Contra Mundum

You’ll have to pardon me some in this piece, but I’ve been thinking a great deal about all that’s taken place the last 5 ½ years; where I was, to where I am, to where I’m headed. And sometimes those thoughts have just rambled on their own, rushing over me with memories. I’ll sit there and think, “that really happened,” and look and see where I am now and wonder how did I not have the trust to believe.

            Believe. I used to roll my eyes when I’d hear someone at church ask to hear another worshiper’s “faith” story. It was always when we’d start with a new class of elders – good old Presbyterian bureaucracy – and I’d listen to someone thirty years my senior drone on about their parents’ church and their first Bible and I’d think “faith stories,” those don’t exist anymore. They ended with Joseph, and Daniel, and Paul. After all, I was master of my own future. Life was good – on the outside anyway – and appearances mattered.

            Early on at the jail, as my life was spinning out of control (as if my former life was ever really in control) I came across Charles Colson’s book, “Who Speaks for God.” Colson was one of the most powerful – and feared – members of Nixon’s inner Whitehouse circle. He was a brilliant lawyer. He was also ruthless, cunning, and not prone to tolerate dissent. Colson met his downfall in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. He was convicted in Federal Court for his role in that scandal and sent to prison. Everything that he had worked for was stripped from him.

            I read Colson’s book feeling hopeless and lost. I was in the initial weeks of the total collapse of my life. I didn’t think I could survive a day, let alone the rest of my life, with the pain and guilt of the past and fear of the future overwhelming me in that dirty cell. And I tried to focus on something Colson wrote in that book, something – a little thread – to help me hang on. You see, Colson found God at his worst moment. God was never lost, he said. It was Colson who had been lost. He wrote these words:

            “I had spent my first 40 years seeking the whole world to the neglect of my soul. But what I couldn’t find in my quest for power and success – that is, true security and meaning – I discovered in prison where all worldly props had been stripped away. And by God’s grace, I lost my life in order that I might find true life in Christ.”

            I couldn’t believe what I was reading. There was no way Colson could mean what he wrote. It made no sense. I knew his story, knew how he left prison and founded “Prison Fellowship” and devoted the remainder of his life to spreading the message of God’s power and love in all circumstances, but there was no way he honestly believed what he wrote.

            A few quick stories. The lawyer.  I have a friend – that word doesn’t begin to describe him – who I called from the jail moments after my arrest. He’s a lawyer and jeopardized his own career by staying by me through those first difficult months. He came to the jail every day for the first three months and then four or five times a week thereafter just to check on me. He asked his minister to visit me at my worst when my own minister refused to “get involved.”

            The minister.  So an Episcopal minister shows up to meet with me and we’re talking through Plexiglas – that’s the way visits are at the jail. And I lose it. I’m a mess, sobbing, wishing I was dead but knowing I can’t be since I’d made a pact with God to “see this through” (whatever that meant. I really hadn’t given it much thought). He listened to me and then didn’t offer me any cookie-cutter prayer or syrupy words of encouragement. He just simply said “God is with you, Larry,” and he asked if he could return for more visits.

            That minister – a man I never would have even met but for my lawyer friend and my own church’s abandonment of me – has become a close friend. He visited me at the receiving center, he’s come out here, and he has led the charge to get me released early.

He is like family which brings me to ...

The relative. My cousin and her husband, a successful couple living in Northern Virginia learn I was arrested. Over Thanksgiving – my first and worst Thanksgiving while locked up – I received a simple “thinking of you” card from them. “We are here for you,” the note said. Two months later, I was called to the visitation room. There again, through the dirty Plexiglas, I saw them. I was as pale as you can be from a lack of sunlight in six months, and I was scared, and lonely, and frankly tired of it all. And yet, after that visit I wrote in my journal something I hadn’t written before that day; I wrote, “I think all this will work out.”

            Five and a half years. I’ve been let down by people in here and out there and I have seen horrendous violence and the waste of many lives. Yet, there are the other moments, like when the big, black kid at the jail bear-hugged me and kept saying over and over “we did it!” when he passed his high school equivalency test. There’s my friendship with DC, a man who forty years ago was as notorious as any inmate in the Virginia prison system. Today, he is one of the kindest, most decent men I’ve ever met. I trust DC. I don’t say that very often in here. And, I feel a kinship to him and a brotherly love I didn’t think possible in the confines of prison.

            Chuck Colson kept a diary of his time behind bars. He wrote the following insightful thoughts early in his incarceration:

            “This is no country club … It is a prison and the conditions are really worse than I expected … there is everything here from lifelong, hardened criminals to young drug offenders.

