Is that odd, or is that God?

DOUGLAS McKAY got the call from God while sitting on a bar stool at Sam's Bar, 30th and Wharton, Grays Ferry, USA.

It wasn't the first call he heard, but it was the final one. After a fight at Sam's that night (he won, he says) he got lost in thought. He wasn't destined to spend his life on a bar stool at Sam's.

The next day McKay presented himself to his parish priest at St. Gabriel's, the massive stone Catholic church dominating his Irish, working-class neighborhood. He said he wanted to become a priest.

Father Hank McKee, aware that McKay had cheated and slept his way through St. John Neumann High, told him he couldn't get into the seminary.

McKay understood, went back to school, repeated what he slept through and emerged as class valedictorian at Lincoln Prep and entered St. Charles Borromeo Seminary. All that, McKay says, was his personal redemption, through the grace of God.

Now he offers God's redemption - and help - to the addicted in the neighborhood he never left, although he spent most of his priestly career with Little Sisters of the Poor in Southwest Philadelphia.

Even when assigned elsewhere, he haunted Grays Ferry, starting from when he was a seminarian "walking the streets looking for winos," as the alcohol-addicted were known then.

After requesting it for many years, McKay was assigned to a full-time mission in Grays Ferry by Archbishop Chaput in June 2014, with the understanding the ministry would assume responsibility for his salary and benefits.

When I went out to talk to him, I expected the usual - hard-working priest swimming upstream against apathy and paltry resources.

What I found was a hard-working, lean and humorous (his phone ring tone is Elvis Presley's "In the Garden") priest in charge of a string of five rowhouses across the street from the doors of St. Gabe's. The properties are owned by Our House Ministries, launched by the 64-year-old McKay in 1997. He calls it the Miracle on 29th Street.

It's like reverse dominoes. In dominoes the object is to knock tiles down. On 29th Street, the object is to build lives up. It's a bootstrap operation on a shoestring budget.

"Our House works with the needs of the community, helping people pay rent, tuition, utility bills, but the heart of the work is recovery," McKay tells me as we tour his for-the-people conglomerate that offers mass, meetings, services and housing, usually for addicted, homeless men. Women are sent to a separate entity run by an Our House volunteer.

In the addicted, McKay sees "the suffering of God, even as they struggle and fail." His brother Anthony died in a crack house and McKay knows he is dealing with a population that will fail and fail again. His challenge is to bring them back to God and to lives worth living.

The heart of the recovery program is the Calix Society, an international Catholic identity program that supplements Alcoholics Anonymous. "We substitute the cup that sanctifies for the cup that stupefies," says McKay with a grin.

The first house was at 1439 S. 29th St. McKay wanted it as a youth ministry. The bank wanted $30,000.

An anonymous donor came up with the cash, another said he'd pay the utility bills.

It wasn't the first or last time that - just as they were needed - benefactors materialized. "Was that odd, or was that God?" says McKay, asking a question that peppers his conversation. "We have benefactors, workers, helpers," he says. These people also help him with food, clothing and donations. "I want for nothing materially," he says.

Bill Shea, the owner of what had been Shea's Funeral Home, gifted the double property on the corner to Our House, which McKay says has "a trust fund in the Bank of Divine Providence."

Our House is a "lifeboat, with the ship over there," McKay says, tilting his head toward St. Gabe's across the street.

The "captain" of that "ship" is Father Domenic Rossi, pastor of St. Gabe's.

He says McKay is "humble, he has a good sense of humor, he brings a very deep faith, which inspires him and inspires others. He journeys with people, he walks with them, in their journey toward God, toward sobriety."

Each rowhouse on 29th Street is connected and they share a large, high-quality wood patio, that McKay jokingly calls the Boardwalk, donated by a friend.

A couple of blocks over is the community center, a former parochial school, at which Our House runs St. Raphael's ARC (Addiction Resource Center).

The well-kept building has a gym on the ground floor and meeting rooms, a chapel and an audio-visual room where inspirational and instructional tapes on recovery are played.

It was there where I met Kathy Diering, 61, after a mass attended by mostly older, white people, the neighbors in this insular pocket of a more racially diverse section of South Philly.

She avoided drugs until her late 20s, then "took diet pills to pep me up" while cleaning the house, and then "meth came through" the neighborhood. She started snorting, then became an intravenous drug user.

She was sober for a while, but her husband drank and before long she was using again. "I lost seven years of sobriety," she says softly.

She lost more than that. Booze and drugs cut through her family like a scythe.

Her daughter Donna hanged herself at 19, and Diering suspects she was using oxycontin. Daughter Kathy died at 27, overdosing on alcohol and pills. Son Michael is in rehab for heroin addiction. Diering, clean since 1999, clung to her sobriety during these disasters.

Diering is the volunteer mentioned earlier who provides housing for homeless, addicted women.

She attributes her recovery to "the grace of God, with the help of Father McKay, who meets you where you are."

McKay met Jim Bradley, whose best friend used to be Mr. Absolut, the Swedish vodka, after spending decades as a drunk.

A decent student and good athlete at Archbishop Ryan, he didn't finish because he fell into the bottle, which boosted his self-confidence, but at a terrible cost.

Even though "I couldn't get out of bed without a drink," Bradley, 48, managed to hold many jobs, if not for long. He never married and his drinking drove away a longtime girlfriend two years ago. Despite his lousy behavior, or maybe because of it, his family paid his way to a rehab house in Boca Raton.

He boozed out and lived on the streets and in the woods before taking a hot, miserable, three-day bus ride back to Philly. A little more than a year ago, he lucked into Our House.

"They provided me with shelter, food, love, friends," says Bradley, a square-built man who's had a supermarket job for a year now.

"I go to work every day, I pay my rent, I smile," Bradley says. "I never smiled before. People accept me and I'm dealing with life on my own terms."

He lives in a room provided by Our House, which he calls a "miracle," and is preparing to leave.

Father McKay, who accepts no salary and lives on Social Security, also lives in a room at Our House, but he has no plans to leave.

Not as long as there are souls to be returned to God and lives to be restored.

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