Scripture scholar sister's trailblazing journey of teaching, compassion

I wrote this profile for the May 22, 2014 issue of National Catholic Reporter's Global Sisters Report. 


Carol Perry loved to read as a child growing up in Kingston, NY. One book she didn’t crack, though, was the Bible. Her family didn’t even own one.

She continued to love to read as a Sister of St. Ursula, just not the Bible, even though she taught religion as well as English at John A. Coleman High School in Kingston, which is about 100 miles north of New York City.

That’s an unlikely background for a woman who would one day break new ground as a Resident Bible Scholar in one of the most prominent Protestant churches in America.

“The Protestants had the Bible and the Catholics had the sacraments,” she says. “I was raw material.”

Sitting in her small 10th floor office overlooking Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, Sr. Carol reflected on the journey that brought her to Marble Collegiate Church where her Sunday morning Bible class is standing-room only.

“In the 1950s there was not a university in the world where a Catholic woman could study the Bible,” she said, explaining that the Mothers General bugged the seminary professors, but Rome kept saying no.

Her chance came in 1957 when she joined 60-some other women from 32 countries to study sacred scripture at Regina Mundi in Rome.

“It was a total revelation to me,” she says, still with a trace of awe in her voice. She discovered the book was “dealing with flesh and blood human beings. These are not just words, there are people here. “

With her interest sparked, she went on to receive a Masters of Sacred Science from St. Mary’s at Notre Dame, Indiana, and then shared her love of scripture with her order’s novices and in occasional talks.

As providence would have it, a member of Marble’s congregation heard her at one those talks and mentioned it to one of the church’s ministers at the time, Florence Pert, a determined Alabama native who began to pursue Sr. Carol to teach a Sunday morning, pre-service adult Bible class. Sr. Carol said no -- several times. The class would start at 9 a.m., which meant she would have to spend Saturday night with sisters in the city because Kingston is a two-hour bus ride away. She also thought, “This is a Protestant church and I’m a Catholic nun.”

But Pert was unrelenting. When the convent’s communal phone rang one day, the sister closest to it answered, then approached Sr. Carol. “It’s the woman from the south from that Protestant church again,” she said.

Sr. Carol’s superior overheard and, knowing what the call was about, asked if she’d like to do it. Sr. Carol replied that, yes, actually, she would, so a “little interview” was arranged with the senior minister, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. It was through Peale, who preached there for more than half a century, that the church drew its worldwide recognition. The Catholic nun and the famous Protestant preacher and best-selling author of The Power of Positive Thinking talked and agreed to pray for one another. They finally decided to give it a try for six weeks. That was 34 years ago.

“They were wonderfully open,” Sr. Carol says. “My approach to the Bible is that this is the word of God in the values of real people with real lives and hopes and fears, not the word of God as recorded by people. They are different views with the same end. They were a really hungry audience, which is what any teacher loves.”

In those days the congregation contained few Catholics and Sr. Carol was the first nun most members had ever met. Marble Collegiate is the oldest place of worship of the Collegiate Reformed Protestant Church in New York City, organized in 1628 under the Dutch West India Company. When Sr. Carol began, it was Peale’s congregation, one that had been shaped in the 1930s in the depth of the Depression. He offered “practical Christianity” with a message of hope to a largely business community.

That has changed drastically now, with about 25 percent of the 2,300-member congregation being former Roman Catholics, although it is still described by members as the power-of-positive-thinking church.

Sr. Carol’s role also has changed. In 1997, then-senior minister Arthur Caliandro dreamt of having a full-time Biblical scholar, not just for his congregation, but for people in their places of business around the city. Sr. Carol gave up high school teaching and joined Marble full time, offering several classes at Marble throughout the week, as well as at noontime in rented spots around Manhattan. Her 10 a.m. Sunday class at Marble is viewed live by people around the world through the church’s web site. A gifted storyteller, she makes the ancient people of the Bible seem like relatives remembered from childhood, people we shared Thanksgiving dinner with many years ago. That’s how she sees them.

“They’re our ancestors,” she says.

