The Good Chase

This blog was written in November, 2014.

            I have a friend named Chase and he’s Muslim. He takes his faith seriously, makes his prayers five times each day, avoids profanity, pornography, and gambling. During Ramadan he was undergoing chemo. The med staff here failed in their diagnosis. His jaw swelled about a year ago. Medical said, “You have an infection.” For nine months they ran Chase around with antibiotics and “suck on tart candies” to “stimulate your salivary glands.” Turns out they were wrong. The swelling got worse, started choking off his airway. A quick trip to MCV and the real diagnosis came in: cancer of the salvia gland, stage “3.” Tough to hear anytime, let alone less than a year before you go home after eighteen years. Chase, he took it all in stride. “It’s in the hands of Allah,” he said and he began the treatments. And Ramadan? In his weakened state, he couldn’t participate in the month long fast. That too was ok. He was alive and survived, he said, by the will of his God.

            Chase is a nice guy, one of the nicest men I’ve met either inside – or outside of prison. He may not have always done the “right” thing and like all of us he made mistakes. He was in here for the last 18 years for crimes he committed. But, he is a kind, decent man who strives to live to the tenets of his faith.

            Religion is a tough topic. My 81-year-old father – a Korean War veteran – tried to tell me at visitation the other day that we need to get those “barbarians” in ISIL. And, he distinguished ISIL by their religion. I asked him what Jesus would do? Jesus, I said, would forgive, and freely allow them to behead Him because it isn’t this body that’s important; it’s your soul. My dad just said Jesus wouldn’t make it in today’s world. I thought to myself, maybe that’s the problem.

            “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” That was Karl Marx, a near penniless writer trying to feed a family in the industrial Darwinism that was London in the 19^th century. Marx was angry at his circumstances, angry at the vast disparity between the haves and have-nots. Religion, he concluded, kept the disadvantaged from rising up and slaughtering those who held them in check. As I said, religion is a tough topic. And, it’s easy to draw anecdotal conclusions and apply them to every circumstance. The world isn’t black and white it is hued in a sorts of grays and religion is right in there.

            There are very good Muslims. There are very bad self-professed Christians. There are agnostics and atheists who better represent Jesus than I could ever hope to. Gandhi understood more about the Sermon on the Mount and our call to action as followers of the Prince of Peace than most Christians I’ve met. There is a self-described “man of faith” in here who claims to love his Catholic Church yet he is one of the meanest, most hateful men I have ever met. He is continually angry. He is a racist and a homophobe. Another man watches Joel Osteen multiple times each week yet runs most of the scams in the building and lies about everything from his “wife” to his upbringing. Christian – by affirmation – say both men.

            Chase occasionally will work himself into a frenzy – as do most Muslims and Christians here – when the subject of gay marriage comes up. Life becomes black and white. Homosexuality is a sin, they all agree. I find it ironic that the same ones who profess eternal damnation for that sin overlook their own murders, adultery, or a dozen other “serious” sins. So, I asked Chase if you’re sexual orientation is biologically predetermined (i.e. it’s in your genes) and God is the ultimate constructor of everything, from the simplest single cell to the sun doesn’t that mean God created those genes? “You have a point,” he told me. Islam – like Christianity – professes to judge not the sinner. All are God’s children.

            Free choice. It isn’t God who warps our minds and distorts and alienates. Over and over the New Testament tells Christians “God is love.” We are called to “turn the other cheek,” “forgive as God has forgiven you,” “care for the widow and orphan … visit the sick and those in prison, … clothes to the naked, feed the hungry … give and it will be given to you.” No, religion doesn’t make people hurl insults at Latino children who come here to escape the murderous rage of gang warfare in Columbia, Honduras, or El Salvador. Religion doesn’t cause “church members” to hold signs at a funeral saying “God hates fags,” or shooting doctors sitting in church because they happen to provide abortions. That’s man’s evil side, his – or her “free choice” packaged as God’s will.

            Beheading, torturing a kidnapped journalist in the name of God is evil and sinful. But, so is labeling all Muslims bad; so is calling on your nation to bomb your enemies into oblivion. That isn’t Godly nor is it confined to one nation, one race, one creed.

