Bad Neighbors
Jewel reached down the back of her shirt and pulled a steak knife from her bra strap. “Here,” she said, pointing it at me. “Take this up the ladder and go through that window. It’s the bathroom window. Then you go down some stairs. Then you see a door. That’ll be the front door. Open it.”
“Please put that away,” I said.
“But the knife is because—” Jewel looked at the ground for a while, searching for words. Her behavior this afternoon had taken on the peculiar quality of a video call over a poor connection. For long stretches, she’d freeze. Then she would burst back to life, everything moving at double speed to catch up. All of a sudden, her head jerked up from the ground, and she glared at me with veiny blue eyes as she resumed in a breathless profusion:
“—because the people in there. They’re talking about me and stealing my things. I can—I can hear them. And I can even”—her eyes grew wider—“I can even smell them. They’re talking about me and stealing my things, and they’re rubbing shit on the walls. And cause of the police I can’t—” The picture froze.
Jewel lived across the street from my family in Akron, Ohio. Houses in our part of town were sharply divided into those of good neighbors and bad neighbors. Put simply, good neighbors didn’t make demands on you and bad neighbors did. The woman who lived next to Jewel, with her perfectly cut grass and regularly timed walks and cheerful greetings, was a good neighbor. I was a good neighbor. Jewel was a bad neighbor. Her life was out of control. She didn’t have a job. A couple times a month, my wife and I would wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of her and her son and her son’s girlfriend screaming at each other. And I now suspected that she used hard drugs.
Earlier Jewel had come through the knee-high weeds in her front lawn to ask if she could borrow a ladder. She was locked out of her house. Our son was going to be baptized the next day, and we were busy with guests and preparations. Still, my wife, Danielle, wanted to help. So I carried our ladder over, and Danielle followed. We peered into several darkened and locked windows, gradually realizing that Jewel was unwell. Then we made it to the back of the house and spotted an open second-floor window. It was there that Jewel produced her knife and delivered her paranoid speech.
“I’m taking this,” I said, grabbing the knife. “But I’m not breaking into your house.”
Jewel’s crazed eyes shifted from me to Danielle. “How about her?” A momentary freeze. “She could slip right through that window. Give her the knife. Here, I’ll hold the ladder. Give her the knife.”
“No,” Danielle said. “No, I can’t. I’m pregnant.”
“Again?” Jewel was shocked into an almost sober look of concern.
“With twins.”
Jewel put a hand on Danielle’s shoulder. “Look, man, I’m sorry. If you need any help when the babies come, I could maybe watch them or something once I”—she lifted a hand and gestured around—“get my life together.”
We told her thanks and that we’d keep that in mind. Jewel shook her head and walked away, following our street towards the main road. It was as if our news had drained all the urgency out of her situation. It was as if the revelation of our irresponsibility—we would soon have four children three years old and under—had converted us in Jewel’s mind from the sort of good neighbors who help you break into your house to the sort of bad neighbors who make demands on you.
What prompted our transformation? It was this: Danielle and I were gradually being drawn to the Catholic Church and had been experimenting in openness to life without the safety net of natural family planning. (Those were two terms we’d learn a few years later while attending R.C.I.A. classes and expecting our fifth child.)
I first became seriously interested in Catholicism when Danielle and I were teaching with the Peace Corps in Adwa, Ethiopia, years earlier. For the two years we were in Adwa, we attended an English-language Mass every week that was celebrated by an Ethiopian priest, for a small mission of nuns from all over the world—Italy, Poland, Ethiopia, South Sudan, South Korea, India, Colombia. There were usually about twenty people and seven nationalities present at Mass. We were always the only non-Catholics and the only native English speakers there.
Mass at the mission could be quite ugly. For the most part, we sang from dated English-language pew missals that had some good and some bad songs. I preferred singing the bad songs, because the nuns had no idea of how to sing the good ones. To make matters worse, Ricardo, a handyman at the monastery, used the auto accompaniment feature from his Casio keyboard to provide the music. I’ll never forget how homesick I felt listening to the nuns butcher “Angels We Have Heard on High” to a canned polka backing track.