She thinks these Bible classes are one reason so many Catholics are drawn to Marble, either enough to join or just to partake of the studies and return to their own churches on Sunday.

“People are hungry for it,” she says. “It’s the greatest book ever written, a roadmap of life and adventure. Every soap opera ever written is in Genesis. These are real people.”

She does not, however, read the Bible literally.

“We read nothing literally except the stock market report. That comes from fear. The Bible wasn’t written in English. We’ve translated it through the years.”

The meanings of words change as culture changes, she says, explaining that the word abomination in Hebrew means “a custom that foreigners have that we don’t.”

“That’s not what it means in English. Tattoos at that time were tied into the worship of pagan deities. That’s not true in 21st century New York. You have to be careful with literal versus real.”

Another draw to Marble for Catholics that Sr. Carol sees is what attracts her as well -- the welcoming spirit, with the ministers, staff and congregation regularly referring to themselves as “the Marble family.”

“I’ve found from them the most incredible Christian welcome. It’s so special. For Catholics, we think we have the truth and that is sufficient, but it isn’t because the truth is filtered through people.”

She sees issues of women, the laity and homosexuality as ones that still need addressing in many Catholic churches and she feels hope in Pope Francis, the kind of hope that sprang up after the second Vatican Council. At Marble, support is built-in. Within its large worshiping community, which reaches worldwide thanks to its live web-streaming, Marble supports groups for women, men, committed couples, people in the arts and its GLBT members.

This latter puts it most directly in opposition to Catholic teaching. Marble is quite open in its embrace, setting up a water table under its banner outside the church on Fifth Avenue every June for the Gay Pride Parade, this past year with congregants wearing “Love. Period” T-shirts. Sr. Carol supports this fully, calling equality “the last civil right.”

“I’ve done research on the Biblical texts used to condemn homosexuality and there is not a single Biblical text that has validity today that supports an antigay stance,” she says. “Marble helped me to see the gay and lesbian community with a human face. They were people in my classes, members of the community, some of them the most ardent practicing Christians.”

She remembers being asked to preach to the newly formed group, which in the 1990s was just gay men, 52 of them on that occasion.

“It was one of the most profound religious experiences of my life,” she says. “They were professional men sharing who they were by birth, over which they had no choice, and their intense desire to live Christian lives. It was a total eye-opener to me.”

Ironically, it was Sr. Carol who encountered prejudice at this otherwise accepting church. At a weekend forum for professionals in the late 1970s, a stockbroker sat next to Sr. Carol. After the two had been talking for awhile, the woman confided that she heard Marble had hired a nun to teach scripture and wondered if the nun was present, declaring she would “never sleep under the same roof with a Catholic nun,” and that she would pack her bags and leave immediately if the nun was there. She asked Sr. Carol if she knew what the nun looked like. Sr. Carol said she did. The woman replied: “Point it out to me.”

When Sr. Carol revealed her identity, the woman was gobsmacked. “My goodness,” she said. “You’re perfectly normal.” And she stayed for the entire weekend.

“She came from a background of religious prejudice,” Sr. Carol says. “Nuns were ‘its.’ That’s where interfaith relations were in the 70s. I feel I’ve been on an ecumenical mission for us to get to know each other.”

Many more people will get to know Sr. Carol now that her first book, Waiting for Our Souls to Catch Up, has been published by Asahina and Wallace in May. It’s about the challenge of having a spiritual journey in a technological world. Every chapter starts with a tough question she’s been asked over the years.

“I feel like Grandma Moses starting something new.”

This being open to new experiences has been a part of her life since childhood when among her closest friends were a Jew, a Lutheran and a member of the Greek Orthodox church. Her father, who had just begun operating his own business as a funeral director, died unexpectedly at 30 of what was probably a ruptured appendix when Sr. Carol was a baby. She and her older brother were raised by their mother who sold the business and went to work in a factory making women’s and children’s clothes. The two children shared the chores of washing the dishes and cleaning the ashes out of the furnace.

“In a sense I was a liberated woman without knowing it,” she said, adding that is probably what attracted her to the Sisters of St. Ursula, which she describes as a 400-year-old community that never had a cloister or wore habits and which was dedicated to the education of women.

