Christmas in the Valley and on the High Places

On a Christmas morning buried in snow a young man in prison took a first trusting step from the valley of humiliation to seek the high places and a season of grace.

Christmas by Fr Gordon MacRae

’Twas the night before Christmas, 2007, when a winter storm descended upon Concord, New Hampshire. I awoke that Christmas morning to a shroud of heavy snow that masked this prison world of concrete and steel under pristine whiteness. A howling wind encased the walled prison yard in drifts of snow while saner men hibernated through the long, cold Christmas trapped inside.

I don’t know what came over me that Christmas morning. By 9:00 AM my claustrophobia was in high gear. Still a source of anxiety after all these years, it reached its usual crescendo with a near panic-driven urge to be outside. Prisoners here have a brief hourly window to move from point A to point B, but it was Christmas. We were snowed in, and there was simply no place to go. But I had to try.

Our friend, Pornchai Moontri had been here with me for about two years then, and we had just landed in the same place. “Where are you going?” he asked as he saw me bundled up against the wind and the snow. I told him I wanted to get an hour outside and asked if he wanted to join me. “Brrrrr!” he shivered, shaking his head. So I boldly made my way alone to a guard station to ask if the outside yard might be open. “Are you nuts?” came the gruff reply.

Thinking it a rhetorical question, I just stood there. The guard grabbed some keys and I followed him outside to a caged in area buried in snow drifts. “You’ll be stuck out here for an hour,” he said as the gate closed behind me and a key engaged the frozen lock with grinding reluctance.

And I thought prison was only hostile on the inside! The wind was howling, snow was blowing wildly, and it was freezing. The yard was empty except for an old picnic table half buried in snow, and a solitary downcast hooded figure sitting there like a silent sentinel. He kept a wary eye on me as I decided to give him a wide berth and walk the perimeter of the yard through the drifts of snow. Had I taken in the scene a little sooner, I might have changed my mind and headed back inside.

Battling the drifts got old really fast, so I made my way through the snow to the opposite side of the table, cleared a wet section of bench, and sat down. His bare, freezing hands were balled into fists and his hooded stare fought against eye contact. It was up to me to break the ice. Literally!

My own wariness lifted as the balled fists and attempts to look fierce were betrayed by streaks of tears interrupted by my uninvited presence. There were over 500 prisoners in that building, and I had never before seen this menacing but frightened kid. So I asked his name. “James,” he said through a struggle to sound gruff.

I noticed that James’ fists were tightly balled not because he was planning to smack me, but because his hands were freezing. The two-dollar gloves sold to us back then were next to useless against the cold so I was wearing two pairs. I quietly removed the outer gloves and handed them over. It’s against the rules here to give a freezing fellow human a used pair of gloves, but it was long ago. The statute of limitations for that offense has likely expired. I doubt they’ll throw me in prison for it.

James stared at the gloves for a moment of silent defiance, then quickly put them on. There was no holding back what I sensed was coming next. His face fell into his newly gloved hands, and I spent the rest of that hour a cold silent witness to this young man’s torrent of grief. Then the guard appeared to ask whether I was ready to come back in. “No, I’m good,” I said. “I’ll stay for another hour.”

Though I Walk Through the Valley of Shadow

James, it turned out, did not even know it was Christmas. At 21, he had never before been in prison. He arrived just weeks earlier, and on the morning of Christmas Eve he was moved from the receiving unit to the eight-man cells on the top floor of that prison building. He had been there only a day and one overnight when we met that cold Christmas morning in the snow.

In the midst of tears, James asked, “Why would they put someone like me up there?” By “someone like me,” he seemed to mean that life for him was a lot more fragile than for most young men his age in prison. James is part African-American, part Asian, and part God-knows-what. In the racially sensitive world of prison, he did not feel like a comfortable fit anywhere. He had been assigned to a tough place where practiced predators zeroed in quickly upon his inner vulnerability.

