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Hendra’s Messiah
The Messiah of Morris Avenue
By Tony Hendra
Henry Holt and Company, 2006.
Tony Hendra’s acclaimed memoir, Father Joe, includes an account of a conversation in which Hendra and Joseph Warrilow, his Benedictine friend and mentor, discuss the topic of change. Hendra is lamenting some of the liturgical and musical changes that have, in his opinion, diluted the experience of monastic prayer. Joe tells him, “We rather confuse change and newness, I think. What is truly new never changes.”
Asked for clarification, Joe explains that the world worships newness in things—like new cars and houses, which “begin to get old the minute you acquire them. New is not in things. New is within us. The truly new is something that is new forever: you. Every morning of your life and every evening, every moment is new. You have never lived this moment before and you never will again. In this sense the new is also the eternal.”
Change that fails to generate newness is pointless, Joe goes on. But still, “every so often” it is necessary “to clear away bad habits, deadwood, and outdated customs, to adapt to new information. That was necessary to return the Church to its essentials.”
Hendra’s new novel, The Messiah of Morris Avenue, indicates that Hendra took Father Joe’s observation to heart. This novel is both darkly comic in its satire of the state of contemporary Christianity, and highly spiritual in its vision of the necessary corrective. Hendra has imagined a world very much like our own; in fact, it is our own, but ten or so years from now. It is an American future in which today’s budding theocracy has fully bloomed. Fundamentalist Christians run the country, host the Academy Awards, and plan Armageddon. It is clearly a time to challenge bad habits and outdated customs, to effect change that generates newness. So into this world comes Jesus, in the person of José Francisco Lorcan Kennedy of Morris Avenue in the Bronx.
José’s skeptical scribe is the aptly named Johnny Greco, an old-school journalist forced to ply his trade in a world that has about as much enthusiasm for old-school journalism as Bill O’Reilly of Fox News has for MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. One of Johnny’s beats, and the top-rated department of the Web-based “newspaper” for which he writes, is the “Nut Log, which brought our reportorial scrutiny to bear upon rampant cases of mental derangement,” including that of religious nuts and self- identified messiahs. It is in the context of a Nut Log sighting that Johnny first becomes aware of José Kennedy. José appears to be more than your average Nut Log and warrants further investigation by the reporter. What he learns will change his own, and many other, lives.
Thirty-year-old José, it seems, smacks of authenticity. He strives to stay out of the spotlight. He doesn’t appear to be asking for money. His words ring true. And he performs miracles that appear to be the real thing and not cheap carnival tricks. Johnny is drawn in and seeks to find the truth about the young man.
In counterpoint to José we meet the Reverend James Zebediah Sabbath, top dog of America’s fundamentalist Christians, advisor to presidents and actual shot-caller for foreign and domestic policy-making.
The Reverend had been Spiritual Adviser to three presidents, enjoyed the rank of two-star general as chaplain-in-chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, and had twice been reappointed Spiritual Clerk of what he first dubbed the Supreme Court Under God. He was arguably one of the most powerful men in the nation—certainly the CEO of fundamentalist Christianity, which by the second decade of Christ’s Millennium was the only kind left standing.
While Sabbath cavorts with the principalities and powers, José drives a beat-up van and hangs with the Apostle Posse of misfits, ex-crack whores, former GIs, and his mother, Maria, of Morris Avenue in the Bronx. He offers enigmatic teachings that seem to parallel those of Jesus—but he makes it clear, in an interview with Johnny Greco, that there is more than parallelism going on:
“Christianity is unrecognizable to me. Christians have removed me from my own religion. They teach that my teachings don’t apply until I return in glory and kill all their enemies. Oh, and reign for thousand years. I always forget that part. I did so much reigning last time. King of this, king of that.”
“Yeah, I remember. They put that sign on your cross.”
“Until then, they’re free to ignore my only commandment: Love one another, even your enemy. Free to take revenge on whom they please; wage wars; steal from the poor and blame them for their own poverty; allow disease, misery, famine, and environmental devastation, even nuclear war, to sweep the planet, because—bring it on! All these man-made horrors are signs sent by me that I’m just around the corner? That’s not Christianity, that’s insanity.
“What I promised was that I would return exactly the same as the first time. An obscure event in an obscure place, an ordinary Joe you wouldn’t look at twice. Which would change the course of history.”
These two forces, José and Sabbath, will of course clash, and as the novel plays out we will learn whether the first shall be last and the last shall be first. And though Hendra is writing a parallel to a well-known story, it is remarkable how much he brings to it that is unexpected and leaves the reader gasping in delight and surprise, sometimes undone by the emotional impact.
With any luck, this much of a summary is enough to entice you to read the novel. The Messiah of Morris Avenue is an important novel precisely because Tony Hendra does what old Father Joe said needs to be done: he uncovers an authentic newness that strips Christianity down to its essence—that is, the heart of what Jesus did and taught. This is an important novel because Hendra’s rendering of this essence is remarkably refreshing and alive, so much so that its very presence in the pages of the novel highlights its absence in the faces of televangelists, theocratic pundits, and the red-hatted denizens of Vatican City. It is an important novel because it shows a living Jesus to those who have given up on Jesus because the religion that grew from his teachings has become debilitated, destructive, and abysmal.
Not long after Christmas I was talking with some family members and remarked that I’d love to write a novel in which Jesus returns to Earth as a man in contemporary America. I’m happy to say that Tony Hendra has saved me a lot of work. And in doing so he has done his part to help take Jesus back from the Christians.
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