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.

 

Ten Years After (2)

It is one week until the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attack of 9/11, “the day that changed America”.  As I sit here in this prison dormitory I recognize how much my own life changed.  On 9/11 I was an in-house attorney for a large, Virginia headquartered property and casualty insurer.  I was “happily” married to my college sweetheart.  We were the stereotypical upper income, white American couple with two “perfect” sons, a “perfect home”, a “perfect” life.  After the attack, all that would be tested.  I was sure what our country needed to do.  I was equally sure what I needed to do.  Ten years after, I confess I was wrong on almost every count.

Just as I sold my soul to prove some vague, abstract point about love, commitment and family, so too did America after 9/11.  We are not a better nation for our reaction to 9/11.  America has lost its moral framework.  We were wrong in our reaction to the evil foisted upon us; we are wrong for our behavior – at home and abroad.  I fear the lives lost that day and in the years since in Afghanistan and Iraq will be for nothing.  As Judy Collins mournfully sang, “When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?”

Luke, in his Gospel, recounts Jesus speaking to the multitudes.   Over and over the Savior says “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you; give to everyone who asks you… “He calls on his followers to forgive, show mercy.  And then He brings forward these words:

“You call me ‘Lord, Lord’, and do not do what I say.” 

In other words, we talk a good game, but we don’t put our money where our mouth is.

 A few years ago a deranged gunman broke into an Amish schoolhouse and shortly thereafter brutally murdered a number of young Amish girls.  What was the reaction in the Amish community?  They prayed for the dead gunman and wrapped his family in compassion and mercy.

I was all in favor of obliterating Afghanistan.  I bought into the doctrine that you are either “with us or against us”.  Arrest foreign nationals and hold them without trial?  No problem.  Torture to get information?  I’m OK with that.  Kill thousands of men, women and children in Afghanistan and Iraq – “collateral damage” – in the name of winning the war on terror?  Small price to pay for “safety”.  That was all “PI Larry” (pre-incarceration Larry).  Now I see my country:  the one $17 trillion in debt where 46 million people need food stamps, where over 2.3 million people are behind bars, the vast majority of which are locked up for nonviolent crimes – and I ask what of our founding declarations that all “men” are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?  Wonderful words, but just words if we are willing to sell our collective soul for safety and fail to show mercy.

Politicians get standing ovations for demanding that the Ten Commandments be posted in schools and offices to remind us of our “Judeo-Christian” heritage.  But, I wonder what would Jesus say about our reaction to 9/11?  What do we make of His Sermon on the Mount, His call to forgive “seven times seventy”?  We talk a good game but we fall way, way short.

On 9/11, as I detailed in other blogs, I consoled my then wife as she sobbed, worried our sons would be drawn into some worldwide conflagration.  We made love that night, two people trying to cling to innocence in a world seemingly gone mad. Shortly after, in an attempt to “prove” our life would be better after the attack, I began stealing increasingly larger sums of money.  I had stolen before – then always to gain some psychological response of love and appreciation from my “soulmate” who deep down – I knew didn’t feel for me what I felt for her.  After 9/11 I was determined to have it all!

Ironically, as I sit in here I see the same convulsive behavior in my country.  Why did they hate us so?  We asked after 9/11.  And then immediately we retaliated, launching attacks aimed at eliminating the danger. 

But danger can’t be totally eliminated.  We will always face the risk of someone – anyone – trying to do the unthinkable.  Much like I had to learn that I couldn’t make someone feel what I needed, we need to learn there is not absolute safety.  There is pestilence, natural disasters and the occasional sociopath lurking.  But if we truly believe in God, then we know we are called to be strong and courageous.  We are not to fear, though “the mountains fall in the sea”.  God is our help; not B1 bombers, not drones, nor laser technology.  We can’t violate our own core principles in the name of security.

I read a piece in the September issue of “Esquire” concerning a Sudanese man captured and held at Guantanamo Bay for ten years.  He was held chained and naked in a freezing cell for days on end; hands chained above his head, hands and feet chained to the floor; denied access to counsel.  Is this justice?  Is this an appropriate response?  Should this be tolerable in America?  This alleged “mastermind” (who coincidentally is uneducated and speaks no English) was eventually given a 34 month sentence (that’s right – 34 months).  

I have witnessed firsthand the barbarism and unjust circumstances of prison.  A just, compassionate society can do better.  As I sit here, I wish we as a nation had done things differently.  I wish I had acted differently.

There is a Bible parable I return to often as I struggle to make sense of my life.  At the end of Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount he records the savior telling His followers to hear the words and act on them.  They will be “like the man who dug his foundation on the rocks. And when the flood came and the torrents burst against the house” it could not be shaken.

The part that so intrigues me in the story says “when the flood” comes, not “if”.  Faith is like that house on the rock.  Troubles are inevitable in our individual and collective lives. But by faith, we are sustained.  My marriage, I realized, was not built on a strong foundation.  Love and commitment were mere shifting sand.   The rule of love, opposition to torture?  Those deeply held “virtues” of America’s psyche were also cast in sand.

Ten years later and what have we learned?  Is war ever justified?  Is torture ever acceptable?  Does safety trump freedom?

A poet/songwriter once wrote a piece comparing America, his America, to a wayward love.  She was breaking his heart because she couldn’t see how beautiful she was; she didn’t understand how her behavior was killing him.  Ten years after 9/11, divorced, alone in prison, I look at my country and I understand what he meant.  The past ten years have not been kind to her.