            A little background on me. In my college days, my mother always told me to consider the ministry. I could talk! Was it because I was so theologically astute that my mom wanted me to pursue a seminary education? No. She just wanted to be the mother of a preacher. But, we were a “churched” family. I was a deacon at 16, read Calvin and a host of other protestant “reformed: theologians. Intellectually, I got “it.” I always wondered, however, when the minister would take a position not in keeping with his congregation’s voting habits how the members would discount the words as not realistic in “the real world.” God and mammon co-existed quite easily in most churches that I’ve attended. Uncle Sam, it seems, sits on the left side of God. My adult life – married, father, ordained elder, Sunday school teacher, I lived quite comfortably with that cognitive dissonance. That all changed in August 2008.

            I understand more now about the infinite power and mystery of God than I ever did. And, everyday I’m reminded how far I must go. Too often guys in here use “religion” as a means of separation, segregation, and self-delusion. They miss the “real” message. Funny but the same is true out there. You ever read Paul’s letter to the Corinthians about love? Every wedding – it seems – uses Paul’s words. I can tell you – 28 years with a woman I still love and pray for everyday in spite of the divorce – we didn’t meet Paul’s test. We failed; almost everyone does.

            Don’t blame God for the evil that’s done in His name. Blame those of us who profess belief and then distort His desires and ways for our own selfish, evil, and petty hopes. And maybe, just maybe, we can all start practicing a little more what we profess.

Year-End Thoughts and Timely Rants – It’s All Words

Another year down. A lot has been going on the past few weeks in here and out in the “real” world that’s kept me thinking. For better or worse, there’s plenty of time to think while you’re in here. Funny, but most guys try and avoid thinking in here. Thinking is dangerous. You think and you ask yourself “why,” why did I ever let it get this far, why did I not properly account for the consequences, why did I not understand the hurt my arrest would bring? Guys try and avoid why; they try to avoid painful self-reflection and admit no matter how bad their lives were, how bad the hand they were dealt, they – and they alone – are responsible for their incarceration. Yeah, thinking is dangerous in here.
            I have a friend, a young guy I work with – only 36 and already he’s been in twenty-one years on a first degree murder charge. He killed a neighbor kid, a teenage boy just like him, and then casually left the scene, changed out of his blood-soaked clothes (stabbing someone to death will do that), and went to school. He was in the school cafeteria when the SWAT team came swarming in and with guns drawn arrested him.

            Every year since his twelfth behind bars he’s come up for parole (murder 1, old law, do twelve, then parole eligibility until you hit your “mandatory” release date – usually at 50% of your sentence). Every year at his hearing the parole examiner asks, “Do you know why you did it, why you killed that boy?” And every year he gives the same answer: “I don’t know. I haven’t given it that much thought?” What??

            I don’t get it. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about my selfish, stupid, reckless behavior. I can’t forget the call to my wife, her words in her letters telling me she was divorcing me. I can’t forget my parents’ faces in court as I was sentenced. I have a running list in my head of every person who in spite of my complete self-immolation of my life – has sent me a letter or card saying “you’re in our thoughts and prayers.” I remember to the millisecond that moment when I gave up and when God said “not yet.” My entire purpose for being now is to make right what I did wrong. I can’t help but think about it; and he says it never crosses his mind. Thinking.

            Nelson Mandela died a few weeks ago. He was – he is – a remarkable man. No one gave him much thought when he was arrested and imprisoned for having the radical idea that apartheid was evil. Mandela was no Gandhi. He was willing to use violence to achieve his goal.   The white government sent him to prison to silence him. They misjudged who they were dealing with.

            A writer noted that prison was “the crucible that formed the Mandela we know.” No matter what happened in prison the system could not take away Madela’s pride, his dignity, and his sense of justice. “He refused,” the writer said, “to be intimidated in any circumstance.” Mandela, talking about prison, simply said. “I came out mature.”

