In downtown Detroit, there is a church on Trumbull Avenue, across from an empty field. It is a huge, Gothic structure made of red brick and limestone, and it looks as if it blew in from another century. Pointy spires. Arched doorways. Stained glass windows, including one in which the apostle Paul asks, “What must I do to be saved?”
The building itself dates back to 1881, when the neighborhood was full of mansions and wealthy Presbyterians. They built the church to hold twelve hundred members, the largest such congregation in the Midwest. Now the mansions are gone, so are the Presbyterians, and in this poor, barren neighborhood, the church seems forgotten. The walls are decaying. The roof is crumbling. Over the years, some of the stained glass panels were stolen, and some windows have been boarded up.
I used to drive past this church on my way to Tiger Stadium, a famous baseball park a half mile down the street. I never went inside. I never saw anyone go inside.
For all I knew, the place was abandoned.
I was about to find out.
In the months since the Reb had surprised me with those words enemy schmenemy, I had been forced to rethink some of my own prejudices. The truth was, while I tried to be a charitable man, I still drew mental lines between “my” side and the “other” side—whether cultural, ethnic, or religious. I had been taught, as many of us are, that charity begins at home, and helping your own kind should come first.
But who was my “own kind”? I lived far from where I was raised. I married a woman from a different faith. I was a white man in an overwhelmingly African-American city. And while I had been lucky financially, Detroit was going broke around me. The near-depression that would soon hit the nation foretold itself in our streets. Jobs disappeared at an alarming rate. Homes were foreclosed. Buildings were abandoned. Our daily bread, the auto industry, was crumbling, and the swelling numbers of unemployed and homeless were scary.
One night I found myself at a downtown shelter, a Christian rescue mission, where I decided to spend the night and write about the experience. I waited on line for a blanket and soap. I was given a bed. I heard a minister preach about Jesus and was surprised at how many of the weary men, chins in their hands, still listened to how they could be saved.
At one point, in line for food, a man turned and asked if I was who he thought I was.
Yes, I said.
He nodded slowly.
“So…What happened to you?”
That night motivated me to create a charity for the homeless. We raised and distributed money to area shelters. We took pride in no overhead or administrative fees, and if we couldn’t see and touch where the disbursements went, we didn’t proceed. That meant many in-person visits.
And so, on a humid September afternoon, I pulled my car up to the old, decaying church on Trumbull. The pastor, I had been told, ran a small shelter there. I had come to see if it needed assistance.
A traffic signal swayed in the wind. I stepped from the car and clicked the lock button on my key. A man and a woman, both African-American, were sitting by the church wall in fold-up aluminum chairs, the cheap kind we used to take to the beach. They stared at me. The man was missing his left leg.
I’m looking for the pastor, I said.
The woman rose. She pushed through a small red door that was weakly hinged. I waited. The one-legged man, his crutches resting against the chair, smiled at me. He wore glasses and was missing most of his front teeth.
“Kinda warm today,” he said.
Yeah, I said.
I glanced at my watch. I shifted on my feet. Finally, I saw movement in the shadows.
And then.
And then out stepped a large man.
An extremely large man.
He was, I would learn, fifty years old—although his face was still boyish, with a thin, close-cropped beard—and he was tall as a basketball player, but he had to weigh more than four hundred pounds. His body seemed to unroll in layers, a broad slab of a chest cascading into a huge belly that hung like a pillow over the belt of his pants. His arms spread the sleeves of his oversized white T-shirt. His forehead was sweating, and he breathed heavily, as if he’d just climbed stairs.
If this is a Man of God, I thought, I’m the man in the moon.
“Hello,” he rasped, holding out his hand. “I’m Henry.”