“My friends, when sometimes we are asked why does someone perish, someone so young in age, I can only fall back on the wisdom of our tradition. It is true that David did not live long for his day. But while he lived, David taught, inspired, and left us a great spiritual legacy, including the Book of Psalms. One of those Psalms, the twenty-third, is read sometimes at funerals.
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul…
“Is it not better to have known Rinah, my daughter, for four years, than not to have known her at all?”
WINTER
Then some people came, bringing a paralyzed man, carried by four of them.
And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made a hole in the roof.
MARK 2:3—4
Winter Solstice
On a Sunday morning, with the snow whipping sideways, I pulled open the church’s large front door and stepped into the vestibule. The sanctuary was freezing—and empty. The roof hole was above me. I could hear the wind whipping the blue tarp. An organ sound was coming from somewhere, but there was no one around.
“Psst.”
I turned to see the thin man with the high forehead, motioning me to another door on the side. I walked in and did a double take.
Here was some kind of makeshift mini-sanctuary, just two short pews wide, with a side “wall” of plastic sheeting staple-gunned into wooden two-by-fours. It was like a fort that kids make in the attic. The plastic wrapped overhead as well, creating a low ceiling.
Apparently, with no heat to fight the cold, the church had been forced to build a plastic tent inside its own sanctuary. Congregants huddled in the limited seating. The small space made it less frigid, although people still kept their coats on. And this was where Pastor Henry Covington now conducted his Sunday service. Instead of a grand altar, he had a small lectern. Instead of the soaring pipe organ behind him, there was a black-and-white banner nailed on the wall.
“We are grateful to you, God,” Henry was saying as I slid into a back row. “God of hope…we give you thanks and praise…in Jesus’s name, amen.”
I glanced around. Between the roof hole, the heat being shut off, and now a plastic prayer tent, you wondered how long before the church withered out of existence altogether.
Henry’s sermon that day had to do with judging people by their past. He began by lamenting how hard it is to shake a habit—especially an addiction.
“I know how it is,” he bellowed. “I know what it’s like when you done swore, I’ll never do this again…next time I get my money, I’m gonna do this and I’m gonna do that,’ and you go home and you promise your loved ones, ‘I messed up, but I’m gonna get back’—”
“Amen!”
“And then you get some money, and all those promises—out the window.”
“Way-ell!”
“You’re so sick and tired of being sick and tired—”
“Sick and tired!”
“But there comes a time when you have to admit to God, this stuff is stronger than me—it’s stronger than the rehab program—it’s stronger than the pastor at the church…I need you, Lord…I need you, Jesus…”
He started clapping.
“But you gotta be like Smokey Robinson…”
He burst into song. He did two lines from “You Really Got a Hold on Me.”
Then back to preaching.
“And maybe you make it to the supermarket and buy some groceries, then someone comes up to you and you get weak…and all the groceries that you bought for seventy dollars, you’ll give ’em away for twenty—”
“Fifteen!”
“Yes, sir…fifteen…that’s right, if you on a hard enough mission to get high…I’m tellin’ you, I know what it’s like to be in, and I know what it’s like to be out.”
“Amen!”
“But we gotta fight this thing. And it’s not good enough for just you to get clean. If someone else is trying, you gotta believe in them too—”
“Preach it, Pastor!”
“In the Book of Acts, we read that Paul—after his conversion—people distrusted him because he used to persecute the church, but now he praised it. ‘Is this the same guy? Can’t be! Nuh-uh.’…It’s amazing how folks can’t see you, ’cause they want to keep you in that past. Some of our greatest problems in ministering to people is that they knew us back before we came to the Lord—”
“Yes it is!”
“The same thing with Paul…They saw him…they couldn’t believe that this man’s from Jesus, because they looked at his past—”
“That’s right!”
“They just looked at his past. And when we’re still looking at ourselves through our past, we’re not seeing what God has done. What He can do! We’re not seeing the little things that happen in our lives—”
“Tell it now.”
“When people tell me that I’m good, my response is, ‘I’m trying.’ But there’s some people that know me from back when—anytime I make that trip to New York—and when they hear I’m the pastor of a church, all of a sudden, it’s like “I know you gettin’ paid, boy. I know you gettin’ paid. I know you.’”
He paused. His voice lowered.
“No, I say. You knew me. You knew that person, but you don’t know the person that I’m trying to become.”
Sitting in the back, I felt a shiver of embarrassment. The truth was, I had struggled with similar thoughts about Henry. I’d wondered if, back among his New York world, he’d laugh and say, “Yeah, I got a whole new thing going on.”
Instead, here he was, preaching in a plastic tent.
“You are not your past!” he told his congregation.
Did you ever hear a sermon that felt as if it were being screamed into your ear alone? When that happens, it usually has more to do with you than the preacher.
DECEMBER
Good and Evil
After all his years of dogged survival, the Reb, I believed, could beat back any illness; he just might not beat them all.