James entered young adulthood with an acute social anxiety disorder and panic attacks. This, coupled with severe ADHD — Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder — made him stand out here as a marginal figure among marginal figures. “I can’t go back up there,” he sobbed. I told him that refusing to go might have consequences that would only make the matter worse. I told him that it was very difficult to get anything done about his plight on a Christmas morning. So I made a precarious promise that from the moment I made it I wondered if it could actually happen. I promised to try to get him moved to a safer, saner place.

So later that day I spoke discreetly with someone in a position to help. I explained what took place, and he said, “I’ll look into it.” Just hours later on that Christmas afternoon, I saw James out the window carrying his meager belongings to the cellblock next to the one where I lived. I knew most of the men there, so I passed the word to go easy on him. They did. It was Christmas, after all.

When you rescue someone lost at sea, a sort of bond forms of its own accord. I eventually learned of all the baggage in life that brought James to that Christmas day. Like many who land in prison, James was missing most of the infrastructure of a life that might help prevent such a thing. He was like a tree without roots, swaying into whatever direction the winds of life blew.

I learned over time that James was removed from his home as a young child because of a history of abuse and neglect. He grew up in the foster care system, moving from place to place, even state to state. Not many people could cope with his racing thoughts, lack of control, and craving for attention.

From age ten to seventeen, James had been in six foster homes, some better than others, but none leaving him with a foundation and a sense of family. At age 17 he simply walked out the door, emancipating himself to the streets where life descended on a steady downward spiral.

James’ crime was as bizarre and misunderstood as the rest of his life. Having broken into a vacant building for a place to sleep, he fled as a police officer approached him. The chase ended in a scuffle, and on the way to the ground, the officer’s weapon fell from his holster. James picked it up. What happened next is a matter of controversy. Some, including the officer, thought James was pointing the gun at him. Others, including James, say he was just a panic-stricken kid trying to give it back.

Either way, just a month before this incident, a terrible tragedy occurred in Manchester, New Hampshire that, justly or not, became a frame of reference for James’ offense. A career police officer, Michael Briggs, was shot and killed in the line of duty by a young, African American man who is today the sole prisoner on New Hampshire’s death row.

I once wrote about that tragedy and its aftermath in the life of John Breckinridge, Officer Briggs’ partner who was present in that Manchester alley on that night. John Breckinridge himself wrote courageously of his new opposition to the death penalty based on his recent reversion to his Catholic faith. But James was also a part of the fallout of that story. His fumbling crime of picking up an officer’s dropped weapon resulted in a ten year sentence.

Hinds’ Feet on High Places

I have served that sentence with him. Most people here find it very difficult to be around James for any length of time. When James discovered that I am a Catholic priest, he thought little of it. “I was Catholic in one of my foster homes,” he said. It was an odd way of phrasing the only religious experience he has ever had in his young, unpredictable life. “You’re like my father now,” he said. “You’re the only person I feel safe with.”

I got James a part-time job in the prison library where he earned a dollar a day. He helped return books and put them back on the shelves. Sometimes, he even put them back in the right place. He seemed to think that the rest of his job description was to make certain that everyone else knew he was my friend.

James was released a few years ago. On another Christmas morning, a decade after that sorrowful mystery of our first Christmas encounter, I spent another Christmas morning with James — that time at a Mass to honor the Birth of Christ the King. The tears of sorrow in the bitter cold that life dealt him were gone. He smiled a lot then, perhaps too much for a young man in prison. He didn’t even realize that all my other friends vie for space to make sure James sat on the other side of me so none of them had to sit with him. He smiled and fidgeted and tried to get my attention all through Mass, but I’ll take that over the oppression of bitterness and sorrow any day.

I had an odd experience with James shortly after that Mass. During a quieter moment in the prison library, James asked me if I remembered the first time we met. I told him that I remembered it very well, that it was Christmas morning nearly a decade earlier. James said, “I was in a real deep, dark place then. Now I feel like I’m in the high places.”

