Road to Triumph

I read a devotion the other morning that began with a story about French General Ferdinand Foch at the First Battle of the Marne during World War I. the Germans had attacked in overwhelming numbers and the French lines were disintegrating. Foch sent the following communiqué to headquarters.

            “My center is giving away, my right is retreating. Situation excellent. I am attacking.”

            The author of the devotion wrote that “sometimes in life’s battles we can feel as if we are losing on every front.” He then noted that trials can be God’s road to triumph. I thought about those words this week as I tried to steel myself for another year in here. I spend every morning before sunrise in prayer and Bible reading. And, I think this experience has made me a better man, a better Christian, a wiser, more merciful believer. But faith and hope are tested repeatedly and I’ve come to accept that having faith, believing when everything tells you otherwise, is the key.

            For the past six months a group of supporters have been lobbying to get my sentence reduced – modified in a way that would allow me to leave prison and get to work paying off my restitution and doing what I’ve been called to do. That sounds funny from in here, saying you have a calling, but one of the many things I’ve learned during my time in here is that I can teach and motivate men in very difficult circumstances.

            Many people wrote letters to the Governor on my behalf. My cousin, who – along with her husband – has cared for me and supported me in more ways than I can count since those very dark days at the jail, sent me copies of those letters. “Read them when you’re feeling down so you see what people think of you,” she told me when she mailed them. I haven’t read any yet. I haven’t been in a position where I “needed” to read them and, quite candidly, the fact that someone would take the time and effort to write on my behalf is very humbling and touching. So, I start each day reminding myself I can’t do anything that would discourage and disappoint the people who have backed me, and prayed for me, and hung in there with me when logic and common sense should have told them otherwise.

            Hope is a mysterious thing. It’s a feeling that what is wanted will happen. It’s expectation. Combined with faith – an unquestioning trust and confidence – hope is what keeps us going when everything tells us all is lost. As I’ve written before, I love how Stephen King’s protagonist Andy Dufresne in “The Shawshank Redemption” explains hope:

            “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best thing. And hope never dies.”

            Michael Morton spent twenty-five years in a Texas prison for the murder of his wife. The evidence, the prosecutor said, was overwhelming. Morton described his nights in the prison, the screams, the smells, the despair. At one point in his time behind bars, his son (who was required to visit once each quarter) wrote and said “I don’t want to visit anymore.” What could Morton do? Within two years, the son wrote again. This time to ask that he be allowed to be adopted by his aunt and uncle and change his last name. Morton just said, “Those days were the worst.”

            Twenty years after he entered Texas DOC the parole board (yes Virginia, Texas still has parole) offered to release Morton. “Admit you killed your wife and you will make parole.” Morton couldn’t do it. No matter how much he hated prison, how much he missed freedom and fresh air and privacy and the thousand other things we take for granted each day, he couldn’t say he killed his wife.

            Morton had a lawyer who for nine years had tried without success to get his case reopened. “I told him to take the parole board’s offer,” the lawyer said. “And when he told me he couldn’t, when he told me he knew all he had left was his honor, I promised then and there I’d never give up trying to get him free.” Honor matters. Even when you face the worst you do so with dignity and honor. And you hope. You never give up hope.

            I wish I could say that the whole time I’ve been in here I was honorable, but I can’t. When I first got locked up, I was a mess. I’d spent so much time living with what I was doing, so much time anxious, depressed, and hating myself that my arrest should have been a relief. It wasn’t. I lost everything I loved and held dear and it didn’t depart quietly. I was full of fear and self-pity. I said things. I wrote things. I thought things that I deeply regret. I was weak, and cowardly, and dishonest. It’s hard to imagine being worse than you are at your lowest, yet I was. Jail was not character building. Jail was destroying what little was left.

            So Michael Morton stayed in prison and he hoped, and he prayed, and he believed. One evening, years earlier, when the prison was awash in the cacophony of piercing screams and shouts, Morton put his headphones on and turned his small radio dial to nothing but static. He wanted the white noise to block out every sound around him.

