Have a Little Faith - Mitch Albom [52]
Defused it?
“Defused it. We need to do that. Especially with family.
“You know, in our tradition, we ask forgiveness from everyone—even casual acquaintances. But with those we are closest with—wives, children, parents—we too often let things linger. Don’t wait, Mitch. It’s such a waste.”
He told me a story. A man buried his wife. At the gravesite he stood by the Reb, tears falling down his face.
“I loved her,” he whispered.
The Reb nodded.
“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