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To a house on the hill

Why did a New York lawyer move to a Brazilian slum? Jane Cacouris talks to Luke Simone about his extraordinary story.

Jane Cacouris

Jane Cacouris is a writer and consultant working in international development on environment, poverty and livelihood issues.

an aerial view of a shantytown on a steep hill side in Rio, Sugerloaf Mountain is visible in the distance
Morro da Providencia, Rio de Janeiro.

It was a hot and humid evening in 2015 and Luke had just moved into a tiny house in Morro da Providencia, Rio de Janeiro’s oldest favela, a shantytown located in the heart of the city. His new home was near the top of the hill, sandwiched between two loud and rampant drug dens. He could hear the parties and orgies happening above and below him twenty-four hours a day; his neighbours regularly firing bullets out of the windows. The noise was draining and constant. It was dark outside, and Luke sat frozen in fear, staring at a blank laptop screen by his window facing the street… waiting and praying. He had just been informed that the bandidos (drug traffickers from the main drug gang in the favela) were on their way to pay him a visit. Gossip on the street had spread that he was an undercover police officer. Why else would a white British gringo in his thirties choose to buy a house in one of Rio’s poorest and most dangerous communities?  

“After about five minutes I saw a glint out of the corner of my eye… I looked around and a number of drug dealers were arriving on the porch.” 

Faced with ten heavily armed gang members, they asked who he was and what he was doing in their community. Luke took a breath and explained that God had called him to Brazil from New York, and that he was choosing to live in Providencia because he loved the neighbourhood, and wanted to serve the community and build something for them; for their children and their young people. The gang listened. Then remarkably they lowered their guns, said “ok then”, and walked away. Luke was stunned.  

“I know what happens to people… It was a very violent time. I thought I was going to die and it was terrifying. But God turned it around...” 

The relief that he was alive quickly turned into disappointment; a realisation that despite all the sacrifices he had made to be there, he wasn’t wanted by the people he had given up everything to serve. 

Armed police patrol the favela.

Armed police stand on steep steps between shantytown dwellings

Five years previously Luke was living in New York working as a finance lawyer with a corporate law firm. He was single, his firm paid for his Manhattan apartment, and he had so much disposable income that he saved half his pay each month. Originally from the UK, he grew up going to a local church in Surrey with his family, but he’d fallen far away from God.  

“I was in a favourable position to go off the rails. And I did go off the rails.” he says. 

In 2009, the financial crash hit and having spent five years living and working in New York, Luke began to question the premise and direction of his life. Through a family member, he was put in touch with a Christian association working with street children in São Paulo in Brazil, providing living accommodation to homeless children, who were disenfranchised from their families and/or victims of abuse and neglect. The aim was to reintegrate the children where possible with their families. During a weekend visit to São Paulo, within fifteen minutes of being shown around one of the shelters, Luke had a deep conviction that this was where he was meant to be.  

 “It was not this Damascus Road moment,” he says.  “It was a familiar voice. Not someone who was needing to twist my arm or convince me. I felt I was in good hands. Even though change was going to mean going from a six-figure bonus to zero salary…. I was suddenly ready to risk everything knowing I was in these safe hands.” 

A few months later Luke moved from New York to Brazil and went on to live and work in one of the shelters for street children for several years. He talks about a particularly bleak time when one of the boys in the shelter took a dislike to him, the relationship becoming so acrimonious that Luke even began fearing for his life. Emotionally and mentally drained, feeling rejected by the children he was trying to care for, he went away for a couple of days to regroup and called his sister. He recalls, 

“She said to me, ‘Just come home Luke. Just come home.’” 

Her words made him realise that he had life choices the street kids simply didn’t have. He could choose to leave them and “go home” at any moment; home to people who loved and cared for him. The children he was working with were born without options or choices. So, Luke decided to stay, and by making that decision, hoped to model a love and commitment to those who perhaps had never experienced it. A love that doesn’t diminish or disappear, even when we turn our backs. 

Luke Simone.