            I carry a Mandela quote with me. It goes:

            “Difficulties break some men but make others. No axe is sharp enough to cut the soul of a sinner who keeps on trying, one armed with the hope that he will rise even in the end.” Such beautiful words. Such powerful meaning.  Difficulties.

            I have a friend in here named Chuck. I met him at receiving. Chuck’s an “old head,” sixty-five and four more to go in here. This isn’t Chuck’s “first rodeo.” He’s been in twice before. Chuck has a drinking problem. He also has a temper problem. Combing the two is like using a match around gasoline. Chuck was driving drunk when a cop pulled him over. “I just wanna go home,” Chuck sputtered and pulled a gun on the cop. Chuck then walked home and passed out in his yard.

            Law enforcement didn’t take kindly to Chuck’s gun waving – “threatening an officer” they called it and now he’s doing ten years. But, Chuck was there at receiving and he knows what a psychotic carnival DOC is.

            Anyway, Chuck’s been in visits a number of times when I’ve been up on my monthly visit with my parents. And Chuck always gives a wave and a “Hey counselor,” shout out to me. The other afternoon, I finished running and Chuck was sitting on the picnic table. He called me over. “Saw you in VI Saturday,” he said. “I wanted to tell your folks from the first time I saw them at receiving they never had to worry about you. I’ve seen you face down gang bangers and knuckleheads and never once back off from your convictions or who you are.” I thought about Chuck’s words that night. I feel alone and isolated much of the time that I’m in here. I frankly don’t get much of the behavior or bullshit that passes for being a “grown ass man” in here. There is nothing “grown” or “manly” about much of what guys do in here.

            At first, I think I was overly aggressive, overly blunt because I had some deep felt desire to get my ass kicked. See, I hated what I was outside; hated who I’d become; and I didn’t see any way of finding the real me again. So I was blunt and brutal and stood my ground and kept waiting to be punched or jumped or worse. And it never came. It never came because for all the bravado voiced in here, men in prison are basically cowards. They join gangs because they’re afraid to be alone. They talk of their gun exploits and their break-ins and beatings as evidence of their machismo. And I saw through it. I saw it was a bunch of lies and bullshit.

            Guys in here are afraid of me (funny, but my young friend Mustafa says I could be vicious bully if I wanted to be), afraid because I tell them the truth. Prison exposes a man’s weakness. It takes a lot to carry yourself with self-respect, pride, and dignity. I’ve come to realize the men who learn that overcome prison and all the other baggage they carry.  Self-respect.

            My friend Bob left the day after Christmas. In the past month four men who made prison livable have left: Scotty and Dave got home (and are doing great); Craig was transferred after his major screw up (and I still feel that loss); and Bob. Bob is a man of honor and courage. Bob came in very young in the eighties after committing a very violent crime. And he saw and survived the worst in prison: the racial animus, the stabbings, extortion, and rapes, and the drugs. He made parole before he defeated the demons he faced. And drugs and alcohol led him back here.

            Bob didn’t give up. He left the other day with a future laid out for him. He was a guy who in another time in my life I would have considered a friend. He was serious when need be, well-read, and loyal, characteristics sorely lacking in here. I will miss my conversations with him. I know he will do well. Friendship.

            A federal judge appointed by George W. Bush ruled that the NSA surveillance program was “most probably unconstitutional.” He asked, “What would our founding fathers say to our government’s massive snooping?” I wonder. We live in a nation of fear. We are afraid of “terrorists” and in the name of defeating them we sell our national identity of freedom. Meanwhile, more children die each year in this country from poverty, hunger, and neglect than all the deaths caused by terrorists in this nation’s history.

            In the name of law and order we’ve created a massive prison industrial complex that incarcerates more men and women than any country in the world; more behind bars than Stalin’s gulag purges in the Soviet Union. I live in a police state inside prison where I am constantly subjected to cameras, strip searches and questioning. And the officers are always right; the cameras conveniently turn off when a man is left to die from a heart attack or during a confrontation with an officer. If people outside don’t wake up and demand that their freedoms be respected, the difference between life inside the fence and outside the fence will only be the barbed wire. Freedom.

