30

“There is cold for September,” I told Irma on the way to her house. It was my best effort to comment on the unseasonably cool night in Spanish.

“Sí, hace fresco,” she agreed.

I stepped on the gas to minimize the nightly struggle for conversation. Irma was a fascinating person, but our lives and backgrounds were so different. She had grown up in abject poverty in Mexico; I’d grown up in middle-class suburbs across the United States. She had six siblings; I had none. She was single; I was married. When my bad Spanish came into the mix, it left conversation exceedingly difficult. We had already agreed that Donald had done innumerable cute things that day, established that her family was all fine, and now only the road sounds filled the car.

We approached the bridge over McNeil Drive, and I pointed out her window. “Our new church is that way,” I said. “We’re taking classes there tonight.” After I dropped her off I was going to meet Joe for the first session of the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults at Saint William.

“My church is that way, too,” she said.

I suddenly remembered that she and her family were Catholic. In fact, all my life I’d heard them discuss the goings on at San Guillermo, which means. . . “Saint William? You go to Saint William? That’s where we’re going, too!”

At that moment it was as if a piggy bank containing an infinite wealth of topics for conversation was smashed. Its riches poured out in heaps, and now the problem was getting through it all before we got to her house. I eased my foot off the accelerator and moved into the right lane. I asked if she’d seen the stunning new building they were constructing down the street. She had, and we marveled at the priest’s vision for creating a beautiful church that was large enough to house his thousands of parishioners. I told her a funny story about one of the deacons; she’d already heard about the incident and told me through bursts of laughter some additional information that made it even funnier. After we caught our breath, she repeated an insight that her aunt in Mexico had called to share about the Gospel reading from last Sunday’s Mass. I told her that it reminded me of Pope Benedict’s commentary in his homily, and as I spoke I was filled with a comforting sense of connectedness to know that every Catholic in the world heard the same Scriptures that we had that Sunday.

I parked the car along the curb in front of her house and locked the doors so we could finish talking. When I eventually had to cut the conversation short so I wouldn’t be late for RCIA, I noticed that we’d been parked in front of the house for fifteen minutes.

* * *

“Does anyone have any questions before we wrap up?” asked Noe Rocha, the new RCIA director at Saint William. This was the man Janie Castillo had told us about the day that Joe discovered the Guadalupanas’ breakfasts, and I could see why she’d praised him so highly. There was an aura about him that made you want to be in his presence. He was a Hispanic gentleman of a medium build, a neat white beard framing his tanned face. His movements had the confidence of a man who understood the world, yet contained not a hint of arrogance. He spoke in a direct, no-nonsense tone that was punctuated with frequent smiles.

This first class was the Inquiry, a millennia-old tradition where members of the Christian community would engage in dialogues with people wishing to know more about this religion. Those who wanted to continue would undergo the Rite of Acceptance, in which their ears, eyes, lips, and heart would be marked with the sign of the cross. Then would begin the Catechumenate, which was originally a time when seekers would enter the catacombs, learning the Faith by candlelight, using assumed names for safety. After that was the Rite of Election, when the catechumens would stand before the community and announce their desire to become Christians. After a period of purification during Lent, they would come into communion with the Church at Easter.

After a few announcements, Noe said he would conclude the meeting with his own testimony of what Jesus had done for him. I stretched my legs and snuck a peek at the time on my phone. Thirty minutes left. My mind was slipping further and further into an exhausted fog.

Noe took his place at the front of the room and began his tale. His arms were loose and animated as he spoke, the movements of a seasoned storyteller.

“This life of mine that you see now, it is a life profoundly changed by an encounter with the Lord,” he began. He’d mentioned that he grew up along the Texas-Mexico border, and a slight Spanish accent clipped his words. He stepped into the aisle between the two rows of seats and made eye contact with all thirty of us before he continued, slowly: “It is possible for your life to change, once you live under the lordship of Jesus Christ.”

Oh, boy. When Noe turned to the other side of the room I snuck a glance at Joe, who was intensely focused on the talk. I twisted to see the clock at the back of the room. Noe seemed like a great guy, but I wished we could skip this. He couldn’t possibly have that much of a story to tell. He seemed so grounded and devout, I couldn’t imagine that he’d missed church more than a handful of times in his entire life. I might like to hear about his journey one day, but right now I was too tired.

“When I was younger, I messed up,” Noe began. There was an almost imperceptible tremor in his voice as he added, “I messed up real bad. I got into drugs. My cousin and I would run around, get thrown in jail, cause trouble, then do more drugs. Then I discovered heroin. I became a dealer. And at the age of twenty-eight, after fifteen years of this lifestyle, I ended up in a mental hospital.”

Joe and I exchanged startled glances. Noe walked to the front of the room, and I studied the kind, open face of this man whose reputation for kindness and holiness preceded him even before he moved here. I couldn’t attribute the term “border-town heroin dealer” to that face.