But Mass could also be beautiful. I remember processing into the little chapel one Palm Sunday led by two Ethiopian nuns singing what I took to be the Sanctus in Ge’ez. I could pick out only a couple words from the alien, pentatonic chant—kidus (holy), semay (heaven), hosannah. Behind the mission was a view of the mountains that stretched north of Adwa in a chain that someone had told me was named Mary’s Fence.
Even more beautiful to me was the profound commitment to service that I witnessed among the Catholics. One day, I visited a Missionaries of Charity clinic farther into town and was shocked by the kind of work the nuns were performing. Sure, I wanted to help the needy, but I was terrified of contracting tuberculosis or one of the other vaguely nineteenth-century diseases that were rampant in places like this. The Indian women at the mission, seemingly unable to speak to me in English, offered benign smiles and kept on with their work. I mimed my need to get to another appointment and left.
At this point, I was interested in Catholicism, but my time in Ethiopia seemed so remote from the rest of my life that it didn’t make sense to pursue conversion. No doubt American Catholicism would look different than the church I’d found at the monastery. Also, I had been reading Calvin’s Institutes while in the Peace Corps. Throughout the book, Calvin makes a number of strong arguments against the Catholic Church of his day but asserts after each point that none of these failings justify schism. Finally, in his account of the Lord’s Supper, Calvin comes to his big reveal: The Catholic doctrine of Christ’s real presence in the elements is idolatrous. Catholic theologians present the sacrament through all kinds of convoluted language, but in reality, Calvin asserts, it’s very simple.
Calvin’s explanation of Christ’s spiritual presence in the Lord’s Supper is actually anything but simple. At least, it confused me. But I took that confusion, in itself, as a reason to remain Protestant. I’m almost always willing to believe that my inherited traditions are supported by good reasons, which I can’t fully understand. My parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had all been devout Protestants. So why would I leave the mighty fortress of their faith for something so foreign and mysterious as the gleam of sanctity that seemed to shine from Mass in the shadow of Mary’s Fence?
After Danielle and I left Ethiopia and settled in Akron, we attended a small church from a Reformed denomination. We liked their outreach programs to the poor. We also liked their style of worship, which every week included a penitential act, three readings from the lectionary, a recitation of the Creed, and celebration of the Lord’s Supper. The pastor wore vestments. And the music was much better than it had been at the mission. It was still Protestant, but the Sunday service was ordered more like Mass at the mission than like the low-church, evangelical worship services my wife and I had attended growing up.
While we were having our first two children, Danielle reconnected with a friend from college who’d converted to Catholicism and become a postulant at Christ the Bridegroom, a Byzantine Catholic monastery not too far from Akron. Sister Petra sent us books and films of Catholic apologetics, met with Danielle, and prayed for our conversion. Gradually, all of it—the sacraments, the magisterium, the veneration of the saints—started to make sense. What’s more, it was obvious to us that, like the Catholics we knew in Adwa, Sister Petra was radically devoted to Christ.
It was around this time that we read a few critiques of contraception, felt convicted, and decided to begin living according to this conviction. Almost immediately, Danielle became pregnant with the twins that Jewel found so shocking, and our lives were transformed. And after the twins came, there were still key differences between us and other bad neighbors. We never had trouble making our rent. Whenever the police came to our house, it was to ask about someone else. But at the same time, loving our children though we did, Danielle and I simply couldn’t handle all the responsibilities of caring for them.
At the very least, I was starting to look like a bad neighbor. I wasn’t unemployed the winter in which the twins were born, but thanks to a teaching release from my graduate school (ostensibly for working on my dissertation), I never actually went to work. And there were other things. What with potty-training one child while three wore diapers and having two, sometimes three, children regularly waking up during the night, I could behave in a Jewel-like fashion, freezing in a vacant stare and eventually springing from it into some not always appropriate action. For the first year or so of the twins’ life, I’d tap both of my feet whenever I was sitting down. Sometimes my feet were moving Rock ’n
Play cradles with the twins in them; sometimes they were just tapping into the air, out of habit.
