It is so much fun to watch children because for them everything is new. Teenagers already know quite a lot about the world, but they are still willing to experiment with new identities and become someone entirely different from one day to the next. When people reach middle age, this all seems to stop. People typically settle for stable identities, careers, and seek durable relationships. For good reason: To function society needs dependable adults. So it is really something extraordinary when individuals in midlife radically change their relationship to the world. I recently met an investment banker who decided to leave Wall Street and become a priest. I was curious how this happened. “It was a calling. I had to do it,” he said. He went on to tell me that he is much happier now. Today I encountered in the New York Times Hollywood soap opera producer who also seemed to have had an epiphany. He also felt a strong calling to dramatically change his career. I am getting very curious about what happens psychologically when people experience such a calling in midlife. See for yourself.
A Pilgrim’s Progress: Using Film to Aid the Poor
By NICK MADIGAN in New York Times, December 25, 2004
BURBANK, Calif., Dec. 21 – It’s a very long way from Hollywood to the slums of Calcutta. They might as well be on different planets.
Gerard Thomas Straub knows the journey.
At one time a successful soap opera producer who turned out overwrought dramas like “General Hospital” and “Capitol,” and more recently an author, Mr. Straub now makes documentaries about the crushing reality of the world’s poor. He has finally found his calling.
In the last few years, Mr. Straub, raised as a Catholic in Queens, said he has traveled to 29 cities in nine countries, including Kenya, the Philippines, Jamaica, Mexico, Brazil and India. He wanted, he said, to “put the power of film at the service of the poor” by photographing and filming what he sees as the suffocating, deeply unjust conditions of countless millions. He has documented, too, the misery in his own backyard, Los Angeles’s skid row, where as many as 10,000 people live on the streets and in shelters.
“I’m not an evangelist; they give a whole bad name to Christianity,” Mr. Straub said in an interview in his office here. “I’m not interested in converting anyone. My message is for Christians who show an utter lack of concern or compassion for people who have nothing.”
Mr. Straub had struggled with doubts about his faith since his teens, when he dropped out of a seminary in New Jersey after just a semester. Christianity, he thought, was “full of contradictions and absurdities.”
Later, after working in soaps and as a producer for Pat Robertson’s television show “The 700 Club,” he became even more disillusioned. He wrote a scathing book, “Salvation for Sale” (Prometheus Books, 1986), about his experiences with televangelists, whom he described as “purveyors of falsehoods.” His novel “Dear Kate” (Prometheus, 1992) was “a diatribe against the Church and any form of religion,” he said, in which the main character was “so exhausted by his search for God that he wanted to kill himself.”
Almost 10 years ago, broke and forlorn, Mr. Straub sat down in an empty church in Rome, where he was working on another novel, to rest his feet. He had not gone there to pray: far from it, he insisted. But something extraordinary happened.
“God broke through the silence,” Mr. Straub said. It was a moment of revelation, he said, in which he felt “enveloped in love” for the first time, and it transformed him “from an atheist to a pilgrim.”
He discarded the dark novel he had been working on for more than three years and, inspired by St. Francis and another saint from Assisi, Clare, began writing another tale. The memoir that resulted, “The Sun and Moon Over Assisi” (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2000), sought to explain how the lives of the two medieval saints helped transform a self-described cynic who had spent two decades immersed in the world of television in New York and Los Angeles.
“Television was all about beauty and superficiality and creating fantasy, to divert us from reality,” Mr. Straub said. He remembered sitting at an editing console in 1981, watching a fresh episode of the soap opera he was producing, “The Doctors,” with Alec Baldwin in his first starring role, and asking himself, “Who would watch this?”
What he is doing now, he said sardonically, is truly “reality television.”
“I’d really like to do ‘Survivor Skid Row,’ ” he said. “I’d put some people down there with the rats and the gunfire and the mental illness and the drug addicts and see how long they last.”
Mr. Straub almost didn’t.
In 1999, when he ventured overseas to document what he called “global poverty and the Christian response to it,” he was horrified. On his first night in Calcutta, staying in a church in the heart of a slum, he said he was so overwhelmed by the pervasive squalor – the thousands living in the streets, the filth, the wailing – that he could not close his eyes.
“I had stepped into a nightmare,” he said. “I had more in my bag than these people had in their whole lives. The next morning I couldn’t put the camera up to my eye. I had no way to take it in. I was too uncomfortable and upset.”
