Chapter 54. Everybody and her Dog

Too Rich to Tithe

One of the few non-Germans attending the church when we first arrived was Maria. She was fluent in German and three or four other languages and carried the title, baroness. Her story mocked my temptation to imagine sophistication was the key to reaching the “high and mighty.” She became an Adventist because of the witness of her maid.

At the time, she was living in Brazil. Her children had been kidnapped by a former husband and whisked off to another country. For two years she had no contact with them, and her husband devoted all the legal resources his considerable wealth could command to making sure they would remain with him until they reached adulthood.

The odds stacked against her appeared utterly insuperable. As she sank into black hopelessness, her maid taught her to pray, to believe, to hope in the promises of God. Eventually, Maria's new spiritual life led her to connect with the church that had given her maid her faith. Maria began attending the Adventist Church, took Bible studies and was baptized.

Later, reunited with her children, she moved to New York City and began attending Advent Hope. For someone in her social class, hanging out with the people of Advent Hope was definitely slumming. Once, she was in the kitchen while JoLynne Owen was feeding her baby. As the women were making conversation around the feeding of babies, Maria remarked she had never fed a baby. Her own children had always been cared for by nannies and maids. It had been the same in the home she grew up in. In that world, only servants fed children, changed diapers, took care of sick kids. The women present decided she should not go her entire life without feeding a baby, so they had her sit. They placed Evan in her arms and instructed her in the fine art of handling a jar of baby food, a spoon and a hungry infant.

Maria and her mother always gave offering – handfuls of coins. Once, she explained to me that she was too rich to tithe. For middle class people, tithing was no big deal. Ten percent of their income didn't amount to much, so it was easy for them to give. But for her, ten percent would be a very large sum. She was sure I would understand. I was dumbfounded. I didn't know what to say.

In addition to the entire floor that comprised her apartment on Fifth Avenue, she had a palatial estate upstate. On her weekends at her estate she attended a local church whose membership was mostly poor immigrants. She gave her handfuls of coins to them on the Sabbaths she was there. Once, she mentioned to me the church was trying to raise money to purchase a 15-passenger van. I urged her to buy it for them. I figured she could write a check and never miss it. She brushed off my counsel.

She loved regaling me with tales of hobnobbing with the high and mighty, with senators and the mayor and the governor. A part of me envied her access to the networks of power. I wished I could bend the governor's ear. She imagined herself brilliant, I increasingly thought of her as a good-hearted naif. The more I understood her view of reality, the less able I was to engage in conversation. She simply did not understand the world outside the rarefied atmosphere of the old-money rich. I didn't know how to get past the class differences and be the pastor I felt she needed. Still she and her mother were faithful in attending when they were in town. She began dating someone whose name was regularly in the national media. Her boyfriend would slip into church about the time I stood to preach and slip out during the closing hymn. I never met him.

Another couple of women began attending not too long after we launched our English services, also mother and daughter. I guessed the older woman was in her late seventies. I had no idea how old her daughter was. They were there every week, smiling, but resisted every attempt I made to step into their world. I never learned their last names. I never learned their address, never had their phone number. After about a year, they began bringing their toy poodle with them. The dog never barked. We courteously didn’t notice.

Of course, not everyone was so aloof.

Alex

Alex was probably in his early twenties. He grew up in an Adventist home in Harlem. He was schizophrenic. When I first met him he was in and out of his mother's and grandmother's place. It sounded to me like they would take him in, feed and shelter him as long as they could, then when they couldn't take it any more he would be back on the street. He occasionally mentioned Rick Shorter. I knew Rick, a smart, devout business man, who lived north of the City. I wondered if Alex was inventing a relationship that didn't exist.

At one point, fairly early in our relationship, social services placed Alex in an apartment with several roommates who also suffered from mental disorders. Alex was excited. His own place! No more begging Mom to let him come back home. The people at social services had promised they would help him and the others in the apartment so they would always have a place of their own.

I didn't know how long it lasted. But weeks or months later, he mentioned in passing spending the night riding the subway. Even with the support of a social worker, quasi- independent living in a place that required some measure of responsibility and consistency was beyond Alex.

I couldn't help wondering, where is God? Jesus met people like Alex, people whose lives were hopelessly disordered. In the gospels never once did someone whose life was out of whack come asking for help and not get it. Alex' life was definitely out of whack.

If you didn't know him, Alex could be intimidating. He was at least 6 feet 4. His face did not completely hide his mental dysfunction. Church members were afraid of him. Especially women who would sometimes turn around in some back room in the basement and see Alex standing in the door staring at them.