The attack that had left him slumped in a chair, confused and mumbling, proved not to be a stroke at all, but rather a tragic consequence of his multiple afflictions. In the stir of doctors and prescriptions, the Reb’s Dilantin medication—taken, ironically, to control seizures—had been inadvertently increased to levels that pummeled him. Toxic levels.
Simply put, pills had turned the Reb into a human scarecrow.
When the problem was finally discovered—after several terrible months—dosages were quickly adjusted, and he was, in a matter of days, brought out of his crippling stupor.
I first heard about this in a phone call with Gilah and a subsequent one with Sarah.
“It’s amazing…,” they said. “It’s remarkable…”
There was a buoyancy in their voices I hadn’t heard in months, as if an unexpected summer had arrived in their backyard. And when I caught a plane to the East Coast and entered the house myself, and got my first glimpse of the Reb in his office—well, I wish I could describe the feeling. I have read stories about coma patients who suddenly, after years, awaken and ask for a piece of chocolate cake, while loved ones stare in dropped-jaw disbelief. Maybe it was like that.
All I know is that he turned in his chair, wearing one of those vests with all the pockets, and he held out his bony arms, and he smiled in that excited, crinkle-eyed way that seemed to emit sunlight, and he crowed, “Hellooo, stranger”—and I honestly thought I had seen someone return from the dead.
What was it like? I asked him, when we’d had a chance to settle.
“A fog,” he said. “Like a dark hole. I was here, but somehow I wasn’t here.”
Did you think it was…you know…
“The end?”
Yeah.
“At times.”
And what were you thinking at those times?
&nb
sp; “I was thinking mostly about my family. I wanted to calm them. But I felt helpless to do so.”
You scared the heck out of me—us, I said.
“I am sorry about that.”
No. I mean. It’s not your fault.
“Mitch, I have been asking myself why this happened,” he said, rubbing his chin. “Why I have been…spared, so to speak. After all, another couple of whatchamacallits…”
Milligrams?
“That’s it. And I could’ve been kaput.”
Aren’t you furious?
He shrugged. “Look. I’m not happy, if that’s what you’re asking. But I must believe the doctors were doing their best.”
I couldn’t believe his tolerance. Most people would have been at a lawyer’s office. I guess the Reb felt if there was a reason for his rescue, it wasn’t to file lawsuits.
“Maybe I have a little more to give,” he said.
Or get.
“When you give, you get,” he said.
I walked right into that one.
Now, I knew the Reb believed that corny line. He truly was happiest when he could help someone. But I assumed a Man of God had no choice. His religion obliged him toward what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
On the other hand, Napoleon once dismissed religion as “what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.” Meaning, without the fear of God—or literally the hell we might have to pay—the rest of us would just take what we wanted.
The news headlines certainly endorsed that idea. In recent months, there had been terrorist train blasts in India, greedy executives sentenced in the Enron fraud case, a truck driver who’d shot five girls in an Amish schoolhouse, and a California congressman sent to jail for taking millions in bribes while living on a yacht.
Do you think it’s true, I asked the Reb that day, that our nature is evil?
“No,” he said. “I believe there is goodness in man.”
So we do have better angels?
“Deep down, yes.”
Then why do we do so many bad things?
He sighed. “Because one thing God gave us—and I’m afraid it’s at times a little too much—is free will. Freedom to choose. I believe he gave us everything needed to build a beautiful world, if we choose wisely.
“But we can also choose badly. And we can mess things up something awful.”
Can man change between good and evil?
The Reb nodded slowly. “In both directions.”
Human nature is a question we’ve grappled with for centuries. If a child were raised alone, separate from society, media, social dynamics, would that child grow up kind and openhearted? Or would it be feral and bloodthirsty, looking out solely for its own survival?
We’ll never know. We are not raised by wolves. But clearly, we wrestle with conflicting urges. Christianity believes Satan tempts us with evil. Hindus see evil as a challenge to life’s balance. Judaism refers to a man’s righteous inclination versus his evil inclination as two warring spirits; the evil spirit can, at first, be as flimsy as a cobweb, but if allowed to grow, it becomes thick as a cart rope.
The Reb once did a sermon on how the same things in life can be good or evil, depending on what, with free will, we do with them. Speech can bless or curse. Money can save or destroy. Science can heal or kill. Even nature can work for you or against you: fire can warm or burn; water can sustain life or flood it away.
“But nowhere in the story of Creation,” the Reb said, “do we read the word ‘bad.’ God did not create bad things.”
So God leaves it to us?
“He leaves it to us,” he replied. “Now, I do believe there are times when God clenches his fist and says, ‘Ooh, don’t do it, you’re gonna get yourself into trouble.’ And you might say, well, why doesn’t God jump in? Why doesn’t he eliminate the negative and accentuate the positive?
“Because, from the beginning, God said, ‘I’m gonna put this world into your hands. If I run everything, then that’s not you.’ So we were created with a piece of divinity inside us, but with this thing called free will, and I think God watches us every day, lovingly, praying we will make the right choices.”
Do you really think God prays? I asked.
