the dining room, alone, staring out the window at what is shaping up to be a fine day. I’m about to dig in when I stop myself, spoon hovering in midair. Something doesn’t feel right. What is it? Ah, yes. “Thank You, Lord, for our daily bread…” Shit. I can’t remember the rest. Oh, never mind. “Thank You, God, for the grub.” I dive in. The Happy O’s, for once, live up to their name. I, however, am not a Happy O. I still suffer, though not for my sins or anyone else’s. I just suffer, for suffering’s sake, I suppose, or perhaps like Saint Paul, who famously complained of “a thorn in my flesh.” Yes, that’s how I feel, only my thorn feels more like a branch, or maybe a redwood.
I ask Brother Crispin, the most psychologically attuned of the friars, about this. I don’t understand the Christian—and especially the Franciscan—notion that suffering is a form of “perfect joy.” I have suffered for many years now and find no joy in it, perfect or otherwise. Am I missing something? Or was Francis a masochist?
No, he wasn’t, says Brother Crispin, and neither are his progeny. “Suffering is the experience of one’s self being crushed and remade into the image of the divine love,” he says, and again I wince at the violent imagery, like the Sufis’ advocating annihilation of the self, or Wayne from Staten Island threatening to throw me back against my own experience. Why must God hurt so much? Because, says Brother Crispin, it is a necessary transition between suffering and love. “One suffers, at least a little, for love because the will to love destroys the narcissistic self.” This is good suffering, he says. And bad suffering? “It’s self-destructive, masochistic, or, worse still, a kind of macho spirituality.” I know what he means by macho spirituality. I’ve met these people. Smug meditators who brag about how long they can sit in serene silence, devout Christians who take great pride in their humility. These are people so confident in their spiritual abilities they don’t need anyone’s help, thank you very much.
I am not one of these people, not by a long shot, so I’m not offended when, toward the end of my stay, Brother Oisin asks, “Would you like us to pray over you?” I don’t know exactly what he means, but I like the way it sounds. I picture Franciscans hovering over me like angels. I agree.
He and two of his colleagues will meet me in the main chapel that evening. I arrive a few minutes early. The chapel is empty, the only sound the thwok-thwok-thwok of a ceiling fan. I take a seat in one of the pews. I feel like I’m in the reception area of a doctor’s office. That same sense of doing the right thing, being responsible, but still dreading what lies ahead and hoping it doesn’t hurt too much.
Brother Oisin arrives with two other friars. One of them is an Irishman, like him, only taller, with deeply recessed eyes and a large protruding forehead. I’ve never seen anything quite like it; his forehead arrives a few seconds before the rest of him.
“What seems to be the problem?” inquires The Forehead, sounding like a doctor examining a patient.
“I have a dull ache,” I say but regret the words as soon as they leave my lips. They sound so lame.
“I see,” says The Forehead, without judgment, as if dealing with a particularly challenging case.
I lower my head and close my eyes, as instructed, and then feel hands on me. Reassuring hands. All I hear is the ceiling fan, then The Forehead says, “Jesus, help this child.”
“Jesus says He loves you, cherishes you. Please be clear, Lord, what is the source of this dull ache, this tip of a spear? Please remove it.”
“I’m getting something,” interjects Brother Oisin. It’s a verse from the Bible. “For he who gives himself to pleasure, he is dead while he is alive.” Not helpful, I think, not helpful.
“I’m getting an image,” says another of the brothers. “This may sound strange, but you’re a child at a birthday party. There are hats, and candles and a cake. But there’s nobody there. You hear a sound on the other side of a fence, but you find nothing when you get there. Maybe the lesson is that there is nowhere you need to be.”
“Lord Jesus,” I hear another voice say. “help Eric find where home is. Offer him wisdom and guidance.”
The Forehead is getting an image of me fishing off of a pier with a simple Tom Sawyer pole. I’m fishing, he says, with an air of expectation, not hopelessness. Someone else gets an image of me milking a cow. Nobody is quite sure what that means.
They bless me. They pray for my search, and for my family and friends. The Forehead says, “Thank You, Lord, for these images.” And that’s it. They’re gone. I’m alone in the cavernous chapel. The fan is silent now. All I hear is the occasional airplane and my own heartbeat. I feel like crying, but the tears don’t come. I don’t know what to make of those images. I’ve never milked a cow and am not one for fishing. Maybe there is some hidden meaning there. Maybe not. Yet I am filled with gratitude, touched that these three men, one with a forehead the size of Mount Rushmore, cared enough about my indeterminate dull ache to seek divine grace. Unfortunately, there was none that warm evening in the South Bronx, none I could detect, anyway. There was, though, plenty of what Aldous Huxley calls “human grace.” Maybe that is enough.
* * *
It’s time for me to go home. The brothers give me the names of some places where I could volunteer. I vow to follow up, but know I probably won’t. I will get busy. Life will intervene. I say as much to Brother Crispin, who tells me, “That’s okay. Your wife and daughter are your apostolate.” Of course. Charity begins at home. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
I wonder, though: Could I take a giant leap and dedicate my life to helping others? Could I actually become a friar? In years past, I have occasionally observed two of their vows—poverty and chastity—though never voluntarily, so I suppose it doesn’t count. (I’ve never cared much for the third vow, obedience.) Regrettably, as much as I admire the Franciscans, as much as I like them, I can’t see becoming one of them. I lack the self-discipline. I lack the personal relationship with Jesus. Besides, I like my stuff too much. I like experiences too much. And, truth be told, I like sex too much.
Little do I know that, a few thousand miles away, a religion awaits me that not only permits such indulgences, but sanctifies them.