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TORONTO – The last thing Mitch Albom expected to happen when his childhood rabbi asked for a eulogy was a spiritual conversion.
Raised Jewish, the 51-year-old best-selling author hadn't practiced his faith in years and had grown quite skeptical of organized religion.
That didn't mean he wasn’t interested in mortality.
His 1997 runaway hit "Tuesdays With Morrie" chronicled lessons Albom learned from his dying professor, while his fiction forays – 2003's "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" and 2006's "For One More Day" – pondered the next life.
"Still, I was as cynical about religion as anybody 10 years ago," Albom says. "I did roll my eyes at it. I did think of the worst examples of faith; the priest scandals, the ethnic-cleansing wars. There had been more atrocities committed in the name of God than anything else in the world."
But when Rabbi Albert Lewis – or the Reb as he's known in Albom's latest book, "Have a Little Faith" – asked him to speak at his funeral, the author agreed. But he had some conditions.
"I wanted to get to know him as a man a little bit so I wouldn't look like a buffoon when I eulogized him," Albom says with a slight chuckle.
Shuttling between his adopted hometown of Detroit, where he's a sportswriter for the Free Press newspaper, Albom spent Sundays in the suburban New Jersey town where he grew up getting reacquainted with the man who first taught him about his faith.
"It wasn't a book I planned to do," Albom says thoughtfully.
"I didn't think he would live so long either. I mean, who asks you for a eulogy and then lives for eight more years," he laughs.
"After a while I started to think it was a trick adult education class. So like most things in life that stay with you," he pauses, "it took me by surprise."
But his weekly conversations with a dying man didn't immediately leap from the couch to the page, he says.
"I thought I'd written that story with 'Tuesdays With Morrie' and I didn't want to do a fake version of that, per se."
It was after Albom became acquainted with a Christian pastor at I Am My Brother's Keeper ministry in Detroit that Lewis' eulogy request started to ferment into something deeper.
Albom saw how the life experiences of Lewis and Rev. Henry Covington, who had traded a past marred by drug abuse and thievery to serve God in Detroit, could start a dialogue on community and hope.
"As I was having these Sunday visits with the Reb, I started working with the homeless and this underlying thing about faith and believing in something bigger than yourself started to surface," he says. "That's when I thought, 'This is a story that can reach a lot of people.'"
Just as Covington, who readily admits breaking all Ten Commandments before he changed, Albom says having faith is something that comes with age.
"I think that being cynical is a comfortable position to be in, but as you get older it's not just about making fun of people and dismissing everybody else. If you're really trying to grow you really have to try to understand people better.
"Just like religion, it's easy to be cynical about the poor and homeless; I know because I was. But when you see people inside a [derelict] church huddled in a tent with snow raining down that are still faithful, what is there to learn about that?"
He lets the thought hang for a moment before answering his own question.
"Once you see things like that you have an obligation to tell people about it."
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On the Net:
Mitch Albom: mitchalbom.com
I Am My Brother’s Keeper ministry: www.iammybrotherskeeper-pc.org