Giving It All Away

Tags

faith, giving, leaving, Parole, Prison, saying goodbye

“A generous person will prosper; whoever refreshes others will be refreshed.” ~ Proverbs 11:25 

One inmate’s great artistic capture of the cells we lived in.

As soon as inmates know someone is leaving for parole, they bombard that person with three of the words most used in prison: “Can I get….” Just as one in the world accumulates stuff, so too does an inmate. Some parolees just walk away from their cell and leave it to their cellies to clean out all their stuff and dispose of it however they want: keep it, give it away, sell it, throw it out. Other parolees take everything they have with them.

During my nine years in prison, I accumulated a lot of stuff. The DOC has policies on what personal property we can have in our cells and limits on the amount of property we can permissibly horde. From our commissary service, we can order food, hygiene, and other products. We can also order a musical instrument such as a guitar or keyboard from an outside vendor. There are special annual sales by inmate organizations, where we could order hot sauce, jalapenos, and other food items not on the commissary list. And then there are books, photographs, calendars, and mail that people send, art and craft projects that inmates create, and boxes of legal files detailing our demise.

I knew that parole was a possibility for me as early as 2019. So I started a will, a list of people that I wanted to have certain things. I kept this list in a composition book and made a note when I believed a certain item would benefit an individual. When the word got out that I had been granted parole in 2022, and the treasure hunters accosted me, I was ready for them.

“Can I get your calculator?”

“Can I get your TV?”

“Can I get your sunglasses?”

I had a simple answer: “I already willed it to someone else.”

Complicating everything was the policy that said I could not give any of my stuff to other inmates. I was supposed to pack everything I had, tote it to the intake department to be inventoried and boxed, and then schlep all that stuff with me when I left. The actual practice, regardless of policy, is that staff only care about the big things: TV, computer tablet, musical instrument, and typewriter. Their biggest concern, however, is that you don’t try and take official DOC prisoner clothing with you! (Authentic corrections boots on eBay go for $100 or more!)

Some inmates turn parole into a veritable yard sale or auction house, setting prices and collecting nicotine products as payment. That way they can enter freedom with a supply of e-cigarettes. (Though, the official DOC brand is “E-cig for Inmate” from who knows what country!)

In prison, nothing is free. There is an entire underground economy. There’s also a basic concern that someone giving you something “for free” will come with hidden costs to be collected later. Therefore, when it became time to approach the beneficiaries of my will, acting as my own executor, I was met with skepticism.

“I saw you needed a pair of sunglasses and I want you to have these.”

“For how much?”

“Nothing.”

“No, really, how much?”

“I’m leaving, and I want to give them to you.”

“Well, if you’re sure you don’t want anything.”

I had spent years compiling my will. And I delighted in giving things away. One guy that walked to pill line every morning had an old torn rain poncho that barely served its purpose. I had a like-new button-up raincoat with a hood that our activities department had sold, and I presented it to this gentleman.

“For real, no charge?”

“For real, for real. I saw how soggy you were at pill line.”

“This a blessing from God. God bless you, my brother!”

One of my favorite gifts was a pair of headphones I used to practice my keyboard and listen to my tablet. Nothing lifted my spirit beyond the boundary of the razor-wire fencing like classical music on those noise-isolating ear coverings! And I knew a music lover who would benefit from them.

“Can’t I give you something for them?”

“Nope. I’m downsizing. And you’ll love the frequency range. You’ll hear music in your music you haven’t heard before!”

“This is really something. Thank you so much!”

The hardest one was the television set. I knew a guy whose TV had given up the ghost, and he didn’t have enough money for a new one. (The cost of a 19” TV from the commissary is nearly $300). But I had to take my TV with me, according to policy. With some creative strategizing, we made it work. We switched televisions, which were close enough in design. I had my name and inmate number scribed onto his old TV, and brought home that broken television.

I gave away nearly everything. Dictionary, thesaurus, Bible concordance, gloves, jalapenos, Dove soap, toothpaste, pens, calculator, typewriter ribbons, booklight, ramen noodles. And I made sure to cover as many people in my will as possible, even people I had not had good relationships with. That really surprised some inmates!

In the end, I had my required stuff packed and ready to go, and it all fit onto a small cart which I rolled to intake the Friday before my release. The property sergeant looked through the boxes. “Got any state clothes?” he asked. Then he packed everything, tagged it with my name, and set it aside for my Monday morning release.

The cell felt empty that weekend, but it felt right. I came to prison with nothing but the clothes on my back. All that I had accumulated was for survival—and as much comfort as possible—in that setting. Now others would benefit from a multitude of small comforts during their long days in that dark place.

The unexpected reward as I waited for release was the reciprocal generosity of my fellow inmates. All weekend I had offers of special cell-cooked meals from guys who didn’t want my stomach to be empty before I left. (I’ll do an entire blog on prison cooking in the future, but for a basic look at jailhouse cuisine, see this PBS explanatory video). I had so much food that I was able to share it with others!

Giving things away is indeed a blessing. The gratitude I received was its own reward. But the most special part was that moment of recognition in the eyes of my fellow human beings—that moment they realized that I was offering them something without price, without asking for anything in return, that I was simply giving this thing to them because of who they were, where they were, and what they needed. The light dawned, their eyes brightened, and they smiled. There was joy in their heart and joy in mine. “Whoever refreshes others, will truly be refreshed.” And I left prison on that Monday morning in October, refreshed and ready to face the challenges of freedom!

Vowing to Face the Challenges

Tags

God, helpmate, love, prayer, Relationships, Vows, Weddings

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper as his partner.” (Genesis 2:18)

Anniversaries are great when you’re together with the one you love. When you’re apart, it’s bittersweet. It’s like eating those little chocolate chips used in baking. They look like milk chocolate, but instead they are low sugar, intense chocolate. And there is a microsecond of chocolate taste and joy on your taste buds until the bitterness takes over and you want to run a paper towel over your tongue. That’s an anniversary in prison.

September 17, 2011 was a perfect day, as Sonia and I celebrated our marriage surrounded by family and friends (literally “surrounded” – it was a wedding in the round in an old theatre in Foxburg, PA). The weather was beautiful, and the reception tent sat beside the gently flowing Allegheny River. We were even treated with a flyby of a bald eagle winging above the river’s surface. Good food, laughter, dancing and toasts, glow-stick necklaces, cake, hugs, and joy.

September 17, 2013 would feature none of that. Worse yet, we had had plans to spend a weekend at Foxburg near our anniversary date. After I was incarcerated, Sonia had the emotional task of calling to cancel our reservation. Our two-year anniversary would have no kiss – not even a hug or a shared smile. And I knew if there was to be any “sweet” to counteract the “bitter” of that day, then we would need to do something creative and special.

With our options fairly limited, since the 17th was not our visitation day, I talked with our favorite Lutheran clergy person, Pastor John, during a visit he paid to me at the beginning of September. I told him that I had been thinking a lot about our wedding vows, and how they were sort of general – for better, for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and health. And with all the caca Sonia and I have been slogging through, I told him that we would like to renew our wedding vows on our anniversary. It would have to be by phone, and our phone calls last 15 minutes (less one minute to inform the recipient that an inmate is calling, and less three reminders at 12, 13, and 14 minutes that your call is going to be disconnected in three, two, and one minutes). “Can you do a renewal of vows over the speaker of Sonia’s cell phone in ten minutes?” I asked, knowing that it probably sounded a bit crazy. Pastor John said he was up to the challenge!

I started writing and rewriting vows that were relevant to our current situation in life. I knew I was on the right track when I tried reading them to Sonia during a visit. She started tearing up, then I started choking up. We agreed that we would have Pastor John read the vows, and we would respond, “I will.” Otherwise I’d be a puddle on the floor of our cell block, and crying on the phone is not a strong perception builder in here.

The 17th arrived, and I was to call at 6:30. Sonia and the kids were gathered in Pastor John’s office at the church. The ceremony started with the call to worship by the digital fembot announcing over the speakerphone, “You have a collect call from an inmate at the so-and-so prison. This call may be monitored or recorded. To accept the charges, Press 1.” After being certain we could all hear each other, Pastor John started with a prayer and a scripture reading that he had selected. It was Song of Solomon 2:10-14:

 My Beloved speaks and says to me:

“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away;

 For now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.

 The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come,

 And the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.

 The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom;

 They give forth fragrance.

 Arise, My Love, my fair one, and come away.

 O My Dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff,

 Let me see your face, let me hear your voice;

 For your voice is sweet and your face is lovely”

How appropriate! What an excellent passage calling to one another to “come away, my love, arise and let me see your face.” Yeah, that pulled pretty rough on the heart.

Then it was time for the vows, and I pictured myself standing with Sonia, our hands joined tightly, as Pastor John said:

  “Will you love, honor, support, and care for each other……

… in good financial times, and when you have to rely on family and friends to get by.

… when you’re together, and when you’re kept from being together

… when life seems easy, and when you have to work hard to put one foot in front of the other

… in happy times, and when you’re going through your darkest days

… in times of joy, and when days and nights are full of tears

… when you’re working together as helpmates, and when you need to take care of a lot of things on your own

… when you’re walking together hand-in-hand, and when you’re helping each other get back up after getting knocked down.”

After each part, (7 in all!!!!!!!), we answered, “I will.” I could hear the waiver in Sonia’s voice and her sniffles over the phone, as I was making ample use of my hanky (actually, they don’t issue us hankies in here, but I ordered two extra washcloths from the commissary to use as hankies, especially since toilet paper is limited).

Then Pastor John pronounced that we were renewed as husband and wife, and instructed us to imagine kissing each other. Soon our time was up, and Sonia and the kids went to Eat & Park for the reception, complete with a grilled sticky! Since there are no grilled stickies here, I had a honey bun from the commissary! (480 calories, 25 grams of fat – oh yeah!) and a cup of instant coffee. We had not only endured our anniversary apart, but our love grew even stronger despite it.

