Second of four parts
It was June 2002, and Aaron Graham was all of 22. But he had made up his mind: He would go to Boston to help save Boston.
Sitting down at the laptop in his parents' suburban Virginia home, he tapped out a parting appeal to family and friends.
"I am calling on your help in my time of need," he wrote. "Pray that I would learn the secret of being content whatever the circumstance, that I would not focus on maintaining a lifestyle, but rather on fulfilling a calling."
He didn't know where he would land in Boston, or what exactly he would do, but he did know something of what it meant to head off into the unknown. The son of a Southern Baptist missionary, he had, through his father's calling, seen more of the world's troubles than most children, from the crushing poverty of Africa to the terrors of war in the Mideast.
But his would be a very different mission, to the cool capital of New England, a region that had long been tough territory for evangelicals, but where stubborn poverty and old racial divisions beckoned.
He wanted to help, but first he wanted to feel. What was it like to wonder where his next meal would come from, or where he might find a bed? He imagined himself, like one of Jesus' disciples, relying on the good will of others to get by. He coveted a hard test of faith.
With his graduation invitations, he enclosed a note insisting that friends and family not give him money. He refused offers of assistance from other members of his home church, gave his car to a friend, and packed his knapsack - no phone, no credit card, and about $300 cash. He was prepared, if need be, to sleep on the streets.
"My heart was racing like crazy," he said. "I wanted to be put in a situation where, if God doesn't come through, I'm going to fail. God smiles when we have to rely on him."
Four months later, Aaron Graham met Ma Siss.
They were an unlikely pair, a college-educated white evangelical from Richmond and a semiliterate 65-year-old African-American great-grandmother born into poverty in rural Alabama.
Tall and angular, with an outlander's soft accent and manner, he was a virtual unknown, a spiritual tourist in an old town. She was a bedrock figure in her troubled Dorchester neighborhood, a large, laconic presence known by her nickname (her given name is Idene Wilkerson) and by her dream of a new church born in a chop shop.
They were joined together by the civic heartbreak of that summer of 2002: the death of 10-year-old Trina Persad.
The little girl had been killed just three weeks after Aaron arrived in Boston, felled by an errant bullet from a gang member's gun. Aaron, bartering work as a driver for a nonprofit called Fair Foods in exchange for a room in the Dorchester home of the organization's founder, couldn't help but notice the street-corner shrine of purple teddy bears piled up in Persad's memory. And for Ma Siss, who lived just a few blocks from the park where the girl was slain, the tragedy was way too close to home.
So that fall, when a group of volunteers gathered to build a playground in Persad's memory, Aaron and Ma Siss both showed up. Amid the sounds of hammering and sawing, Jack Sullivan, who was a tenant of Ma Siss's and a co-worker of Aaron's, engineered an introduction.
Ma Siss was intrigued by this nice young man who was a committed Christian - a contrast, she thought, with many of the youths in her own family who weren't serious enough about church. And Aaron was just happy to have a connection, especially with this woman with the strange name and the crazy-looking corner garage, surrounded by used appliances and racks of worn clothing, that reminded him of Appalachia.
A few weeks later, Sullivan drove Ma Siss and Ma Fann, her closest friend and the cofounder of the prayer group, up to Northeastern University, where Aaron was to talk about social justice with a Baptist Bible study group.
"There's like 20 college students, and he comes in with this group of older black women, and I think he had just met them," recalled Karin Hernandez, the Baptist chaplain at Northeastern. "She had the garage, and she was . . . funneling through donations and giving them out to people in the area, and she began to have this vision of having a church there. And he was poor, and he needed a pair of shoes."
Hernandez had already concluded that Aaron was a bit of an odd duck; she had met him the previous summer, when he had been an intern at a Boston church, but his embrace of a self-inflicted poverty struck her.
"I was so impressed and surprised and thought he was crazy at the same time," Hernandez said.
Aaron admits that when he invited Ma Siss and Ma Fann to Northeastern, he assumed they wouldn't make it.
"I didn't think they would show up," he said. "I knew it would be awkward. Once they showed up, I was like, something's going on here. This is just strange. . . . They must need help."
