My Brother the Agnostic

I sat at the table in My Brother the Agnostic’s kitchen and watched him perform a rite that I’d consider great Eucharist.  Here in the place he had run to from the hopelessness of Detroit’s Cass Corridor, he had sublet a rent-controlled apartment in a complex occupied mostly by Hasidic Jews.  Here among these mystics who seemed to passers-by to be withdrawn in their long black clothes, Dan the Doubter performed Mass for me, not with Bread and wine, but with Toast and Coffee.

My brother Dan was my Other for the first 17 years of my life.  We were the bookends of our neighborhood ragamuffins’ pick-up baseball games, he the best and first to be picked and I the last.  He was the shortstop, who could perform the prefect double-play; I was the absent-minded outfielder.  He was the Golden Student at St. Mary’s School, I the younger brother who disappointed his teachers a year later when they found out I was, unlike him, a “daydreamer”.  Later at Notre Dame High School for Boys, that title would change to “underachiever”.  But when I followed him from Chicago to Detroit to the Jesuit university there, now University of Detroit Mercy, our lives developed a certain parity; I began to make branch off from the trail he had blazed for me and make my own path. 

Now twenty years later I was working at the university to which he had welcomed me, married to the woman I had met there, raising three kids in a two-flat two blocks away from campus, walking to Gesu church on Sundays for Mass and to the Social Hall on Wednesday evenings for Prayer Meetings.  Faith and life wove a seamless garment for Kathy and me; neither would make sense without the other.  Dan meanwhile had returned from the army during the Vietnam War having found his own hell not in the war itself, but in the depersonalization and mindless power of basic training.    He’d come back and rejected everything he’d done, leaving his profession in Chemical Engineering for a mindless clerical job, and leaving his wife for a life of hitchhiking across the country and working only when it was necessary to make enough money for the next few months.

This apartment was his cell, the place in which he could live a monastic life, not of a churchy holiness but of withdrawal from relationships in a city so full of people that one did not look into the eyes of strangers; 8 million looking past 8 million others sharing the same busy sidewalks.  He was very happy that I came to visit him, meeting me at Grand Central Station and walking me briskly to the subway to his Lower East Side apartment, one of a dozen that looked just like it, 17 stories of stark red brick monolith broken by oxidizing aluminum window frames and dull glass.  Inside was a tiny kitchen, a sparse living room shrunk by his bookshelves, with a couch and a TV and a little desk by a window with his computer.  After a day of walking, walking, walking, dinner at a Senegalese restaurant, and more and more walking, he made up the couch as a bed for me and we called it a night. 

I was in his comfort zone, he leading and I following, trusting, appreciating, marveling.  The talk we talked was the talk he enjoyed – politics, world affairs, and economics.  There would be no talk of intimacy, commitment, and certainly no talk about faith or belief or religion.  In the twenty years that I had diverged from his trail, we had come to speak different languages, and I had developed the young brother’s habit of deferring to him when we were together.  And now I was in his Space. 

I look back to that morning twenty years ago, though, as sharing Communion with Dan, of passing the Bread and the Cup.  The two of us squeezed into his tiny kitchen, a chair relieved of its books for me to sit in as he followed a rubric so like the priests we would watch as Altar Boys.  He took down coffee beans from a shelf – “Coffee beans” he made clear to me, not that stuff that comes in a can, like we lemmings buy.  Quietly placing two measuring cups of the shiny, aromatic beans into the grinder, he covered it, pressed the button, and just smiled at me, as if to say, “This is my real coffee.”  Water measured into the bottom section of his palm-sized cast aluminum vacuum pot and freshly ground coffee into the top; he lit the burner of his stove with a wooden match, dropped the blackened stick into a pile of its spent siblings in a cup on the stove, and turned to the precise slicing of bread.  “This is real bread, not like that stuff that you get at the store.” 

The bread toasted; the coffee perked.  Their smells filled the little room, where he served me at his little table, the toast, the coffee.  We spoke of politics, world affairs, and economics, partaking in wordless intimacy, and commitment, Dan performing his ritual of faith, belief, and religion as adeptly and silently as he had, decades earlier performed the perfect double-play. 

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.