What he said reminded me vividly of a strange book I read fify years ago, Hinds’ Feet on High Places by Hannah Hurnard. It was first published by Christian Literature Crusade in 1955, but I read it in 1975. At the time, I was a Capuchin novice preparing for simple profession of vows, and I came across the book “by accident” on a shelf one day. It was fascinating. Hannah Hurnard was a native of London who became an Evangelical missionary in Palestine and Israel for fifty years.

Hinds’ Feet on High Places is a small allegorical novel (158 pp) about the spiritual journey. The central character is a young woman named “Much Afraid” who heard a call to leave the Valley of Humiliation where she lived imprisoned. She wanted to journey to the High Places of the Chief Shepherd, and was accompanied on her difficult journey by two other allegorical characters, Suffering and Sorrow. At the end of the journey she was transformed with a new life and a new name. It’s an odd, quirky, but beautiful novel. Fifty years later, I remembered every character and facet of the book.

On the day after James made me think of it back then, Pornchai-Max Moontri handed me something he received in the mail that day from our friend and BTSW reader, Mike Fazzino in Connecticut. It was the Winter 2016 issue of GrayFriar News, the quarterly newsletter of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, the order founded by the late Father Benedict Goeschel, CFR. For perspective, I once wrote of him when I too was lost in shadow in “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night.”

The cover of the newsletter had an excellent article by Father John Paul Ouellette, CFR, entitled “The Humility of Christ Is Coming Down Joyfully for Others.” In it, Father Ouellette cited Hannah Hurnard’s Hinds’ Feet on High Places:

“A surprising character plays an important role in the transformation of Much Afraid: the water that flows down from the heights to the depths. As it makes its way down the mountain, the water constantly sings, ‘from the heights we leap and go, to the valley down below, always answering the call to the lowest place of all!’”

That’s what Christmas is. It is Christ descending from the heights to the lowest place of all. That Christmas morning in the freezing cold with James is now like a ghost of Christmas past. I’m re-reading Hinds’ Feet on High Places now, fifty years after picking it up for the first time. It’s a Christmas gift given for the second time.

For Christ to call James out of the depths to the heights, someone had to go down to that valley to meet him there. As Father Ouellete concludes from his analogy of the living water leaping from the heights, “Humility is not only a coming down, but doing so joyfully.” The joyful part has been missing for me, but I’m working on it. The key is knowing that Christ has come, and when you enter the Valley of Humiliation, you will only have to stay long enough to journey with someone else to the high places.

Angels we have heard on high, sweetly singing o’er the plains, and the mountains in reply echo back their joyous strains: “Gloria in Excelcis Deo! Gloria in Excelsis Deo!”

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You might also like these related Advent and Christmas posts from Beyond These Stone Walls.

The Music of Eric Genuis Inspired Advent Hope

Christmas for Those Bowed Down by the Fatigue of this World

The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God

How December 25 Became Christmas

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom

After 29 years in a U.S. prison, adjusting to the world is an immense challenge. Simultaneously adjusting to another country and culture is a task beyond measure.

A few years ago, I was invited to write a review of the now famous prison film, The Shawshank Redemption. It is the most replayed film in television history. I combined the review into a story about the prison I am in for going on 27 years. My account, published at LinkedIn, is “The Shawshank Redemption and its Real World Revision.” I hope you will read it.

There is a profoundly sad development in the film — which is a must-see, by the way. The elder prison inmate-librarian, a beloved character played by the great actor, James Whitmore, is paroled after serving many decades. The transition from life in prison to life as a free man in some unnamed Maine city is just too jarring. He is an alien in the strangest of worlds, the free one, and he is suddenly alone — isolated — for the first time in forty years. The alienation and isolation are just too much, and he takes his own life.