Ma Siss was looking for a preacher, and Aaron, in some ways, seemed a natural. At ease in front of crowds, he is passionate about the Bible, and about social justice. Also, he likes to talk.
Ma Siss saw all that immediately, first at the park, and then at Northeastern. She saw the gap between them, too. He was very young. And very white. And there was no knowing how long he might be around.
But then, she remembers thinking, a lot of folks in her experience didn't stick with things for long. Living on Drayton Avenue, people learn not to lean too hard on anything or anyone.
"He's young, very young, and . . . he was raised up as a missionary in Africa, and you know how poor Africa is. He raised up with that, and once you raised up with something in you, it's a true sign," Ma Siss said.
"When he walk in this home, he walk in like he's home," she said. "He never said, 'This is a black home.' And I think that's another thing, too. He knows he's protected by the Holy Spirit, so he'll walk in here, walk the streets, take their hands, early in the morning, late at night. . . . I can honestly say he never show no kind of color, Aaron. You know, he fit in, and he really, really love his church."
A young woman named Amy Boyer saw it too. A recent seminary graduate from West Virginia, Amy was working as a Southern Baptist campus minister in Worcester and first met Aaron in July, when she heard him speak at City on a Hill about his work with Sudanese refugees. Amy, whose Cherokee heritage had made her more attentive to issues of race, had been on short-term missions to Venezuela and Thailand, and was intrigued by Aaron. By November, when she met him again at a Christian conference in New London, romance was in the air.
Aaron had begun stopping by Ma Siss's Place to deliver supplies from Fair Foods, and he loved to linger and talk with Ma Siss and her friends. Ma Siss gave him a pair of used Timberland work boots from the thrift shop inventory. In November, she invited him to a dinner to celebrate the fact that Fair Foods had designated Ma Siss's Place a dollar bag location, where bags of produce and bread were sold for a dollar; Aaron, proposing a first date with Amy, invited her to come.
Aaron had to cancel at the last minute, but Ma Siss then made another offer: to come lead the women of the garage in a prayer meeting.
"Mom Fann said, 'We can pray down here, [but] we got to get us a preacher,' " Ma Siss recalled.
So on December 14, 2002, Aaron and Amy drove down to the garage, unsure of what to expect. They found a group of five people - Ma Siss; Ma Fann; Ma Siss's niece, Arlene Baldwin; another relative, Gary Wilkerson; and a friend, Denise Alexander - sitting around a table and ready to ask questions. Denise and Gary were both nonbelievers, but they were curious.
"We didn't have a plan," Aaron said. "Denise was like, 'I've heard about the Ten Commandments before - what is that?' and so I was like, OK, well let's go to it, and so we had Bibles, and we opened up to Exodus 20, and we read each of them."
Amy pulled out her guitar and began to play Christmas songs. Ma Siss made soup. Aaron left to run an errand, and Amy spent the morning stringing green beans with Arlene.
Aaron and Amy came back the next Saturday, then each weekend after that. Ma Siss or her daughter, Dora, would make a grits and sausage breakfast, and Aaron and Amy would discuss a Bible passage or answer questions about Christianity. Each session would begin with conversation about the week just past. Missy Thompson, whose addiction caused her to give up her four sons to be raised by Ma Siss, would talk about her challenges with drugs; someone else would mention concerns about money, or about a kid in a gang. Invariably, someone would cry.
"People were just so broken," Aaron said. "You could just say one word - God loves you - and there would be tears."
The women of Quincy Street were now calling Aaron "Bishop" or "Father." The gathering of five grew to 10, and then 20, and then 25, enough that it could no longer meet at a table, but instead in chairs arranged in a circle around the garage. Enough that Aaron had to start preparing a sermon. Enough that it started to feel like church.
"One day he came to our Bible study," Ma Siss would later explain. "I gave him a good meal, and I ain't got rid of him yet."
Aaron preaches in a conversational style, weaving his sermons into the service without a clear beginning or end, open to interruption by himself or others. He walks back and forth, as if pacing in some imaginary cage, and uses his long arms to punch the air to accentuate a point. Often, when saying something particularly prayerful, he closes his eyes.
