An Interview With ‘Henrique Of The Trinity’. His Cloth Shoulder Bag Contains All His Worldly Possessions: A Bible, A Crucifix, An Icon Of The Trinity And A Towel.

Q. Can you tell our readers how you arrived at this special vocation in the Church?

A. I was born in France and arrived in Brazil in 1987. I began to live in one of the large, very poor favelas of São Paulo. I spent two years living there, getting to know the situation in Brazil, living in a small wooden shack, the same kind of shack that everybody else lived in all over that area. I had come to Brazil to share in the life of the most marginalized people and to try and lead a life of contemplative prayer in that setting. I did not go to the favela to help resolve the huge problems of the people there, I just wanted to work on a person to person level. I spent two years there and they were happy years, but deep down I somehow felt called to something deeper, a greater simplicity of lifestyle.

I still had a small house of my own, and a small job and I was very much aware of so many poor persons who lived in the parks and alcoves of the great city, who had neither job nor shelter.

So I came to stay with the small group of monks in Taize, Alagoinhas, and I spent six months in a hermitage with them. There it became clear that I was called to be a pilgrim. This life would have two dimensions: as contemplative aspect – I felt called to dedicate myself as a monk, (granted a very peculiar and special kind of monk!) living a monastic vocation as a hermit and as a pilgrim. So, a monastic life, but also a life on the roads, together with those who were most abandoned those who had no homes, those who walked the roads begging alms, those who slept on the sidewalks and alcoves of the cities.

Q. You spent fourteen years as a pilgrim on the roads of Brazil, especially here in the North-East?

A. Yes, I traveled much in the North-East, especially in the sertão (the scrub semi-desert) areas, because that was the area where the people suffered most.  It is very sparsely populated so that sometimes one can walk for 30-40 kilometers without encountering a single house. These immense dry arid areas were the places where I traveled most. When I would arrive in the capital cities like Salvador, Recife, Fortaleza, João Pessoa, I would live with the street people and stay there for two or three months. So for the first eleven years it was a life on the roads or on the city streets. I spent long stretches of time in solitude on the roads, four, five, six months at a time – I even went to Peru and all over Amazonia. That and living with the street people, the drug addicts, prostitutes, alcoholics – those who suffered so much violence in the cities, people who had lost everything.

And every so often I would stop for a period at a hermitage. It is extraordinary how a pilgrim will meet up with hermits: I found them in Peru, in Bolivia and even in the sertão.

Q. I loved your book, with its stories of people you met on the roads and on the city streets. Did you ever feel afraid when you were alone on the roads, or perhaps more so when you were sleeping on the city streets?

A. Yes. The street people themselves have many sayings about this: ‘One who sleeps on the streets lies on cardboard and fear is his blanket’. I remember another man who said to me, ‘I’m so afraid to sleep on the streets that I can only do so when I’m drunk, without drinking I can’t sleep.’ So, for street people fear is an integral part of sleeping rough. The more you sleep on the streets the more fearful you become. Many times I have been attacked, many times I woke up at four in the morning having a bucket of cold water poured over me; or being attacked with sticks; even once I remember a group of us sleeping at the entrance of a church, the priest thought we were dirtying the place and he had someone throw disinfectant over us. So the more you experienced these things the greater your fear of sleeping on the streets. In the city of Salvador alone I was taken three times by the night militia, by armed men in unmarked cars without number plates. Once they dropped me nearby, but the other times they dropped us at a distance from the city and really we never knew if we were on ‘a journey with no return’. There were instances of everybody being shot in such ‘street cleanings’ so they caused terrible anguish and we would be warned never to return to Salvador. Of course we would be back in Salvador the following day. But really fear is part of living on the streets. Fear is no sin. It’s part of our make-up and God does not take it away. What God does is to give me peace of heart to live with this fear, so that even though I am afraid, I don’t lose interior peace.

Q. I get the impression from your book that the people whom you encountered on the streets and on the roads were also the greatest stimulus for your prayer life.

A. Encounters with other people certainly nourish one’s prayer life: I can truly say I meet God in these encounters; they are an authentic experience of God. But in order that such encounters should happen one needs to be a person of prayer. We are more open to such encounters when we allow God time to prepare us for them, so that when the moment comes we have that interior liberty to allow others to come into our life. If we are moving too fast, if we are on our guard with people, these encounters just won’t happen.

Sometimes one just is not welcomed. I remember once I spent a whole week sleeping in the open in the sertão without being welcomed. But then I would say to myself, ok, if I am not welcomed by anyone today, it must be because God is preparing me for a very special meeting. And sometimes it happened. On such occasion, I think, God immerses you in solitude, deep in the mystery of Himself, in order that you will be sufficiently empty of self to make space for the other through the open doors of your being. And so I got into the habit of living such days of solitude as an inner preparation, a kind of self-emptying, so that at the moment of meeting I could allow the other to enter freely into our encounter.

