“I mean…I really loved her.”
The man broke down.
“And…I almost told her once.”
The Reb looked at me sadly.
“Nothing haunts like the things we don’t say.”
Later that day, I asked the Reb to forgive me for anything I might have ever said or done that hurt him. He smiled and said that while he couldn’t think of anything, he would “consider all such matters addressed.”
Well, I joked, I’m glad we got that over with.
“You’re in the clear.”
Timing is everything.
“That’s right. Which is why our sages tell us to repent exactly one day before we die.”
But how do you know it’s the day before you die? I asked.
He raised his eyebrows.
“Exactly.”
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.
EZEKIEL 36:26
The Moment of Truth
It was Christmas week in Detroit, but there seemed to be more “For Sale” signs on houses than blinking lights. Folks were not shopping much. Kids were being warned to expect less from Santa. The Depression of our age was unfolding and we sensed it; we wore it on our faces.
Down on Trumbull, Pastor Henry’s church sat cloaked in darkness-they couldn’t afford outside lighting-and unless you pulled open the side door, you might not even know the building was occupied. In all my time there, I never saw the place fully illuminated. “Dim” was pretty much the word for inside, as if the electricity were as old as the walls.
That night with Cass had shown me another way of unraveling Henry-talking to his congregants.
A fellow named Dan, for example, one of the church’s few white members, told me that, years earlier, he had been alcoholic and homeless, sleeping nights on a handball court on Detroit ’s Belle Isle. He would drink a fifth of liquor and up to twelve beers a day, pass out, wake up, and start drinking again. One chilly night he came to the church, but it was closed. Henry, sitting in his car, saw Dan walking away and called him over, then asked if he needed a place to stay.
“He didn’t know me from a hill of beans,” Dan told me. “I could have been Jack the Ripper.” Eventually, Dan got sober by staying thirty straight days in the church.
Another congregant, a short, energetic woman named Shirley, recalled twenty or thirty kids sleeping at Henry’s small house on Friday nights or Saturday afternoons. He called the group the “Peace Posse.” He taught them to cook, he played games, but mostly he made them feel safe. Henry so inspired Shirley that she became a church elder.
A man named Freddie showed me the private room with the wooden bed frame that he lived in on the church’s third floor. He said Henry offered it to him when he was out on the streets. A lady named Luanne noted that Henry never charged for a funeral or a wedding. “The Lord will pay us back,” he would say.
And then there was Marlene, a handsome woman with sad, almond eyes, who told me a brutal tale of drug addiction and violence, culminating in a confrontation with the man she was living with: he yanked her and her two-year-old son out of bed, beat her, and pushed them down a flight of stairs. They landed on an old board with nails in it, and her son gashed his forehead. The man refused to let them go to a hospital. He literally held them captive while they bled.
Two days later, he finally left the house, and Marlene grabbed her son and ran-with only the clothes they were wearing. At the police station, an officer called Henry, who spoke to Marlene over the phone. He sounded so concerned and soothing that she asked the police to take her to his church, even though she’d never met him. Henry gave Marlene and her son a hot meal and a place to sleep-and she’d been coming to his ministry ever since.
I thought about how churches and synagogues usually build memberships. Some run schools. Some host social events. Some offer singles nights, lecture series, carnivals, and sign-up drives. Annual dues are part of the equation.
At I Am My Brother’s Keeper, there were no dues, no drives, no singles nights. Membership grew the old- fashioned way: a desperate need for God.
Still, none of this helped Henry with his heating problems or his bills. His Sunday services continued inside a plastic tent. The homeless nights were still noisy with hot air blowers, and the men kept their coats on when they lay down to sleep. Early winter continued its attack, and the snow piled up on the church’s front steps.
Although I tended to stay away from religious themes in my newspaper writing, I felt a need to expose these conditions to the readership of the
I filed the stories, but something still nagged at me.
And so one night, just before Christmas, I went to Henry’s house. It was down the block from the church. He had mortgaged it for thirty thousand dollars, back when he arrived in Detroit sixteen years ago. It might not be worth that today.
The brick facade was old, a front gate was loose, and the empty lot where he’d once served food to the neighborhood was matted with snow, ice, and mud. The shed where they stored the food was still there, with netting to protect it from birds.
Henry sat on a small couch in his front room-where Cass once spent a year. He was suffering a head cold and he coughed several times. His place was tidy but poor, the paint was peeling, and the ceiling in the kitchen had partially collapsed. He seemed more pensive than usual. Maybe it was the holiday. His walls held photos of his children, but it was clear they weren’t getting a lot of Christmas presents this year.
In his drug dealing days, if Henry wanted a TV, customers would trade him one for dope. Jewelry? Designer clothes? He didn’t even need to leave his house.
I asked if he ever thought, when he entered the ministry, that one day he might be doing better than he was?
“No,” he said. “I think I was meant to work with the poor.”
Yeah, I joked, but you don’t have to
He looked around at the crumbling house. He drew a deep breath.
“I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
How do you mean?
He lowered his eyes.
Then he said something I will never forget.
“Mitch, I am an awful person. The things I have done in my life, they can never be erased. I have broken