            He lay there with his eyes closed and the sounds of the prison drowned out amid the constant crack and whir of static until he heard it, the clear beautiful sound of a classical music piece on a station that never came in on his radio. And the music soothed him; he felt peace and security; the bitterness and the loss left him. Even though he was behind bars, Michael Morton was free.  And I knew what he meant.  I understood.  I’d been there and had the same epiphany, that moment I knew it would all be alright.

            Freedom. On the eve of his twenty-fifth year behind bars a Texas court ordered DNA testing on evidence – a blood soaked bandana – found at the scene. The test showed Michael Morton’s wife’s blood and the blood of an itinerant construction worker already doing a life sentence for the rape and murder of a woman that occurred less than a year after the death of Morton’s wife. A review of the evidence used to convict Morton showed that the prosecutors withheld evidence that would have exonerated Morton. The prosecutors needed a conviction, so why not the husband?

            And just like that, the doors of the prison swung open. Morton was exonerated with apology – and money – from the state. But the twenty-five years? The bitterness over the loss? How do you go on? “I never gave up hope,” he said. Hope is a good thing. Andy Dufresne sure knew what he was talking about.

            On a sweltering July day in 1863, Joshua Chamberlain looked over all that remained of his bloodied Maine regiment. Only one of six men remained standing. They were out of ammunition. All day they had fought, barely holding their line against a succession of enemy attacks. They could not stop another onslaught. Nothing stood between his line and his army’s rear. His battered regiment was the right flank of the union line. There was no reason to go on. No hope of success. But hope is a funny thing. Sometimes it just takes a step forward. Chamberlain ordered his men to fix bayonets; and they followed; on the order they charged down the hill into the advancing army; and the tide turned and the men from Maine prevailed; and the union was saved.

            I don’t know what the Governor will do. In less than a week his term ends. The new Governor will take his oath of office on Saturday ending the McDonnell administration. And Governor McDonnell? He faces his own legal problems. The Washington Post recently reported that the Governor’s private attorneys met with Justice Department prosecutors to delay his indictment on influence peddling and improper receipt of gifts until after his term expires. And I’ve wandered the past few weeks if in his time alone the Governor ever said to himself “I wish I’d handled things differently.” Or “I’m a good man who made a mess of things. I just need a fresh start.” I wonder if he has had his epiphany yet, his revelation that there are consequences to our actions and we have to face those consequences – “man up” – and then move forward with integrity and honor.

            I don’t know if I’m getting out early. I do know I have hope and hope is a good thing, maybe the best thing. Hope a lot of times is all we have left when we lose everything else. But, hope never dies. As long as you hope, you are on the road to triumph. It doesn’t matter if you’re in prison, or poverty, or just in pain. Hope keeps you going.

Empty

Easter, 2012.  Another “new” season and yet, so much this year is like the last three Easters.  All of them spent incarcerated; all of them spent removed from what I knew, what I cherished.

Each year as Easter approached I’d try and find meaning, try and understand why, why was I going through this, why had I lost so much, where was the loving God I prayed to each day in the midst of struggle?  On a simple level, I knew I was guilty.  I was paying the price, serving the sentence, imposed by a legitimate court following my guilty plea for the theft of two million dollars.  And, I knew I deserved to be punished.  I knew all along I was breaking the law.  I knew I’d lose my wife and friends.  I knew it all.  Yet, the punishment was worse than expected.  The swiftness and finality of rejection beyond what I could imagine.  I was paying more than a just price for my conduct.

I have felt so alone, so abandoned, rejected, and betrayed that no one, I feared could comprehend the depth of my suffering.  I would cry out, over and over at night alone in a stank cell, “help me, God.  Please help me.”  And my tears, my pleas would fall on deaf ears.  Everything I had feared my whole life, everything I believed about myself, that no one did love me, that everyone was dependent on me giving them something or they would abandon me, proved true.  It was, on more than one occasion almost too painful to bear.

On more than one occasion, especially in that first year of living in a jail cell with no physical contact with friends or family other than the all too infrequent thirty-minute “how are you doing?” through Plexiglas, I actively planned my own death.  Death, I believed, was better than prison, divorce, rejection.  I was empty.  Nothing could change my circumstances.  It is the worst position to be in.  Hopelessness kills.