But he rallied, traveling on to Bangalore, Chennai and Guwahati, and took hundreds of photographs of the people he encountered, trying his best, he said, to show compassion without exploiting them.
“I never just point and click,” he wrote in a note to a reporter. “I first enter into some kind of exchange. Often we share a laugh, or an expression of sympathy or understanding. A portrait then becomes more than a depiction of a face, it becomes a record of a personal encounter.”
Many of the pictures were used in his book “When Did I See You Hungry?” (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2002), which included images from subsequent trips to other countries, among them Kenya and the Philippines. A 37-minute video version, with the same title, was narrated by the actor Martin Sheen. The film, and others he has made, has been widely shown at schools and universities; Mr. Straub sometimes appears to answer questions.
At the Bishop Hendricken High School in Warwick, R.I., for instance, a screening of “When Did I See You Hungry?” prompted a citywide response, school officials said, that raised more than $17,000 for various charities.
In the video’s narration, Mr. Sheen recites a stunning array of facts. “Globally,” he says, “about 800 million people do not have access to adequate food and nutrition. Of those, 200 million are children.
“More than 40 million people a year die of preventable disease or malnutrition: shockingly, 12 million of them are children under the age of 5,” Mr. Sheen continues. “Every minute of every day, 20 children die of hunger or diseases related to hunger.”
In January 2002, concerned about raising money for filming and for post-production and for his frequent trips abroad, Mr. Straub established the San Damiano Foundation, named after the church in Italy where, in 1206, a former soldier and bon vivant experienced an epiphany of his own: much later, he became St. Francis of Assisi.
Turning his sights on South America, Mr. Straub traveled to Manaus, in the Amazon region of Brazil, in April 2002, to film the lives of slum dwellers and lepers. The film that resulted, “Embracing the Leper,” was made at the behest of James B. Flickinger, a retired business and tax attorney from Grand Rapids, Mich., who had founded a nonprofit organization, Amazon Relief, in 1995.
“Gerry came alone with his video camera, his still camera and his notebook,” said Mr. Flickinger, who flew with him from Miami to Brazil. In the film, residents of a lepers’ colony are shown stoically and even graciously enduring the withering of their bodies. It is a disease, Mr. Straub said, that he thought had been eradicated in the Middle Ages.
The film also shows life in a mazelike slum in Manaus where shacks are perched on stilts above festering pools of waste.
Mr. Flickinger said screenings of the film had helped to raise as much as $50,000 from donors in the United States to contribute to five schools, with about 1,000 students, that Amazon Relief administers in Manaus.
“I was kind of amazed how the word-of-mouth spread about the film,” he said. “People were very touched by it. It got the message out to people who I couldn’t physically go to meet. With such a little effort at this end, we can do so much good down there.”
Closer to home, Mr. Straub, made two other films that have been used extensively as fund-raising tools: “We Have a Table for Four Ready,” about a Franciscan soup kitchen in the blighted Kensington section of Philadelphia, and “Rescue Me,” a feature-length documentary about skid row in Los Angeles and the work of the Union Rescue Mission there.
“The poor have taught me about my own vulnerability,” said Mr. Straub, 57, who lives with his wife, Kathleen, in North Hollywood. “I went from riches to rags.”
Emboldened by the reception to his films, Mr. Straub tackled an even more ambitious project in the summer of 2003. The film, “Endless Exodus,” traces the path of migrants from wretchedly poor villages in El Salvador and Mexico into the United States, illegally and often at the risk of their lives, to find work.
“Families are torn apart in the name of survival,” Mr. Straub says in the narration. Since 1995, he notes, more than 3,000 immigrants have died trying to cross the nearly 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico, many of them after collapsing in the sweltering Arizona desert, others shot by paramilitary vigilantes. The migrants face rattlesnakes, robberies, bandits and the border patrol.
One of the film’s most poignant scenes shows a hardscrabble cemetery in the border town of Calexico, Calif., where migrants who die in the desert are buried. There are row upon row of small headstones, most with the barest of inscriptions, either “Jane Doe” or “John Doe” – or “Jhon,” as it is misspelled on one grave. The adjacent property is a garbage dump.
Mr. Straub is planning another trip next month to Peru, where he intends to document the work of a Florida doctor who “gave up everything” to help the indigent.
“Not knowing what to do,” Mr. Straub said, “is not an excuse to do nothing.”