Song of Erin

by BJ Hoff

  Although his parents had long since retired and gone back to their home country to live, David had returned to Scotland only twice, to take his medical education in Edinburgh and to visit his parents on a later occasion. America was David’s home, and he loved it: its sprawling expanse, its energy, its excitement, its people—especially the people, with their never-ending, fascinating diversity.

  His own “call of God” had not been quite so clear as that of his father’s, at least not in the beginning. He had known only that he was called to some sort of ministry and had for a time assumed that ministry would take place behind a pulpit. Only when he returned from Edinburgh and began to do some charity work in the tenement sections of the city did he finally catch God’s vision for his life’s work. Since then he had established four mission houses—two of which he still supervised on a daily basis—and trained two “Timothies” of his own, sending them out to launch similar missions, one near the harbor and the other in the notorious Five Points slum.

  During the years that he labored as both physician and pastor, he came to realize that he was no more one than the other. His patients had become his church, a church without walls. They had also become his family. He had no real home of his own. Home was whichever mission house he happened to lodge in on any given night. With his parents back in Scotland and his brother, William, teaching in a New England college, there was no reason, after all, to maintain a home.

  He could easily have slipped into a solitary, empty life, had it not been for his patients and others who passed through the mission houses. Most of the time, though, David would have said his life was anything but empty. He seldom indulged in introspection, and when loneliness crept in on him, he usually managed to deflect it by busying himself even more.

  So far as he was concerned, God had granted him a full life, one blessed by a work he loved to do and a faith that had thus far sustained him through all manner of change and challenge. As he now approached his midthirties, however, the occasional thought of a home and family edged its way into his thoughts. Sometimes a particular event—such as coming upon the lovely but unfortunate young expectant mother upstairs—would evoke a yearning for something more than what he had.

  Other times it was the bleak prospect of returning to an empty room late at night, with no one waiting to care whether he returned or not.

  He hoped these longings didn’t mark him in the Lord’s eyes as an ingrate. At those times when loneliness crept in on him without warning he would remind himself that Christ, too, had lived a solitary life.

  But wasn’t it possible that even Christ had sometimes been lonely?

  The thought came unbidden, catching David by surprise, and he found himself wondering if the Lord might not suffer similar pangs of loneliness and disappointment when his own creation, the children he loved beyond all understanding, drifted through their days with only halfhearted attempts to seek his presence, his fellowship—when they sought him at all.

  The possibility caused David to take time out from his efforts and stop to offer a heartfelt prayer of loving thanks to his Savior, the one friend who did share that empty room late at night.

  14

  TEARING DOWN THE WALLS

  The Pharisee’s cant goes up for peace,

  But the cries of his victims never cease.

  JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY

  Samantha was so astonished to glance over and see Jack—very wet, slightly disheveled, and obviously disgruntled—slipping into the pew beside her that she could do nothing but stare at him, speechless. Jack countered with a narrow-eyed, somewhat challenging look, as if daring her to show even the slightest hint of satisfaction at his appearance.

  “Jack! What are you doing—”

  Heads turned at her loud whisper, and Samantha felt her face flame.

  “You invited me, remember?” he muttered a little too loudly. Again, people turned to look, including Cavan Sheridan—who broke into a wide smile at the sight of Jack—as did the Carver children and the widowed Sadie Brown at the other end of the pew.

  “I—well…yes, I did,” Samantha finally managed to choke out as he settled himself into the cramped space beside her. “I’m so glad…you could make it.”

  She tried to move down to allow him more room, but the pew was packed to capacity.

  “You’re drenched,” she whispered.

  One dark brow lifted a fraction. “It’s raining,” he said, straight-faced. His gaze flicked over her. “As you’ve obviously discovered for yourself.”

  Samantha put a hand to her still damp hair, and his eyes followed her movement.

  “I need to talk with you and Sheridan immediately after the service,” he whispered, leaning closer. “It’s important.”

  “Has something happened? Did you find Cavan’s sister and the children?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet. But there’s something you need to know. Both of you.”

  At that point, an elderly black lady directly in front of them turned to scowl. Again, Samantha’s face burned. But Jack merely shot the woman an engaging smile, at the same time giving Samantha a slight nudge with his elbow.

  Rufus was just stepping up to the scarred wooden pulpit. The instant he spied Jack, his face broke into a wide, gleeful grin. For a moment Samantha thought he was going to delay the sermon and come barreling out into the congregation!

  Instead, he delayed only another second or two, then launched into the morning message.

  “Brethren!” he thundered. Every head snapped to attention, including Jack’s. “This morning the Lord has laid it on my heart to speak to you about tearing down the walls of this church!”

  Predictably, several people in the congregation glanced at the interior walls, then cast questioning looks at their large, usually jovial preacher.

  “That’s what I said, brethren. We need to tear down these walls!” Rufus made a wide, sweeping motion with one arm to encompass their surroundings. “Tear them down and take this church out of this old building!”