Each year, as the Lenten season began, I vowed to renew.  I’d sacrifice some silly pleasure and devote myself to meditation and prayer.  I’d try and meet God halfway, try and understand what all of this meant, try and hope when every rational fiber in me said hope is gone.  Easter would arrive; I’d hear the words from my years of church attendance ring in my head.  “The Lord is Risen”, and the rote response, “He is Risen indeed”, and I would wait expectantly for the miracle to unfold.  I wanted, I craved that “come thou long expected Jesus” moment, the one that would restore me to family and friends.  It never came.

Tough.  Painful.  Lonely.  Survivable?  I wasn’t sure.  I cried to God, I argued with Him; I tried everything I knew and then I concluded nothing I could offer or promise would matter.   My life was beyond my control.  The only decision I really had to make was, do I hope or do I just go on. 

I thought of a man in Texas as I tried to figure out what to do.  He served over fifteen years in a Texas prison, convicted of murdering his wife.  He told anyone who would listen he wasn’t the killer.  He loved his wife, he told the jury.  But the evidence, the prosecution argued, was overwhelming.  It was cold-blooded murder.  Life in prison was his destiny. 

I heard Michael Morton speak about his time in maximum security, how close he came to breaking.  There was the time his son turned twelve and wrote him and announced “I don’t want to visit anymore”.  And the pain from that letter seared his heart.  It got worse.  At seventeen, his son wrote again.  “I’m going to be adopted” by the family raising him.  He was changing his name.  “My heart broke”, Morton said.  He gave up.

Then a miracle happened.  The Innocence Project heard about his case.  They petitioned the court to examine the prosecution’s file and discovered evidence exonerating Morton that was withheld at trial.  And then DNA evidence proved conclusively Morton was not the killer.  Another man, already doing life in Texas for murder, had killed his wife.

Michael Morton walked out of prison a free man.  But, he wasn’t truly free until he was able to forgive all those people who put him in that hell, all those people who abandoned him.  Nothing he went through made sense and yet, in God’s infinite wisdom it all made sense.  He had survived the valley, stared into the abyss, and was made whole.  More importantly, Michael Morton found peace.  He mattered and what he’d gone through mattered.

This Lenten season I embarked on another time of renewal and spiritual cleansing.  I gave up potato chips – my weakness in here, and coffee.   Each morning I began with reading one or two Psalms and an Old and New Testament lesson.  Ironically, three times I read Psalm 77, a Psalm of crying out to a silent God and then finding strength remembering His prior amazing deeds.

More ironically, I read the story of Joseph, sold into slavery, imprisoned for thirteen years, and then he saved both Egypt and the Israelites.  “You intended it for evil, but God intended it for good.”  I read the Exodus story.  God heard the cries of His people and sent Moses, a murderer of an Egyptian, abandoned by his own people, to go and announce to Pharaoh, “God says, Let my people go.”

And I listened as I prayed waiting for God to tell me what this all means.  I heard silence, but the silence gave me comfort.  I cried out some nights, I hurt, I was lonely, but somehow each morning the silence sustained me.  Did anyone know what I was going through?  Did anyone care?  I read the Gospels and saw it, the suffering, the rejection.  His twelve most trusted friends; one betrays him, ten run and hide, afraid for their own lives; only one – John – shows up at his execution.  He knew what I felt.  He knows what I’m going through.  He is with me.

This morning I awoke to a cloudless Easter morning.  I went out and ran.  Over and over I heard the words from the Gospel of Luke, “and they went to the tomb and it was empty.  And the angel of the Lord said, “He is not here.  He is Risen.”  I thought about that empty tomb.  I thought about all I’d been through these past four years.  And I realized I’d never felt closer to God than I did this morning.

I don’t know what tomorrow will bring.  I don’t know when this trial will end or what will be in my future.  I know what I pray for each day.  There is hope in suffering; there is hope in emptiness.  “The tomb is empty.”  There is hope.