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Mary Paul and Geraldine belong to the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, an order founded in France in 1641 as Sisters of the Refuge to shelter banished women. The order was renamed and internationalized in 1835 under the leadership of Mother, later Saint, Maria Euphrasia, who emphasized gratitude as the basis of the order's faith and works. "Vous avez un coeur fait pour aimer, fait pour etre reconnaissant." (You have a heart created to love and to be grateful.) Theologically, the tenet of gratitude is seen as the opposite of original sin because it grasps God as the source of all that is good. Mary Paul translates this idea into appreciation: "The staff truly appreciates the people they represent." Both she and Geraldine de-emphasize the role of religion in the center's work. It never seems to be mentioned, and both staff and clients represent all faiths and none. But faith is clearly at the core of the nuns' own lives, though it is a private business with them, and both must be prodded to discuss it.
"Two things you cannot describe to anyone else," says Mary Paul. "Sex and prayer. God lives in a different realm of reality. To talk about that reaches beyond the point of talk.
"But I can talk endlessly about the center. The community set us up, in a way. As the needs evidenced themselves, we developed programs to try to meet those needs. Our employment office was a response to the fact that there's 12% jobless in Sunset Park, 4% higher than the rest of the city. You were kidding Geraldine about our building an empire here. Well, we did. We started with a dozen staff, and we never dreamed we'd grow as big as we are. But the needs are so various and complicated. Last week I did a preliminary interview with a woman who said at first that her problem was her 14-year-old son, who never showed up at school. The woman carried an enormous briefcase with her --all the time, I learned later--packed with every notice and letter she has ever received. She cannot read, so she carries this file around with her for reference. When I got to meet her son, he could not read either, and he didn't go to school because he was ashamed.
"Or you take Maria. Maria is smart, clever, volatile, funny, mischievous, a real piece of work. She would have us believe that she does not realize that she loves her father in spite of his awful behavior, but she does realize that. She does not need to be taught to love him, so in that she is playing a sort of game by pretending her love is a secret we all must disclose. But Maria does need to learn to live at peace with the world, because in temperament she is very much like her father. That's her real problem."
The Center for Family Life is not the sole agency of help in Sunset Park. Lutheran Hospital offers high school equivalency classes to the community, as well as medical care. Doug Heilman, a Lutheran minister, established Discipleship House in 1981, a sort of Boys Town for teenagers in trouble. Heilman's work with street kids is praised everywhere in Sunset Park; wherever he walks he is greeted warmly by young men, many of whom are former gang members. The help he provides takes the form of moral encouragement or simple solace. Heilman corresponds with a young man from the neighborhood now in prison for murdering his six-month-old child in a fit of rage. Before Heilman took to the streets, no one in Sunset Park recognized such people.