Princeton’s Hidden Chaplains | The New Yorker

Kyle Berlin was recently recollecting the genesis of an idea: “Every student I knew was in some way or another anxious or depressed, and I’m not sure why. It still baffles me.”

This was five years ago, well before you-know-what, and at Princeton University, a rarefied realm of how could this be. Berlin, from Arroyo Grande, California, was the valedictorian of the class of 2018. He often met at 8 A.M., under a Korean dogwood tree on campus, with his chaplain, Matthew Weiner, the school’s associate dean of religious life, known to students as Dean Matt. They’d been batting around the question of compassion, and how to cultivate it in a high-powered setting, where the emphasis seemed always to be on matters of excellence, performance, efficiency, and survival. Institutions do not, as a matter of course, perpetuate kindness.

One morning, Weiner told Berlin about something that he’d noticed at lunch the day before. The woman responsible for swiping the diners’ meal cards had been smiling and chattering with students as they filed by, converting a glum procession into a buoyant parade. Dean Matt thought, She’s doing my job.

“That’s Catalina!” Berlin said. He’d known her since freshman year. “She’s a hidden chaplain,” he added. He named a couple of others. “Hidden chaplain”: this, then, would be the term they’d use for staff members (not professors!) who, in their regular encounters, brightened students’ days. This unwitting ministry combined elements of angelic supervision, parental nurturing, and what Berlin called “quietly glorious acts of caring.”

They printed up postcards—“Who is your hidden chaplain?”—and distributed them in a surreptitious way around campus. Nominations poured in, and a new tradition, in a place already thick with old ones, was born. “I really appreciated the organic and rogue informality of it,” Berlin said.

Earlier this month, the hidden chaplains were summoned to a now-annual banquet at Murray-Dodge Hall, the religious-life HQ. There were about a hundred celebrants: some fifty hidden chaplains, plus their guests, and about half as many students. (A hundred and nineteen students had submitted names.)

Catalina Maldonado-Lopez (the Catalina) sat in a corner with her daughter Gloria. She wore a blue button-down and jeans: “I met Kyle in 2014. He asked me, ‘How do you have so much energy?’ And I said, ‘If I don’t talk to you guys, I’ll feel your sadness.’ My job is very simple. It’s boring if you don’t talk. I’m just a mama with five kids. And I feel like these kids are part of my kids. Their mama’s not here. ‘You see this crazy woman? I hope my crooked smile is making you happy!’ ”

Nearby, three other hidden chaplains from dining services, Jackeline Davis, Mumu Pwee, and Thomas Stallone (“as in the Italian Stallion,” he said), sat with Rosmeilyn Jerez, a senior from Miami, who’d nominated Stallone. He had worked his way up from pot-scrubber to cook in a university kitchen, and now, in semiretirement, he, like Catalina, was swiping meal cards. “The students put a lot of confidence in me,” he said. “I don’t have kids of my own. It makes me feel—I hate to use the word ‘important.’ ”

“Valued,” Pwee said.

“It’s precious—the acknowledgment,” Davis said. “And I think it makes the students feel great to do something for the staff.”

Nely Serrano Rivas, a sophomore from El Salvador, by way of Oakland, said that her mother was a custodian at the library at U.C. Berkeley and was, in her own way, a hidden chaplain. “I can’t walk by the people who work here without saying hi,” Rivas said. “I can see the parent in them. This inspires us to see them, to be on the lookout, and meanwhile they’re on the lookout for people who see them.”

Someone produced a microphone, and, one by one, students and staff stood to pay tribute to one another, as though at a wedding where everyone was getting married to everyone else.

Mia González Guerrero, a barista in the library café, who’d been nominated by eight students, exclaimed, “This is my Oscar!” She had on white jeans and high heels. “You guys are good people. You have love in your heart. We have to have love for the students. Because they are the ones who pay our checks.”

At a table in back sat the man who would be cleaning up this celebration the following morning: Keith Upshur, from Trenton. He had been a custodian at the school’s art museum for fifteen years but had recently transferred to Murray-Dodge, because the museum was undergoing an expansion. Fifty-eight and lean, he had on a Nike cap and a checked shirt, and was accompanied by a woman in a green parka, with matching fingernails.

Upshur didn’t know the name of the student who nominated him. “But I think I know who it is,” he said. “I conversate with him. He’s Muslim. He comes for Friday prayers.

“I’m the fourth of ten kids,” he continued. “I’m a spiritual person, a Christian. I’ve had a million jobs. Drove a cab, worked in a steel mill. I was a very talkative cabdriver. At the steel mill, I had an experience like this, too. We had mentors, you know? It was so dangerous in there, you had to have them. I’ve seen guys lose legs, hands, arms. Fingers.”

“One of my friends was cut in half,” the woman said.

“This is my hidden chaplain right here,” he said, gesturing toward her.

She splayed out her left hand. “Ain’t no ring on it,” she said.

“You’ll get it,” he said. As to the question of the existence of angels, he averred that they were all around us, and that any of us might be one. ♦