I don’t know where you’re at in life – if you are married or not. But if you are, you and your spouse might want to try writing out some vows that reflect your own commitment to marriage in the face of life’s challenges. And you can say them to each other with or without clergy present. Although it is awesome to have someone there to pray for your marriage, to name you as husband and wife, and to remind you that God is there to provide the grace necessary to keep you together as one, whatever trials and bittersweet days may come your way!

Suffering and Restoration

Tags

freedom, God, hope, Jesus, Parole, Prison, Suffering

“And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.” (1 Peter 5:10)

It was time once again to step into the arena, to face the powers that be—the PA Parole Board. In August of 2022, I went before the Board for my fourth time—the last had been in 2020 when I was denied parole and given a two-year hit. (A “hit” is the amount of time that must transpire before you can reapply for parole). I never knew what to expect when I met with the Board. Each experience had been different, with new faces interrogating me each time.

In 2019 I had been told that my answers were too long, and to “cut out all the psychology crap.” I received a nine-month hit.

In 2020, I kept my answers short and to the point, and left out the psychology lingo. And I was told by the interviewer that my answers were too short and simple. “Come on,” she said at the end of the interview. “You’re obviously smarter than that.” I got a two-year hit.

So, what do you do to prepare for a parole interview? Step one: Ask yourself every possible question that may be raised. Step two: prepare a response that is clear, concise, humble, remorseful, and conciliatory. Your answer should admit to all details of your crime, accept full responsibility, and demonstrate an understanding of your defects, but not sound defensive, minimizing, or insensitive. You must incorporate what you learned in your rehabilitation classes and demonstrate your commitment to living a crime-free life, without sounding unrealistic, rehearsed, or overly confident. No easy task! That’s what I did, for months in advance, and I felt ready—at least as ready as I could be.

The interview was the roughest that I had been through yet. Two women were before me on the video screen: one was a Board member, the other a Hearing Examiner. The Board member was the one who would vote yes or no on my parole. The examiner was the one shining the bright light in my face and saying, “We have ways of making you talk!” It was her report that would be supplied to the other Board members to determine their vote.

The examiner asked question after question. Before I had finished answering one, she was interrupting with another. She changed topics and focus often, trying to throw me off balance. And she used provocative language to see if I would respond with anger, defensiveness, or hostility. I stayed patient and calm, responding as best as I could.

There were several odd moments. At one point the hearing examiner asked me how I identify sexually: “You had three failed marriages, and then assaulted your stepson. Maybe you’re a homosexual who hasn’t realized it yet?” I replied, “I identify as a heterosexual.”

Another odd moment was when the Board member, who had been reading something on her screen, interrupted the examiner and said, “Wait! You had an affair with your best friend’s wife?” And she proceeded to rail against the fact that I was a pastor during the affair. She thought that the affair had been with a parishioner. They were trying to make it seem like I had violated a position of authority by having an affair with a member of my own congregation. It took quite a while to clear up the whole saga of my affair with Sonia, who was not a parishioner and lived 150 miles away. (And I resisted the temptation to point out that having an affair, while immoral, was not a crime in Pennsylvania!)

They then asked about my plans for success in parole. Partway through my reply, the Board member again raised the matter of how many times I had been married: “You have three broken marriages. How do you expect to succeed at anything?”

The whole interview took about 17 minutes, but it felt like hours. The only positive glimmer was in a statement from the Hearing Examiner: “You’re an intelligent guy. If you are granted parole, just don’t try to outsmart the system.” (Whatever that meant). But I clung to that sentence, hoping there was still a chance they were considering parole for me.

I left that interview bewildered and shaken, feeling pummeled, demeaned, and muddled. I wanted to get home to my parents to help them out with the challenges of life in their older years, and I felt that I had somehow let them down by not having a better interview. I went back to the cell block and sent emails out, requesting prayer for me and for the Board members’ votes. I needed five out of nine Parole Board members to say yes to my parole, or I wasn’t going anywhere.

Two weeks later I was on the callout sheet to go see Parole. This would be the moment when I received the Board’s parole decision from my Parole Agent.

My agent instructed me to sit down and didn’t waste any time. I was so prepared for a denial, that I almost didn’t hear her correctly. “I’ve got your positive parole decision,” she said.

“What?” I asked in disbelief, as I dropped into the chair.

“The Board voted to grant you parole.”

She read through the rest of the two or three pages of the decision. (They are required to read the entire “green sheet” to the inmate, as there are several inmates who can’t read). As she explained the requirements of my parole, my eyes got damp, and then wet, and then downright soggy. “Are you OK?” she asked.

“I was just so certain it was going to be a no. I’m so happy. So relieved.”

“Well, you must have done all right,” she replied. “Or else it would have been a no.”

When we’re in the midst of misery and hardship, it’s hard to hold onto hope for the future. There are those times when nothing seems to be going right and things seem to just be getting worse. And there are even bleaker days, when it appears that even the whole world is against us. But even in these darkest moments, God is working for our good. He is our savior who is moving us from sadness to joy, even though the night is dark and the light of dawn a distant hope.

Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book Tales of Terror, Times of Wonder, tells a parable of God’s saving acts in our lives. She recalls discovering a very large loggerhead turtle trapped in the sand dunes on a beach, dried out and exhausted. She requested help from the local ranger station, and a man in a jeep eventually pulled up to the turtle, flipped it on its back, wrapped some chains around it, and dragged the turtle over the sand toward the water. The turtle’s head was flopping around and digging into the sand. It must have been a terrible trip. When they reached the water’s edge, the man unchained the turtle, flipped it back onto its belly, and watched as the waves washed in. The turtle sensed the ocean before it, and pushed itself out into the freedom of the water that was its home.

She concludes the parable with these words: “Watching her swim slowly away after her nightmare ride through the dunes, I noted that it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.”

Have you been there, too? In those circumstances that seemed like the end, but were really a new beginning? When everything was upside down and hopeless, and God was there reaching out with a hand of healing, or peace, or freedom?

The Apostle Peter writes that all persons throughout the world undergo the same kind of sufferings. Yet God, the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. To him be the power for ever and ever. Amen. (1 Peter 5:9-11).

Good Works

Tags

faith, Prison, prison life

“For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” – Ephesians 2:10

It was a perfect summer day, a day for swimming. I was young, probably six or so. My mom had brought us to the home of a family friend to spend the afternoon in their beautiful inground pool. It was surrounded by a concrete patio area where the mothers sat at tables, chatting away, while my sister and I and a small pod of kids played games in the pool.

The mothers were supposed to be keeping an eye on the toddler who was too young to go in the pool, but they were distracted by their conversations. The little girl toddled away from the moms’ tables to the edge of the pool and leaned over to touch the water. Her center of gravity was not designed for such a lean and she plopped into the water with hardly a splash and sank to the bottom like a stone.

I was the only person in or out of the pool who saw it. I was in the middle of the pool, so I swam over, dove under the water, picked up the child, and put her back on her feet. It took only a few seconds. The little girl was only wearing a diaper, which was now soaked with pool water. She spluttered, then headed for her mother with her arms out, dripping water and crying.

As I went back to swimming, the mom tables erupted in shrieks! What happened? Did she fall in? Oh my gosh! That kind of stuff as the moms tried to decipher what had produced the dripping, crying child. I shouted to them that it was okay. She fell in. I picked her up out of the water. No big deal. But let’s just say the mom crowd was much more attentive to their children after that.

But what if I had not been there to see the child plunge to the bottom? Or what if I had also been distracted playing games with the other kids? Reflecting on it now, it was as though I’d been placed in that particular moment to do something that God wanted me to do. I was given a specific task to accomplish in God’s grand plan for his creation, or as the Apostle Paul put it, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

Think what this means for our lives! God has structured his creation in such a way that we are integral to his accomplishment of good works in the world. And with those opportunities for good works comes great responsibility. Remember, we humans are flawed. We are not perfect. And even though we have been created in Jesus Christ, we can be stubborn and foolish, resisting these divine moments where God asks us to step up and do the right thing.

Back to the toddler on the bottom of the pool. Imagine that I had seen her fall in, but I was having too much fun in my water games to turn aside and rescue her. That’s our human self-centeredness. Or worse, imagine if I had seen the girl tumble into the water and simply didn’t care. That’s our human apathy. Or imagine if I simply figured that somebody else would come to the aid of the toddler and did not feel a need to get involved. That’s our human tendency to shirk responsibility.

Most of us may never be in a position to save someone from drowning. But what about those other everyday good works that God has prepared for us? How many times have we seen a need, an opportunity to do good, and rejected it? Dismissed it as inconsequential in the grand scheme of the universe? Even simple situations where we shirk our good work responsibilities can have life-changing ramifications. Here’s an example.

In here, each cell block of about 120 inmates has a counselor who is tasked to track our progress, make sure that we are taking our prescribed programs, and ready us to see the Parole Board. Our cell block’s counselor was terrified of us. She was near retirement age and was so thin that you could see her facial bones clearly. With long black hair flipped back over her head like the grim reaper’s hood, she was labeled “Skeletor” by the inmates.

And when I say that Skelly was terrified of us, I’m not exaggerating. She never came out of her office unless she had to. She only moved throughout the institution when the walkways were free of inmates. And if she happened to be on the walks when inmates went by, she would move to the closest building and stand motionless, like a frightened rabbit freezes when it’s scared. There’s a word for this that the rabbits used in the novel “Watership Down.” The rabbits called it going “tharn,” which the author describes as “that state of staring, glazed paralysis that comes over terrified rabbits, so that they sit and watch their enemies approach to take their lives.” Skelly went “tharn” in the presence of inmates she had been hired to counsel and shepherd through their time in prison.

She was apparently equally afraid of computers, unable to make the leap that the rest of the DOC had into the age of electronic records management and reporting. But she wasn’t afraid of paper. She loved paper, and her office was filled with piles and piles of the stuff, as though she were building a paper wall to separate her further from the inmates. She also loved Post-It notes. It looked like someone had pranked her by covering every available surface of her office with yellow squares, accented with the occasional orange or blue.