            I’ve spent a good deal of time this past year thinking about God. Funny writing that because I’ve come to believe God thinks about me all the time. Before my arrest, I was an ordained elder in my church and taught Sunday School and yet I learned more about the mystery and magnificence of God in a dark cell and even darker days in here than ever before.

            Here’s what I’ve realized. We talk a lot about God’s blessings when things are going great, but we don’t give Him much thought. And then our world comes crashing down and like Job we yell out, “Why” and we’re scared, and alone, and at the end of our rope and the time comes in the quiet and stillness of the night we know, we know we aren’t alone; we are loved. I believe the words of Pastor Rick Warren:

            “God can bring good even out of the bad in my life … God loves to turn crucifixions into resurrections.”

            Very hopeful words from a man dealing with the suicide of his oldest son. Faith.

            I love Pope Francis which is surprising coming from such an unabashed Protestant. But this Pope gets it. God is in the AIDS wards, and war zones, and prisons, and slums. He’s with those crying for help and out of loss or pain or fear. “Emmanuel,” “God with us.” The last few weeks I haven’t been able to get that Advent hymn out of my mind:

            “O come, O come Emmanuel
            And ransom captive Israel”

            And over Christmas I re-read Luke’s Gospel and remembered Jesus in the synagogue where He read from the Prophet Isaiah, “He has sent Me to proclaim release to captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed.” That is the God who kept me going when I made such a mess of my life. That’s the God who sees me though today.

            So it’s the New Year and things are good because I have hope. And as Andy Dufresne says in “The Shawshank Redemption,”

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

Mandela

As I write this, Nelson Mandela lies in a South African hospital on life support.  Ninety-four with consciousness fading, his last days on earth may be approaching.  While his family battles over his body and his possessions, his country holds its collective breath.  What will happen to South Africa, they wonder, after he’s gone?

“I’m no saint.”  Mandela once remarked to a celebrity journalist fawning over him.  He understood his path.  So often we seek to idolize our heroes.  We make them perfect.  Mandela knew better.  He was a lawyer by training.  Faced with the oppressive Apartheid system, he sought revolution. An active leader in the ANC (African National Congress), he saw military action, bombings, and the like against the minority white government as not just legitimate but necessary.  Simply put, he was no Gandhi.

And, he had blood on his hands.  As corrupt and ruthless as the white Afrikaner government was, the ANC matched them.  Mandela was arrested, convicted and sent to prison.  The government believed by removing him they would silence him.  They were wrong.

A few years ago I read a book built around Mandela’s prison diary.  I was intrigued.  I had started a daily journal three days after my arrest.  I assumed Mandela’s would be different.  I assumed his would be political rhetoric of the first order.  I was wrong.  He diaried the things he saw, and felt, and experienced.  As I read his diary I saw the growth, the transformation of the man in the ordinary (if life in prison can ever be considered ordinary). 

I was no political prisoner, but I wanted to face my incarceration the way he did, with dignity, and courage, and honor, all those concepts that are in such short supply in places such as this.

I remember the day years ago when he walked out of prison.  I watched on TV and was sure South Africa would explode in violence and bloodletting.  There would be vengeance, I believed, retribution for his imprisonment.

I was wrong.  Contrary to what those in power thought, prison hadn’t broken Mandela.  It made him stronger.  And wiser.  I still see him walking out the front gate of the prison, a solitary man, but a man with a calmness because he knew what had to be done.  There was no bloodletting.  There was no call for revenge.  There was Mandela with a message of peaceful transition of power and reconciliation.  And South Africa moved forward, just as Mandela did when he walked out of the prison.

His nation is not perfect. There are problems; the social divide still lingers; corruption in government; crime; and yet, it has moved forward.  It is a nation with a future.

“I’m no saint.”  Perhaps, we are too quick to declare actions and people heroic only to topple them later.  Perhaps, we can learn from Mandela’s experience and the power of human will for transformation, for vision, for mercy.