A man sits on a concrete path with one leg splayed out in front.

What is intriguing about Luke’s story is not the desire to “re-purpose” his life. So many of us feel at times in our lives that we are drifting without purpose or meaning but when we look for more purpose, it tends to be either seeking fulfilment in our work - towards more wealth or influence or social legacy - or through our relationships. What is intriguing is that Luke chose to follow God’s purpose, rather than his own.  

Luke’s story is one of sacrificing comfort, wealth and status to simply do life alongside the people that society in general has given up on, and, at times, in return getting hostility and death threats from the very people he is walking with. The story is a little reminiscent of the gospel story of Jesus Christ. Although, of course, Luke will be the first to say that he’s certainly not Jesus - “unqualified”, “unprepared” and “broken” are words he uses to describe himself – but perhaps this self-awareness of his own flaws has given him the ability to rely entirely on God rather than himself, in a place where he simply has to. 

Missionaries, like Luke, are perceived by many to be the outworking of a colonial interpretation of the “Great Commission.” This refers to a number of passages in the gospel of Matthew where Jesus tells his apostles to “make disciples of all nations.” People assume this means going to far flung places and preaching about Jesus. But when I asked Luke about his work in Providencia, for him, mission is far more integral and encompassing than “straight evangelism.”  

As theologian Christopher Wright points out, Jesus was concerned with responding to the needs of people - both materially and spiritually - in the power of the Holy Spirit. The two go together and are integrated. The Book of Acts and letters of the apostle Paul in the Bible show a commitment of the followers of Jesus to preach the good news and bring others to faith, but also to live with compassion as a loving community seeking to address the social and material needs of those around them. In fact, Paul’s first of many missionary journeys was to provide famine relief to prevent starvation of the people in Judea.  

So where is Luke now thirteen years after he first left New York? He still lives in Providencia and together with his team of volunteers and a local church in Rio, he has built and runs a community house, Casa Cruzeiro (House of the Cross) and adjoining educational annex at the highest point of the favela.  

Casa Cruzeiro.

A group of buildings jostle together at the summit of a hill in a city.

On entering Casa Cruzeiro during my visit to Rio a few months ago, I was struck by the sense of peace. The community around the house is far from calm. It’s poverty at its crudest and, as Luke will say, at times depicting humanity at its darkest. Murder, rape, incest, drugs, extortion, prostitution, abuse, neglect… the list goes on. Life at the margins doesn’t get more marginalised than this. Casa Cruzeiro is a light in the darkness, a stillness in the chaos. It operates an open-door policy where anyone is welcome, drug traffickers included (as long as they behave), for a meal, to hang out, to talk, even to stay if someone needs a roof over their head. About 200 children, adolescents and adults pass through their doors each week, and some of the activities include an afterschool programme, adult literacy support, a communal vegetable garden, career counselling, guitar lessons, bible studies and prayer groups. Material and spiritual needs met seamlessly and uncomplicatedly together as part of a whole.  

A  Providencia family.

A mother sits with a toddler standing in front of her. The father appears from the side lying on his back reaching an arm out.
A family play in a Rio favela.

If you could rewind the clock by thirteen years, and make a different choice, would you? I ask Luke. He pauses, and says no, but is clear that it hasn’t always felt like an easy choice. He’s often pondered over the comfort and wealth that he left behind. But at the moment he has no plans to leave.  

And what has he learnt about God over these years in Brazil?   

When he relies on God he feels a deep sense of peace, and a conviction of God’s love in a way he hadn’t known before.  

“When God called me to Brazil, he was saying, ‘You need to know me again. I want to reintroduce myself to you. This is who I am. And this is how much I love you.”

Jesus said to His father, “Let thy Kingdom come, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” And as I walk around the safe, clean space of Casa Cruzeiro… chat with Iam over lunch, who became a Christian five years ago when reading a passage of scripture with Luke… hear about Monique, who with the team’s help, has been accepted onto a youth apprenticeship programme… look out from the roof top past the carefully nurtured community vegetable garden to the dark winding alleys and mish mash of favela shacks sprawling down the hill and into the city beyond….and watch Luke’s eyes lighten as he tells me about the young people that he and his team look after and walk through life with…  

I realise this is what Jesus meant.  