When you met with Skelly, she would shuffle through the stacks of documents, searching for the files that told her about you. My first encounter with Skelly was when she and the PSS (psychological support staff – or “psych lady” for short) were holding my review prior to my annual meeting with the PRT (psychological resource team). Because I take a pill for anxiety I have to meet with the PRT every year. I had been supposed to meet with Skelly for my annual review (a general review of your progress as an inmate), but we were eight months past my my annual review, and she had never called me to her office.

So at this Pre-PRT meeting the psych lady asked if I had any questions. I said that I had a question for my counselor. “When am I going to have my annual review?”

“On your DOC anniversary date,” Skelly told me.

I told her that was eight months ago.

“Then that’s when I did your annual review.”

“Without me present?” I asked.

“No,” Skelly said. I met with you then.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s wrong. You haven’t even spoken to me in the year plus that I’ve been on the block.”

She gave a loud sigh, and said, “I most certainly did meet with you.”

What I didn’t realize until later was that the rest of the staff were on to Skelly’s incompetence. The psych lady leaned towards Skelly and said slyly, “Well then, his annual review should be in his file.”

As the psych lady started to leaf through papers, Skelly grabbed the folder and said, “I’ll find it.”

It wasn’t there. Skelly had never performed my annual review. So she proceeded to give me the two-minute condensed review while the psych lady rolled her eyes and smiled behind her hand.

Four months later I was called to Skelly’s office for the regularly scheduled annual review. She did not greet me or even acknowledge my presence. I took a seat in the empty chair so that we sat on opposite sides of her desk with a large computer monitor and stacks of paper between us. I could not see her. So I shifted my chair to the right to be able to make eye contact. She adjusted her own position to her right so the monitor remained between us. Every time I moved to be able to see her, she hid behind the computer screen. She asked me a few required questions and then told me to send the next person in.

This was the person whose job it was to guide me through the system. She would be voting on me to determine whether or not to recommend me to the Parole Board when that time came. And she couldn’t even look me in the eyes. It was the same for everybody. She hid from us and filled out papers. And if you asked her a question, chances were that she didn’t know the answer. Or else she knew the answer and just didn’t want to do any additional work that might result from that answer. Imagine if someone needed serious assistance from her in her role as counselor? I don’t have to imagine, because I saw it play out in real life.

Enter D- Morgan, my friend. I mentioned him in another blog as “M-” (for Morgan) where I wrote about the way he took great care of an older, wheelchair bound inmate, “Mr. H-.” Morgan was in his early forties, a quiet, small-framed guy who stayed away from trouble. He had a history of drug problems, and had successfully completed the TC (therapeutic community) program while in prison. He had also taken the HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) vocational training course and received his certifications. In fact, he had done so well in the class that the HVAC instructor hired him to be the class tutor.

Morgan was getting close to his minimum date and had been granted parole. And as part of the parole process, he had to develop a home plan; that is, find a suitable place to live upon release. It’s not easy. Many inmates do not have the support of family to fall back on. Or if they do have a family that’s willing to take them in, sometimes there is more than one ex-offender in a family unit, and there are rules against residing with graduates of the prison system. If there’s no family option, then inmates look for a house or apartment, a financial impossibility for most inmates who leave prison with the clothes on their back and an empty wallet. If you do have some savings, many landlords will turn you down because you have a criminal record.

As a result of lack of housing options, many inmates are sent to halfway houses. The state-run halfway houses are called CCCs (Community Correction Centers). These are transitional facilities for inmates who live in a spartan, rule-based housing setting as they look for work and other housing. There are two main problems with halfway houses. First, you’re around other recently released inmates who may have established less than wholesome plans for their future, which usually include getting high, connecting with their old bad influences, getting high, thinking up new ways to get in trouble so they can hurry back to prison, and getting high.

The pull of drugs and alcohol is omnipresent for inmates reentering society, even in CCC facilities that are offering drug and alcohol treatment programs. And this creates the second problem: the drug dealers know where the customers are. Since most halfway houses are located in socioeconomically struggling areas, drugs are readily available. And as inmates head out to search for a job, the dealers are there to give them what they want. Not a new start in a life free of addiction and criminal behavior, but a taste of their former existence that is curled and waiting like a boa constrictor, ready to wrap them up and crush the life out of them.

Morgan had a history of drug and alcohol addiction, and he knew what would happen if he went to a halfway house. He also had a history of mental illness, which amplifies the challenges of staying clean and sober. In here they call it “double trouble in recovery.” So he was looking for alternatives to his regional CCC. Through his own initiative, resourcefulness, and letter writing, Morgan was able to locate an apartment tower in his home city that provided subsidized housing for seniors and those with disabilities. His history of mental health issues meant that he could qualify for an apartment. The tower was in a better neighborhood, and he would be away from many of the risks to his successful reintegration into the real world.

He went to Skeletor with the information. He needed her, as an agent of the institution, to complete a resident application and submit it to the housing facility since, as you might expect, the housing facility was skeptical of any information that an incarcerated felon might submit on his own.

Skelly scribbled something down, and Morgan’s request disappeared into her piles of papers and Post-It notes. Days went by, and Morgan had no response. He wrote her request slips. No response. Finally he stopped her on the block and point-blanked her. She went full “tharn” on him, and managed to whisper a nervous “I’m working on it” before scurrying past him.

By chance Morgan had a family-friend connection to one of the prison’s administrators. And he had this family friend contact the administrator, explain the situation, and ask what could be done. Within days, Morgan was called up to the front offices (this never happens, unless the Feds are there to interview you), and the administrator introduced Morgan to one of the administrative assistants, who was told by the administrator to take care of Morgan and handle his housing application process. Morgan was so thankful and appreciative that you could see the relief in his face, in his whole being.

The administrative assistant gathered his information, contacted the housing authority, and got the process moving. But a few weeks later, the helpful assistant, who was pregnant, had to take an unexpected and extended medical leave. It was just weeks until Morgan’s parole date, and the housing application process was not complete.

And so the process was back in Skelly’s feckless hands. Morgan stopped by one day to check her progress on the housing application. And from behind the piles of paper and computer screen, she said, “I’m just going to send you to a CCC.”

Morgan pleaded with her to help him apply to the senior towers. Skelly’s response? “You can have the CCC staff take care of your application when you get there.”

When I shook Morgan’s hand on a July morning to say goodbye, he was nervous. He was paroling into a world of risk, and he knew it. What Skelly had not seen, but what Morgan knew, was that he was in danger. He was like that toddler who had tumbled into the pool and was sitting on the bottom wondering why somebody had not come to his rescue. Wondering why Skelly had failed to do one simple good work that would have changed his life.

Morgan died three months later of a drug overdose. Everything that he had feared came true, and his three months of parole into a toxic setting ended his life.

Garrison Keillor of “Prairie Home Companion” fame once said something like this: “There’s not a lot of good that you have to do in this world, but the good you have to do, you have to do.” God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. What good works has God prepared for you? Do them. Do good works. You can change someone’s life as you join God in achieving his divine plan for the life of the world, and you may even save a life.

Piping Hot Faith

“Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purposes of quarreling over opinions… Let us then pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding… May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Jesus Christ, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” – Romans 14:1,19; 15:5-6

With springtime comes ice cream. As the snow melts and the trees blossom, ice cream stands reopen for the summer season, many times offering free treats to draw customers out of hibernation.

Christianity comes in a lot of different flavors, just like ice cream. The oddest ice cream I ever had was served for dessert at an upscale restaurant – chocolate with chunks of fudge and bacon. If it had not been frozen, I would not have recognized it as ice cream. Even more peculiar, around New Year’s Day I saw a story on TV about an ice cream parlor that served sauerkraut ice cream to kick off the new year. Some flavors of ice cream complement each other, and you might find them in the same dish – strawberry and vanilla. Others clash, and are seldom seen together – lime and peanut butter.

Romans 14:1 to 15:13 deals with different flavors of Christianity. Some ate or abstained from certain foods because of their beliefs. Some preferred Saturday for worship while others preferred Sunday. And these differences were causing strain and quarreling over opinions within the early Church. You’ve probably noticed in life that your own flavor of the Christian faith relates well to the flavors of some family and friends. But then there are those people whose flavor clashes with your own. You don’t really understand them, and they are equally confused by you. This is why many consider it a breach of social etiquette to discuss the topic of religion – you want to avoid the quarreling.

One of my fellow Christian inmates that I clash with is my friend Piper. If my flavor of Christianity is Methodist/Lutheran/Catholic – an ice cream mix of vanilla, coffee beans, and raisins – then Piper’s is Independent/Pentecostal/Fundamentalist/Freestyle – a mix of birthday cake, thumb tacks, jalapeños, and topped off by a whole lot of nuts.

Piper runs hot and cold with his faith. It goes dormant for a year or so, and then bubbles up like an Icelandic volcano and starts spewing out molten lava. He loves to argue, not rationally or logically, but in a passive-aggressive blast of pointed criticism. You know how this sounds. “I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with your religion, BUT…!” “I know we’re all entitled to our own opinion, BUT…!” Once he gets himself wound up, he bombards you with disconnected bits of scripture flung at you like buckshot. And in a confined space like our cell block, it’s hard to get away from him. When Piper’s faith is waxing, he goes to church and Bible study every week, until somebody – the preacher, the Bible study leader, a fellow inmate – makes him upset, and he stops going. Then his faith wanes for a while and he won’t have anything to do with church.

One time I was out in the yard doing a cardio workout beside the jogging track, and Piper wheeled up in his wheelchair (Piper has only one leg). It was a beautiful sunny day, and Piper was trending hot for Jesus. He had his tablet computer with him and his headphones on, and was listening to contemporary Christian music. He parked his chair there beside the small concrete pad where I was doing pushups, sit-ups, and burpees. Then with his face turned toward the sunshine, he started singing along with the Christian music, in a manner that allowed me to both recognize the song and cringe at his intonation. He sang to the sky, drawing looks from all who kept coming by on the jogging track. They would glance at Piper, in his religious fever, and then at me with a look of sympathy for having my perfectly nice afternoon of exercise interrupted. Between songs, Piper would talk to Jesus, loudly, with a lot of thank-yous and amens.