Missing the Message

The nation celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day the other day.  In a strange twist, it fell on the same day that the nation’s first Black President celebrated his inauguration and the beginning of his second term.  Living in a place with such a large percentage of Black men you would assume the day resonates with them.  Unfortunately, there is a great deal of ambivalence among the young, incarcerated Black men in here.  And in the white ranks, it borders on contempt.  Much of it arises from ignorance, from missing the message.

There is an old political story from the days of Ronald Reagan’s election.  A well-off Park Avenue liberal was bemoaning to her friends that Reagan won a landslide reelection.  “I don’t know how”, she said.  “I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”  And so it goes for most of the young Black men I know in here.

“I don’t know anyone who respects King,” said Will, a normally very bright studious twenty-eight year old.  “He sold out.  He isn’t a leader of our community.”  As he spoke, three or four other equally young bright Black men nodded in agreement.  “White people like King.”  I could only smile.

I then pointed out that according to surveys among Black Americans; Dr. King is the single most revered figure in American history.  No other person even comes close.  Whites, on the other hand, hold mixed feelings, partly out of the battle over enshrining his birthday as a national holiday and partially over the ugly strains of prejudice that somehow continue to lie just below the surface.

“How can that be?”  My young friend asked.  I don’t know anyone who likes him.  I thought of the wealthy liberal in New York who couldn’t grasp that her view wasn’t the norm.  And I wondered how so many could miss the true meaning of Dr. King’s words, how so many miss the message.

Imagine a young Black man who graduates college in his teens.  He comes from an educated family of ministers in the segregated South.   He heads to Boston to begin graduate studies in Theology, and he discovers the words and works of a half-naked Indian lawyer named Gandhi.  King reads Gandhi’s words and sees in Gandhi’s message of peaceful, nonviolent protest the Christian response to oppression. 

All during his time in Boston King honed his message of using a nonviolent response to evil.  At age twenty-six, King earned his PhD.  He and his young bride accepted a call to a church in Montgomery, Alabama.  It is difficult to imagine America, the South, back in the 1950’s.  Most of the young men in here are quick to use the term “Jim Crow”, but they know nothing of it.  Theirs is a world of Rap singers being number one on the charts, of interracial couples, of a Black President winning a second term.  They know nothing of “colored only” bathrooms and water fountains.  They can’t fathom that you could be arrested for sitting at a lunch counter in a public restaurant or refusing to give up your seat to a white person on a public bus.

This was the world Martin and Coretta King ventured into in Montgomery, a world of separate but woefully unequal.  King preached nonviolence, and forgiveness, and mercy while his flock was regularly embarrassed, humiliated, or worse by their white counterparts.  It didn’t take long for King to find an issue to rally the Black community.

It came in the package of a petite, quiet Black woman who refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery public bus to a White passenger.  When asked year’s later why she subjected herself to arrest and death threats, Rosa Parks simply replied, “I was tired.”

“I was tired.”  Tired of indignity, and disrespect, and disobedience to the laws of her God, that all men and women are God’s precious children.  In those three words the Civil Rights movement found their direction and Dr. King became the movement’s Moses.

Dr. King led marches and boycotts and protests – always nonviolent protests – to challenge the conscience of a nation.  So often he and his followers were met with arrest and violence, horrible violence.

“You must love your enemy,” he would tell anyone who would listen.  Loving your enemy, seeing the Godliness in the most evil of men, is usually easier then liking your enemy.  It’s tough, he would say, to like someone who is beating you, or opening up a high-powered fire hose on you, or lynching you.  “Love your enemy.  Do not return his evil with evil.”

No American orator or writer captured the affirmative duty of a man of faith to nonviolently challenge evil – even to the point of death – as Dr. King did.  His “Letter from Birmingham Jail” stands as one of the great written statements of Christian faith in action.  His, “I Have A Dream” speech eloquently captures the Biblical dream of America as a land where all God’s children are truly free. 

Freedom.   I watch these young, Black men miss the poetic beauty of freedom.  Freedom isn’t about purchasing power or the ability to say and do whatever you want.  Freedom is a peace that is given by the Almighty that no tyrant, no nation, can suppress.  Dietrich Bonheoffer knew real freedom even as the Nazis hung a noose around his neck.  Martin Luther King knew freedom even as he understood his life would be cut short.