“They had a spirit of openness and revolution. They were always out there. What could be better than to join them?”

She lives now in an apartment with one other sister and is an active member of St. Colman’s in East Kingston, serving as a lector on Saturday evenings. Tuesday and Wednesday nights she spends in the city with other sisters. She sees no separation between her Catholic life and her Marble life.

“They blend together,” she says. “They’re God’s world and there’s wealth in both. I consider myself one of the richest women in the world.”

Asked what is the most important thing she has learned from the Bible, she readily says, “God loves us, as amazing as that is. God cares about us and God forgives us. From the earliest books of the Bible that forgiveness is prominent. One of the biggest lessons is we’re not to fear God.”

And that’s the message she’s heard preached at Marble for more than three decades.

“It’s not a negative pulpit. We Christians can be hard on ourselves, parsing sin. That’s not what life is about. It’s received love.”

ASTEPsings Around the World

For the last 18 months Artists Striving To End Poverty (ASTEP) has been gathering footage of students and professional musicians from around the world to collaborate on "Where You Lead", an International Music Video featuring Carole King's legendary song. Filming took place in New York City with professional musicians and students from ASTEP's programs with The International Rescue Committee; Deep South Dade Florida with students from enFAMILIA; Quito, Ecuador with students from CRISFE/Project CREO; Bangalore, India with students from The Shanti Bhavan Children's Project; and Pune, India with students from Teach For India.

Featuring Kristin Chenoweth (Wicked, “The West Wing”), Danielle Brooks and Samira Wiley (Netflix's “Orange Is the New Black”), Jonathan Groff and Frankie Alvarez (HBO's “Looking”), Tituss Burgess (“30 Rock”), Debra Monk (“Grey's Anatomy,” Chicago), Andrew Lippa (Composer: Addams Family, Wild Party, Big Fish), Julia Murney (Wild Party, Wicked), Lawrence Stallings (The Book of Mormon), Q. Smith (Mary Poppins), Mary-Mitchell Campbell (Broadway Conductor), and The Original Casts of Title of Show and Big Fish, it captures the children celebrating the transforming power of the arts and clearly demonstrates how art crosses all border and unites us.

ASTEP's "Where You Lead" International Music Video was directed by Andrew Cohen. Yazmany Arboleda was the Director of Photography. Produced by Mary-Mitchell Campbell, Abby Gerdts, Andrew Cohen, and Yazmany Arboleda. Watch it — http://youtu.be/6LFlIcmXX7Q — and make sure you listen to the end for the delightful giggle.

ASTEP connects performing and visual artists with underserved youth in the U.S. and around the world to awaken their imaginations, foster critical thinking, and help them break the cycle of poverty. The music video was shot on location with our partners and students in India, Ecuador, and in the US.

To learn more, volunteer, and donate: www.asteponline.org

ASTEP's International Music Video partners:

enFAMILIA - www.enfamiliainc.org
The International Rescue Committee - www.rescue.org
Project CREO - www.projectcreo.com
The Shanti Bhavan Children's Project - www.shantibhavanonline.org
Teach For India - www.teachforindia.org

A Friend in the Front Row

This Mysterious Ways essay by Laura Kaye appeared in Guideposts magazine.



 This was the worst seat in the house. Why did I sleep through my alarm? I’d missed Easter Sunday service at my church, and a friend recommended St. Malachy’s instead–just blocks from my apartment in New York City’s theater district.

I’d made it just in time, but the pews, even the aisles were so packed I could barely fit inside. An usher led me and a few others to a spot directly in front of the priest–and the entire congregation. As a former Off-Broadway singer, I was used to the spotlight, but in front of all these strangers I wanted to disappear.

I mumbled my way through the service, trying not to draw attention. When the basket came around for the offertory, I passed it quickly to the woman beside me. She couldn’t quite reach the next person, so she slid it across the floor. “I hope God doesn’t mind!” she whispered, in an impeccable British accent.