But he rarely describes what he does as preaching; instead, he uses the word sharing. He doesn't hold himself out as a leader. In the early days, he had no idea how long he might stay, but he knew he would never be truly of this place. He didn't want people to think that, because of him, things would change for the better, or that things would crumble when, one day, he was gone.
"I am very aware of my whiteness and age, even more so than the folks in the neighborhood," he said. "Notice how I don't call myself 'pastor' much. I had a hard time accepting this for longest time. For one, I think it can exclude other people from their responsibility. I believe we are all ministers. And two, I was never trying to become a pastor, especially in Dorchester. It was the result of loving people and sharing my story with them. The neighborhood has conferred this title on me."
By the spring of 2003, people had begun to think seriously that this earnest little group in this broken down building, with floors sloped so the auto oil would run down to a drain, with a green carpet covering the cement and paper curtains to cover the walls, might invite the presence of God.
"That's when it started becoming a little more formal," Amy said. "They wanted it to be church."
Aaron had moved into a Salvation Army center in Codman Square, called the Jubilee House - the former home of Jonathan and Jordan Knight of New Kids on the Block fame. But Ma Siss wanted him around more, so she offered him a free room at 22 Drayton, a rental property she owned that had been a den of drug dealing.
"There were kittens that were just running around, abandoned kittens, and you couldn't even see out of the windows because the nicotine stain was so thick," Aaron said. "The walls were beaten in, and the doors were beaten down."
Ma Siss just wanted to hold on to the house, but Aaron had bigger ideas. At Jubilee House, he had met a young couple, Brian and Cathi Corcoran, who were interested in "intentional Christian communities," and Brian, an architect, started helping to rehab the building. Later that year, Brian and Cathi moved in, too, determined to attract a houseful of young Christians who could help transform the neighborhood.
The worship service became regularized, Saturday afternoons at 1, so as not to interfere with any neighbors, like Ma Fann, who belonged to other churches. Someone donated a stack of Bibles. And a kind of free-range liturgy began to evolve.
As midday passed, one autumn day, about a dozen people settled into the random collection of beat-up couches and broken chairs that dot the garage. Donated chairs functioned as pews for a week, used for worship and then given to the needy, only to be replaced by someone else's castoff furniture.
A broken piano had a makeshift crèche of religious statuary arranged atop it. Slightly deflated balloons - the remnants of some recent celebration - hung from metal pipes along the ceiling. White paper fans had been attached to the green walls as a form of decoration. On shelves above the chairs were dozens of cans of tomatoes and boxes of canned stuffing. A cat named Church wandered across the floor, the congregation's attempt to deal with a mice problem.
Dora decided it was time for prayer. She hit a pot with a spoon.
Ma Fann, her head wrapped in a colorful scarf, leapt out of her seat, the first to testify.
"I could just fly in here this morning," she blurted out. She had good news: Her granddaughter's deployment to Iraq had been postponed.
"God is a mighty God," she said, working her voice up to a shout. "I know the Lord is good. Glory. Hallelujah. Yes, Lord. I thank him."
Then Ma Siss jumped in. She doesn't have the strength to stand during worship and was sunk into a deep soft chair. Her voice rose slowly as she talked about the the birth of the church.
"What we have been praying and asking for is coming to show in our lifetime," she said, "and it just such an uplift. Make us so high that we don't know what to think. Just look what God is doing."
She slammed her hand down on a nearby table.
"He ain't let us down yet. He ain't failed us. He done brought us this far - he ain't gonna let us go now."
At times, Ma Siss had herself been uncertain that this little congregation would survive. But on this day, she offered a rebuke to neighborhood doubters.
"I know what they say about this little church - ain't nobody in there. But God showed them something this morning."
A handful of newcomers drifted into the garage, and Ma Siss invested her hope in them.
"Y'all should know the door is always open," she said. "And don't let this be your last time. We'll be looking forward for you. And thanks so much. And thank God. And thank you."