  It took Samantha only a few seconds to realize where Rufus was going with his curious opening. She was pleased to note that, beside her, Jack seemed to be all ears.

  Always direct, Rufus leaned over the pulpit and began to scan the faces of his congregation, as if to make eye contact with each of them, one by one.

  “The Lord, he’s made it clear that we’ve been sittin’ in our pews long enough. It’s time to quit hidin’ behind these walls. We need to get out there in the world and find out what’s been goin’ on all this time we’ve been hunkerin’ down in our warm, comfortable church building.”

  Samantha suppressed a smile. The slight lift of Jack’s shoulders told her that they—and others—were likely thinking along the same lines: The wooden pews were anything but comfortable, and even with both stoves firing full blast, the building was never really warm.

  But Rufus seemed not to notice his congregation’s amusement. He was clearly a man with a message. “It strikes me, brethren, that we’ve been playin’ church so long, we might just have forgotten what the real world out there is like. Well, today the Lord says it’s about time we go find out!”

  It wasn’t that Jack had never heard Rufus speak before. He’d had occasion, if infrequently, to observe his old friend’s ability to hold an audience and would thus have speculated that no sermon of Rufus Carver’s would ever be boring.

  What he hadn’t expected was to find his interest so immediately and wholly captured by the subject of this particular message. At first he’d been intrigued to realize that the thrust of the sermon apparently had to do with one of his own personal grievances against the “institutional church”—be it the Roman Church of his boyhood or an uptown society congregation. It had long been Jack’s observation that most of the churchgoing crowd, at least those with whom he’d come in contact over the years, knew next to nothing about the “real world”—and cared even less.

  When he realized where Rufus was heading, he could have no more
shut him out than he could have ignored Samantha’s disquieting presence beside him. Never mind that he felt much like the proverbial black sheep in the midst of the flock. In spite of his general feeling of not belonging, he settled back, frankly curious to hear what Rufus had to say.

  And it seemed that Rufus had quite a lot to say.

  “I want you to understand that I’m not just preaching to you, brethren. I’m preaching to myself here, too. Because all of us, myself included, have been guilty of bein’ so busy with church work of late that I fear we might just have lost sight of the Lord’s work. We’ve been havin’ such a good time with our suppers and our socials, been so wrapped up in our prayer meetings and our board meetings and our Sunday-after-service meetings that we haven’t taken the time for meeting with the people—the folks who need what you and me already got. The Lord! People like the tax collectors and the trash collectors, the publicans and the prostitutes, the gamblers and the guttersnipes, and the godforsaken souls dyin’ in the streets because we’ve been too busy to take the love of Jesus to them!”

  Jack stared at the massive black man whom he had long counted as his closest friend as if he’d never seen him before. Rufus had just issued the same indictment on the camp who called themselves Christians that Jack himself had harbored for years now.

  With the exception of a few—Rufus, obviously, for one, and certainly Samantha, for another—it seemed to him that many of the churchgoers who professed to be “imitators of Christ” gave rather poor imitations indeed.

  From the little he knew about him—and it was little, he conceded—the man called Jesus hadn’t just sat around singing hymns and looking pious and generally doing nothing. Jack wasn’t exactly sure what he did do, for his education in spiritual matters was sorely lacking if not bordering on nonexistent. But according to those who claimed to know, Jesus had been a lot more than mere talk.

  Rufus’s voice abruptly jerked him out of his reflection. Startled, Jack felt as if his friend had been reading his mind as he went on with his sermon.

  “Too often we act like we might catch some fearsome disease, were we to go among the heathens out there. But from what I can tell, the Lord, he didn’t seem to be the least bit concerned about that. He made it his business to get to know all kinds of folks. He went to their houses. He sat down at the supper table with them.”

  Jack grinned at the thought of Rufus’s fondness for a good meal.

  Rufus was just getting warmed up, it seemed. “Jesus, he got to know people. Who they were, what their troubles were, what they needed—and more times than not, he pitched in with some help…before he started preaching to them!

  “The Lord, he was smart enough to know that people wouldn’t pay much attention to what he had to say if they were hungry or sick or down-and-out. He knew they weren’t goin’ to care about what a fellow had to say unless they saw that that fellow cared about them.

  “And something else, brethren—I don’t know about your Scriptures, but I don’t recall my Bible sayin’ a whole lot about the Lord criticizing folks, much less condemning them. Fact is, the only ones I recollect the Lord ever condemning were the Pharisees.” Rufus paused, drew in an expansive breath, then broke into a big, broad smile as he added, “You know. The religious people. Like us.

  “And I sure don’t recollect his ignoring folks! He paid attention to people, the Lord did!”

  Jack studied his old friend. He had often taunted Rufus—good-naturedly—that he could have been a rich man if he had chosen politics instead of a pulpit. But he had never realized before today just how accurate that observation probably was.

  No matter how much he needled Rufus, however, he never doubted the conviction of his friend’s heart. Rufus was exactly where he was meant to be, doing what he was meant to do—what he wanted to do.