Another time I noticed that Piper had a lot of Post-It notes stuck on the inside of his cell door and all over the walls. He said the devil was in his cell, or demons, or both. The sticky notes bore religious phrases and Bible verses and pictures of crosses that were there to drive out the evil that had taken up residence. This evil manifested itself in claw marks on the ceiling that only Piper could see. I asked him if the notes were working. “They help,” he said, “but the devil keeps sending his demons to get me.” Within a month or two the yellow notes were mostly gone, and Piper’s fear of the demonic had waned.

Then there was the time that Piper saw Jesus walking around outside our cell block. It was around three AM, and Piper hit his call button to alert the nighttime guard. He told the CO that from his cell window he had seen a guy walking out near the security fence. He insisted it was Jesus. Within minutes COs with flashlights and vehicles with spotlights converged on the area that Piper had specified. The lights shining in the cell windows woke up a lot of inmates who thought someone was going over the fence. After a thorough search of the area, the guards declared the perimeter Jesus-free, and everybody went back to sleep.

When I started attending Catholic Mass instead of Protestant worship, Piper repeatedly put me on the spot and demanded that I answer all his criticisms of Catholic theology and practice. Piper said he was against “religion,” which he somehow equated with the Roman Catholic Church, and told me that instead I just needed to have personal faith, which meant believing what he believed. He had never heard of the Nicene Creed or Apostle’s Creed, and had no use for them. “That’s man’s teaching, not God’s teaching.” I was patient with him, and did my best to answer his attacks calmly and with reason and truth. He thought that Catholics were barred from reading the Bible, and was surprised to learn that the Mass contained so much scripture reading – Old Testament, Psalm, Epistle, and Gospel – every Sunday. And that Catholics even read and studied their Bibles throughout the week. We had lots of other chats about his misperceptions of Catholic “idol” worship, “worshipping” Mary and the saints, confessing to priests “instead of God,” and blindly obeying the “Antichrist Pope.” By the end of several months of dialog, he still thought I was treading the wrong and dangerous theological path, but maybe – just MAYBE – I was not going to hell.

Piper’s own relationship with scripture was a hodgepodge. He would fire verses at people, oftentimes misquoting the Bible, and string together pieces from Genesis to Revelation to support his argument. When he was peppering me with the Word in this way, I would bring out my Bible and look not only at the correct text of the verses, but at the words around the verses and what their contextual meaning was. His view was that he did not need to have his Bible at hand. God gave him the verses directly for him to use in any situation. He would argue, “Doesn’t the Bible say (insert verse out of context here)?” And I’d ask where that verse came from. Many times he had no idea. So I’d take him into the Bible and suggest that verses are not stones to throw at people, but part of a larger story of who God is, and how we are to relate to God and live our lives. Sometimes, a few times, he even saw what I was trying to show him. But only sometimes. And sometimes he stretched me to see my own faith in a new and different light.

The biggest stretch for me was around New Year’s Day 2019. My parents were traveling to Florida for their annual winter escape from the frozen North to the tropical paradise of Clearwater, Florida, where they typically stayed until April. Their trip south took three days, and they took turns driving. I refrained from calling them during their travel days for two reasons: I did not want to be a distraction by calling when they were driving, and they were usually exhausted at the end of the day after navigating busy highways. So I waited until the fourth day, New Year’s Eve, figuring that they would have had time to arrive in Florida and recover a bit from their trek.

As soon as I called, Mom answered, and I knew something was wrong. She could not talk, she said. They were at the emergency room and were admitting Dad who might be having a heart attack or pneumonia or both. On the first day of their journey, Dad had started to feel weak. Mom took over the driving. Dad got weaker by the day, but insisted on pressing on. When he had problems standing and walking, Mom wanted to call 911. Dad insisted that they should get to Florida, and he would get checked out there. Their journey took four days instead of three. As soon as they got to Clearwater, Mom ignored any further argument from Dad and drove him straight to the hospital, making this a Guinness World Record for the longest trip to an emergency room.

Mom had to go, and I would not be able to call until the next day. I told her I loved them and was praying for them. As soon as I hung up, I emailed the people on my list at I had contact with and asked them to join in praying for Dad. Then I sat at one of the tables in our block common area, feeling anxious and helpless. All around me inmates were playing cards or dominos, watching TV, talking and laughing and shouting, making phone calls, getting showers. We were close to locking in for the night, and there was literally nothing I could do except pray.

At that moment, Piper rolled up in his wheelchair. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “I’ve never seen you look like this.”

I was in a daze, but did my best to explain the situation to Piper.

“Can I pray for you?” he asked.

My first thought was that this would be a bad idea. I wasn’t certain what constituted “prayer” for Piper, but I was pretty certain that it would be in a very different idiom from the way I spoke to God. Just as I was ready to tell him I was going to my cell to pray on my own, he wheeled directly in front of me, grabbed my hands, and bowed his head. “Heavenly Father…,” he began. That sounded familiar enough, so I bowed my head and closed my eyes.

With the noise and busy-ness of the block swirling around us, Piper held my hands firmly and prayed for my dad, for the doctors and nurses caring for him, for the healing he needed, for my mom that she feel God’s peace and love, for me that I trust that God had my father in his good hands. There was one part about God’s will and whether Dad lived or died that caused me a moment of fretting. But when Piper got to “Amen,” I knew that he had lifted to God everything that needed to be said, and I felt peace settle over me like a summer rain, washing away my sense of helplessness and worry.

Piper checked in with me over the next several days as I made calls and received news about Dad. Dad had two stents inserted into blocked arteries around his heart. He received antibiotics for a blood infection and treatment for possible blood clots. But he was on his way to wellness, and I rejoiced when I could talk to him again on the phone.

Despite all of our differences as Christians, God put Piper in the right time and place with the right prayer to minister to me in a desperate time of need. And I knew that although our different flavors of Christianity would certainly reignite our quarrels over opinions at some point in the future, Piper had in some important and faithful way fulfilled God’s hope for us as expressed in Romans: “May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Jesus Christ, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Words Like a Honeycomb

“Pleasant words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body.” – Proverbs 16:24

When I first came to prison, a former coworker sent me a letter of encouragement. Among his words was an exhortation to read. Reading, he said, opens your mind to a world bigger than the space you’re in. A book will take you, if only for a while, beyond those cell walls that try to close you in.

I’ve lost track of how many books I’ve read in prison. Thank God for prison libraries, and for friends and family who have sent me books! When I was out there in the real world, facing the challenges of everyday living, I wished that I had more time to read. While that may seem like a warning to be careful what you wish for, I am thankful for the idle time I have endured by escaping into the written word.

When I read John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars,” I learned that Anne Frank, in addition to her famous “Diary,” kept a notebook of quotations from books that she read. I have done the same for these past nearly eight years, filling up composition books with words that I found meaningful from the books I read. There were a few books in which I found nothing noteworthy, but they were the exception. Even the worst storyteller eventually produces a gem that hits the proverbial nail on the head, so that when you come across it, it shines a spotlight of truth on your experience.

In 2020, with the isolation of pandemic restrictions, many people turned to reading to lift themselves beyond the limits of six-foot separation. In here, our normal level of social distancing was magnified to the point that on most days, we’ve spent less than an hour or two outside our cells. That meant more time to read! So here’s a sample of my year of literary mind expansion, as I put on my headphones, turned on classical music, and lived vicariously through storytelling that helped me to endure and transcend confinement.

In January I read Diana Gabaldon’s “Voyager,” part of her “Outlander” series, in which she talks about finding peace in the difficult times of life:

“It had happened before, many times, but it always took me by surprise. Always in the midst of great stress, wading waist-deep in trouble and sorrow… I would glance out a window, open a door, look into a face, and there it would be, unexpected and unmistakable. A moment of peace. I never looked for it, gave it no name; yet I knew it always when the gift of peace came. I stood quite still for the moment that it lasted, thinking it strange and not strange that grace should find me here, too.”

In February I found this image of light in Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See”:

“The brain is locked in total darkness, or course. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”

March brought Covid restrictions in abundance, and I found these words about courage in Conn Iggulden’s “Genghis: Birth of an Empire”:

“Courage cannot be left like bones in a bag. It must be brought out and shown the light again and again, growing stronger each time. If you think it will keep for the times you need it, you are wrong. It is like any other part of your strength. If you ignore it, the bag will be empty when you need it the most.”

That same month I also found this line in Chuck Wendig’s “Wanderers.” Coffee drinkers will understand:

“Saying that Cassie Tran had a coffee habit was like saying that fish had a water habit.”

April eliminated our Easter worship service, and I encountered these words in Neal Stephenson’s “Anathem”:

“Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”

In May, when so many people working in the meatpacking industry were getting Covid, I read Upton Sinclair’s classic “The Jungle”:

“Yet the soul of Ona was not dead – the souls of none of them were dead, but only sleeping; and now and then they would awaken, and these were cruel times. The gates of memory would roll open – old joys would stretch out their arms to them, old hopes and dreams would call to them, and they would stir beneath the burden that lay upon them, and feel its forever immeasurable weight.”

June took me back a thousand years to Bernard Cornwell’s “The Sword of Kings,” part of his Saxon Tales series, where the hero irreverently affirms the need for God’s aid:

“The Lord of Hosts is with us,” Father Oda said.

“He damned well better be,” Utrich replied.

July took me to a fictional account of Roger Bacon and the beginning of scientific thought in James Blish’s “Doctor Mirabilis.” There was a short Latin quote just four words, but four powerful words that connect hope and fear:

“Nec spe nec metu” which translates “No hope can have no fear.”

In August I learned that the Parole Board was extending my stay here at Camp Sunshine, and I came across this passage in Grant Naylor’s sci-fi comedy “Red Dwarf.” It has to do with boredom, and maybe by this point in the Covid restrictions you were bored as well:

“Five months later, Lister stared out of the sleeping quarter’s viewport window and saw nothing. Just a few, very distant stars, and an awful lot of black. It was pretty much the same view he’d had for the past twenty-one weeks. At first he’d found it awe-inspiring. Then slowly, that had given way to just plain dull. Then very dull. Then deeply dull. And now it was something below deeply dull, and even below deeply, hideously dull; a word for which had yet to be devised.