            The reason I am glad to be here, however, is the sudden realization of how many needs there are here … My heart has ached for so many while I am here; more important, when I leave I hope I can do something about the concept of rehabilitation and punishment. All its high sounding names – deterrence, rehabilitation – are untrue. If it is punishment, so be it; but maybe it is more humane to whip a man’s body than destroy his soul slowly.”

            He concluded with these words:

            “I have an obligation to try to improve the fate and circumstances of man in this plight … I am convinced the Lord has planned this for me and will use me for His purpose.”

            There is a simple story in John’s Gospel about Jesus healing a young, blind man. Prior to the healing, the discussion centers on the cause of the man’s blindness. “Is it the result of his parents’ sin or his?” the disciples ask. “Neither,” comes Jesus’s reply. “It was so the works of God might be displayed in him.” And with those words Jesus gave the young man his sight. Those in power didn’t understand who did this; how could it be, they wondered. And they questioned the man about the “healer.” His answer comes to me often: “All I know is once I was blind and now I see.”

            “Contra Mundum” – “against the world” – it was the great Latin rallying cry of the fourth century Christian theologian Athanasius. It means to stand for Christ against the powers of the world and to understand that God’s ways are different. I see now why God has so long spoken through the perspective of the powerless, why He makes special demands on His people to care for the oppressed, sick, and suffering. Justice does not devolve from human institutions and laws but in the righteousness of God and His Word.

            That may sound all fanciful and self-delusional, but it simply means it is wiser to take refuge in the Lord than any earthly prince.

            What does all that mean? It means even when we get off course, God is in control. It means at my worst, God was at His best. It means that there is a reason for all this. As Bob Dylan sang in “My Back Pages,” “I once was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” The visits, the Bible coming from my friend Charlie, being befriended by an Episcopal minister, the cards from “Martha,” and even my divorce, they happened to put me where I am today in relation to my God. Or, as the young man told the Pharisees, “I was blind and now I see.”

            It is the season of Lent, preparation for Easter, and for the first time in six years I didn’t give up something like coffee or chips. Instead, I’m reading a treatise on the 91^st Psalm and a study of the Book of James. It is hard to fathom any sacrifice I could make worthy of what God has done for me.

            What does this have to do with prison? Probably nothing, but nothing happens by coincidence. I look back over these past 5 ½ years and see what Chuck Colson meant. Like Paul being blinded on the road to Damascus and the scales suddenly falling from his eyes and he saw, I see what it means. Or, as Mr. Colson so eloquently put it,

            “It is in God’s timing, not ours. And it is the result of His sovereign will, not of any magic wand we may think we wield.”

            This chapter of my life will someday come to an end and a new one will begin and the lessons of this chapter, the understanding of contra mundum will carry forward. And I don’t think the Circuit Court judge who sentenced me had any idea what God would do for me.

            

The Code

Inmates talk endlessly about “the code.” The conversation always begins with “Back when the penitentiary and doing time meant something, guys lived by the code.”  It’s funny, but the guys that say that weren’t doing bids back in those penitentiary days. The guys who were – those men down twenty, thirty, even forty years – know that “the code” was just a fancy word for mind your own business, ignore what you see, and don’t snitch.

            It was a brutal world where every man had a blade hidden for protection, where extortion and rape were daily occurrences; and where the officers had little control over the lives of the inmates. Ironically, that’s still the way prison is. By the time guys get here from the higher levels, where they walked through the mine fields and either were victim or victimizer, they can see home and aren’t willing to tack on more time to their sentence. Give a twenty year old thirty years and he can’t comprehend it. What’s he do? He fights, he steals, he does whatever he has to do to make a name for himself and protect himself.

            But, ten years in and now he’s thirty and his girlfriend has stopped writing. Friends have moved on. He has little left outside and he realizes all the time he’s done so far only accounts for a third of what he must do. The realization sets in that he may never get out. Most go to “the code.” They see nothing; they say nothing; they do nothing. And, like the stranded boys alone on the island in “Lord of the Flies,” tribalism and Darwinian observation like the strong preying on the weak, become the inmate’s daily existence. It’s all about survival. Nothing more, nothing less.

            I’ve been thinking about “the code” a good bit during Lent. Every morning during this Lenten season I take a three by five index card and jot down a meaningful verse or two from my morning reading. Throughout the day, I’ll refer back to the card to focus on what I consider the important thought of the day. Every verse I jot down is contrary to “the code.” How we live in here, how we conduct our lives in here is contrary to what God expects. But, here’s the irony – so is the way I lived “BP” (before prison). I keep coming back to the Proverb: the wisdom of man is foolishness to God.