“They put me on methadone for five and a half years—five and a half! But it didn’t work.” A beat of silence as he considered his next sentence. “And one morning I was brought into a counselor’s office. The counselor looked at my file, which was about three inches thick, and then he looked right at me, and he said: ‘There is no hope for you.’ ” He delivered each word of the last sentence carefully, capturing the weight they once held. There. Is. No. Hope. For. You. His liver had malfunctioned twice, he forgot entire days at a time, and he was still strung out on drugs after five years of methadone. It was a simple fact, the counselor explained, that he would be dead or doing life within a year.

Noe got out of the mental facility only to have two drug deals go bad and to rack up multiple felony charges. While on the run from the law he went back to his parents’ home, where he lay in bed, becoming increasingly desperate from the symptoms of withdrawal. Then he remembered that he’d seen a new Catholic church next door. He got out of bed, pulled on his boots, and walked over.

His plan was to con the parish’s stubborn Irish priest out of fifteen dollars to buy a half gram. But when he arrived in the chair across from the priest’s desk, the words wouldn’t come out. Instead, he admitted that he was a drug dealer and a drug addict. With his sunglasses on and his head spinning from the symptoms of withdrawal, the words flooded out so quickly he couldn’t stop them. By the end, he’d told the priest every bad thing he’d done that he could remember.

The priest was unflustered. He didn’t seem horrified, or even surprised. In a moment that Noe imitated by leaning over an RCIA candidate in the front row, the priest calmly rose from his chair, walked over to Noe, lowered himself until he was inches away from his face, and said: “Noe. I’m not going to tell you that Jesus has all the answers. He is your only answer.”

Noe stood and resumed his place at the front of the room. “And I thought, That’s just lies. I ain’t gonna buy that”, he said. When he spoke in his voice from thirty years before, I got a chill. He flawlessly employed a particular kind of Mexican-American accent, a ghostly whisper where the s’s are drawn out like a hiss, that I’d only ever heard on documentaries about maximum-security prisons.

At the priest’s suggestion, Noe reluctantly attended a church meeting where people laid hands on him and prayed for him. When he got home, he asked his parents for help, and his father pulled together enough money to rent a motel room for a week—one with bars on the windows so there would be no escape. For three days and three nights Noe didn’t eat anything and hardly had a sip to drink. As he suffered through the agony of withdrawal, people came by to pray, and the priest came to anoint him with oil. While he writhed in bed, his dad sat in the kitchen, waiting.

“And on the third night, God called me by name,” he said. “And he said, ‘Look over there.’ ” Noe turned his head slowly to reenact the moment. “There was my father, on the floor.” His father had gone to sleep on the cold ground in front of the door, so that he’d know if his son tried to escape.

“And the voice said: ‘Look at how much that man loves you. I love you a million times more than that man lying on the floor does. Because you’re my son.’ ”

Noe’s voice grew quiet. “I cried all night—sobbed. I woke up the next morning. My pillow was wet from tears. And I realized that my cravings—they were gone. It was November 11, 1976. I have never craved heroin again.”

Nobody moved. The only sound was the whistle of a train that rumbled by a few blocks away.

Noe said that the moment when God healed him of his addiction ignited within him a desperate desire to find and know this God who said he was his father. At first he was still an unemployed drug dealer, so he would sit in the hallway outside of children’s First Communion classes, eavesdropping to soak up whatever he could learn. He eventually dedicated his life to being a missionary and spent the next thirty years proclaiming the same message he was here to deliver to us today:

“Jesus is alive,” he said, searching each one of us so that we might understand. His voice cracked as he continued. “And he cares. And he has the power to give new life to everyone who wants it.”

A hot tightness gripped my throat. Joe wiped a tear from his eye.

At the end of the evening, Noe walked all of us to the exit where he stood with his arms wide, ready for any hands that needed shaking or backs that needed slapping. We were the last to leave. He had simply said goodbye to everyone else, but as he shook Joe’s hand, he looked from him to me and asked, “Joe, Jennifer, how is your journey to the Lord going?” I glanced self-consciously at my leg, wondering if my noticeable limp had prompted him to ask.

“It’s going well!” Joe said.

Noe turned to me. “Oh, yeah, it’s fine,” I said. “Well, I mean, there are some challenges. Sometimes it feels like a lot. . .” I could tell that I was about to start crying and talking about how much I was working and how confused I was about this contraception issue and how my doctors said I shouldn’t have any more kids. So I shut down that whole line of thinking and forced myself to add, “But I’m sure it’ll all work out. Everything is fine.” I’d hoped my tone wouldn’t make it so obvious that I was lying.

Noe’s brown eyes met mine, with no hesitation. He gently patted me on the back and said, “Remember, Jennifer, you’re not doing this alone.”