“Oh, are you a visitor here too?” I asked, surprised by her accent. She shook her head. “I’m a regular,” she said. “My husband worked at the Neil Simon Theatre before he passed away, and this church has always been very supportive of the arts.”

The Neil Simon Theatre! I’d never performed there, but I had worked at the August Wilson Theatre, right across the street, several years ago. I’d never forget the evening I ducked out early from a performance of Jersey Boys, exiting the Wilson onto a deserted street.

A menacing man approached from the shadows behind me, screaming violently. I braced myself for an attack… when suddenly, someone else shouted, “Stagehands out front!” In seconds, a group of stagehands from across the street surrounded the crazed man and drove him off. Their leader was an older gentleman they called “The Mayor of 52nd Street.” I still thought of him whenever I passed by the two theaters.

“What did your husband do at the Simon?” I asked the woman, just before the service resumed.

“He was a stagehand,” the woman said. “Everyone knew Tommy–he’d always stand in front of the theater and keep an eye on things. People called him the Mayor of 52nd Street.”

Worst seat in the house? Not quite. I’d been seated here for a reason.

Cabaret

Alan Cumming appears to be trying hard to recapture the zest of his Tony-winning magic as the Emcee of the Kit Kat Klub, but he comes off as a bit tired, as does most of Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall’s anemic revival of Cabaret at Studio 54.

Perhaps it’s because it’s a revival of a revival (Mendes and Marshall recreate their Tony-winning work from 1998) that the show lacks energy, or maybe it’s because I just experienced it that way having a week before seen the revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, whose main character, played by a Neil Patrick Harris who pushes the wow factor to the max, is a similarly raunchy singer on the fringes of life and begs comparison to Cabaret’s Emcee.

After winning a Tony for the role 16 years ago, Cumming wasn’t even nominated this year. Neither was Michelle Williams, making her Broadway debut as Sally Bowles, the role that won Natasha Richardson a Tony the last time around. Williams has a nice voice, but her Sally doesn’t possess the young and vulnerable quality she needs to have.

Marshall’s choreography no long seems shocking, with its dominant motif of dancers grabbing their crotches — or someone else’s crotch or ass. It was more interesting 16 years ago. Now it gets tiresome.

What enjoyment the evening does bring comes from the onstage band playing those great Kander and Ebb tunes under the direction of Patrick Vaccariello (the musicians double as chorus members as they did previously) and from Linda Emond as Fraulein Schneider. I have only seen her in straight plays, where she always stands out, and on “The Good Wife” where I love her recurring role as a stone-faced military judge. When she sang “What Would You Do?” I got chills.

Danny Burstein is good too — isn’t he always? — as Herr Schultz.

Studio 54 has been refashioned with cabaret seating as it was in 1998 to give the feel of a pre-World War II night club in Berlin. Robert Brill has returned as set and club designer, as did William Ivey Long for costumes.

The previous revival ran for six years. I will be interested to see how long this one lasts.

Bullets Over Broadway: The Musical

Lots of gangland shootings take place in director/choreographer Susan Stroman’s Bullets Over Broadway: The Musical, but the most tragic killing of all is her murder of Woody Allen’s hilarious 1994 movie from which this Broadway musical, at the St. James Theatre, has been adapted.

The humor of the movie is too often overwhelmed by the musical numbers, which interrupt this crazy story of an unsuccessful playwright, David Shayne (Zach Braff, left in photo), who gets the backing for a Broadway production of one of his plays from a mob boss, Nick Valenti (Vincent Pastore), who insists his dumb-as-a-post girl friend Olive Neal (Helene Yorke), a stripper who aspires to be an actress, be given a part.

I loved the movie and was happy to see it peak through from time to time. But just when I got involved, Stroman, a five-time Tony Award winner, would bring on a flashy dance number, many of which were reminiscent of her choreography in The Producers. (More dancing weiners.) The choreography wasn’t just unoriginal, it was tedious.

I had this same objection to the Broadway version of Ghost. In that case, the musical numbers came barreling on every time a tender moment occurred, thus squashing the charm of the movie.

