While a student at Union Theological Seminary following an early career as a teacher and writer, Frederick Buechner took part in field education in New York City. The following excerpt from Now and Then relates a slice of his experiences.
In addition to the worlds of Union and home, there was also the world of East Harlem, where, as part of the fieldwork program, I found myself running what the parish called an “employment clinic,” though all it was was me sitting with a telephone and no other qualifications in a storefront office on 104th Street.
I was born in New York and had lived there off and on all my life, but the New York I knew was bounded by Central Park to the west and Lexington Avenue to the east, to the north by 96th Street and to the south by Grand Central Station. Broadway theaters took me to the west side every once in a while and secondhand bookshops to the lower reaches of downtown, but by and large the city I knew was one relatively unscarred by violence, poverty, ugliness. … But East Harlem was another kind of city altogether-and with almost no beauty at all.
Many who happened into the storefront office on 104th Street did so simply out of curiosity. The place had something to do with the church, they knew. Maybe there would be a handout. It was a place to go anyway, different from most of the other places they went. Some of them were drunk, some glassy-eyed with drugs, but most of them, you felt, were just tired and bored with wandering the littered streets day after day to no particular purpose. There were a few chairs to sit in. In winter it was warm. Nobody tried to hustle them out unless they got obstreperous, and they rarely did.
One cadaverous man, however, got very angry once. He said if I was so good at getting people jobs, why didn’t I get a decent one for myself? Did anybody think I’d be piddling my time away up there in the slums if I could do any better anywhere else? The whole thing was some sort of racket, he said. I was some kind of phony. He wheeled around, looking for support that never came, and I remember his pounding my desk so hard that some papers slipped off to the floor, remember the deep, hollow notes of his rage, which he didn’t have the energy to sustain for long and which, except for me, nobody else there paid much attention to.
They seemed to know him. His name was George. Last names were rare in East Harlem. He quieted down eventually and showed me a tattoo on his arm that had something to do with his having been tortured once for being a Christian, he said. He looked like a man who might have been tortured once, but what it had to do with the tattoo he never made clear.
The part of his charge that stung, of course, was the part about my being a phony. I worked there only once or twice a week, and when I was through, I went back to a world that he could have known of only through the movies if, in fact, he ever had the price of a movie.
Every winter there were church groups that would send to the parish boxes full of the Christmas cards they had received that year, secondhand Christmas cards with the part torn off where the messages had been. Instead of throwing them out with the garbage, they sent them to East Harlem under the assumption that the poor people who couldn’t afford Christmas cards themselves would enjoy looking at; them, showing them to their children, maybe even pasting them in scrapbooks. There were times when I felt that what I was doing there was in roughly the same hair-raising key.
I managed to find a few jobs for people. The non-English-speaking Puerto Ricans had the hardest time a because in those days the state employment office wasn’t set up to conduct interviews in Spanish, but I discovered somehow that the Horn and Hardart restaurant chain occasionally needed dishwashers whether they spoke English or not, and the Eagle Pencil factory, if I remember rightly, also came through from time to time. I think I may also have gotten a few boys into messenger jobs and a woman or two into a housecleaning service, but the closest I came to triumph was with a man whose first name was Fred.
He was an alcoholic. Years before, he said, he had studied Greek and could still recite the Greek alphabet. It was true. He recited it for me. He was a thickset man in his late fifties or early sixties, white-haired, with a blurred, intelligent face. If he had ever had a family, I don’t remember his speaking of it. He seemed very much alone in the world, but without self-pity, hopeful in a sort of battered way, determined to pull himself together if he could manage it, but resolved to make the best of it even if he couldn’t. He made much of the fact that he and I had the same first name. He saw it as a bond between us.
When he first arrived in the of office, he was dressed like a tramp, but the parish always had a supply of cleaned and mended old clothes on hand, and by the time they had fitted him out, you might almost have guessed that he was a man who could recite the Greek alphabet.
We became friends. He dropped by the office from time to time. I made a number of phone calls for him about jobs, the drinking seemed more or less under control, and eventually one of the interviews I arranged for him worked out, and he got a position as night watchman at one of the faculty residences at Union.
I didn’t see him much after that. I ran into him once at the building where he worked, and there was a strangeness for us both, I think, in meeting each other so much out of our usual 104th Street context and in roles so different that East Harlem became like a secret we were keeping almost from each other. How were things going? He said they were going all right. Unless you had known, you wouldn’t have guessed that his overcoat was a church handout.
It was winter, and he had it buttoned up tight under his chin. His face seemed buttoned up tight too-less so as not to let the coldness in, I thought, than so as not to let some inner coldness out. Something good had started for him, but something good had also ended, if only something between us. Now that he had the job, his need for my services, such as they were, was at an end. What was left was just his need for somebody to be alone in the world with, and I didn’t have the wherewithal for that. We both of us knew it. How were things going for me? I said they were going all right.
The last time I saw him I knew it was the last time although I no longer remember how I knew. It was on a windy street corner up near the seminary. Had he started drinking again? Had he lost his job? Was he going away somewhere, or was I? I remember only that he had to hold his hat by the brim to keep it from blowing off and that for some forgotten reason we were saying a final good-by. I remember that I said, “I’ll be seeing you,” but that I knew it was not true.
When you find something in a human face that calls out to you, not just for help but in some sense for yourself, how far do you go in answering that call, how far can you go, seeing that you have your own life to get on with as much as he has his? As for me, I went as far as that windy street corner up around 120th Street and Broadway, and I can see him standing there as in some way he is standing there still, and as I also am standing there still. He is alone and making the best of it with his thin, church-rummage overcoat flapping around his legs. His one free hand is raised in the air to wave good-by. It was the last time.
“Here and there in the world and now and then in ourselves,” Tillich said, “is a New Creation.” This side of glory, maybe that is the best we can hope for.
-Frederick Buechner
Pawlet, Vermont
The gospel must be preached afresh and told in new ways to every generation, since every generation has its own unique questions. The gospel must constantly be forwarded to a new address, because the recipient is repeatedly changing his place of residence.
-Helmut Thielicke
If angels came in packages, we’d almost always pick the wrong one.
Even as the devil is evil disguised as good, angels are goodness disguised.
They show up in foolscap, calico, and gingham, and brown paper bags.
Jesus discovered the realm of God in a mustard seed,
the smallest and least portentous of all seeds.
Mustard seeds and angels have this in common.
They are little epiphanies of the divine amidst the ordinary.
-F. Forester Church
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