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Christmas survival
7 min read

Team Christmas and the three gifts of Christmas

How can we push past the stresses of the festive season to rediscover the magic? Roger Bretherton tells us how he learned to find joy in being on Team Christmas. Part 2 of Unwrapping God this Christmas.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

An animated scene shows a man in a Christmas jumper and a child look around a corner into something and be delighted
Arthur Christmas, Roger Bretherton's doppelgänger.
Aardman Animations.

There is one job at Christmas I always forget I have to do. It’s the one where you get the Christmas tree home only to realise that, if it isn’t going to be dead of dehydration by Christmas Eve, some chump has to saw one inch off the bottom of it. In my mind there is another version of myself who is admirably skilled and handy at things like this. That Roger- let’s call him manly-Roger- has a neatly ordered garage full of power tools ready for any task, and a set of multi-sized saws hanging outlined by a perfect silhouette on the wall. Unfortunately, this Roger- let’s call him real-Roger- does not own that garage. To give you an idea of just how chaotic our garage is, the police once woke us up at 3am to tell us it had been broken into and trashed by burglars. When I joined them in my dressing gown to inspect the ‘crime scene’, it turned out the kids had left it open, and I was forced to confess that our garage always looks like that.  

So as the rest of the family disappear into the house, pinning up lights in a joyous cacophony of festive music, I’m swearing in the garage trying to find a saw. It’s usually completely inaccessible; wedged under a leaf blower, a bottle of windscreen fluid, and some discarded dumbbells which manly-Roger, were he to exist, might have actually used. Eventually I’ll emerge brandishing something completely ill-fitting for the task- some garden secateurs, a metal file, or a rusty axe, and I’ll then spend the next twenty minutes sweating over the base of the Christmas tree, thinking it all would have been much easier if real-Roger had bothered to pick up those dumbbells more than once this year. If a bad workman blames his tools, a truly abysmal workman has no clue what his tools even do. By the time I’ve finished clipping, hacking, and filing, the base of the tree looks not so much neatly sawn as gnawed-by-a-passing-beaver. I enter the house like a war hero flushed and dirtied from battle, defeatedly clutching the mangled tree. It requires every spare inch of inner resolve not to declare Christmas cancelled.  

When I was a kid Christmas seemed so much easier. It was something that just happened. The festive magic occurred as if by magic. It took me longer than it should have to realise that Christmas only happens because someone makes it happen- and when you have kids and family that someone, is you. Given my incompetence with Christmas trees then, it may come as a surprise to know that I’ve learned to love being part of Team Christmas, being part of the gang who are in on the act and can make the magic happen. (And not just because our teenage sons reckons I look like Arthur Christmas in our wedding photos.) I have learned that there is, just beneath the surface, a bone-deep satisfaction in the hard work of hosting Christmas at home. It has become a spiritual discipline for me, and I should probably explain why. 

We go into Christmas knowing that this year there is joy and beauty to be found in responding to other people’s demands. 

Ronald Rollheiser, in his book Domestic Monastery, tells the story of a monk who followed the call to prayer deep into the solitude of the Sahara Desert. His name was Carlo Caretto, and after all his spiritual exertions and mystical extremes, he reflected that he was still no holier, no more godly, no less selfish than the mother he had left at home. His view was that the very act of raising children and constantly responding to the needs of the household had shaped her, even more effectively than the desert winds, into the attentive caring presence he had come to know. Rollheiser extends this story to us all. In the monastery, life is ordered by the monastery bell. When it rings the monks turn to prayer. Whatever they are doing – eating, speaking, half-way through a sentence – they stop and turn their attention immediately to God. Rollheiser suggests that we view the demands and interruptions of home and work just like this, as the monastery bell inviting us to turn to whatever is demanded of us in that moment. In doing so, we find ourselves shaped, like Caretto’s mother, into a more gracious and attentive form. 