Set in New York City in 1929, Bullets features songs drawn mainly from the 1920s American Songbook — with adaptations and additional lyrics by Glen Kelly — but I felt two shows were vying with each other — a musical program and a funny play. They didn’t mesh. Included are "Tain't Nobody's Bus'ness," "Running Wild," "Let's Misbehave," "I Found A New Baby.”

The tap dancing gangsters number was the standout of the musical part, largely because it featured Nick Cordero (right in photo) who did the best job of recreating the movie’s humor as Cheech, Olive’s thug of a body guard, who in typical Woody Allen fashion, ends up giving Shayne advice on how to rewrite his play and turns it into a hit.

I also liked Yorke’s Olive, but I did not like Marin Mazzie’s portrayal of the stage diva Helen Sinclair. She has a beautiful voice, but I found her performance to be large without being funny. It would be hard to compare with my memory of Dianne Wiest in her Academy Award-winning role in the film.

Allen wrote the musical’s book, as he had written the movie (with Douglas McGrath).

With 17 Broadway shows opening in these few hectic weeks known as voting season for theatre critics, it stands to reason they aren’t all going to be good, but I was really disappointed in this one, being a huge (for the most part) Woody fan. I would have liked more Woody Allen and less Susan Stroman.

My advice, order the movie and stay home.

Denzel Washington Brings Another Powerful Performance to Broadway in A Raisin in the Sun

What becomes of a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
              -- Langston Hughes


Director Kenny Leon and his strong cast, headed by Denzel Washington, do a first-rate job of presenting the humor as well as drama in the well-paced Broadway revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking play, A Raisin in the Sun, now through June 15 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where the original production opened in 1959. This tale of three generations of a struggling black family, the Youngers, on Chicago’s South Side in the 1950s, is still timely with its themes of the working class poor, racism, ethnic identity and the redeeming power of family love.

The longest held deferred dream in the play belongs to Lena, the family matriarch played by LaTanya Richardson Jackson. It was her great hope to raise her two children, Walter Lee (Washington, in photo) and Beneatha (an engaging Anika Noni Rose), in a house, but she and her husband could never make enough to get them out of the cramped, shabby two-bedroom, roach-infested apartment where she still lives, now as a widow, with her grown children and Walter Lee’s wife, Ruth (Sophie Okonedo, in photo), and their son, Travis (Bryce Clyde Jenkins). All share a bathroom with everyone else on the floor of this walk-up tenement. (Sets by Mark Thompson).

Lena sees a chance for her dream to finally be realized thanks to a $10,000 check from Walter senior’s life insurance policy. But she is not the only one with a dream. Walter Lee wants to quit his job as a chauffeur for a white man and open his own liquor store and Beneatha wants to go to medical school.

What will happen to this money is one of the dramas of the play. The other is the racism the family encounters after Lena puts a down payment on a house in the all-white Clybourne Park neighborhood. Together these will be the breaking and the making of Walter Lee.

When Raisin premiered in 1959, it was the first play written by an African-American woman to be produced on Broadway. Hansberry died five years later of cancer at the age of 34. Author James Baldwin, who said he had never seen so many black people in the theater, wrote about the play’s importance, that “never in the history of the American theater had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage. Black people ignored the theater because the theater had always ignored them.”

But Hansberry captured the world as they knew it. Lena introduces the deferred dream theme early on, referring to her late husband: “Big Walter used to say, he’d get right wet in his eyes sometimes, lean his head back with the water standing in his eyes and say, ‘Seems like God didn’t see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams, but he did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile.'”

Unfortunately, Big Walter “just couldn’t never catch up with his dreams.”

Walter Lee shares this frustration. “Sometimes it’s like I can see the future stretched out in front of me, just plain as day. … Just waiting for me, a big, looming blank space, full of nothing. Just waiting for me.”

His obsession worries Lena. “You something new, boy. In my time we was worried about not being lynched and getting to the North if we could and to stay alive and still have a pinch of dignity too. … Now here come you and Beneatha talking ‘bout things we ain’t never even thought about hardly, me and your daddy. You ain’t satisfied or proud of nothing we done. I mean that you had a home; that we kept you out of trouble till you was grown; that you don’t have to ride to work on the back of nobody’s streetcar. You my children, but how different we done become.”