Aaron was just sitting down when Dora poked her head into the room. She generally hovers near the worship service, listening from a doorway or the kitchen or the back of the room, one foot in the service but one foot outside. On this day, she was overseeing the preparation of lunch in the kitchen, but when she heard a lull in the testimony, she stepped into the room. She didn't refer directly to her long history of drug use, but she didn't have to - everyone knew.
"I want to give thanks to God for returning the burning desire of wanting to know more about him," she said. "When I first started down here, I wanted to know God, and I wanted to do God's will, [but] I had abandoned that."
Dora had been getting together weekly with a group of women to study the Bible and was supposed to be leading the group, but she hadn't been reading or preparing, and, as a result, she said, each week she would have to ask someone else to lead. Now, she asked for prayers, so that she would return to study.
Next up was Karen, a newcomer who would not return. She spoke briefly, but clearly.
"I'm in a financial bind," she said. "But I'm not going to give up hope. I know God will be there."
The group broke into applause.
Some days, as he preached, Aaron would allude to his own story.
He was born in Memphis and lived longest in Richmond, but when he talked about his journey to Ma Siss's Place, he started with Liberia, where the Grahams lived as Southern Baptist missionaries from 1986, when Aaron was 6, until 1989. There Aaron witnessed poverty for the first time, and he has been drawn to it ever since.
"We had only been there a short time when we walked 15 minutes into the bush, into a village, and there was a baby starving in the village - she was a twin, and they couldn't feed both, so they elected to let one starve to death," said Aaron's mother, Laurie Graham. "Aaron would go with his dad to take a hard-boiled egg, or some food, to feed the baby . . . and when the baby died, he wanted to go to the funeral. Most little kids don't want to do things like that."
The experience of poverty, as Aaron describes it now, seemed linked directly to a zeal for Christianity, a zeal that Aaron found lacking back home.
"In Africa, man, people walk an hour or two to get to church," he recalled. "Being in Africa for those three years . . . I felt like the church could thrive better outside of the western culture, which is exciting for me."
It was in Liberia that Aaron first told his parents he wanted to be baptized. Maurice Graham had been baptized at age 5; Laurie, a Presbyterian, at age 12; but the couple, worried that Aaron was just eager for the thrill of immersion in a snake-infested creek, decided he wasn't ready.
Aaron was ultimately baptized at age 14, in a suburban Richmond megachurch, but his critique of Western material culture grew only sharper. By his own assessment, he became "very judgmental." He recalls returning from a mission trip at age 16, horrified by the disparity between the wealth of his own congregation and the people he had been trying to help in the Dominican Republic.
"As I got older, I was like, OK, half the world is living on less than $2 a day, and we don't talk about this?" he said. "We were raising $400,000 for a new church organ, so I calculated how many chapels we could build. . . . Some people were like, yeah, that's so true, but the music minister did not like me for it."
By the time he got to college, at the University of Richmond, his journal was filled with his critique of American churches and derision for his pampered subculture - "rich-whitey"; "suburban spirituality"; and "comfortable Christianity."
The summer of 2001, he came to Boston as an intern for his youth minister, who was starting a church in the South End called City on a Hill. Then in 2002, upon his graduation, he made the decision to move north.
"I fell in love with the authenticity of the people. . . . I just felt, like, man, the white church is dead. I fell in love with Dorchester. I was looking for something different."
He found that something at Quincy Street, and Ma Siss's Place.
"I realized that this was, for sure, one of the most distressed areas of Boston," he said, "and that was exactly where God wanted me to be."
After Liberia, the Grahams had returned to Memphis for nine months, then accepted another mission, to a tiny Persian Gulf nation they had barely heard of, Kuwait. Maurice Graham was assigned as the English language pastor of the National Evangelical Church of Kuwait, which had a membership made up largely of foreign workers from India and the Philippines. The family expected to remain in Kuwait for years.
But at just about 5 a.m. on Aug. 2, 1990, Aaron heard the noise.
He was 10 years old, and sound asleep, and there was a rumble outside that sounded like the garbage man.
Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait City.
