In the spring of 1981, Rev. Joseph F. Girzone’s doctor urged him to slow down and lower his blood pressure, or risk suffering a stroke.
Girzone, then pastor of a fractious parish in the archdiocese of Albany, N.Y., was only 50, but he worked out an agreement allowing him to retire from the active priesthood.
Living on minimal income from helping out in parishes on weekends and serving on the advisory board of a power company, Girzone began writing. He first wrote two books, a handbook for parents teaching religion to their children and a story about a teenage girl designed to help adolescents develop healthy attitudes. He couldn’t interest publishers, so he published them himself.
Then he wrote the book he had been thinking about for a long time, a novel about Jesus coming back to live among us today and dealing with contemporary problems. He called the novel “Joshua,” Jesus’ Hebrew name, and published it himself in 1983, leaving “father” off his name on the book because he “didn’t want to battle people’s preconceptions” about what kind of a book a priest would write.
The protagonist, a humble, open-hearted woodcarver who appears one day in a town called Auburn, infuriates inflexible church leaders by attending services of every faith. Joshua is also critical of church laws and customs and insists that God made people free.
“God never intended that religion become what it is today,” Joshua says at one point in the book. “Jesus came to earth to try to free people from that kind of regimented religion where people are threatened if they don’t obey rules and rituals invented by the clergy. Jesus came to teach people that they are God’s children and as God’s children, they are free, free to grow as human beings, to become beautiful people as God intended.”
When Girzone was invited to give talks or conduct retreats, he sold his books afterward, wanting only to earn enough to pay the printing bills. Then word of mouth took over. Those who had read the book bought extra copies to give to friends and relatives, and after three or four months, Girzone was selling up to 60 copies of “Joshua” each week.
By the end of three years when Waldenbooks began stocking “Joshua” in some of its stores, Girzone was shipping 900 copies a week, and his dream of a peaceful retirement had turned into a nightmare of paperwork and packing boxes.
Around that time Girzone got a call from literary agent Peter Ginsburg who had received a copy of “Joshua” from a friend. Ginsburg began browsing through it while on a train, read the entire book, and then decided he wanted to represent Girzone. Girzone was delighted, because he was so tired of packing books.
`Safe gamble’ for publisher
But the first 28 publishing houses that Ginsburg approached rejected “Joshua.” Macmillan eventually published it in trade paperback in 1987.
Michelle Rapkin, the editor who bought “Joshua” for Macmillan and now is editor of Crossings Book Club, says, “This simply written story has a real power that affected me on an emotional, visceral level in a way I hadn’t experienced before. It wasn’t a hard decision for me to acquire it. It seemed like a safe gamble. I was thrilled that so many people had the same reaction that I did.
“At the time there were very few works of fiction, short of historical novels, that focused on the Bible or certainly Jesus.”
“Joshua,” now published by Doubleday (hardcover gift edition) and Scribner (paperback), has become a classic in the religion category, selling steadily to readers around the world. A spokesman for Doubleday says that “Joshua” has sold more than 2 million copies in America, and its four sequels at least 250,000 copies each. It has been translated into nine languages, including Hebrew and Arabic.
Word of mouth has always sold “Joshua.” Early on, an elderly church volunteer in Florida stocked it in her church’s book shop and sold it to vacationers who spread the word around the country. A Belgian lawyer who was visiting America discovered “Joshua” and shipped home copies, which found their way into NATO headquarters. That resulted in a speaking engagement there for Girzone who, for lack of money, had to hop a military transport to Brussels.
A priest on the Vatican staff even presented a copy of “Joshua” to former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev. And Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf read “Joshua” in two nights during Operation Desert Storm and wrote to the author, saying that the book gave him “spiritual strength . . . (and) great peace of mind.”
Phyllis Tickle, editor at large in religion for Publishers Weekly, in her 1995 book “Rediscovering the Sacred” writes:
“That first Joshua novel now stands as one of the bestselling novels of this century. It also opened the eyes of our domestic book industry to the enormous potential in the faith fiction category.”
“I couldn’t believe (the success),” Girzone says during a visit to Chicago. “I knew the book would be a tremendous help to people, because as a parish priest I saw how the people were hurting and I knew what they needed: a Jesus that made sense, a Jesus that could heal, a Jesus they could fall in love with. I knew that Jesus’ message would do a lot of healing. Since I was ordained I always tried to preach Jesus in all my sermons.
“I think `Joshua’ took off because people were hungering for Jesus and not knowing it. With Jewish people it’s the same thing. One Jewish man, whose father and uncle had built the first Reformed synagogue in Albany, called me one day. He’s an old man. He told me, `I read “Joshua” and that was the Jesus I always secretly treasured in my heart. But what have our religions–my religion as well as yours–done to that beautiful, beautiful man?’ “
Inspiring changes in people
Girzone says that “practically everybody that writes me a letter tells me the book has changed their life. And a good number of people have changed their jobs and adopted an entirely different lifestyle.”
Reaction from clergy, however, has been mixed. “A lot of them have complained,” Girzone says. “I think some of them are probably offended because I (compare) the modern clergy to the Scribes and Pharisees, which is the way it is.
“I know how miserable the people are sometimes, and I just wanted to get that across, that we’re not really Christ-like in the way we treat people and that’s causing a hell of a lot of damage.
“I get letters from priests who say that `Joshua’ saved their priesthood, and I’ve gotten beautiful comments from some bishops. But they don’t put it in writing. When I meet them, they tell me personally.”
Girzone grew up in Albany, the oldest of 12 children of a butcher and housewife. Wanting to be a priest from childhood, he entered the seminary at age 14, graduated from St. Bonaventure University in 1953 and was ordained two years later.
He spent years working among New York street gangs, ministering to coal miners in a depressed Pennsylvania town and served on New York civil rights commissions. Then he was assigned to the Albany diocese and served as pastor of several parishes before leaving the mainstream of the church.
Girzone says that he doesn’t view himself as a maverick. “I ask myself, `What would Jesus do?’ I look at that as being the way things should be. When people find fault with it, that’s their problem. And I suppose from their point of view I’m a maverick. I just felt that the church needs a lot of healing. I have done what I thought I should do.
“I think we have an instinctive feeling that we want to be at peace with God. That’s what the book does. It recognizes the fact that we are human, that we fall, we make mistakes, but that’s the way God made us. If God made us that way he’s not going to tear us apart for being weak, as long as we’re struggling, trying to be close to him.”
Girzone wrote four “Joshua” sequels, “The Shepherd” (Macmillan), “Joshua and the Children” (Macmillan), “Joshua in the Holy Land” (Macmillan) and “Joshua in the City” (Doubleday), and most recently, an illustrated, inspirational book, “What Is God?” (Doubleday).
Jesus, not churches
Those who have discovered the “Joshua” books inevitably rediscover a Jesus whose simple message, in Girzone’s view, seems to have gotten lost in organized religion.
“Before the Reformation (in the 16th Century), clergy and people were sort of lax in the way they practiced their religion,” Girzone says. “All they knew about Christianity was Jesus, so the spirituality books were all about Jesus.
“Once Christianity broke up for the first time, churches began to spring up and people’s allegiance was distracted away from Jesus and toward their church. Each church came up with its own customs, traditions and practices, and the churches became competitors.
“When people were born into these different denominations, they were focused on their church as a way of helping them avoid the pitfall of being attracted to another church. So we becme aware of our denominational differences.
“After 400 years of this interdenominational warfare, (religion) wasn’t about Jesus anymore. It was about loyalty to your church. The church became God, the church became their religion and no longer the medium of Jesus’ message.”
