Happenstance

Happenstance is an outdated word with origins traced back to the 19^th century. It means, “things just happen.” There isn’t any rhyme or reason to what befalls us. No, we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Life, so many believe, plays out like that. You do the best you can, be a decent person, and still one day you find yourself on a plane being diverted into a tower by armed terrorists; or, you’re sitting at a café enjoying lunch while a marathon finishes. You watch the runners cross the finish line, your glass in hand toasting their fortitude when a homemade bomb explodes. Its happenstance, people will tell you. You were just there when everything turned to hell, or so they tell you.

            Contrasting those folks are the “if only” crowd. “If only I’d done this,” they’ll tell you, “then I would have ended up … “In those folks’ minds they are masters of their own fate. They control their lives. They replay every decision and believe “this” led to “that.” There is nothing else at work in the cosmos but their own actions. It’s Hollywood’s “butterfly effect” driven totally by one’s own ego.

            I’ve been thinking about those two theories since my conversation with Rabbi Dave after our recent workout. Rabbi Dave – my name for him that somehow stuck – is my weight lifting partner. Five months ago we asked a young college guy working on his physical fitness/trainer degree to help us with a weight training program. Three times a week, Dave and I hit the weights. I’ve never been a weight lifter, but there’s something about lifting more than your body weight in a dead lift, or bench pressing your body weight, that burns and excites your muscles. And Dave and I are a good pair. We encourage each other and laugh a lot during our ninety minutes moving weight.

            Rabbi Dave is leader of the small, conservative Jewish group on the compound. Funny, but he was raised in a middle-class Protestant home. He came to prison in ’05, felt lost and wasn’t sure who he was or where he was headed. Like Moses at the burning bush, one night he felt called to go in a new direction. He started studying Hebrew, switched to a kosher diet, and then officially converted. There are about twenty conservative Jews on the compound but that overstates the actual committed, practicing Jews.

            Lunenburg, in an attempt to control who gets on the “common fare” (Kosher/Halal) religious diet, provides that any inmate enrolled in a religious program for six months and who attended at least two services in a month can be provided the common fare diet. As a result, all the approved religious programs have large rolls of participants who really don’t participate. Dave presides over a flock of twenty that in reality is really three.

            That doesn’t deter Dave. He begins each morning with a prayer shawl covering his shoulders as he recites his morning prayers in Hebrew. He follows basic Levitican dietary laws (no milk and meat on the same tray). And, Dave knows he stands out. “Dave the Jew” or “Dave the Hebrew” is heard daily as guys look to him to tailor and repair clothing. Dave, apart from being the lead Jewish inmate, is also the best tailor on the compound. He can sew or repair anything. I met Dave eighteen months ago when he enrolled in the college IT program. It didn’t take long before we became friends; mere happenstance.

            A funny thing happened the past few months. I, a guy who’d never thought of lifting weights, now had a workout partner. Dave, a guy who hadn’t run since basic training, now had a running partner. My strength and his mileage began to increase. And during those three a week workouts, those two hours we’d spend together on the weight pile Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, we began opening up to each other and talking about our pain. It’s strange how it would come out. We’d be jogging around the track and one of us would say, “I remember …” and the story would lead to that melancholy moment when you realized how close you still wore your emotions when it came to her, or them.

            I read a book a few months ago by a young writer who’d made it big with his first novel. He was a success, at least to those who saw him. But inside he was a mass of conflict, doubt, and pain. His marriage collapsed. He contemplated suicide, and instead, he began to die slowly from alcohol, drugs, and a dozen other arrows to his soul. He wrote, “It takes a man ten years to get over a divorce.” I couldn’t get his words out of my mind.

            Happenstance. We had a pretty intense workout on Thursday. My arms ached and sweat poured off me even fifteen minutes after we’d finished our last set. Dave told me a story about a guy he’d met at jail. They’d exchanged words, threats were made, and then Dave – out of character for the man I knew – pummeled his would-be assailant before the man knew what hit him. “The guy never had a chance. He was bigger and had friends who could really hurt me. But they didn’t. After that, they left me alone. It’s been like that my entire sentence. God’s always protected me. “And, I realized, he was right.

            How do I explain going from a sense of total helplessness and depression so great that I wished I was dead to where I am now? How was I kept safe each and every time a threat was made to me? How did I negotiate my way through this barren and violent wilderness unscathed? That isn’t happenstance.

            I think often of my five months at the receiving unit. In those five months I saw a lifetime of violence, degradation, and human folly. Yet not once in those five months did I ever fear for my safety. “Though a host of enemies surround me, I will not fear.” I thought about King David’s words a great deal while I was at receiving. David wrote those words with a death sentence hanging over his head. Pursued and hounded each day. Forced to live in caves, he somehow knew his life was controlled by a force larger than his enemies. David knew, even in his darkest hours, that he was shielded and watched by his God.