  In truth Jack knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that the big, jovial son of a slave, who now stood leaning on his pulpit and smiling on his people, was above all else a true man of God.

  Indeed, if ever he had known such a man—a man of God—Rufus Carver was that man.

  He hadn’t the faintest notion what had set Rufus off this morning. Apparently, he’d had one of his “words from the Lord” and felt constrained to share it. As for himself, he had to admit that he felt a certain satisfaction in knowing that Rufus didn’t necessarily equate religious with Christlike.

  Jack would concede that his own contempt for the mealymouthed hypocrites who could quote the Scriptures at length but saw nothing whatsoever wrong with tearing children away from their parents and selling them on an auction block might be somewhat excessive. As was, no doubt, his disgust for those who saw no disparity between warming the pews every Sunday and charging impoverished immigrants obscene rent monies for rooms unfit for pigs the rest of the week.

  Pharisees, Rufus had called them.

  Jack’s censure would have undoubtedly been a lot less charitable.

  But what had captured his interest so thoroughly today wasn’t the realization that he and Rufus apparently saw eye-to-eye in this regard. He was more intrigued by the portrait Rufus had drawn of a Christ who wasn’t above rubbing shoulders with the infidels of his day.

  Jack supposed his reaction to this bit of enlightenment might have something to do with the fact that he was an infidel himself.

  In any event, this was a different view of the Christ he remembered from his mother and his brief experience with the church of his childhood. That Christ had been a suffering Savior, who, to Jack’s childlike imagination, had seemed somewhat pale and wan, beleaguered and victimized by his accusers, then mercilessly nailed to a tree, where he died in agony. That Christ had been beyond his comprehension.

  Another view, again almost entirely based on his boyhood recollection and to some extent the teachings of a few particularly tyrannical nuns, had been that of a stern rule maker, a kind of divine disciplinarian. Fiercely stubborn and independent even then, Jack had responded as he was wont to do with authority in general: with deep-seated rebellion and even a certain measure of animosity.

  Perhaps if Martha had lived longer, he might have come to know her Christ better. Certainly the Jesus Martha had worshiped had been a more approachable Christ, albeit a compassionate, long-suffering one. But they had had so little time, he and Martha, and back then he had lived in a virtual frenzy, establishing the paper and amassing his fortune. Work had become his god. And after Martha’s death, work had also become his salvation.

  The Christ Rufus had spoken of this morning was unfamiliar to Jack, but he was not without appeal. This Jesus would seem to be a more manly Christ, someone who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, who valued Everyman and perhaps even enjoyed going into the midst of a crowd and getting to know them while making himself known to them.

  He considered Rufus’s frequent references to the fact that Jesus had been a great one for sitting down to supper with the worst of the worst. Now, Jack could say for a certainty that most of the Christians he had known would never dream of jeopardizing their reputations by having supper with Black Jack Kane. Yet from what Rufus claimed, Jesus had sat down at the table with some very shady types. Obviously, he hadn’t been one to mind what other people said.

  He thought about Samantha, about the night she had graced his table with her presence, how surprised—and delighted—he had been that she would dare to risk her reputation in such a way. For him.

  The memory warmed his heart all over again.

  And Rufus and Amelia—how many meals had he shared with them over the years? Countless times he had sat at their table and known himself to be the object of their affection and goodwill.

  Yes, Jack decided, he thought he could almost believe in, even admire, a Christ such as the one Rufus had described.

  The thought startled him, and he was almost relieved when Rufus again yanked him out of his musings, so foreign to his nature, with a rousing declaration that was surely meant to challenge the entire congregation:

  �
�You are good people, brethren! Truly good people. But I think the Lord is telling us today that we’re in danger of thinking ourselves too good, too holy to be of any earthly good! Seems to me we need to roll up our sleeves like the Lord did and commence to knock down the walls of this church building. We need to be taking our religion out there where it belongs—into the streets of the city, to the people! Amen, brethren?”

  Jack actually jumped when the entire congregation issued forth a resounding communal “Amen!” He realized with great surprise that for a minute there, he’d been close to adding one of his own.

  Samantha was keenly aware that Rufus had captured Jack’s full attention. She had known almost the exact moment when he honed in on the morning message with the same intensity he seemed to bring to everything that engaged his interest. It was evident in the way he sat, unmoving except for an occasional flexing of his shoulders, his arms crossed over his chest, his gaze locked on Rufus in absolute concentration.

  She made an effort to suppress the ripple of excitement coursing through her, warning herself not to make too much of this. Jack had already indicated that his coming here today had nothing to do with the worship service.

  Still, she found it impossible not to be encouraged, at least a little, by his unmistakable attention to Rufus’s words, enough so that she closed her eyes for a moment and breathed a silent but fervent prayer for him. God knew Jack’s motives for coming, after all, and, if he chose, could use those motives to his own ends.

  Please, Lord…

  15

  A DIVIDED HEART

  Dread has followed longing,

  And our hearts are torn.

  W. B. YEATS