“If you went to the British Library and changed every word in every single book to the word ‘dull,’ and then read out all the books in a boring monotone, you would come pretty close to describing Lister’s life onboard Red Dwarf.”

In September I found these words about endurance in journalist Sebastian Junger’s account of soldiers in Afghanistan, “War”:

“The most valuable thing I knew from all that running [in training] was that when you start hurting you’re not even close to the bottom of the valley, and that if you don’t panic at the first agonies there’s much, much more of yourself to give.”

October included another war biography, Navy SEAL Erich Blehm’s “Fearless,” in which he wrote a note to his father, and it made me think of the many ways I am thankful for my own father:

“Dad: Thanks for instilling in me all that I have. Thanks for believing in me even when I didn’t believe in myself. God couldn’t of given me a better example of who I want to be in my life. If I become half the man you are, I’ll be happy of who I am. I wish I could express in words the respect I have for you. I think you’re the greatest dad ever. Thanks for being so positive in my life.”

In November I read Palestinian doctor Izzeldin Abuelaish’s “I Shall Not Hate.” He had this to say about happiness and joy:

“If you measure happiness in your hand, it is good, but it is for you alone. But the happiness you have by sharing it with others, imagine how much larger it would be. Happiness is for sharing, not for keeping to ourselves. We are so much better when enriched by others and much happier when there is a common joy.”

I ended 2020 with Victor Hugo’s very big book “Les Miserables” that had this great incite into moments of epiphany – God being made known to us:

“There are thoughts which are prayers. These moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.”

As I said earlier, I have composition books full of quotes like these. And when I need encouragement or solace, I flip through the pages of these gleanings from years of reading. I encourage you to get a notebook and do the same. When you read something that really speaks to your soul, write it down. And when you need a boost in the hard times of life, these passages that you scribbled on a page will be like a honeycomb, sweetness to your soul.

Mischief by Statute

When I thought, “My foot is slipping,” your steadfast love, O Lord, held me up.

When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul.

Can wicked rulers be allied with you, those who contrive mischief by statute?

But the Lord has become my stronghold, and my God the rock of my refuge.

– Psalm 94:18-20,22

Football is a game of rules, and the game is played according to these rules. If not, a guy dressed in black and white stripes (we don’t wear stripes in prison – just plain old solid DOC brown) throws a yellow flag on the field and penalties are assessed. Some of these rules are as old as the game itself. Some of them are changed by the agreement of the NFL. Some rule changes, like those against targeting of a player’s head and neck area, make sense. Others, like the challenges to review pass interference calls, were tried and rejected.

One of the basic rules of football is that a team has four tries, or downs, to advance the ball ten yards on the field. Imagine in the middle of a game that a team has completed two of those downs, and still has not reached the ten yard marker. Let’s say they still have six yards left to go. That makes it third down and six. The offense knows where that imaginary yellow first down line that we see on TV is located. They know how far they have to go, and their strategy is to get past that line.

Imagine then that a referee suddenly runs onto the field and informs the players that the rules have been changed. Instead of ten yards, the offense now has to move the ball thirty yards to achieve a new first down! That makes it third down and twenty-six yards to go! The chances of successfully completing this third down conversion plummet. Nobody knew this rule change was coming. Somewhere in the recesses of NFL decision making, there was a discussion and a vote. And now, this is just the way it’s going to work.

This has just happened in the state of Pennsylvania, not with football, but with parole decisions for inmates. And many of us in here are as mystified and confused as those football players would be by such an abrupt and patently disruptive and unfair change to the rules of the game.

Here are the basic rules of parole. For nearly every crime, except for those with a life sentence, judges analyze the requirements of the law and issue two dates related to a defendant’s sentence: a minimum and a maximum. A minimum sentence is the amount of time which must elapse before an inmate is eligible for parole. This does not guarantee parole when that minimum sentence date is reached. Instead, it means that the parole board will evaluate an inmate’s readiness for release back into the community, where they will abide by strict parole requirements until they reach their maximum sentence date, and their period of parole comes to an end. A maximum sentence is the most amount of time that a person can be imprisoned related to their crime.

I’m going to use myself as an example. I received a sentence of nine to twenty-five years. After an appeal, my sentence was changed to five-and-a-half to seventeen years. This means that I was eligible for parole in December of 2018. Because the DOC failed to enroll me in required programming, I was not reviewed for parole until November 2019. At that time I had not yet finished my program, and was told by the Parole Board that I would be reviewed again after completion. I completed the program in March 2020 and met with the Board in July. In August I received a denial of parole with two-year hit. This means that I would not be reviewed again by the Parole Board until August 2022.

As you can imagine, I was less than pleased with this result. My interviews had not gone well for a number of reasons which I won’t elaborate here. But I still had some hope. Under the existing statutes, I could apply for “early” review by the Board after completing one year of the two-year hit, which would be in August of this year. I was not guaranteed to receive an early review, but it often happened.

This is the point in the game where the referee ran onto the field and announced the rule change. On November 25, 2020 (the day before Thanksgiving of all things!) the governor signed into law Act 124, based on House Bill 1538 of 2019.

Before the new bill was signed into law, the rules regarding requests for early parole review said this: “The Board shall not be required to consider nor dispose of an application by an inmate or an inmate’s attorney where a parole decision has been issued by the Board on that case within one year of the date of the current application for parole” (Section 6139.a.3). In other words, if an inmate applies for early review on a long parole hit, the Board has no obligation to act on that request until a year has passed since the denial of parole. Under this long-existing rule, the Board, in nearly all cases, did not take action on requests for review within less than one year of a decision, and instead moved the request to the recycle bin.

The new law adds a section (6149.a.3.3.i) which changes the one-year exclusion to a three-year exclusion for a list of crimes, including murder, manslaughter, kidnapping, and a number of sexual offenses. This change effectively eliminates the possibility for an early parole review decision for people convicted of these crimes who receive a multi-year parole hit. In my case, it nearly eliminates the possibility of receiving an early review after August of this year. Instead I will have to wait until August 2022. So with the stroke of a pen, I’ve gone from third down and seven months to third down and nineteen months.

While I understand the impetus behind such a law change in the sense of cracking down on the worst of the worst crimes and offenders, I believe there are several deficiencies in this new rule, and that its intent is misguided.

First, Act 124 creates a separate law for a class of offenses, while keeping the one-year rule in place for nearly all other crimes. The class of offenses listed in this act already carry very long sentences. The legislature has previously issued specific sentencing guidelines which judges use to determine minimum and maximum sentences. The Act is effectively a move by the legislature to override the independent discretion of the judiciary and extend the length of minimum sentences, making long sentences longer.

Second, Act 124 applies this rule in general across the board for all offenders. A key facet of our judicial system is the consideration of an individual offender when a judge hands down a sentence. While the courts have general sentencing guidelines in place, the judge also considers a wide range of factors after conducting a presentence investigation: criminal history, age, employment history, family history, education, victim impact statements, and any other mitigating or aggravating factors. The judge then takes all of this information into account and creates a sentence that he or she feels is fitting for that individual offender. Act 124 instead applies the same restrictive policy to all inmates that committed certain crimes. As the rule existed, the Parole Board had discretion to consider an individual’s circumstances and decide whether or not an early review was warranted. Act 124 takes that discretion away, further limiting the judgment of the Parole Board when assessing a unique person applying for parole.

Third, Act 124 singles out a set of crimes which have lower risks of recidivism than crimes which are not subject to this change in the law. Recidivism means the repetition of illegal behavior after one has been punished for a crime. According to a US Department of Justice report from 2014, violent offenders were less likely to be arrested for a new crime than property offenders, drug offenders, and public order offenders. Only around ⅓ of violent offenders were arrested for another violent crime. When it comes to sexual offenses, only 5.6% of persons convicted of rape or sexual assault are arrested for a new rape or sexual assault within five years of release from prison. Other studies that follow repeat offenses over a longer period of time place the rate at less than 14%. Act 124 is counterproductive. It punishes the people with a remarkably lower risk of recidivism, while leaving the one-year early parole application option in place for those who are far more likely to leave prison and commit another crime.

Fourth, keeping people in prison past their minimum sentences is costly. In a 2020 report by PA Auditor General Eugene A. Pasquale titled “Criminal Justice: Reforms to Improve Lives & Save Money,” Pasquale states that “lock-’em-up, tough-on-crime policies started in the 1990s” along with “mandatory minimums, three-strikes-and-you’re-out and other buzz phrases that once sounded good are turning out to be, in practice, unsustainable both fiscally and morally. These practices all cost taxpayers money. For example, Pennsylvania spent $2.6 billion in fiscal year 2018-2019 to incarcerate roughly 45,929 people.” That’s a cost of over $56,000 per inmate! Act 124 results in keeping inmates further past their minimum sentences, and this creates a significant financial burden on a system that is already weighing heavily on the state budget.

Fifth and finally, Act 124 was enacted on the common assumption that more time in prison makes one a better human being. It doesn’t. The simple fact of the matter is that sitting in prison for a fair amount of time as decided by a court, and supported with education, vocational training, and corrective programming, increases an inmate’s chances for success in the world upon release. In my case, though, I’ve been told to sit here for two more years with no more requirements for programs or education. I am simply to behave myself by remaining free of misconduct and see the Board in two years. A denial of liberty appropriately applied by a fair minimum sentence can achieve a punitive and reformative effect on an inmate. However, an extended denial of liberty beyond that point in overcrowded, dehumanizing confinement wears on an inmate and can negatively impact any beneficial outcome. It takes a strong sense of self-worth, a focus on self-improvement, and the maintenance of a positive attitude to rise above the debilitating effects of freedom denied and long delayed. And it especially takes a lot of faith in Jesus as my stronghold and the rock of my refuge.

So what do I do now that it seems that my stay here will lengthen?

