For People Like Me

By Michael P. Evans

Mario is a man of deep faith. He believes in God. He believes that Christ is truly present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. He has believed these things most of his life.

For most of his life, he also believed that church was not a place for someone like him.

Mario is around sixty, with long white hair, a long white beard, and a round, friendly face. He grew up in El Salvador and came to the Bay Area legally with his family as a teenager. After struggles with school and mental health, his mother sent him back to El Salvador to stay with relatives. A few years later, he decided to return to the United States on his own. It was a journey of more than three thousand miles, across multiple borders, full of encounters he still finds difficult to fully describe.

“If I were to tell you all the details,” he told me, “you’d think it sounds too far-fetched to be real. All I can say is that someone was looking out for me.” With a smile, he gestured to the sky.

What carried him, he said, was human kindness, strangers who helped when they didn’t have to, who appeared at the right moment and then were gone. Mario doesn’t experience these moments as coincidence. He experiences them as God. And he still does, daily. Earlier on the day we spoke, he had submitted an application for housing. A stranger had added an unexpected signature of endorsement to his petition. For Mario, that was just the latest example that God is looking out for him.

He is Catholic, and his reverence for the sacrament is genuine and specific. But he has long carried a sense that the institutional church - formal, ordered, respectable - is not built for people like himself. People whose mental health makes others uncomfortable. People without stable housing. People whom society, as he puts it, would rather not see.

He didn’t describe a single incident of rejection. He didn’t need to. The discomfort was cumulative, ambient, the kind that doesn’t require a dramatic moment to leave its mark.

So when Mario first encountered Open Cathedral at 16th and Mission, he was skeptical. The Thursday evening service is bilingual, Spanish and English, and its congregation is largely Spanish-speaking neighbors from the Mission. Its leadership is female. Pastor Monique’s style is distinctive and unconventional. Mario looked at all of this with suspicion and wondered whether she might be a witch. With that in mind, he steered clear.

But he found that the service returned every Thursday evening, week after week. He saw the seriousness with which people received the worship and the message it preached. He saw the meals offered consistently to the community. He saw care, extended without conditions.

And gradually, in the way he has always recognized God - through the kindness of people who didn’t have to show up but did - he began to recognize God was there too.

Open Cathedral, he now says, is a church for people he describes as society’s “rejects.” A church for people like him. It meets people where they are, without requiring them to be something else first. And there, among folding chairs and familiar faces on a warm Thursday evening, he receives the Eucharist he has always believed in, in a place he has finally come to believe is for him.

Pastor Katie introduced us that evening at 16th and Mission. It was a clear June night, the kind San Francisco occasionally offers as a reminder of what summer can feel like. Around us, the neighborhood moved at its usual pace: unhurried, complicated, alive.

Mario shook my hand and smiled. Someone, it seemed, was still looking out for him.