That morning, the Graham house was entered four times by Iraqi troops, and on one occasion, a soldier began assaulting his mother. To this day, Aaron believes his mother was spared the worst because he burst into tears, and the soldier backed off.
"That was a spiritual mark on my life, because I thought, either I could be killed, or my parents could be killed," Aaron said. "It was the first time in my life that I was confronted with the fact that I might lose my life, and where would I spend eternity? And then I saw a soldier a couple hours later, dead on the side of the road, and it really forced me to say, 'OK, what do I believe in?' "
He continued: "I didn't say a prayer or whatever, but I really said, 'God, if I die, I want to be with you.' And I remember saying, like, 'When I get out of this, I want to really make a public decision about this, and make this known.' "
Aaron, his 13-year-old brother, and his parents fled to the US embassy, and over the next six weeks were held hostage there, cut off for much of the time from electricity, water, sewage, and surrounded by Iraqi troops.
Although it is not clear how well Aaron understood this, at the time, no one was sure whether the Americans holed up at the embassy would make it. Saddam had been using Westerners as "human shields" around key military installations.
Ultimately, under intense international pressure, the women and children were allowed to leave; to this day, Aaron believes his father and the other adult men were later freed because the prayers of Baptist ministers back home caused Saddam to have a troubled dream.
"It was a time of terror," Maurice Graham said of his son's experience, "and it broke his innocence. He had a very severe time trying to figure out what was real, and what was not. . . . He saw the world could be quite harsh, even if you're a good kid."
'Last week, we talked about the whole idea of being powerless, or of being a slave to something," Aaron was saying, as the faces of those gathered at the garage turned his way.
It was the fall of 2004. There were new windows, but castoff couches still served as pews, and a stack of donated Bibles shared shelving with "The I (Heart) NY Diet"; Dickens's "Great Expectations"; and "Disclosure," a torrid novel by Michael Crichton. There were occasional steps toward a more polished service - one week Aaron preached through a microphone hooked up to a boombox - but then the audio equipment was stolen, and it was back to shouting.
Aaron had noticed very early on that his congregation approached the worship service in the confessional style of a 12-step meeting, and so on this October afternoon, he decided to start working his way through a 12-week series of sermons riffing off the personal recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
After a brief joking joust with Dora - no one in the congregation knows these 12 steps better than her - he zeroed in on his theme.
Handing the congregants a list, he said, "Go down to where it says step Number 1. This is what we went over last week. . . . We admitted that we were powerless over our deficiencies, and that our life had become unmanageable. The key word here is that we admitted. This substance basically controls us. We become its slave. It becomes our master."
Aaron then asked the worshipers to give him some examples of things to which people become addicted. Quickly, the voices rose in a spontaneous litany of guilt: alcohol, anger, love, weight-lifting, sleep, nicotine, pain, TV, exercise, worshiping how you look, gambling, nosedrops, cocaine, work, sugar, people, sex, caffeine, shoplifting, chocolate, risk, pornography.
And then, weaving between the Gospel of Mark, the odyssey of that season's Red Sox ("All things are possible."), and the second step of AA, Aaron launched into the heart of the sermon.
"Many addictions plague our culture of self," he said. "It's a result of sin."
But, he said: "One of the awesome things about being a Christian is that all things are possible. Nobody is counted out."
As he spoke, a string of sirens whizzed by. Nobody looked up.
"What's going to last?" he asked. "Our faith."
And then, as he often did, he asked if anyone wanted to offer thoughts on his remarks.
Eloise Chaney stepped up. A longtime drug addict, she told the congregation about her struggles to stay clean.
"I've come a long way, but I have a long way to go," she said.
Aaron approached, and placed his hand on her head.
"Bless her," he said, his eyes closed tight. "Heal her."
The service was over. Lunch was waiting.
The worshipers stood for the closing hymn, the one with the lyrics they have made their anthem: "We have decided to follow Jesus. No turning back."
They formed a circle, joined hands, and began to sing.
Michael Paulson can be reached at mpaulson@globe.com. Pat Greenhouse can be reached at greenhouse@globe.com.