On the morning after I found out about this change in the rules, I went outside to our small exercise yard for our every-other-day fifty minutes of fresh air. I was the only inmate out that cold, early morning. As I worked out alone on the weight machines, still stressing over the bad news of Act 124, a sharp-shinned hawk flew overhead and perched on a security camera – right in the middle of the prison. Hawks, for me, are one of the ways that God lets me know that I’m not alone, and that things are going to be OK. The hawk watched me work out for about ten minutes and then flew off. A few minutes later Father McDonald, our prison chaplain, came through the yard on his way to the block to deliver the Eucharist. I received communion and a blessing. God could not have been more clear to me! He’s got this!

So I will apply for early parole review in August as I had planned to do. I will pray, and I ask that you will join me in prayer that the Parole Board consider my application and grant me early review. They don’t have to, but they are able to, if they so choose. I will pray for mercy and freedom, and I will also pray for the grace of God to cheer my heart and hold me up as I face the challenge of a longer distance on this new and extended third down.

Noises

Just so you know, this one might be a little gross. It has to do with the things you discover about another human being when you live in close proximity. As the old saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. And whether they be spouse, sibling, friend, roommate, or coworker, the more we are around other people, the more we become aware of their quirks and eccentricities.

The confines of prison force you to spend more time with another individual than most people would ever choose. When people ask me what prison is like, I tell them they can discover the answer themselves in four easy steps: 1) move two beds into your bathroom; 2) pick a random stranger on the street to move into the bathroom with you; 3) have someone else close and lock the bathroom door from the outside; 4) spend the next several years getting to know and appreciate each other.

You cannot help but notice everything your cellie does. And sometimes his actions become unbearable, which leads to tension in the carceral relationship. But what do you do when your criticisms of your cellie sound petty, even to your own ears? How do you live out the Christian faith when you cannot stand some of the things the person “closest” to you does?

After I’d been with a previous cellie, Princess, for about two months, I ran into his old cellie, Tim. Tim asked me how things were going with Princess, and I replied, “Fine.” Fine is one of those ambiguous responses that covers a lot of ground, from “tolerable” to “horrific, but I don’t want to complain.”

“Fine, huh?” Tim seemed to know that there was tension in my cellular life with Princess. And then he asked me a most peculiar question. A question that I’ve never been asked before about any fellow human. “How can you stand those mouth noises?”

Unfortunately the question made perfect sense to me, and I exclaimed, “No kidding!” Then Tim and I spent the next half hour covering the plethora of oral and nasal and other expressions that Princess produces.

1) The Deep Snort. And I mean Snor-or-or-or-ort! He claims that he can’t breathe through his nose. He has to breathe through his mouth instead. But in order to maintain a partially clear airway through his nose, sinuses, and throat, he does a full-bodied, extended-stacatto inhale that is part machine gun and part ShopVac. The Deep Snort is generally followed by…

2) The Earsplitting Throat Clear. Cuh-CUH! If this occurs in the close quarters of the cell, the decibel level of the Throat Clear can cause tinnitus. If your ear is anywhere in the direct path of the Cuh-CUH concussion, you risk ruptured eardrums. One handy side effect of the Throat Clear is that you can locate your cellie anywhere, even out in the yard, just by listening. There he goes – out on the block, back row of chairs in front of the block television. And I didn’t even have to look!

3) The Self-Initiated Belch. When you were a child, you might have discovered that you can make yourself burp by gulping air and swallowing it into your stomach. Gagunk-gagunk-BURP! Princess was apparently so amazed at his childhood auto-belch that he continues it even at age 61. He loves to start out the mornings with a chorus of Gagunk-gagunk-BURPs. And if he overhears me performing my own occasional natural belch, he immediately counters with his air gulping, inflating his stomach to the required pressure to generate a BURP that is longer and louder than mine.

4) The Air Sample. Sniff-sniff-pause (repeat endlessly). If Princess senses a potential odor floating around the cell, he begins to Sniff-sniff, despite his claim that he cannot breathe through his nose. Any time I open food packaging, sprinkle detergent in my wash bin, or seat myself on the toilet, he starts Sniff-sniffing. The detection of any irritating scent triggers his countermeasure – lighting a homemade cinnamon incense stick that he keeps by his bunk. He waves the incense around and continues to Sniff-sniff until he’s certain the smell emergency has passed. He is particularly averse to Tide detergent and packaged chicken breast.

5) The Dying Breath. Gasp-gasp-gassssp! Although Princess claims to be in excellent physical condition, any mild exertion, such as rooting around through his multiple boxes of chips, cupcakes, and other food stored beneath his bunk, causes a fit of huffing and puffing. One day a younger black inmate was at the cell door, begging a few pieces of candy from Princess. After he mined some candy from his under-bed treasure trove, he presented it to the inmate at the door with a Gasp-gasp-gassssp! The inmate responded to the labored breathing with, “Get that old man noise sh-t out of my face!”

6) The Orange Slice Shlurp. Princess has determined that eating three oranges per day will keep him at the pinnacle of health. He quarter slices the oranges, inserts a slice against the few teeth left in his mouth, closes his lips over the rind, then gums the orange pulp while humming num-num-num. As soon as the juice is depleted, he extracts the rind from his mouth with a loud Shlurp! Do the math – three oranges, four quarters each, means num-num-num-Shlurp! twelve times in rapid succession, and I mean rapid! He hardly stops for a Dying Breath, going through the fruit with such haste that you would think they were the worst tasting medicine on earth and he was in a rush to get it over with.

7) The Gas Pass. Okay – obviously not a mouth noise, but it is nearly always followed by the whisper-muffled apology, “Oh, excuse me,” which comes across as, “Oo, a-oo-ma.”

8) The Mocha-Slurp-Uccino. Princess makes one cup of coffee each morning. He calls it a mochaccino, a concoction of powdered cappuccino, creamer, sugar, and instant coffee. He never takes a sip from his cup – it’s always a long slurp.

9) The Triple Slurp. Princess owns a second cup with a spill proof lid just for water. Like the mochaccino, he never sips, he slurps, though he doesn’t slurp his water just once – it’s always in clusters of three followed by the satisfied lip smack and gasp of “aaaah.” The Triple Slurp is best enjoyed at 4 am, right after Princess has risen to urinate for the seventh time that night.

10) The Chomp and Breathe. Princess likes to cook things in the cell, and he likes to eat them hot. After taking a large bite of hot food, he tries to chew and breathe at the same time. But remember, he says he can’t breathe through his nose. So it’s an open-mouth chew that goes, Chomp chomp gasp… chomp chomp gasp.”

There are other mouth noises, but this gives you an idea of the repertoire of sounds that Princess produces. And of course the mouth noises come in combinations. Here’s a for instance. Princess is reclining on his bunk watching “Dance Moms.” (He loves that show, but that’s a story for another time.) At the commercial break he clears his throat, Cuh-CUH, and then sits up to reach for his sippy cup of water, Slurp-slurp-slurp-lipsmack-aaaah! The action of sitting up has dislodged a bubble in his intestines which results in the passing of gas and the mumbled apology, “Oo, a-oo-ma.” With the chance that he has generated a malodor, he scans the cell air – Sniff-sniff-pause, Sniff-sniff-pause. Satisfied that the expulsion was benign, but before settling back onto the bed to continue with the dramatic joy of Dance Moms, he curtails the sniffing and launches into three auto-belches. Gagunk-gagunk-BURP! (x 3)

I know this may sound like I’m just whining about the struggles of life with a cellie, but my hunch is that you may know something of what I’m talking about. While you probably don’t have a cellie, you might have a spouse, significant other, child, parent, friend, coworker, neighbor, or someone else who knows how to annoy you with a mouth noise or two. So what I want to share with you is my journey of self-discovery as I wrestled with how to live with the mouth noises without choking out the source.

I turned first to psychology, where I was surprised to learn that my irritation with my cellie’s mouth noises is apparently a problem with me, not him. I read an article by Elizabeth Bernstein entitled, “I Love You, But I Can’t Stand the Way You Chew,” in which she asks, “If you can’t stand the sound of someone’s chewing, does that person need to close his or her mouth? Or do you?” She goes on to write that “people who have an extreme aversion to specific noises – most often ‘mouth sounds’ such as chewing or lip-smacking, but also noises such as…sniffing – suffer from a condition called misophonia,” which may affect up to 20% of the population, according to researchers.

One woman in the article says that she is aware of her misophonia, and “feels solace knowing she’s not alone.” I already knew I was not alone because Princess’s old cellie had described his own misophonia disorder quite clearly to me, “How can you stand the mouth noises?”

As much as I had been tempted to launch into a verbal tirade and stuff socks into Princess’s mouth, the article made it clear that this was not an appropriate response. “The person who is annoyed by the sounds is the one who needs to change and learn coping skills. If others accommodate you by changing…they are only enabling you.”

What are these coping skills that I was supposed to learn? According to the article, I should not seek to avoid the sounds. “If you always put on headphones [which I tried] or move to another room [which is hard to accomplish in a prison cell], you aren’t fully participating in the relationship. The idea is to learn to tolerate the symptoms.”

So, to sum up, I suffer from a psychological condition called misophonia. If I complain to my cellie about his mouth noises, I am being unfair to him. If he stops making noises because I complain, then I have caused him to become an enabler for my condition. If I try and block out the noises with head phones, I am harming our cellie relationship. The only solution is to learn to tolerate the symptoms.

Therefore, on the one hand, I want to shove a sock in my cellie’s mouth. But on the other hand, psychologists say I need to own my condition and seek to be more understanding. What do I do? Or, as a Christian slogan goes, WWJD?

Not surprisingly, scripture is fairly silent on mouth noises. Historically, we know that in biblical times, people lived in much smaller homes and shelters, and were in closer proximity without the benefit of headphones or white noise generators. I would have expected at least one disciple at the Last Supper to be bothered by the way one of the other guys was chewing with his mouth open. But in order to keep them from getting on each other’s nerves, perhaps Jesus healed his followers of any existing misophonia.

There is an apocryphal scripture, Sirach 19:9, which says, “Let anything you hear die within you; be assured it will not make you burst.” Though this is about gossip and refraining from spreading what you hear, it also works with mouth noises. Deal with it. It won’t kill you. No one ever exploded from listening to someone making mouth noises. There is a risk, though, that I could explode in anger and hurtful speech.