            What does all this have to do with “the code?” I find myself going against the grain. I’m being pulled two directions most times. My eyes tell me the vast majority of men I’m locked up with are full of malice. They feel victimized; they lack empathy. Ignorance flourishes in here. Each day I try and fight the urge to berate someone for being disrespectful, dishonest, or just not caring enough about themselves or their loved ones to get right. Simply put, almost every day I find myself thinking, “I hate this place and the men in here.”

            But then, there is the other side, the side that tells me to empathize and be compassionate toward even the worst. Call it an attempt to atone for my own misjudgments, but I try and see the good in all. So, I butt in when the code says “butt out.” I tell guys what I think even when I’m warned over and over to keep my opinions to myself. Under “the code,” truth is a casualty.

            Why am I writing this? I don’t really know. I’ve had a few weeks of confrontations that have only emboldened me. One of cards I carry has the words from Isaiah 40:10-13 on it. It is one of the most moving pieces of scripture I know. It says:

“Do not fear, for I am with you.

Do not anxiously look about you, for I am your God.

I will strengthen you, surely I will help you;

Surely I will uphold you …

Those who war with you will be as nothing and non-existent.

For I am your God, Who upholds your right hand,

Who says to you, Do not fear, I will help you.”

            Here’s what I take that to mean. You do the right thing and you know God will have your back. There is no “code” above His. Too often men in here do the expedient thing to get by. Too often out there, the same thing is done. It’s a pretty radical idea, but it’s one I’m trying. Too many men fail in here. Too many fail out there. There has to be a better way

Waiting

The Lenten season began this morning.  More traditionally observed by Catholics, since my incarceration I have tried to use Lent as a day of fasting and reflection each week.  I spend time trying to figure out what I am called to do.  Who, I ask, does God see when He sees me?  Lent, I’ve come to appreciate, is a time of reflection, confession, and anticipation.  Lent gives way to Easter and in Easter I find hope.

At 3:50 this morning Lent began for me.  During my devotional period I read Psalm 102.  A verse jumped off the page: 

“From heaven the Lord gazed upon the earth, to hear the groaning of the prisoner….”

That verse has sustained me for much of the last five Lenten seasons as I have dealt with my incarceration and the losses that flowed from that.  Where I am now in that spiritual journey is a long way from where I began, as my life – on that sunny August Monday – collapsed around me.  Over and over those first few days I asked myself why, why was this happening to me?  The truth was, I put all that was happening in motion years earlier when I strayed from the course set out for me.  And, the decisions I made had consequences.  The problem was consequences, I always assumed, bore a rational relationship to our action.  Embezzle and be arrested, you deserve to make restitution, spend some small amount of prison time (maybe), and endure a minimum amount of public exposure.  But, that wasn’t how it played out. 

I was scared, angry, and lonely for longer than I care to admit.  I found myself in a foreign world.  Everything I thought I knew didn’t make sense “inside”.  Right and wrong were blurred as both inmates and officers felt justified in behaving expediently. 

There were a number of people who claimed to be my friends who withdrew from me almost immediately after my arrest.  A few came by the jail for visits.  But, I soon realized they weren’t there to lend support.  I was an animal in a cage.  They looked, left, then told our wide circle of acquaintances how I’d fallen.  I thought of Bob Dylan’s bitter “Positively Fourth Street” on more than one occasion.

“You got a lot of nerve

To say you are my friend

When I was down

You just stood there grinning.”

Almost immediately, I knew my wife would leave me.  I had resigned myself to that fate years earlier.  You know the feeling, when you look at that someone and don’t see back what you crave, what you need.  The divorce took its toll.  I heard a minister remark one day that nothing is more painful than rejection.  It was one of the purest truths I ever heard.

I built up scars.  Trials will do that to you.  I lost hope weekly and somehow found it with a letter, a visit, a story, or a simple prayer.  And I decided I wouldn’t let this place, this experience, define me.  I survived perhaps the worst four months of my life going through DOC’s Receiving center and landed here, a low custody facility with an overwhelming need first for GED tutors and later college tutors.

It was as if God’s hand had directed my journey here.  Slowly, Bible verses I had read dozens of times at the start of my incarceration (in my prior life, I was “too busy” for Bible study) began to make sense.  I understood Deuteronomy 8:2.

            “You shall remember all the ways which the Lord your God hassled you in the wilderness…that He might humble you, testing you, to know what was in your heart….”