What’s more, my house and lawn were starting to look like they belonged to bad neighbors. The spring after the twins were born, the grass grew to a disreputable length and groundhogs started killing the bushes along the driveway. I had to find some way of keeping the kids from falling off the front porch, so my father-in-law rigged up a sheet of plywood that I could hang in front of the opening that led to the porch steps. Other houses in our neighborhood sported similar plywood windows or doors, but those houses were abandoned. We were having the opposite problem. One day, my friends at school were naming the interior design schemes they’d adopted for their apartments. “Shabby Chic,” one said. “Gay Grandma Brutalism,” another said. “Unlicensed Daycare,” I said.
During this time, the people at our Protestant church were remarkably kind. They brought us meals and clothes and toys and offered all kinds of help. But I worried that they found our lack of control baffling. Why were we choosing to be bad neighbors? When we told our pastor about the twins, Danielle said that we were trying to leave room for God in our family planning. He looked perplexed and said, “Well . . . don’t.” A friend in the congregation, with whom I’d served as an usher, kept working his vasectomy into our conversations. It went like this: “Abby says the rose bushes in front of the church need pruned. We ought to add that to the list for the spring cleanup. I enjoy a good pruning myself. Shearing, snapping, snipping away at the plant—for the health of the plant, of course. Anyway, all this talk we’re having of snipping, it reminds me . . .” Part of me was offended by this kind of advice. But part of me understood. I worried that the Catholic position on contraception might be morally correct but practically impossible. I certainly couldn’t afford to keep having two children every year.
Meanwhile, I was experiencing a series of intense nudges towards the Catholic Church. On the twins’ first birthday, I was at the M.L.A. conference in Seattle. I found the Droopy Dog Jacobinism of the talks disheartening—enervated professors dishing out reheated versions of yesterday’s radicalism. “The doctrine of non-contradiction is part of the logic of white supremacy,” I heard one presenter say, clearly bored by his own—utterly insane—idea. These talks were given before a backdrop of swirling anxiety. Everyone my age was at the conference to look for a job, and there didn’t seem to be any. At the suggestion of a sympathetic friend, I skipped the afternoon panels to visit a traveling exhibit of Renaissance paintings at the Seattle art museum. Standing before Annibale Carracci’s Pietà, I seemed to actually hear Christ’s words from the cross, “Behold, your mother,” and broke down into tears.
One month later, I was attending Mass at a Catholic university as part of the only in-person interview I’d managed to land. When the priest elevated the host and said, “Behold the Lamb of God,” I looked up and saw, with great vividness, the outline of the mountains that lie just north of Adwa. It was Mary’s Fence. Again, I found myself weeping in public.
What had started out as a kind of confused attraction toward the Catholic Church had achieved piercing clarity. On the one hand was the transcendent beauty of Catholic tradition and worship and charity. On the other hand was the terrible demand of the Church that I cede control of my life and become vulnerable to the sorts of overwhelming responsibilities that could further render me a bad neighbor. G. K. Chesterton once wrote that “the Church is a house with a hundred gates.” To me, the Church felt like a house I had locked myself out of with my middle-class prejudices and standards. I felt a little like Jewel, simultaneously driven by a desire to enter the house and afraid of what might await me inside.
But the conflict didn’t take long to resolve. The draw of the Church’s beauty overcame my fear of Her demands, and on Easter of 2021, Danielle and I were confirmed and received into full communion with the Catholic Church.
In the years since, I’ve benefited tremendously from that decision. The practices of praying the Rosary, attending adoration, and worshiping with members of the Emmanuel Community have all clearly enriched my life. While I’m still far from achieving the evident sanctity of the Catholics I knew in Adwa or at Christ the Bridegroom Monastery, I’ve learned to sin a little less and to love God a little more.
What is more surprising, though, is how I found the beautiful and difficult aspects of being Catholic to be not opposed but intertwined. That is to say, my very poverty in meeting the demands of the Church allows me to experience its riches. The material poverty revealed in my struggle to provide for six children on a junior professor’s salary, the even more daunting spiritual poverty revealed in my struggle to conform my will to the Church’s teaching—these are the tools God has chosen to make plain my need for conversion and salvation through the sacraments of His Church. The large family with which God has blessed me is not only, in turn, delightful and exasperating, sustaining and exhausting; it’s also a means of my salvation: a kind of Jacob’s Ladder stretching from earth to heaven.