Christmas, more than any other time of year, has started to have a similar effect on me. When people need food or drink, when the presents need to be wrapped, when board games are needed for entertainment, when fresh air is needed to break the monotony, when someone needs to talk… I hear the sound of the monastery bell. The demands can be relentless, and easy to resent, but I have come to find some delight in willingly responding to them without a second thought.  

Psychologists have written something similar about the things that motivate us towards being at our best. Self Determination Theory for example, holds that there are three basic psychological needs to which we are all intrinsically drawn. They are the conditions for feeling that what we do was initiated by us and hasn’t been imposed by the tyranny of our circumstances.   

The first is autonomy. We have to feel on some level that we chose to do what we are currently doing. This is where the monastery bell can be so helpful at Christmas. We may not have chosen our families or the place of our birth, but we can choose how we respond to the obligations these things place upon us. As the guru of meaning, Viktor Frankl once said, we should not ask what the meaning of our lives is, because in the duties and demands of each day, life itself is constantly questioning us. Meaning is to be found in how we respond. Whether we are willing to do the things we have to do, as if we chose to do them. This is an intention we can set for ourselves long before the family rock up for Christmas dinner. We go into Christmas knowing that this year there is joy and beauty to be found in responding to other people’s demands. We only make ourselves miserable by imagining a world where we only ever call the shots and never have to serve them. Like the proverbial puppy, autonomy is not just for Christmas… it’s for life.

Some of our best memories of Christmas can be the conversations we had while cooking, or washing up, or serving drinks, or setting the table. If we find it difficult to ask for help, we may need to set up the request in advance. 

It’s all very well claiming our intention to serve the family at Christmas, but if we don’t brace ourselves for it, it’s liable to collapse with the first person to turn down our homemade cranberry sauce (it’s a long story- see Unwrapping God this Christmas Part 1). We can choose our duty, but we don’t have to choose it alone. This speaks to our second psychological need: relatedness. We want to connect with other people, to make contact and build relationships. Doing our duty at Christmas is great, but we need to watch out for that subtle moment when our delight at serving others morphs into stomping around wishing we didn’t have to. Often this is because we ignored the moment at which we probably should have asked for help. We start to feel alone in serving and, even worse, we start mentally rehearsing all the reasons why the rest of our family are useless wasters who never lift a finger.  

We need to be attentive to the pivot point at which our desire to serve turns into martyrdom, and not be seduced by the moral superiority of going it alone. If we can learn to ask those around us to help when we need it, we can create unanticipated times of connection. Some of our best memories of Christmas can be the conversations we had while cooking, or washing up, or serving drinks, or setting the table. If we find it difficult to ask for help, we may need to set up the request in advance. We let the family know that at some point during Christmas it will all feel a bit too much and we need them to be ready to help. In our house, at such times my other half has ‘permission to boss’. Given that she is more likely than me to be aware and stressed out by what needs to be done, she is free to point it out. And if, at times, that comes across a bit bossy, it’s no big deal- just Team Christmas working together to get things done.   

And, if the theory is right, getting things done is the third psychological need (alongside autonomy and relatedness) that motivates positive behaviour. We like to find outlets for our competence, our skills and abilities. To listen out for the monastery bell is to ask ourselves the question: what am I able to do in this moment that would contribute to hosting the family right now?  And for me, ultimately, that’s what makes the practice of Christmas a spiritual discipline. A few hundred years ago the Jesuit spiritual director, Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751), grew tired of convoluted esoteric paths to spiritual enlightenment. He preferred a much more down to earth approach. He wrote: the duty of every moment is a shadow that conceals the action of God. Sometimes we miss God because we are put off by the shadow that conceals the divine presence in everyday life. But when we approach the demands of the festive season, willing to give what we have, to whomever we can, we celebrate once again this Christmas, in our own small way, the coming of heaven to earth.  

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