News of the character “Brooks”’ terrible end reaches the prison and casts a pall over an already darkened existence for the inmates of Shawshank. One of them — the wrongly convicted Andy Dufresne decides that he cannot have such an end. So he begins a plan for escape that will take 20 years to complete. He breaks through a cell wall and crawls through three miles of foul stench in a sewer pipe. Such an end is a sort of metaphor for leaving prison in the real world. You can free a man from decades in prison, but its residual stench can follow him for years to come.

America has a prison problem. This nation imprisons more of its citizens than all 28 countries of the European Union combined. The United States has five-percent of the world’s population but twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. The only nations that impose more, and longer prison sentences are Third World countries.

Pornchai Moontri lost his freedom at age 18 on March 21, 1992. He was set free — after ICE tacked another five grueling months onto his sentence — on February 8, 2021, just weeks short of 29 years. He is now 47. The most formative and defining years of his adult life have been spent as a prisoner. And if you have followed the published account of his life, then you know that his prison began at age 11 when he was removed from Thailand. You will find that account, also published as a LinkedIn article, in “Human Trafficking: Thailand to America and a Cold Case in Guam.”

Just two weeks ago, I wrote the story of Pornchai’s five month post-prison stay in ICE detention and his return to Thailand. It ended rather abruptly because his final arrival was just hours before that post was published. Pornchai literally went from 29 years in shackles of one sort or another to standing in the lobby alone at the Bangkok Holiday Inn Express for his mandatory 15 days in quarantine required by the Thai government. We were notified at the last minute that we would have to arrange and prepay the hotel expenses. A few good friends and BTSW readers quickly mobilized to make short work of that obstacle.

The scene at the hotel check-in was both poignant and comical. On the day I write this, I was talking with Pornchai about the topic of this post, and he said, “Make sure you write about my first night in the hotel.” “All of it?,” I asked. “Don’t leave anything out,” he said. So here goes:

It was just after midnight on Monday into Tuesday Bangkok time, on February 9th. After a nearly 24-hour flight, and a brief appearance in the Bangkok Airport security area, the two ICE agents escorting Pornchai wished him well and left. Someone then escorted him to a waiting hotel van. Upon arrival, the driver let him out and said, “The check-in counter is just inside.” Pornchai was frozen in place and the driver looked puzzled. After a moment Pornchai said, “You mean ... I just go in by myself?” It had been 29 years since Pornchai entered a building unescorted.

Free in the City of Angels

In Thailand, Bangkok is called “Krung Thep,” meaning, “City of Angels.” It is a city that never sleeps, a city of 9.3 million souls. Imagine this scene. Pornchai was standing at the main entrance of an urban hotel with its dazzling lights, having to will himself to take the first step of freedom. He walked toward the light, through the doors, and into the brightly lit lobby. It was now about 1:00 AM, and even at that hour two smiling clerks awaited him behind a large counter. Pornchai had no luggage. He had nothing but the clothes he had worn during a grueling 24-hour flight.

“Sawasdee, Khun Pornchai,” said the clerk. Pornchai repeated from long dormant memory the traditional Thai greeting. The check-in went smoothly and he was given a keycard. He had no idea what it was for. Then the clerk said, your stay is in Room 3-8. The elevator is over there. Again, he was frozen in place. The clerk asked him a question in Thai and Pornchai answered with some embarrassment, “I’m sorry. I do not fully understand Thai.” The clerk then asked in English, “Is there anything more you need, Khun Pornchai?” He answered as he did the driver out on the street. “You mean ... I go by myself?”

Pornchai made it into the elevator. As the door closed, this was the moment when he first knew he was free. He stood still for a full thirty seconds wondering what to do. He had no living memory of ever being in an elevator in which he is the one to decide where it goes. Both exhilarated and intimidated, he pushed the “3” button and the elevator moved beneath his feet. When he arrived at Room 3-8, the door was locked. He had no idea how to get in. Then he remembered the keycard. “Maybe it’s this thing,” he thought. He put it in a slot upside down and nothing happened. So he tried again, and this time the door clicked open. He was utterly amazed.

