I thought about changing the name of this Web Site yesterday. What would Joe think or say about ‘his faith’? Does the idea of ‘faith’ in some ways betray his message and life? I could imagine a dialogue something like this,

“What have you been doing Donnie?”, Joe asks.

“I have been writing about you on a Web Site, Joe.”

After some back and forth about what a Web Site is, Joe asks,

“What is your Web Site called?”

“The Faith of Joe,” I reply.

Joe digests this for a moment. Then he opens up,

“Belief in God is voluntary. Each to his own. But you cannot serial kill.” He says emphatically. “You should tell people that you have to have a prayer life, you have to have a prayer life. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Belief in God is voluntary, but Christians have it easier.”

I doubt very much that Joe would ever use the word ‘faith’ to describe himself. I do not think that Joe experienced faith in God. He had knowledge. He talked to God and knew God. Faith or belief is necessary for those unlike himself–people like me.

At conferences, before skeptical audiences, it was natural to speak about Joe’s ‘faith’ as a resource or strength that allowed him to ‘cope with’ or ‘overcome’ his schizophrenia and the sufferings that should have enveloped him. But if Joe had attended a conference, and listened to people talking about him, he would not have known what they were talking about.

“I live with God, Donnie. He keeps me busy. I never suffer.”

God and suffering for Joe seem mutually exclusive. The genuine presence of the former excludes the latter.

After being with Joe for thousands of hours, while he was alive and still in this world, telling me, showing me it is so, I did not understand him. Three years after his death, I must remind myself who he was.

Joe did not have faith, as I do, as we do.

He knew.

In the days and weeks after the Camp Fire, thick smoke darkened the skies over the valley below the ridge, charred by the flames of November 8. The sun would sometimes appear like a full moon on a dark night striving to shine through evening clouds. Among my memories of those dark days in November was a lunch with Joe at The Italian Cottage in Chico. Neither night nor day, the skies, the air, were filled with a shadowy substance. I put on an N95 mask prior to getting out of the car. Joe did not comment on any of it. He enjoyed his lunch with gusto, as always.

I never spoke to Joe about what happened to his beloved Paradise, although I am sure he knew about it. Joe was aware that bad things happened, but he never acknowledged them as a real threat to God’s creation and this world of abundant, divine grace. There were only a handful of lunch outings remaining with Joe after the Camp Fire, which in hindsight seemed to punctuate the beginning of the end of an era of joy. The Thanksgiving holiday came and went, quietly. Joe was in good spirits, but he had lost a little weight, which concerned me. Then came Christmas, the New Year, a few more family dinners, lunches, and our weekly trips to the wound clinic. Suddenly, in mid-January of 2019, Joe collapsed and had difficulty breathing.

He passed from this life on January 29.

“In coffee
In pepper and salt
In delicate flavors of spice
In textures and colors
In supporting beams
In the rock of a hearth
Where you prefer to take your meal.”

These recollections from ‘The Face of Joe’ are mostly drawn from lunches with Joe at a little family restaurant in the town of Paradise, California, ‘The Cozy Diner’. Joe loved this restaurant. A few majestic Ponderosa pines grew around the rear parking lot towering over the restaurant and a few other buildings, including a quaint, little apartment complex tucked away in the back. Walking in the main rear doors always gave me a sense of being high in the mountains, when in fact we were on a ridge in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, not more than ten miles or so from the Sacramento Valley floor. These trees spoke to Joe and were his friends.

On November 8, 2018 the Camp Fire raged through this part of Paradise, but the Cozy Diner still stands. I heard on the local news that the restaurant had reopened a couple of weeks ago. I do not know the fate of these trees, but I pray they still watch over this place.

I have not had the heart to visit Paradise since the fire, even though I live not that far away. I tell myself that I want to remember Paradise as it was, as Joe knew it, as I knew it with Joe. But, I am aware that this is not the whole truth.