            At receiving I was told by my counselor (funny DOC word counselor; there is no “counseling” involved. The counselor is the person who serves as a conduit for DOC’s central office to tell you where they’re sending you) that I was scheduled to go to one of three facilities, none of which was this place. The morning they packed me up (3:30 a.m. in fact) I learned for the first time I was getting on a bus for Lunenburg. That was Friday, November 20^th. The following Monday I interviewed for work as a teacher’s aide in the adult basic education program. I was hired that day. It’s unheard of in DOC to get work that soon after arrival.

            Four weeks after starting my job I wrote a proposal for a creative writing class. A few weeks later I was teaching, on my own, and guys lined up to take the class.

            Six months later the school principal called me into her office. She told me the local community college had received close to a $1 million “Second Chance Act’ grant to provide college education to select, high recidivism risk offenders. She told me it was the only program of its kind in the country and that six mentors/academic aides would be hired to live with the students and tutor them. Since that day I have worked with students at all levels of education. Did all that just happen? Did I just “luck” into these opportunities?

            There’s a young guy in the bunk next to me named Thomas. I’ve always felt a special kinship with him. Perhaps it was the fact he’s the same age as my estranged older son, but I always tried to give him advice or just listen when he struggled during his last two years in here. Thomas is a good kid. I don’t say that lightly. He’s a young man who deserved better.

            His parents split when he was young and he became just another in the millions of middle class white kids shuttled between divorced parents. His mom moved to Oklahoma; he and his younger sister stayed with their dad; and that’s when it started. His father began to sexually abuse his younger sister. He didn’t know at least not until years later and he found out and turned his father over to the police.

            So Thomas gets depressed – and angry. He’s nineteen and living on his own and waiting for his dad to be prosecuted. And he’s drinking and using drugs. He gets caught with a bottle of Jack Daniels. “Underage possession of alcohol,” a misdemeanor. He’s given a court date six months later. “Stay out of trouble and we’ll drop the charges.” He hears from a culinary school in Oklahoma – “You’re admitted, but you have to be here by September 1^st,” – two months before his court date. He can’t go.

            Thomas blows all his savings – more than $2,000 – in less than a week and soon finds himself living in the woods in a tent. One day he takes his pocket knife with him, heads down the hill from his campsite, and walks in a combination gas station/convenient market. “Give me money, cigarettes, and food,” he says in a calm, matter of fact manner.

            “Please don’t hurt me,” the woman says from behind the counter. He isn’t going to, and he doesn’t. He gets $300 in cash, a box with twenty cartons of cigarettes and food, and then he walks out of the store and back up the hill. He sits on the hill and smokes and watches the police show up at the store. And, he got away with it. He felt like shit, he wanted to die, but no one knew he was the one who robbed the Shell until …

            Four weeks later he’s in a car with a friend who happens to have a broken tail light. The car gets pulled over and his id is checked. “You’re under arrest,” the police say. Thomas had given all the cigarettes away. One of the guys who got a free carton ratted him out.

            Thomas sat in jail and waited for his court date and then the judge asked for his pleas. “Guilty your honor.” A law professor from Washington and Lee wrote the judge on Thomas’s behalf. “I know this young man (Thomas was friends with the man’s son) … I ask you to consider his situation and show mercy.” Apparently the judge’s definition of mercy is different from mine. He sentenced Thomas to prison for seven years. And here’s irony: Thomas’s father gets sentenced later. Know what he got? Fifteen years with all but six months suspended.

            We were talking the other night and Thomas told me if he’d gone to Oklahoma he’d be dead. “I would have OD’d or worse,” he said. “I was so angry and upset.” His sister and he have grown closer. She’s in college, playing soccer, and doing well. Thomas will leave Tuesday with his mom and aunt waiting out front. He’ll get a job, finish school and his degree, and live a good life.

            “And the Lord will save me …

            He will redeem my soul in peace from the battle

            Which is against me …

            Cast your burdens on the Lord and He will sustain

            you …”

            I memorized those lines from David’s 55^th Psalm within days of my arrest. I was lost, overwhelmed with guilt, remorse, and fear. My life, I figured was lost, hopeless. But, my life was more out of control before my arrest. I just couldn’t see it. It took a long time to get over the shock of what my life had become. But that experience, those nights trying to figure out who I was and where I was going wasn’t just controlled by chance. It was coming face to face with the inevitability of what was beyond me. And I understood what Job felt when everything was chaos and in the middle of the whirlwind, with the storm raging, all around he heard. He heard. It wasn’t happenstance. It was mighty, and wonderful, and beyond his control.

            We aren’t masters of our own destiny and we surely aren’t tossed hither and yon by chance. It’s not happenstance. Sometimes it’s confusing, and painful; always it’s beyond our capacity to fully comprehend and understand. In the end, it’s simple faith.