“I think prayer and God,” he said, “are intertwined.”
I stared at him for a moment, marveling at the way he was speaking, analyzing, making jokes. Just weeks ago, hands were being wrung for him, tears were being cried. Now this. His daughter called it a miracle. Maybe it was. I was just relieved that he was better—and that his eulogy could wait.
We heard a honk. The taxi had arrived.
“So, anyhow” he said, wrapping up, “that is the story of my recent life.”
I stood and gave him a hug, a little tighter than usual.
No more scares, okay?
“Ah,” he laughed, jerking a thumb skyward. “You’ll have to take that up with my boss.”
Life of Cass
The story of my recent life. I like that phrase. It makes more sense than the story of my life, because we get so many lives between birth and death. A life to be a child. A life to come of age. A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to parent, to test our promise, to realize our mortality—and, in some lucky cases, to do something after that realization.
The Reb had achieved that.
And so had someone else.
Not Henry—although he certainly lived many lives.
But I refer here to his trusty elder, the man with one leg, who nudged and cajoled me until finally, on a cold night, in a plastic-covered section of the church, he said, in a scratchy voice, “Mister Mitch, I got to share this with you…”
Anthony “Cass” Castelow, it turned out, did have an eye-popping tale: he’d been a star athlete in a big family, gone to the army, come home, become a local drug dealer.
“But okay, now. Here’s what I really need to tell you…”
And this was the story of his recent life.
“Eighteen years ago—back when I had both my legs—I was stabbed in the stomach in a place called Sweetheart’s Bar. I was selling drugs outa there. Two guys came in, and one guy grabbed me from behind and the other guy took the drugs and stabbed me. I nearly died in the hospital. I was gurgling blood. Doctors said I’d be lucky to live through the night. But when I got out, I went back to drugs again.
“Not long after that, the drugs got me sent to prison. Three years. I became a Muslim in there, because the Muslims were clean, they took care of their bodies, and a guy named Usur showed me how to pray, you know, five times a day, on the prayer mats, do the salahs, say ‘Alahu Akbar.’
“But this guy, Usur, at the end of it all, he’d whisper, ‘In Jesus’s name, amen.’ I pulled him to the side one day and he says, ‘Listen, man, I’m a Muslim in here, but my family out there, they’re Christian. I don’t know if it’s Allah or Jesus Christ after this life. I’m just trying to get in, you understand me? ’Cause I ain’t never going home, Cass. Do you understand that I’m gonna die in here?’
“Well, I left prison and that kinda messed me up. I drifted away from anything with God and I got back into drugs—crack, pills, weed. Lost all my money. With no place to go, I went back to the Jeffries Projects, where I grew up, and which was abandoned now and being torn down. I kicked in the back door of a unit and slept in there.
“And that was the first night I called myself homeless.”
I nodded along as Cass spoke, still not sure where he was going with this. His hat was pulled over his ears and his glasses and graying beard gave him an almost artsy look, like an aged jazz musician, but his old brown jacket and his amputated leg told a truer tale. When he spoke, his few remaining teeth poked from his gums like tiny yellowed fence posts.
He was determined to get through this story, so I rubbed my hands to keep warm and said, “Go on, Cass.” Smoke came from my mouth, that’s how cold it was in the church.
“All right, Mister Mitch, now here’s the thing: I almost died
a couple times in those projects. Once, I came back at night and as soon as I walked in, someone whacked me over the head with a gun and cracked my skull open. I never did find out why. But they left me there for dead, bleeding, with my pants pulled down and my pockets turned out.”
Cass leaned over and pulled off his hat. There was a three-inch scar on his head.
“See that?”
He pulled his hat back on.
“Every night in that life, you would either be getting high or drunk or something to try and deal with the reality that you didn’t have no place to go. I’d make money all kinds of little ways. Take out garbage for a bar. Panhandle. And of course, I’d just steal. The hockey team and the baseball team, when they was playing, you could always sneak down there and steal one of them orange things and wave people’s cars in if you look decent enough. You say, ‘Park right here.’ Then you run with their money back to the projects and get high.”
I shook my head. With all the hockey and baseball games I’d gone to, I might have handed Cass a few bills myself.
“I was homeless pretty near five years,” he said. “Five years. Sleeping here or there in them abandoned projects. There was a winter night in the rain where I almost froze to death at a bus stop, my stupid behind out there with no place to go. And I was so hungry and so thin, my stomach was touching my back.
“I had two pairs of pants, and they was both on me. I had three shirts, and all three of ’em was on me. I had one gray coat, and it was my pillow, my cover, everything. And I had a pair of Converse gym shoes that had so many holes in it, I loaded up my feet with baking soda to keep them from stinking.”
Where did you get the baking soda?
“Well, come on—we was all out here smoking crack. That’s what you cook it with. Everyone got baking soda!”
I looked down, feeling stupid.
“And then I heard about this man from New York, Covington. He drove around in this old limo, coming through the neighborhood. He was from a church, so we called him Rebbey Reb.”