The world hasn’t become that different, though. As the family members are packing to move to their new home, they are visited by a representative of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, Karl Lindner (David Cromer), who offers them money to stay away. He assures them “race prejudice simply doesn't enter into it,” but that people there believe “for the happiness of all concerned that our Negro families are happier when they live in their own communities.” Somewhat sadly he tells Walter Lee, “You just can’t force people to change their hearts, son.”

But the situations of the play do force Walter Lee to change his heart. Washington is at his best when he portrays a Walter Lee broken by his foolishness in losing most of the insurance money and the pain of his humiliation. The joking and occasional drunk Walter Lee of Act One is gone. Washington shows us a crushed Walter Lee and it is powerful. But he then creates a Walter Lee who rises to the challenge and leaves us cheering for his triumph.

The production also brings us plenty of comic scenes. Two of my favorites involve Ann Roth’s costumes. In one, Beneatha, inspired by her Nigerian friend Joseph Asagai (Sean Patrick Thomas), appears in colorful African dress and dances around the room. Rose is a joy to watch, as is Jackson when she models a gardening hat dripping in fake flowers given to her by Travis. Both actors are a delight in these scenes.

And all of the scenes are heightened by Branford Marsalis’s jazz and blues compositions that provide transition.

Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry’s husband and literary executor, wrote in 1988 about why plays like Raisin, which has been translated into more than 30 languages, continue to touch people, even if the circumstances portrayed have changed. “For at the deepest level it is not a specific situation but the human condition, human aspiration and human relationships — the persistence of dreams, of the bonds and conflicts between men and women, parents and children, old ways and new, and the endless struggle against human oppression, whatever form it may take, for individual fulfillment, recognition and liberation — that are at the heart of such plays,” he wrote. “It is not surprising therefore that in each generation we recognize ourselves in them anew.”

Caring for the Caregivers

I wrote this feature for the March 23, 2014 issue of The Living Church magazine. Photo by Scott Wynn.

In a storefront office steps from Harlem’s legendary Appollo Theater in one direction and the Clinton Foundation in the other, the Rev. Gregory Johnson chats with Joel Rogers, who holds his year-old niece, Malia, while Malia’s mom seeks advice in an inner room. With life buzzing along outside on 125th Street, the community’s busiest commercial thoroughfare, Johnson is ministry in motion inside, though he doesn’t mentions the name of God, has no idea if Rogers believes and doesn’t need to know. In fact, few people know Johnson is an ordained minister.

Johnson’s “congregation” is one of the largest in the city, or anywhere else for that matter. Nationwide they number 65.7 million. Years ago they had no name, though they faithfully toiled long and hard. But for the last 13 years Johnson has made it his mission to make their identity known. They are family caregivers and Johnson wants employers, corporations and, most of all the caregivers themselves, to recognize that identity and claim it because, as he says repeatedly, they are “the backbone of the health care industry” and it is his calling to see that their physical, spiritual and emotional needs are met.

“It’s been a circuitous road directed by God,” said Johnson, 67, sitting behind his iPad in his tiny office in this EmblemHealth Neighborhood Care facility, one of three established by EmblemHealth in diverse New York City neighborhoods. Johnson serves as the creator/director of the company’s Care for the Family Caregiver Initiative.

It was an unlikely road for this Racine, WI, native who grew up Lutheran, moved to New York to study at Union Theological Seminary’s School of Sacred Music and The Juilliard School, knowing nothing about the health care industry, much less a major health and wellness corporation like New York-based EmblemHealth. But when a friend who was an executive of the company suggested Johnson help it establish an outreach to family caregivers, be they members of Emblem or not, he saw an unexpected pastoral opportunity.

“Talk about the gospel in action,” he said. “It’s a huge investment and I am so grateful.”

With three supporting staff members, Johnson gives caregiving workshops, lectures throughout the city, the region, this country and internationally. With his team he has compiled resource information booklets and an 80-minute DVD, all free regardless of membership through www.emblemhealth.com/careforthefamilycaregiver.org. EmblemHealth’s Initiative has many auxiliary partners, one of which is the Episcopal Diocese of New York.