After more searching I came across Psalm 59. In this psalm, David is in trouble. King Saul’s men have been sent to seek out and kill David. David says that his enemies roam around searching for him, “making noises like a dog.” And they “belch out with their mouth.” What is God’s response? David writes, “But you, O Lord , laugh at them.” God laughs at these noisemakers. And so I wondered, if God’s response to grunting miscreants is laughter, could laughter as a response to my sonorous cellie work for me? Turns out, it does.

I discovered that if I gave a little fake belch, then Princess fired off a series of Gagunk-gagunk-BURPs. If I cleared my throat lightly, he proceeded to ahem and Sno-or-or-ort, culminating in a blast of Cuh-CUH! From my top bunk I could quietly produce a cycle of his own noises, initiating a fury of echoing sounds until it wore him out and he stopped for a while.

If I gave a little raspberry noise with my tongue and lips, he Sniff-sniff-paused repeatedly, trying to detect the odor from a suspected flatulent that he thought I had released. And sometimes he even lit his cinnamon incense!

When he Shlurped his three oranges, I turned my TV to the prison information channel that displayed a clock, and I timed how many seconds it took for him to race through his fruit slurping. His record was twenty-five seconds. Not bad for three oranges!

When he chomp, chomp, gasped through his hot food, I put on my headphones and played Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” otherwise known as the Lone Ranger Theme. The headphones didn’t completely cover up his chomping and breathing, but the accompaniment made me smile.

I turned the very things that annoyed me into mischief and mirth. Of course, I was doing nothing to cure myself of misophonia, but I was, with laughter, improving my relationship with my cellie. I was adapting as I was able so that I could live in peace with him, lower my blood pressure, and avoid the consideration of where to find duct tape to cover his mouth. I’m certain that Elizabeth Bernstein would be appalled by and frown at my actions, but there’s only so much psychology one can bring to bear in a seven-foot by eleven-foot box.

Laughter for me did indeed prove to be the best medicine, and I was able to endure my years with Princess. Eventually, I moved to another cell, and Princess brought in a new, unsuspecting inmate to serenade. It wasn’t long before that inmate sought me out in a quiet corner and asked, “How did you stand it?”

“God got me through it,” I replied.

“What, did you pray or something?”

“No, I read my Bible and I laughed.”

Tongue of Fire

“The tongue is a fire… and is itself set on fire by hell.” – James 3:6

One of the greatest things about America is our Constitutional right to the freedom of speech. We can say whatever we want. And one of the worst things about America is that we can say whatever we want. I don’t have access to all the tweets, posts, blogs, and other electronic information and disinformation churning through cyberspace, and maybe that’s a good thing. The little bit I do see on the news is disconcerting enough. I cannot imagine the daily bombardment that you out in the real world are experiencing.

In here we have our voices, and with the enthusiasm surrounding the election I’ve been hearing a lot of voices. On Saturday November 7, after Biden was declared president elect, an inmate shouted from his cell, “Forget Donald Trump.” He said something other than “forget,” and he said it many times to make sure we all heard. Later that day an 87-year-old inmate told me he hated Democrats, a theme I’d heard from him for many months leading up to the election. If you wanted to get him fired up, you just whispered the name “Biden,” and then walked away quickly. Another inmate had strong views about VP-elect Harris, saying, “Forget them black people.” He said something other than “black people.” Building on his point, he added, “Them forgetting black people are taking over the government.” Out in the yard I was talking to a fellow inmate about the election. A female CO walked by and said, “Forgetting Biden stole that election.” The day ended with an inmate collecting on a bet over the outcome of the election: “I told you that orange mother forgetter was going to lose.”

When I was a child singing songs at vacation Bible school, I learned, “Oh, be careful little eyes what you see.” Maybe you learned it, too. One of the verses goes, “Oh, be careful little mouth what you say…. Cause your Father up above, he is looking down with love. So be careful little mouth what you say.” And while we know that God sees and hears everything, because God is omnipresent and omniscient, we often live our lives without scrutinizing the words our tongues rattle off. This is not something new among humankind. The Epistle of James was written almost 2,000 years ago, and in it James writes that the human tongue is a major problem: “With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so.”

If James thought the tongue was a problem back then, what would he think of social media today? Although we would never say some of the things we write if we were face-to-face with another person, our fingers seem more than ready to take over for our hesitant tongues to lash out from a perceived safe distance. The old adage to think before we speak has gone by the wayside as our primal brain has found a direct route to the keypad. Deep within us lurks a sensitive, subconscious center that monitors the world around us at a faster-than-thought pace. With the loss of real threats like sabre tooth tigers stalking us or enemies crouching behind bushes waiting to hurl spears at us, our primal brain responds with equal measure to somebody tweeting something we don’t agree with. And without a second thought, or sometimes even a first thought, it’s Flame On, as our fingers unleash fury.

Social media promised to draw us closer together, to open us to other points of view, to allow us to dialog with those outside our own narrow ways of thinking and being. Instead, it seems that we have misused the possibilities and potential of electronic connectedness to fashion an antisocial media. This public space of civil discourse has devolved into a weaponized wedge that pries us farther and farther apart.

So, from deep in my disconnected world where I have way too much time to think about things, I want to encourage you to stop being a DRAIN on the world of electronic communication and to instead be a BOOST to those who read your words.

DRAIN is an acronym for the kind of antisocial behavior that James addresses in his Epistle: envy, boastfulness, falsehoods, selfishness, disorder, wickedness, hypocrisy, conflicts, disputes, and cursing (not meaning bad language, but malediction, in which we speak harm or evil against another). DRAIN describes the process by which we spew forth the brackishness and venom of our unchecked minds.

DRAIN stands for Divisive Reflexive Aggressive Ideological Nonsense.

Divisive – It’s Us against Them, or sometimes Me against Everybody. They’re wrong, I’m right. It doesn’t matter what you say, I’m not even going to listen to anything you have to say, nor will I consider doing any of the mental work (thinking) that might influence me to change my mind. And the more distance I can put between you and me, even if it’s verbal distance (or grammatical distance), the better I feel about me.

Reflexive – I’m going to blurt out the first thing that comes into my mind automatically and without subjecting it to any higher mental scrutiny. I might try later to make what I said sound better, or to say that I misspoke, but that’s usually not necessary, because (see Divisive) I’m right and they’re not.

Aggressive – I know that my mind is a complex center of emotions, memories, thoughts, and neurochemistry, but I prefer to think of myself as rational and everybody else as irrational. However, most unchecked expressions that my mind produces tend to be rooted in emotions, which are most easily translated into anger. And although I know that my angry expressions may come across as hostile, that’s okay, because my primal brain has me locked and loaded for cyber combat. And I seem to be able to type the fastest whenever I’m convinced the recipient or target is an idiot.

Ideological – The things I care the most about are the things I’m willing to go to war over. These are my core principles, my beliefs, my religion, my politics, my morals, my social and and cultural identity. I keep these ideologies so closely guarded that, like most people, I don’t even challenge myself by digging deeper to ask why I believe what I believe. And I’ll be darned if I’m going to rattle my foundations by allowing someone else to suggest that there might be another way of looking at life, the universe, and everything.

Nonsense – Wait a second. Hold the phone. Am I saying that what I am sharing with others is nonsense? Here are some tests for nonsense. Am I assuming that I know exactly how others think and feel, and that I know precisely what their internal motivations are? Am I using hyperbole – the worst, the best, the most, the greatest, the least, the only? Am I overgeneralizing – all, every, no one, never, always? Am I commanding others with my speech – must, shall, have to, should, had better? Our Declaration of Independence, echoing Paine’s “Common Sense,” states that “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” That’s a bold statement for anyone to make, and I believe our forefathers had it right. But when I start believing that everything that comes from my own tongue is self-evident truth, then it’s probably evident to many that I’m spouting nonsense.

That’s what it means to be a DRAIN on social media. And as a counter to watching our world go down the DRAIN, I want to instead suggest that you be a BOOST to those we communicate with by choosing Beneficial, Optimistic, Overcautious Statements of Truth.

Beneficial – Is what I say helpful? Does it make the world a better place?

Optimistic – Am I being a light to the world, or am I just perpetuating the darkness? Am I spreading words of hope and positivity, or gloom and doom?

Overcautious – Should I even be saying this at all? Who will be helped and who will be hurt by my words? How could what I say be misconstrued? Have I truly reflected on what I am about to unleash upon the world? Should I sleep on it?

Statements of Truth – Someone once said that truth is the right word, spoken at the right time, for the right reason. Is this the right word? Do I really know what I’m talking about? Have I fact checked myself? Is this the right time? Am I simply adding fuel to a fire? Should I simmer down first? Is this for the right reason? What is my true motivation for choosing these words?

James sets a goal for us to be “perfect”: “For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle.” Perfection for the Christian is best understood as perfect love of God and perfect love of neighbor. Taking the teaching of James and applying it to social media, I believe that if we can be a BOOST to those we communicate with by sharing Beneficial, Optimistic, Overcautious Statements of Truth, then we will not only be controlling our hellish tongues of fire, but we will also be bringing our whole body, our whole being, more in line with the will of God for us and the world.

Singing Trees

“Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy.” – Psalm 96:12

I have not been near a tree in over seven years now. I spent the first four decades of my life around trees. I remember the trees I climbed as a child, and the first tree house that my dad built for me. Carving my initials into a branch, or as I got older, carving the initials of a girl, connected to my initials with a plus sign, surrounded by a heart. Learning to identify trees by their size and shape, their bark and their leaves, for inter-school ecology competitions and Boy Scouts. Tasting the sour crab apples that grew in the woods, and picking sweet, juicy peaches from a tree in South Carolina. Raking piles of leaves, amazed at how many leaves a single tall maple tree can shed. And even memorizing Kilmer’s “I think that I may never see a poem as lovely as a tree.”