Alex was a believer. God was as real to him as the subway or the Empire State Building. Alex was an Adventist. He still remembered memory verses he learned in Sabbath School as a kid. He was in church most Sabbath mornings. He occasionally attended prayer meeting. He believed in doing right, in being honest and kind and generous. At times he would show flashes of brilliance. I remember being startled when he fixed a broken piano. He sometimes asked probing theological questions. Other times his questions invoked a reality that was wholly imaginary. Sometimes his interactions with people were scarily inappropriate.

On really cold nights he would ride the subway all night. I eventually found out he really did know Rick Shorter. Rick came into the city every week on business. Somehow he would find Alex. Alex would help him make deliveries, and Rick would have Alex stay in his hotel room for the night so he could get a shower and a good night's sleep. (My estimation of Rick went way up!) When Alex attended prayer meeting at the church he would often hang around until everyone else left, then ask if he could sleep in the church overnight.

Because my wife and I lived so far out from the city, I made use of a foldout couch in the church basement two or three nights a week. So I was happy to offer Alex a blanket and a pew for the night. Unfortunately Alex did not always come for prayer meeting. Often he would ride the subway all night, then show up at the church about five in the morning and ring the bell, hoping I would let him come in and sleep.

After this happened a few times, I explained, “Look, Alex, if you want to spend the night in the church, come before 11:00 p.m. I’m happy to provide you shelter. But I work late, and I need my sleep. I’m not going to crawl out of bed at five in the morning to let you in.”

Alex solemnly agreed that he would come in the evening instead of at the crack of dawn. The next week, there he was, ringing the bell at five a.m. wanting a place to sleep. I dragged myself out of bed, went up and let him in, protesting and grumbling about his miserable timing.

This was repeated off and on for weeks stretching into months. Finally, one morning after a very late night the bell rang again. The church was cold. I could hear the rain dripping outside. I was exhausted. I decided it was time to teach Alex a lesson. I stayed put. The bell rang again. I pulled the covers over my head. The bell rang again. And again.

Then I remembered the same bell rang upstairs in the caretaker’s apartment at the back of the church. The caretaker, who functioned as the pastor of the Brazilians, kept the same late hours I did. He and his wife were being disturbed by the same incessant ringing I was hearing in my basement bed. I dragged myself out and headed upstairs. I peaked out the window. Sure enough, it was Alex. I opened the door and began hollering.

“Alex, I’ve asked you over and over not to come this early in the morning. If you want shelter, come at night before I go to bed. Why do you do this to me?”

Alex stared at me like a bewildered puppy. “Because I don’t have anywhere else to go.” I gave him a blanket and he settled down to sleep on a pew.

Just how are your related?

Barbara Wallach was in her fifties, I think. Can't remember how she ended up at Advent Hope. She had had cancer and was now was in remission, at least she hoped she was.

Money was tight. She was a broker of printing services or something like that. She used to make a very good living, she said, but with all the downtime she had experienced while fighting cancer, she had gotten behind. That and the changes that were sweeping the printing industry. It wasn't like it used to be. She would work for weeks trying to land a contract only to have it vaporize.

The cancer reappeared, with vengeance. She was in the hospital. Then she was gone. She had no family we knew of. Her friends called. They wanted a funeral for Barbara. They weren't sure how to go about this. They didn't have a lot of money to pay the fees they figured it would cost, but given the renascence of her faith in the last couple of years, Barbara should have a religious ceremony. They could help with refreshments. Could we help?

What kind of funeral do you have for someone who has attended your church for a some months, maybe a year, someone with no religious background you know of, whose friends are not Christians, someone you hardly know whose friends consider you the closest thing she had to family? What do you preach? Was she a Christian? By whose definition? Was she an Adventist? It was clear that Advent Hope was her spiritual home. She came there to meet God. Her friends called us when the services of a pastor and a church were needed.

We did the funeral, of course. On a Sabbath afternoon so many of the church folks could attend. Barbara's friends came, a dozen or so, an almost unimaginably eclectic collection of New Yorkers, all colors, some in suits, some in bohemian get ups, old men, a couple of young adults. I preached. Talked about the God we worshiped, about the hope of resurrection, about Barbara's idealism. 

Afterward over refreshments, Barbara's friend offered the obligatory nice words about my sermon. They thanked us for caring for their friend. They lamented her refusal to accept conventional medical treatment and wondered if she would have lived longer if she had. It seemed to me that because we were Barbara's church, her friends were including me in their struggle to make sense of life and loss. In a very tenuous sense, Advent Hope, at least for the afternoon, was their church, too.