Five Lenten seasons.  Five years of preparation and reflection.  Five years of waiting.  For a man whose main attribute was impatience, waiting has been a struggle.  My friend DC – no odder pair of friends may exist – told me once he felt for me.  How ironic, a man locked up forty years felt sorry for me. “You know the world out there.  You know what you could be doing.  You know how the system plays and creates different results.  Every day must feel like a month to you.”  He was right.

Prison isn’t’ easy for anyone.  And, I’ve learned no matter how heinous the crime, with few exceptions, most people are redeemable.  But that redemption won’t come from places like this.  Even at a low level facility, prison is a dehumanizing experience.  There is nothing to be gained rehabilitatively by locking a man – or woman – away.  We as a society should stop lying to ourselves about prison being about rehabilitation and re-entry to society.

If we want to punish and break people and subject them to a Thunderdome world of filth, violence, heartbreak, and hopelessness at least be honest and say that’s what we believe.  But, we won’t say that because we’d have to admit this Judeo-Christian nation doesn’t give a damn about the tenets of that theology and we’re no better than anyone else.

But, this is about Lent, and reflection, and anticipation.  As I fasted today I realized there was much to be thankful for in this experience.  For one, things could be much worse.  My prison experience is not even comparable to the experiences some of the men I know have endured.  Nor is it on par with the problems so many face around the world.   I have a wonderful support network – close family and friends and others who hold me up in prayer.  My ex and our sons are doing well, very well in fact.  My parents are healthy and together – fifty eight years this May.

Me?  In small ways day in and day out I seem capable of touching the lives of men in here.  This week, three more of my GED students passed the exam and earned their diplomas.  I’ve been able to use my life experiences – my successes as well as my failures – to help some younger men in here who never had a father.  It’s funny, but many of these kids have become like sons to me.   They have helped fill a void I miss so terribly.

I began this blog telling you I ask myself, who does God see when He sees me.  The answer, I’ve concluded is simple.  He sees one of His children and in God’s eyes each child is precious, each child can be redeemed, no matter how far off the path they wander.

If God could continue to love me, to hold me close even as I drifted farther away, how could I do any less?

I don’t know who reads these postings and it doesn’t matter if you knew the “Old Larry” versus the “New Larry”.  I’ve learned one important lesson the past five years, and it’s a “father” lesson – I will never give up hope in my sons, in my life and in my future.

There is a lot I could write this week about prison.  But, this isn’t the time.  It’s Lent and it’s about anticipation, reflection and waiting.  I’m waiting on Easter and Easter is hope.

 

Play Ball !

It’s almost Spring.  In here, the seasons are controlled by the equipment on the rec yard.  You always know when summer turns to fall when the rec yard workers come out to install the soccer goals.   Soccer – at this prison anyway – is a fall and winter sport.

And Spring?  Spring arrives the day the yard workers come out on the field, take down those same goals and then drag the infield.  That’s right, just like outside, you know its Spring when you hear the sound of balls pinging off aluminum bats, you see guys playing long toss in the outfield and infield practice begins.  Spring hit last Sunday.  It’s time to play ball.

Our dorm is putting together a softball team – two teams actually.  Because our IT college students (40 guys) have night classes at least two nights a week and our day students (44 guys) have classes at least one night a week, we’ve built two teams.  I’m head coach, a role I’m excited about because I love baseball.  Baseball, you see, always reminds me that there’s hope.  No matter what happened the season before, Spring arrives and you start over.  It’s a new season, a new game, a new chance.

I thought about that the other night as I looked over our list of players:  twenty-two guys spanning the age and “bid time” brackets.  A fair number of our “players” will be heading home at the end of summer, their sentences completed.  For them, this Spring really is a new beginning.

And some of the other guys?  For “old heads” like DC and Saleem – and even Mike, down 19 years (though he’s only 34) – there will be parole hearings.  Those three are still part of the “old law”, pre-1995 when parole existed and inmates could earn “30 for 30”, meaning you only did – usually – 50% of your sentence (assuming you earned good time at the max level).  And they try not to think about the disingenuousness of the current parole board’s practices.  It’s Spring.  They each, deep down, carry hope that they will be part of the select few, 2% last year, who will be paroled.

Me?  This July 1^st I can petition the Governor for a conditional release, converting the rest of my time to supervised probation or house arrest.  And I have hope.  No matter how unlikely it appears, I have to have hope. I have to believe.  After all, it’s Spring.  It’s time to play ball.

The other morning the paper reported that Governor McDonnell was on pace to restore more voting rights to convicted felons than any of his recent predecessors.  The article also noted he granted medical releases to two inmates.  I smiled when I read the short description of the older inmate from Salem who was pardoned after being diagnosed with terminal cancer of the bile duct.  See, that was the inmate whom I helped.  I drafted his petition.  He was able to pass away at home with his family beside him and I was part of that.  It’s Spring and things that didn’t make much sense during those long, cold winter days suddenly make sense.  There’s a reason – and a season – for everything.