“You have to fight back.”  “We need to live separately.”  Over and over I hear these young men utter the same words Dr. King faced from his own community.  Violence, he knew was never the answer.  We are called to be better, to be merciful even when confronted by evil.

And Dr. King provoked anger.  He condemned America’s involvement in Vietnam.  War is never the answer he courageously argued.  Inmates who are confronted each day by violence and “might makes right” just shake their heads in bemused wonder.  “He was so foolish”, they’ll say, and I can’t help but think he was the wisest man alive during my lifetime, a man whose vision of America and the world was so much closer to God’s view than most of our national leaders.

This is not to say he was without faults.  King, like all men and women, had foibles and sins and failures.  But the mark of a man is how he behaves in the worst of circumstances.  In that, King proved himself heroic.

So it was with this year’s MLK Day.  They showed a documentary on his life, his legacy on our internal movie channel.  I noticed many TV sets turned to his story.  A few of the guys came by afterward.  “Did you know all that?” they asked.  I did.  And I gave out my dog eared copy of King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, so a few could read it and understand the message.  It’s always been about the message.

Three Men I Know

There are three men I know and each, I learned this week, are facing a significant crisis.  How they deal with their particular crisis, how they proceed forward, will say much about them.  As I watch and pray over the incidents that unfold around me I see faith lessons.

Woo was one of our first IT students.  I say was because this week he was sent to the hole, locked up after fighting another inmate in the staff kitchen.  Fight is the wrong word.  It was no fight.  Woo, a man I’ve described in the blog before as having a head the size of a Rottweiler’s is a huge man. He has tremendous forearms, almost as thick as thighs, “Popeye” arms.  He is a large, strong, powerful man.

Woo is a staff cook.  Tuesday, during his shift, another staff worker began running his mouth.  Words were exchanged. Woo has been dealing for months with his mother’s passing.  Because her home was in Georgia he was unable to attend (inmates are prohibited from funerals out of state).  So Woo, dealing with the loss of his mother, the despair of incarceration, and the stress of waiting to see if his federal crack sentence is reduced (he has five years to do on a federal conviction which he starts when he leaves VA DOC in June 2012.  In July, President Obama signed into law, applying retroactive sentencing guidelines, that corrects the harsh disparity between crack versus powder cocaine sentences) snapped out. 

He picked the obnoxious inmate up and threw him on the heated stove causing second degree burns.  Woo pled guilty to a simple charge of fighting (could have been much worse), and is doing fifteen days in the hole.  His security level is being raised.  His good time (what little we receive) taken (adding 90 plus additional days to his sentence).  He has been removed from his job and college.

I have become aggressively pacifistic (an oxymoron if ever I heard one) since my arrest.  Violence is never the solution.  Behavior – fighting especially – to settle disputes in prison is commonplace.  I regularly recite the mantra to the guys “you can’t put your hands on someone in the real world”.  Unfortunately, in the “real world” too often “might makes right”.  Violence begets violence.  As Gandhi said “an eye for an eye and we’ll all be blind.”

How will Woo respond?  How will the loss of his job, college and good time affect him for the remainder of his bid?  What has he learned from this that will ensure he won’t repeat the insanity?  This is Woo’s third time in prison.  I pray it’s his last but this past week gave me reasons to think it isn’t.

Monday night the 5:00 pm news put up the photo of a “convicted sex offender” caught in a high school parking lot in Richmond.  “An investigation revealed the offender had failed to register.”  The offender?  Alexander, the “lawyer” I’d written about previously who made thousands of dollars each month off the hopes of inmates seeking a way out, the same guy who became involved with an officer this past summer which led to him being investigated and her being fired.  The same Alexander who was only released 56 days ago.

As I’ve written before, I met Alexander at the Henrico Jail.  To see someone I knew in jail came as a complete shock to me.  I’d seen him around bar events, legal ed seminars, and the like from time to time.  My gut reaction always was “this guy’s full of it”.  My opinion didn’t change when I saw him at the jail or later when I saw him here.  He was too cocky, too crazy with the officers, and to quick to tell guys their cases were beatable.  I avoided him.