“Most people don’t know all the wonderful things that are available,” Johnson says.

But if he has a chance, he will tell them. Johnson jokes that his staff says he would show up at a garage door opening if he were asked to talk about family caregiving.

The joke may not be too far from the truth. Last year Johnson and his team put together 745 events, serving 213,000 people at civic presentations, health fairs and in faith communities.

“I would have never defined ministry in this way, yet it’s the core of it -- serving others.”

After beginning his day around 7 a.m. at EmblemHealth’s headquarters in the financial district, Johnson heads out for meetings, presentations, community gatherings, seminars, city, state and national committee meetings, the UN, the International Federation on Aging  and so many other adjunct partners where he brings the voice of the family caregiver. In addition, Johnson does many one-on-one counseling sessions for employees, members, partner associates and frankly anyone with family caregiving issues.

For all of his work he draws upon his Episcopal/Anglican spirituality. He was received into the tradition in the mid-80s and is a member of the Church of the Ascension in Greenwich Village where he is a devoted supporter of the music program. He also is a substitute organist at St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in the theatre district. And although he was ordained as an interfaith minister, he identifies as an Anglican and says it was the prayer book that helped him get through his times as a family caregiver, for his son who died of cancer in 2005 and for his partner of 41 years who died of cancer in 2011.

As if all of that isn’t enough, Johnson also holds a dual membership at Marble Collegiate Church, which is probably one of the most famous Protestant churches in America thanks to its former senior minister Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, who preached there for more than half a century. Johnson serves as the leader of Marble’s pre-service Sunday Prayer Circle.

He also managed to find time to draw on his Anglican spirituality for his just-released book, Peace, Be Still: Prayers and Affirmations: Inspiration for Family Caregivers, co-written with the Rev. Marion A. Gambardella. All of the 30 sections, each just a page and a half, include a prayer, affirmations and a scripture reading, covering such topics as Faith, Gratitude, Anger, Acceptance, Healing and Renewal. Only a few mention family caregivers specifically, so the book is helpful for anyone going through a trying time.

Recognizing the needs of family caregivers -- and family can be defined by blood relationship or through families of choice like friends, neighbors or a faith community -- is more important than ever, Johnson says, because people are living longer. The old concept of a family caregiver -- an adult child in charge of an elderly parent -- is still intact, except that now the child might be a senior citizen as well, caring for a parent who is 90 or older. It’s also tending to a spouse with a chronic illness, people caring for veterans and many other configurations as medicine has increased life spans.

These family caregivers represent a donation of services valued at more than $450 billion, Johnson says. They also can represent a loss of between $17 to $34 billion to corporations as their caregiving duties conflict with work responsibilities, which is why Johnson says it makes sense for a company like EmblemHealth to invest in their needs, bringing potential solutions, resources and tools.

“The caregiver is often the silent patient,” Johnson says. “I didn’t know a thing about insurance. My background was in theology and theatre, but I was given a blank sheet of paper and told to bring awareness to their needs. It has blessed me. I find great ideas in listening to others. It’s the great gift of sharing our weaknesses. That’s a great gift of life. It gives me more appreciation of the doctrine of the communion of saints.”

He makes sure the caregiver looks out for her or his own needs, and assures them that “it is not something you are going through, but something you are growing through.” That’s what he discovered during his periods as a family caregiver.

“I kept finding God in the journey,” he says.

Johnson’s next big effort is for a free day-long seminar on family caregiving, “Name It: Know Its Many Faces,” at the New York Academy of Medicine on April 30, sponsored by EmblemHealth, New York City Partnership for Family Caregiving Corp. Topics will include legal and financial issues as well as self-care. Details and registration are on the web site, www.corporatecaregivers.com.

While the seminar will consider contemporary challenges, Johnson likes to keep in mind examples from scripture to motivate him. He mentions Jesus’s final words as he was dying, when he looked to John and told him to behold Mary as his mother.

 “That’s caregiving from the cross. Can I do less?”