A few weeks ago Lent began.  In my old life, my “free” life, I never gave much thought to Lent.  I didn’t “give up” anything.  I just went on as I was.  “AC” – after confinement – I took a different look at Lent.  Renewal, I figured, could come through sacrifice and discipline.  So each Spring (for the past four seasons of Lent) I’ve fasted, meditated and given something I enjoy up.  This year it’s been coffee and chips, my two favorite commissary purchases.

And giving them up has been fairly easy, just like engaging in 36 hour fasts.  It’s because I know Spring is here and Spring brings renewal, hope and life.

Our ball teams are excited about getting the season underway.  It’ll be a nice break from the three-a-day classes the guys have, a chance to get out in the fresh air and run and playball.  And all those things matter in here.  It all matters because time is the most painful part of prison and Spring brings hope and hope eases the pain of time.

A Matter of Perspective

Last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday. Christians recognize it as a forty day period of atonement and spiritual renewal. Deprive yourself of something you enjoy, break yourself of a bad habit, focus on God and cleanse your heart. It coincides with the story of Jesus spending forty days in the wilderness being tempted by Satan. It culminates on Easter, when believers remember all things are possible with God.



I was never a big Lent guy before my arrest. Every year on Ash Wednesday my ex would go to a brief church service. She’d bring our sons and the minister would place ashes on their foreheads to symbolize our mortality, our spiritual brokenness, our eventual death. Every year she would give up something she loved (ironically, it was during Lent 2009 she decided to go forward with the divorce).


I never participated. Lent, it seemed to me, was one of those form over substance, ritualistic “churchy” things I didn’t have time for. Then, last year I read a Lenten devotional. I gave up meat for the entire forty days, bean trays only at chow, no microwavable burgers at visitation. I fasted one full day. From evening one day, through an entire day, until the next day’s breakfast. I had nothing but water. At the end of Lent I looked back and realized I had done it, I’d made it without breaking my vow. Still, something was missing. Other than the day I fasted, when I stopped five times during the day and prayed specific prayers I’d written down, it was more an exercise in willpower. I realized I’d missed the big point. Lent is about overcoming self and recognizing as humans without God we are nothing but ashes. We wither and fade away, but the spirit dwells forever.


As my blogs reflected the past few weeks, I’ve been in a very difficult trying period. I allowed the circumstances of my incarceration to overwhelm me. I felt hopelessness about the future. I felt utterly betrayed and abandoned by the woman I’d spent 28 years with, the woman I still deeply love. Many of my friends, even my own sons, had turned away from me, I was tired of beating my head into the wall helping guys in here who didn’t care enough about themselves to change. In short, I just didn’t give a shit about anyone or anything anymore.


That changed this week. I’m not sure exactly why, perhaps its God’s way of answering our prayers in not the manner we expect. The other morning I read from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Here was Paul, imprisoned and in chains in Rome, facing death alone, abandoned by almost every friend he had, and he writes this beautiful, impassioned letter to the church. Not once in the letter does he complain about his circumstances.


Over and over he reminds believers that God is bigger than any hardship, any trial we face. It’s all a matter of perspective. The more we talk and complain about our circumstances, the worse they look. Eventually, the trial becomes larger than our faith. Paul was reminding the flock the trials of life can’t compare to our loving, powerful God who exercises His might to see us through.


Deuteronomy 8 is an amazing chapter of the Old Testament. In it, Moses reminds the Israelites of their wandering and struggles for the past forty years.


“You shall remember all the ways which the Lord your God has let you in the wilderness these forty years, that He might humble you, testing you to know what’s in your heart. . .you are to know in your heart that the Lord your God was disciplining you. . .for your God is bringing you into a good land. . .do not forget God, then you will become proud and will forget God who brought you out, who let you through the great and terrible wilderness.”


I realized I was truly blessed, even in this place. My beautiful wife and sons have been able to go on with life. They are happy, healthy, secure and well-adjusted. I am making a difference in a number of guys’ lives who have never had anyone give a damn about them.


Do I wish things were different? Yes, and every night I pray with a list of “miracles”. But, I discovered inner peace this week. My God is bigger than any difficulty I’m currently facing. Whether it’s the loss of my spouse and kids, or lack of progress on my sentence, He will see me through. Over and over this week I was reminded of that, in devotional readings and conversations with guys in here; I realized there is a good land coming.


Lent this year will be devoted to not giving something up, but rather gaining more perspective.