New York Times
By
TRYMAINE LEEPublished: May 12, 2010
It was about 20 minutes after lunch at the Northern Manhattan Nursing Home on 125th Street in Harlem, and the sounds of feet shuffling and wheelchairs squeaking in a ninth-floor hallway seemed to fade as the Rev. Olevia Stewart-Smith began to read aloud the Lord’s Prayer.
“Our Father,” she read, her voice rising, filling a large room at the end of the hall.
In little more than a whisper, Florence Berry, a 96-year-old deacon at Harlem’s Canaan Baptist Church of Christ, with side-swept gray hair and a sweater the color of cotton candy, mouthed along, “who art in Heaven.”
It is a staple of pastoral work: visiting the sick or the shut-in. And there are scores of ministers and church elders throughout Harlem who have been doing it for decades. But across the years, when the ministers and elders themselves have taken ill, they have often been neglected.
Ms. Stewart-Smith, day by day, visit by visit, works to prevent such isolation, becoming, in a sense, the caregiver to Harlem’s caregivers.
As the chairwoman of the sick and shut-in committee of the Baptist Ministers’ Conference of Greater New York and Vicinity, she visits ill members of the 111-year-old fellowship, made up mostly of black clergy members and church elders from Harlem.
She offers prayer and Holy Communion, flowers, cards and candy, anything to show them, she said, that they are not forgotten.
“God didn’t call me to be in the pulpit,” said Ms. Stewart-Smith, 66, a member of Canaan Baptist who attended the seminary after a career as a social worker with the city’s Department of Aging. “He called me to be in nursing homes and the hospitals and bedsides.”
Since joining the committee in 2001, Ms. Stewart-Smith has fought through her own health issues while making the two or three visits a week. She has battled cancer, asthma and a bad hip. She has had knee replacement surgery and a hysterectomy.
“But after all I’m going through,” she said, “I still got joy.”
One of the conference’s ministers had been bouncing for more than a year between a hospital, a nursing home and a rehabilitation facility. For a while, Ms. Stewart-Smith would visit and had good news to report back, that the man was full of spirit and gaining his health and strength. But he ultimately died, perhaps more peacefully for her companionship.
“I was with him through it all,” said Ms. Stewart-Smith, sitting on a bench in a dim corridor at the nursing home, her head down and voice hushed, as it seems to get when she is not praying or preaching. “It’s hard sometimes. It makes me think about my own mortality.”
But there are uplifting moments as well.
“I can see the reward of my labor when someone calls and says, ‘I’m better,’ or, ‘Thank you for the calls, thank you for the visits,’ ” she said.
Long before joining the ministry, Ms. Stewart-Smith, a divorced mother of three and grandmother of two, was the inheritor of humble roots dug deep in the rural South. She is the niece and sister of preachers and the daughter of sharecroppers from Wisner, La.
She tended to them in the winter of their lives and held close the religiosity they shared. The basics mostly, the kind that had been preached one Sunday a month at Holly Grove Baptist Church in their small town by preachers who traveled town to town because there were not enough ministers to go around.
She was baptized in that little church at 12, and recalls it being the kind of place where families worshiped their whole lives, and when they died, they were buried in the cemetery out back.
She was struck by seeing the ministers from her childhood often die in loneliness, with few comforts other than the Bible.
“I feel that sometimes they are the ones that are forgotten,” Ms. Stewart-Smith said.
As she said her goodbyes to Ms. Berry that day, she dug into her black roller bag filled with the tools of her trade: among other things, a Bible, scriptural material and the sacraments for Communion. She searched for a gift that had been sent along to Ms. Berry by another church member.
After a few moments her hand emerged with a little lace sack with a few Hershey’s Kisses wrapped in gold foil. As she peeled them slowly for the older woman, she said with pride that Ms. Berry was the first woman to be made a deacon at their church.
Ms. Stewart-Smith then laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder as she passed through the threshold of the room and promised to return soon. And as she ambled down the hall toward an elevator — a cane in one hand and toting her roller bag in the other — she greeted several patients by name, her voice rising and falling, and melting into the sounds of feet shuffling and wheelchairs squeaking.
Do not cast me away when I am old; do not forsake me when my strength is gone. Psalm 71:9 NIV
