By Amanda Haggard
Each year, several organizations pull together and host a Homeless Memorial on the riverfront in downtown Nashville. This event, which honors all the folks who’ve died living on the streets in the previous year, is held in the cold of December on a Saturday, and it’s often a morning of somber reflection on all that has been lost.
One time, as folks bowed their heads for prayer after a particularly brutal year, I started to look around and noticed that a dog was watching folks, almost like it was wondering what in the world these weird humans were up to. I locked eyes with another friend who had seen the same thing, and we started to chuckle a bit, losing most of what was said in the prayer and focusing largely on just how odd this dog found the entire ordeal.
As the prayer came to a close, my friend and I saw Father Charles Strobel headed our way. I didn’t know Strobel that well and started to feel slightly embarrassed that he may have noticed us not engaged in the very important remembrance happening that morning. As he approached, he leaned in close, smiled conspiratorially and said: “You know, dog is just God spelled backward.”
Strobel, who passed away in August 2023, is best known for his work creating Room in the Inn, an organization that connects congregations across Nashville with people who need emergency shelter in the winter cold, among other things, but he was also an engaging storyteller and a person who loved to provide even a moment of respite for others.
Near the end of his life, Strobel worked on a memoir, The Kingdom of the Poor: My Journey Home. With the help of two editors (his niece Katie Seigenthaler and Amy Frogge), the book will be released this month by Vanderbilt University Press. Reading this posthumous memoir is a lot like experiencing Strobel in person. His stories welcome you into his life. He’s always a little bit mischievous in his delivery. He is calm about his faults and mistakes in a way that is reassuring.
In a section of the book called The Miracle of Forgiveness, he writes about a conflict he had with a childhood friend named Billy Denton at around 7 or 8 years old and how shocked he was by the rage and resentment he experienced. His friend had gotten the better of him, and his anger built up such that the next time they were rolling in the grass, Strobel felt like he had it within him to end the other boy’s life. He stopped before it got to a life-altering event, but the moment gave him a grounding point throughout his life to understand how others might commit violent acts, hold grudges, or let things fester to unhealthy points. He relates this to his work advocating against the death penalty, which became a large part of his life after his mother, Mary Catherine Strobel, was murdered in 1986.
He writes, “Jesus invites us into a world without condemnation. … The choice now becomes ours. We can hold each other in our mistakes, or we can let each other go. We can be a prison to one another or the source of release. Both are choices. One leads us to separation; the other leads us to communion.”
It’s this level of honesty and wisdom that tells us Strobel is talking through forgiving the great sin of murder as much as he is forgiving himself for having the thought. He ends each chapter of The Kingdom of the Poor with one of the sayings of Jesus known as the Beatitudes, and he writes early on that the book will be full of stories and memories he calls “Beatitude Moments,” which he describes as “totally unexpected, grace-filled experiences when one is filled with love. We remember them as divine gifts from above — not simply memories.”
If I had one complaint about this book, it would be that I wanted to read even more of these stories of faith and love than Strobel was able to tell in his final days. In the foreword by author Ann Patchett, she writes that Strobel was always more than a little resistant to writing a book about his life until the very end of it. Seigenthaler and Frogge continue in their editors’ note that he pretty much only agreed because his illness kept him from the work he loved the most, being with people.
But what’s most beautiful about this book is that it’s not just about Charles Strobel. It’s about the people who crossed his path as well. From the characters who challenged him to the folks who guided him in his daily thoughts and actions, the book sees Strobel through his lifelong experience in connecting with others.
After acknowledging the hard work of addressing others’ suffering, he writes, “Yet there is also joy in taking up a small part of someone else’s burden, the part you can manage — the part you think you can carry. You will be strengthened by it and in turn you will know that someone else will not be crushed by what they cannot manage alone. This balance between people is the essence of love and joy.”
Strobel’s stories show us how to genuinely commune more with the people who enter our lives. His life and his memoir call us all to seek Beatitude Moments — unexpected, grace-filled experiences that remind us to see the divine in the everyday, even in a dog’s curious gaze during a prayer.
