There is a sentence in the Rev. Charles Strobel’s posthumous memoir, The Kingdom of the Poor: My Journey Home, that gave me pause.
Even as I write that, it seems silly. The whole book gave me pause. But stick with me. It’s in Chapter 20, when Strobel is telling the story of Gwen Bedford, one of the longtime guests of Room in the Inn, the program in Nashville, Tenn., that Strobel started in 1986 to provide support and shelter for the unhoused. Many nights, Bedford would wind up sleeping on Strobel’s back porch with a friend or two, choosing to go to Strobel’s house instead of the shelter, and sometimes arriving as late as 3 a.m.
Here is the sentence: “She invariably brought her typical ruckus and commotion with her, but my sleep was too deep to get up and address the matter.” It’s that “sleep too deep” that got me.
How did this remarkable man and Catholic priest sleep so well? He not only created Room in the Inn, a program that has a permanent downtown Nashville campus and 200 partner congregations in a variety of denominations in Nashville and beyond; he also founded an offshoot shelter for working men called Matthew 25, started the city’s Loaves and Fishes Community Meal, co-founded what has become Safe Haven Family Shelter for unhoused families, and has had a hand in countless other policies, organizations and benefit events for the unhoused.
One might think that Father Strobel carried the weight of the world, or at least the unhoused world, on his back. That he was so troubled by a society ripe with seemingly insurmountable inequity and poverty at every turn that it kept him up at night. But no. The answer as to how—and in retrospect, the answer is the entire book—comes in the epilogue with another sentence:
Take heart that if you do work that is for peace, you will be in communion. And if you are in communion, you will be at peace even in the presence of divine discontent.
The Kingdom of the Poor, with help from editors Katie Seigenthaler (Strobel’s niece) and Amy Frogge, is his story of how he came to be in communion every day of his life. How he came to embody the “useless servants”—Strobel preferred the “worthless servants” interpretation—in the parable Jesus shares in Luke 17: “When you have done all you have been commanded to do, say, ‘We are useless servants. We have done no more than our duty.’” And ultimately, how he came to the “why” in his life, as he quotes Mark Twain at the opening of the book: “The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
Strobel, who died in 2023, wrote the book with the aid of Seigenthaler and Frogge as he came to the end of his life. He chose to tell his story—characteristically, as we discover—through the stories of other people.
“But as much as we like to think of ourselves as self-made by our initiative and determination, our bootstraps mentality is a myth,” he writes. “We have received through our lives wonderful gifts of love and support from so many generous people. Often these people appear on our journey to care for use when we are most in need.”
These people include Clayton Massie, a homeless man who held court in “The Jungle,” an unkempt patch of land just south of where Strobel grew up in what was then a poor, working-class neighborhood adjacent to North Nashville (and is now known as Germantown). Massie and his friends befriended the 12-year-old Strobel and taught him “how I should treat everyone.”
There was George Orskiborksy, the janitor at Strobel’s nearby parish, The Church of the Assumption, whose simple, single room, outfitted with the bare essentials to live, got Strobel thinking about how much is enough, a question that never left him and portended a theory about our shared poverty. “More than an economic condition, it’s the awareness that we cannot be happy all by ourselves,” writes Strobel. “This is our poverty, and all the riches in the world won’t erase it.”
Strobel introduces us to the Rev. Dan Richardson, the pastor at the Church of the Assumption who became a father figure to Strobel after the death of his father, Martin, when Strobel was 4 years old. It was Father Dan who first inspired in Strobel a desire to become a priest. “We were a poor parish,” writes Strobel, “and we didn’t get a lot of respect, but Father Dan made us believe we were special people living in a special part of town—worthy of the highest respect.”
We also meet Michael “Bear” Hodges, a veteran who once lived in a community of the unhoused on the east bank of the Cumberland River and who camped out in the parking lot of Strobel’s East Nashville parish one freezing night in 1985. Strobel invited Bear and others to sleep in the church’s cafeteria that night and the many freezing nights that followed. Had it not been for Bear, Strobel considers, Room in the Inn might never have come to be.
Of the many people through whom Strobel tells us the “why” of his life, special regard is reserved for his mother, Mary Catherine Strobel, the most worthy of “worthless servants,” whose life is one of remarkable resilience and terrible tragedy. A single mother of four young children after her husband died, she took her husband’s secretary job and became the first female employee of the Nashville Fire Department. “Mama,” as Strobel calls her, “loved the multitudes, the bigger the crowd the better as far as she was concerned. She believed God would provide [but] believed God needed a little help and imagination from us.”
Ultimately, Strobel writes, his mother taught him to have a “confident faith and wield it to serve.” Mary Catherine’s inexplicable murder in 1986, as one of six people to die in a killing spree by an escaped prisoner of a psychiatric prison, stunned Nashville and had a profound effect on Strobel. His writing about the event, his full-time devotion in the aftermath to working with the homeless, his conviction about forgiveness and his activism against the death penalty offer some of the more moving segments of the book.
There is joy and heartbreak in The Kingdom of the Poor, but mostly joy. Its closest literary companion, I think, is Tattoos on the Heart, the 2010 memoir by Greg Boyle, S.J., another remarkable priest in daily communion with those who have fallen out of what Strobel refers to as “the seven systems society creates to support its members”: education, health care, mental health, employment, housing, family and organized religion.
There is also hope.
“We do not need to settle for this,” writes Strobel. “We don’t have to accept patterns of oppression and violence that seem so rooted and ingrained in our culture. Our faith, however small, can uproot these old destructive patterns and replace them with caring and reconciled relationships—especially with the most marginalized in our world.”
It reminds me that Jesus, after healing someone, doesn’t say “I have healed you” or “I have saved you.” He says, “Your faith has saved you.”
This article appears in May 2025.
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