All in One Life

On a Sunday in February – Quinquagesima Sunday to be exact – members of St. Vincent’s Parish saw in their weekly messenger that Father Joseph Gerber had died. Just four weeks before, they had celebrated his eighty-ninth birthday, and now he was gone, vanishing, as it were, between one month and the next. The obituary contained the dates of his birth and death and a brief eulogy, all enclosed within the customary black border. Two other facts were mentioned in the announcement: Father Gerber was born on a farm in Southern Wisconsin, and he served at St. Vincent’s for almost 20 years.

Although his official duties had ceased, Father Gerber was widely known and highly respected in Chicago’s Sheffield neighborhood. This was because he was seen every day, regardless of the weather, ambling down its streets in his familiar black cassock and square biretta, a kind word always on his lips for anyone he met. In fact, few remembered a time when he wasn’t seen.

Father Gerber shuffled along slowly, his nose buried in the prayer book he read as he walked. He never bothered to look up when he crossed a street, but rather relied on God and his guardian angel to look after him. And so they did, because Father Gerber’s obituary also reported that he had died quietly in his sleep.

Of course, God often works in strange ways. And as it happens, Father Gerber was automatically protected when he crossed a street near a school at lunchtime or at the end of the school day, because patrol boys peremptorily stopped all traffic when he appeared at a corner. City policemen also were on the lookout for Father Gerber and were known to pull over, park their patrol cars, and halt traffic when he approached a busy intersection.

When the priest walked on windy days, pages of his prayer book – no longer securely attached because they had been turned so often – were lifted lightly and scattered by the occasional gusts that ruffled them. The sheets, fluttering haphazardly like autumn leaves, were often gathered by children who watched Father Gerber pass. When a child retrieved a page and returned it to him, the priest always advised the finder to read it. He said the page might contain a message that could change his life. If the child said he didn’t understand the message, Father Gerber encouraged him to save the page until he did.

While most adults looked upon Father Gerber’s perambulations with a skeptical eye, the young children in the neighborhood looked forward to his coming because he always stopped to talk to them and distribute pennies, which they could quickly deposit in the nearest grocer’s gumball machine. Best of all was the rare yellow gumball circled by a red stripe. It could be exchanged for a nickel candy bar.

More than once, parents wondered if Father Gerber preached religion when he spoke to the children, but no one ever discovered that he did. His brief admonitions to those who returned an errant page were the limit of his religious remarks.

Of Father Gerber’s past activities, neighbors, including parishioners, knew virtually nothing, nor were any comments about his background ever expressed by church officials. Very few, for example, knew Father Gerber had discovered his religious vocation late in life, and had not entered the priesthood until he was in his sixties. Most took for granted he had become a priest as a young man.

Thus it was that residents of Sheffield were not aware Joseph Gerber, at 29, had married his childhood sweetheart and, in the next two years, had fathered two children. Nor did they know how extremely difficult it was for the parents to raise them in a cramped cottage – where in winter, the single stove lacked the strength to abolish the cold, and the open windows in summer failed to remove the heat.

During his married life, Joseph Gerber had barely been able to feed and clothe his family on the little he earned in the hardware store, where he worked 10 hours a day, six days a week, immersed in the mixed smell of benzene, kerosene, and house paints. Sometimes, on behalf of customers, he searched, in scant light, for nails or screws in rows of wooden drawers. Other times he measured and cut wooden rolls for window shades, helped customers choose wallpaper, or scooped grass seed from a wooden barrel and weighed it in a scale attached by a chain to a high metal ceiling. If he went outside for a moment to breathe fresh air and see the daylight, he squinted until his eyes adjusted to the brightness.

The years dragged, and the future seemed empty of promise. Then 1918 came, and a flu epidemic swept across the country. Like an inexorable wave, it penetrated into every household, killing people, young and old, without compunction – including Joseph Gerber’s wife and two children.

When he buried them, the only future path he saw led to a bottomless abyss. He followed it downward for four years. And the denizens of west Madison and north Clark Streets gladly welcomed him as a member. He sold his few possessions and abandoned the cottage, taking a furnished room above a run-down tavern. Women and drink became his favorite companions, and he begged, borrowed, and cheated to pay for them whenever the little money he picked up from cleaning toilets and scrubbing floors ran out. In short, he experienced total degradation.

Joseph Gerber never knew the exact moment when – or even why, for that matter – the first hint of another change entered his consciousness. Perhaps it occurred the morning he noticed, with an altered perspective, the homeless, the helpless, and the neglected sleeping on the streets. He had seen them and their poverty often enough, but now he suddenly felt their desperation.

From that moment of awareness, two unshakable convictions formed in his mind: he must cease being the person he had become, and he must find a way to help those in need.

The struggle to achieve both goals was long and difficult. There were innumerable setbacks, but also patient encouragement provided by those committed to helping men like him. During the year he fought to overcome his weaknesses, his goals gradually grew larger and brighter, until finally he found his way. Obsessed with a desire to serve, yet never forgetting the powerful lure of temptation that had held him firmly in bondage, Joseph Gerber entered the priesthood and faithfully adhered to a new life.

Questions and doubts, however, assailed Father Gerber for the rest of his life. One couldn’t see them in his face as he walked the neighborhood streets. But they were there, not quite hidden beneath the gentle smile and behind the sad blue eyes. His life had been so tumultuous, the depths to which he had plunged so deep, how could harsh marks of uncertainty not be present?

What did it all mean? If at one point he had been the dedicated husband and father, at another the rake, and still later a priest, who, actually, was he? Was he an abject sinner, an aspiring saint or just an ordinary man, composed of three distinct, strong personalities – each exercising control over him, in its turn, at different times in his life? While he lived, Father Gerber never learned the answer.