Q. It seems that the voice of the Spirit led you in a different direction in the year 2000?

A.  Yes, there were various factors involved. Right from the beginning I was often asked why I would not set up some kind of shelter for street people. And I would just say, ‘No, a pilgrim does not do that.’ But then over the past five years there were more and more requests from the official Church, for days of recollection, retreats, spiritual direction, people who wanted to journey with me, later groups who wanted to make pilgrimages, in threes or fours initially and then fifteen persons. I tried to respond as generously as I could, but at the same time there was an inner resistance in me. I found myself asking whether this was leading me away from my original vocation of being a pilgrim. I even thought of leaving Brazil and Latin America altogether and going to Africa or Asia and beginning all over again. Because, by this time, I was well known here in the North-East. It was a difficult time for me.

After a ten-day retreat it became clear that I should respond joyfully to the requests of the Church. I had my own desires, but there were also these frequent invitations of the Church which also brought me joy. So I made my decision and something changed: the internal tension disappeared and in its place I felt great joy. And it was about that time that we received a new archbishop here in São Salvador de Bahia, Dom Geraldo Majella Agnelo, now a cardinal. When he had been here about five months there was a front-page article on the local newspaper, A Tarde, about the street people in Salvador, saying that nobody was doing anything about them, and asking explicitly, ‘What is the Catholic Church doing about them?’ In fact there was very little being done, but someone spoke to Dom Geraldo about what I had been trying to do. He invited me to come and see him and asked me many questions about the street people. Then he said, ‘I’d like you to consider if it may not be time for you to do something along with these people.’ I had my usual answer ready, but he said, ‘Why don’t you set up a little community of street people to welcome the others?’

I was so struck by his question. Two years previously I had indeed thought of a small community of street people, but I had never spoken of it to anyone. So he was really revealing my own heart to me. We began to look for a big shed, or something in the inner city, where the street people would be welcome to come at night: during the day they could be on the streets as usual. For more than a year I searched. Then in March 2000, in preparing for a little pilgrimage through the city I tried to enter the old church of the Holy Trinity to pray. I found that the church was locked and had last been in use ten years previously. This immense church was vacant and unused. So I went to talk to Dom Geraldo and he immediately agreed to our using it. It was the church of the Holy Trinity, I call myself a pilgrim of the Holy Trinity, and it was the year 2000 – the year of the Holy Trinity. First of all it was to be a place of worship, like any other church; but also, from the beginning Dom Geraldo gave it to us as a dwelling place for the street people. So we spent six months cleaning it up and making the necessary adaptations. We did all the work ourselves. There was no running water, no toilets, no electricity, but little by little we got it in shape and began to invite the street people.

We are a small, fragile community, a couple of volunteers and a few street people, and we have no pretensions. But the important thing is that the street people sleep here and the door is never locked. They say, ‘I sleep in the church’ and they say, ‘The Holy Trinity has welcomed me.’ And when they say that, on one level I know they mean that this stone building which is called the Church of the Holy Trinity welcomed them, but on another level they mean that the Church, the Body of Christ, welcomed them and that they are part of that body.

Q. So, you have a small community who live here, and you have a group of street people who come to sleep here, every night?

A. Yes there are two groups. There is a small fraternity: a few people who choose to live here in the Church of the Holy Trinity, we live very simply, we gather unwanted vegetables at the nearby market, we sleep on cardboard with the street people at night in the church. At the present time there are two women and about six men – the number goes up and down a little in our fraternity. We live a life of prayer and contemplation at the service of the street people. Then there is a larger group of street people whom we welcome every night, from about eighteen to twenty-five persons. After they’ve been coming for about three weeks, if they want to identify more closely with the community then they do and we would have fourteen or fifteen in that community. We have meetings together, a Mass once a week, a prayer service each evening and occasional retreats. It gives them a sense of identity and they say proudly, ‘Yes, I am a member of the community’ and it does give them a real sense of belonging. They participate in community activities and each one has their own chores. They have rights and duties, something they never had on the streets. And then there are a number of others who come here every night but do not as yet belong to the community. The phrase that sums up best what we are about is a phrase that is found often in the New Testament, the first phrase that Peter speaks in the Acts of the Apostle: ‘Get up and walk!’ It is quite striking to note how often Jesus speaks this phrase in the Gospels. And in our shared prayer together here, it became clear to us that this was what Jesus most desires for the street people.

The task is to uncover the beauty of each human being that is often buried under years of abuse and neglect. It doesn’t matter what has been their history, here each one is ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ and is greeted and treated as such. We don’t have to make them beautiful, they are beautiful already as human beings, it’s just a question of awakening again that which has been traumatized. To trust others is the fundamental first step, as it was on the streets: I would always leave my shoulder bag with the other street persons and they left theirs with me. I trusted them and they never betrayed that trust. In twelve years of sleeping rough I was never robbed by the street people. The police robbed me, yes, never the street people. And it’s the same here: when you trust somebody you awaken his capacity to be trusted: they say ‘I am considered worthy of trust so I will show that I am worthy.’

Salamat sa Far East