We don’t have trees in prison. As lovely as a tree may be, you can imagine the security risks – they block the view of surveillance cameras and could be lit on fire, and fallen branches could be wielded as clubs or sharpened into spears. But where I’m detained we are at least surrounded by hills full of trees.

The past few years have seen pitiful autumn displays. Leaves turned from green to brown and then plopped to the ground with the first windy rain storm. But this fall the colors have been magnificent. From my cell window I watched the first burst of color, a tree at the top of a hill that seemed to go from green to neon yellow overnight. I told my cellie to get up and look out the window. “The sun is shining right on this tree! You have to see it! It’s incredible!” (You can imagine that my excitability at times can be annoying when you’re living shoulder to shoulder with another person in what is basically a bathroom.)

That first yellow tree must have gotten the word out fast that fall was coming, because soon the entire hillside was exploding with more yellows and oranges, and reds that flared bright like a fire truck or deepened to almost purple. And with many continuous days of sunshine, blue skies, and light winds, the leaves have stuck around for weeks. And although their colors are losing some of their brilliance as they ebb towards brown, other trees on neighboring hills are just beginning to start their show.

The closest I’ve gotten to a tree in here is the new photo backdrop that the activities department recently purchased. Once a month we have the opportunity to have our picture taken for the cost of a photo ticket – $1.50. We used to pose against a cement block wall. But now we can choose from one of two backgrounds – the Brooklyn Bridge at twilight, or an autumn scene. While I don’t quite understand the significance of an NYC skyline, I was amazed with the beauty of the fall backdrop. It’s a bright yellow maple tree with yellow leaves scattered all over the ground. When I first saw this beautiful scene hanging on the wall of the gym (where we pose for our pictures) I was amazed at how life-like it was. I stood right in front of it and tried to block out everything else. The sunlight in the scene is filtering down through the leaves, coating everything with a soft golden glow. And I remembered all those walks in the woods in the fall, where I could feel the colors soaking into me.

As the leafy wonderland drew me in, I realized with a sigh that there’s a huge difference between looking out my cell window at the beauty of the colorful leaves on the hillsides, and being able to stand in the woods of October, bathed in the kaleidoscope of God’s glorious creation. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I definitely took the road less traveled by. And as I recently found out from the Parole Board, it may be some time before I get to tread a path in the woods.

In my melancholy I turned to the Psalms, where I’ve been seeking refuge for the past years. My mind went immediately to Psalm 96: “Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy.” I knew the verse, and have seen it on a multitude of fall posters and greeting cards. So I flipped the pages of my Bible to find out what was inspiring these singing trees. And I discovered that just as I could admire the beauty of the fall leaves from a distance, yet long to walk among the trees, there is also a deeper beauty to scripture when you step into it, and allow God’s light to bathe you with his living Word.

The reason that the trees are bursting into song, says the psalmist, is that God, the true ruler of the earth, will come to straighten out all flawed forms of justice:

“Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord for he is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with his truth.”

We live in a world where there are many rulers and many forms of justice. And we live in a country that prides itself in the fairness of its foundational and enduring system of law and order. But we also know that our systems are human systems, and that any time we humans get hold of something, we tend to make it less than perfect. (This is true for everything we do, even the church. As my favorite saint used to say, “If you’re looking for the perfect church, just remember that as soon as you become part of it, it won’t be perfect any longer.”)

Our courts, our prisons, our parole boards are all imperfect systems. And while we sometimes encounter the flaws of these institutions firsthand, and must endure the impact of seemingly unjust decisions, God promises that someday he is coming to bring perfect justice, perfect righteousness, and perfect truth! I can’t imagine what perfect justice will be like. Though as I look out at the beauty of the autumn hills, and yearn for that walk in the woods, I know that something better is coming.

So if you have the chance, get out among the trees, and if you listen really closely, maybe you’ll catch that joy of the song that they’re singing: “The Lord is King!”

I Have This Hope

“We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair.” (2 Cor. 5:7-8)

One of the movies they show on TV all the time is Stephen King’s “The Shawshank Redemption,” set in an old, bleak, and brutal prison. In one scene the main character, inmate Andy Dufresne, has been placed in charge of the prison library. He receives a large donation of books, and recruits other inmates to help him file them on shelves.

One of the men picks up a book and reads the title haltingly, “The Count of..Monte…Cris-co.”

“That’s Cristo,” Andy corrects him. “The Count of Monte Cristo.”

The man tries to read the author’s name. “By Alexandre Dum…Ass. Dumb-Ass? Ha ha!”

Andy provides the correct pronunciation and then tells the man, “You know what that’s about? You’d like it. It’s about a prison break.”

To which the inmate replies, “Then we’ll file that one under educational!”

After an inmate recommended it to me, I picked up and read the very thick “Count of Monte Cristo,” which is about much more than just a prison break. It’s a powerfully told story of justice and injustice, love and hate, revenge and forgiveness. The hero, Edmund Dantes, is imprisoned in a solitary cell deep in an island fortress for a crime that he did not commit. Dantes grew weaker and more downhearted with each passing year. Eventually he stopped eating, determined to end his life. One night as he lay in his cell hoping that death would come soon for him, he heard a sound of scraping from behind his cell wall.

Dumas writes, “Though weakened, the young man’s brain seized on the idea that is ever present to the mind of a prisoner: liberty.” He sensed that it was some unfortunate prisoner like himself trying to escape. And with a renewed hope he began to eat again and started his own excavation of his prison wall, digging toward the sound of the scraping noise. Dantes worked for days, digging the hole in his wall. But one day he encountered an obstacle. It was a huge smooth beam that blocked the hole. It meant that he had to dig either above or below it.

In frustration, Dantes cried out, “Oh, my God! My God! I prayed so fervently that I hoped thou hadst heard my prayer. My God! After having deprived me of my liberty! After having deprived me of the peace of death! And after calling me back to existence, have pity on me, oh, my God! And let me not die of despair!”

As if in answer to his prayer, suddenly a man’s voice called out, seemingly from under the ground, “Who speaks of God and of despair in the same breath?”

The voice belonged to a fellow prisoner named Abbé Faria, who had been trying to tunnel to the outer wall, but had instead dug towards Dantes’ cell. The two men eventually connected their tunnels and became friends, with Abbé Faria acting as tutor for the younger Dantes, providing him the education and social skills he would need to remake his life in the world, while they continued to plan their escape.

But the question that gave me pause was the one that Abbé Faria asked in response to Edmund Dantes’ prayer: “Who speaks of God and of despair in the same breath?” Because I can readily answer, “Me! I’ve done that!” And perhaps you have, too.

Despair is that overwhelming feeling that you have run out of options, that there is no possible way you’re ever going to survive the situation in life you find yourself in. In the Old Testament, the prophet Elijah, who spent a lot of time on the run from the authorities, was told by God to take refuge among Israel’s enemies to the north. The Lord told Elijah, “I have commanded a widow there to feed you.” Elijah did as God said and met the widow as she was out gathering a couple of sticks to make a cooking fire. But the woman had no food to share. In fact she was so desperate that she planned to take the handful of flour she had left and a splash of oil, “and bake it for myself and my son, that we may eat it and die.” (1 kings 17:8-12) That’s despair! There’s no more food. So we’ll eat what we have left and then starve to death. No options. No hope.

It’s a feeling of hopelessness that is as powerfully overwhelming today as it was 3,000 years ago for that starving widow. It’s when the oncologist tells you that there are no more treatment options. Or the bank forecloses on your home. Or your social security income forces you to choose between food and medicine. Or your spouse decides life is better without you. Or the jury says “guilty” and sends you to the big house. No choices left. No options. No hope.

The apostle Paul knew a thing or two about hopeless situations, about despair. He writes to the church in Corinth, “We do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, of the affliction we experienced in Asia; for we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself.” (2 Cor. 1:8) That’s pretty heavy hopelessness for such a pillar of faith! There’s some question as to the nature of the crushing events that Paul is referring to. It could be that he was in prison. Or it could even be that he faced the possibility of death by wild animals in the bloody arena at Ephesus. (1 Cor. 15:32) Whatever the situation, Paul says it was so bad that he despaired of life itself.

The Greek word for despair that Paul uses, exaporeomai, is stronger than mere hopelessness; it means to be extremely without any way out. For Paul, this was the end. No more options. No way out. Like the starving widow, the only thing left to do was die. “We despaired of life itself.”

But even when trapped by life-threatening, soul-crushing life circumstances, Paul says that there is a power that fills him, a supernatural hope and consolation that comes directly from Jesus Christ. He writes later in his letter to the Corinthians that we human beings are simple clay jars, but we can be filled with an extraordinary power that comes from God, and not from within ourselves. “We are afflicted in every way,” he says, “but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair.” (2 Cor. 5:7-8)

This is the power of the Holy Spirit! It’s the indwelling spiritual power of Christ himself that allows us to look despair right in the face and instead be filled with hope. It doesn’t mean living in a false reality where you pretend that there are no difficulties before you. And it doesn’t mean minimizing the extreme hardships of life that can weigh us down. It means facing the bleakest of circumstances, sometimes on a longterm basis, and feeling deep down in your soul that God is with you, filling you with love and peace and joy and hope.

It’s hard to describe this hope, because it is so otherworldly. There’s a song by the band Tenth Avenue North called “I Have This Hope,” and I think it does a pretty decent job.

“But sometimes my faith feels thin,

like the night will never end.

Will you catch every tear,

or will you just leave me here?”

That’s the despair part. But then the chorus sings out:

“I have this hope

in the depth of my soul.

In the flood or the fire

you’re with me and you won’t let go.”

It’s that depth-of-my-soul hope that puzzles my fellow inmates, when they ask why I’m always so upbeat and positive. It even confuses some of my friends on the outside who wonder how I can stay joyful and hopeful when I’m knee deep in the hoopla. All I know is that I may not be able to step out of the darkness and despair of this prison, at least not right now, but each step that I take I can take in the light of God’s grace, filled with the hope that God is with me, both now and in the better days that are coming, just outside of these prison walls. And my prayer for you is – despite whatever might have you discouraged or disheartened – that you may be filled with this depth-of-your-soul hope as well.