Some of the officers had tipped me off that things weren’t as Alexander said.  He’d tell guys he ran a $4 million plus scheme on the street to gain inmate awe (point of information:  million dollar thefts carry reverence in prison.  I am treated as a genius because I was dumb enough to get caught after steeling $2 million).  He, in fact, took $30,000 from a trust account.  He also neglected to tell guys he had a 1999 conviction for indecency with a minor.

Even worse, there were indications Alexander hadn’t learned anything from his stay in the hole his last three months here – or his three plus year bid.  A number of guys had stopped me the past few weeks asking for help putting letters and materials together to mail to Alexander.  “He’s agreed to have his law firm handle my appeal,” they’d tell me.  Problem is, there is no law firm.  Alexander isn’t a lawyer.  He’s still running the same hustle he ran in here.

Now, he’s back in jail.  He’s facing new charges and these are serious:  failure to register is a major problem for a sex offender.  Being in a school zone as an unregistered convicted sex offender makes things even worse.  Alexander will, in all likelihood, be back in prison within the next few months.  He’ll get new time for his new charges and additional time for his violation of the terms of his probation.

For the guys in here still doing time, it’s just another dumb ass who gets out and screws up and makes it that much tougher on the rest of us to get out early.  Will Alexander ever get it together?  The answer appears to be doubtful.

And then there is Gary.  Gary is an Episcopal minister, a rector at a well-established church in Richmond.  Shortly after my arrest a dear friend who came almost daily to see me telephoned my minister.  The minister’s response when my friend asked him to visit me at the jail?  “I’m not getting in the middle of his legal problems and his marital problems.”  He wasn’t the only one from my church who rejected me after my arrest.  But the sting of being rejected by my clergy was deep.

My friend turned to his own pastor – Gary – to visit me.  Gary didn’t know me.  He’d never met me.  I wasn’t a member of his flock.  Yet, this man, this stranger, called on me at the jail.  He continued to do so monthly.

When I transferred to the hell that was receiving, Gary showed up.  He listened to me.  When I cried out asking “why” he didn’t offer simple, easy explanations for the mystery that is God.  Shortly after my arrival at receiving he sent me a card with the archangel Michael portrayed.  “Michael is the angel who guards and protects the Lord’s people” he wrote.  I put that card on the bunk so that every night as I lay there hearing the screams throughout the building I saw Michael.  That card, that angel, greets me every time I open my locker.

Throughout my stay here at Lunenburg Gary has written me – and visited.  He sent two amazing books about Christian meditation that helped me “silence the noise” in my head during prayers and bask in the quiet presence of God. There are two men that have led me to a deeper understanding of the mystery and magnificence of the Lord.  Gary and my friend Harley, who asked Gary to visit, are those men.

When I seek to model my Christian life after someone, it’s Gary I think of.  He had no reason to reach out to me.  Yet, his faith led him to me.  I am surviving this because of people like Gary.

Last night I received a copy of a letter Gary mailed to his parishioners.  My friend sent it with a short note that said “keep Gary in your prayers”.   Gary advised his congregation that he’d been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.  “The doctors are optimistic” he wrote about his prognosis.

I have taken to heart conversations and letters I’ve shared with this wonderful pastor.  Life does indeed not appear to make sense sometimes.  And trials and suffering make their way into our lives and they test us to the point of breaking.  But, God is good.  He is in the midst of all storms and He does see us through.

Every night since that first visit he made to the jail, Gary has been included in my prayers.  I don’t understand why or how cancer strikes.  I don’t understand why good people suffer.  But I do know Gary will be fine.  He is a good man and has the love, respect, and prayers of many.

Three men I know this week confronted trials.  Like all of us, some of the trials faced were the result of anger and impulse, or pride and arrogance, and others just visited upon us for no reason.  I pray for all three men that their trials awaken in them the true purpose God calls them to.

And these three remind me of a story:  “A Rottweiler, an attorney and a priest walk into a bar…”