Once inside the dark room, Pornchai began to feel along the walls for a light switch, but there wasn’t one. So he opened the door to let in some light. No light switch anywhere. Then he saw a slot near the door. “Maybe it’s this keycard,” he thought. So he inserted it and the lights came on. Then, finally, after 24 hours in flight and two more hours getting to this point, he had to use the toilet. I would usually spare you this, but he wants me to include it. He reached repeatedly behind him for a lever for the nicety of prison etiquette called “a courtesy flush.” It dawned on him that there was no one else anywhere nearby, another first for him.

But that did not solve the problem of flushing the toilet. After washing his hands he meticulously searched the room for anything that looked like it might flush the toilet. He found nothing. “Surely,” he thought, “the keycard doesn’t flush the toilet too!” So he went to get the keycard out of the wall, thus turning off the lights. Searching again in the dark, he could find no place on or near the toilet to plug in the keycard. But he refused to give up. He restored the lights and searched again. Finally, he spotted what looked like a logo on top of the tank. Do toilets have logos? It did not appear to have a button, but he had nothing to lose. So he reached out and touched the logo, and lo and behold, the thing finally flushed. Pornchai debated with himself whether he should tell me this story.

Pornchai took a quick shower, then collapsed in exhaustion on the bed. Both the room and the bed were larger than anyplace he had ever slept before, and the bed was far softer. He recalled his promise to me that he would not sleep in the bathtub. Thus began a fitful, anxious night, his first in freedom and his first in his homeland after an anguish-filled absence of 36 years. He had never before felt so alone.

Samsung to the Rescue

But we have friends in Bangkok, and they have long awaited Pornchai’s arrival. Yela Smit, a Bangkok travel agent, and Father John Le, a member of the Missionary Society of the Divine Word, dropped off some items for Pornchai that we had sent over there ahead of time. We purchased a small backpack and a change of clothes and pair of sandals often worn in Bangkok. We intended that Pornchai would carry this travel bag in flight, but every time we shipped it to him ICE would move him somewhere else just as it arrived. Then they would just ship it back to us. So we had it sent ahead of time to Yela to bring it to him. I also put together a box of items that would give him a sense of the familiar. This included some of his favorite books, a prayer book, the Saint Maximilian Rosary that BTSW reader Kathleen Riney made for him, and some of his treasured correspondence. Yela and Father John dropped these at the hotel as he slept.

They also brought him a new Samsung Galaxy smartphone loaded with an internet package. Yela sent me his number the day before, so by the end of his first full day in Thailand, we were able to speak. One of our Thailand contacts, Viktor Weyand, also connected with him on his first day there and every day since. Pornchai had never before touched, or even seen, a smart phone, but to my amazement it proved less of a challenge to him than the toilet. (Please don’t tell him I said that!)

A call from me was one of his first on the Samsung phone. I thought he might be elated to hear my voice, but he said, “Actually, I have been listening to you all afternoon.” He left me astonished when he said that he found his way into Beyond These Stone Walls and spent the whole day reading posts about himself, about me, and about some of our weird politics. He read the BTSW “About” page and spent two hours listening to the documentary interviews with me there. He was clearly a newborn fan of the world of information technology.

During my call the next day, I walked him through getting into the Gmail, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts that our friends had set up for him over time. He was surprised to learn that he has over 600 Facebook “friends” most of whom are BTSW readers. Then came the real bombshell. I had him go to Bing.com and put his own name into the Search bar. The results were page after page of eye-popping affirmations of the good man he has become.

I asked him to do this search using Bing because I have found that Google, especially recently, seems to suppress some Catholic and other content with a conservative tone. I have never seen either Bing or Google, but before mentioning this to Pornchai I had a friend search his name on both. Clearly, the Bing search was fairer and more inclusive. Try it for yourself. Search "Pornchai Moontri" on both Bing and Google.

Pornchai had never before seen social media sites. Some of the followers of his Facebook page, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, are men who had been in prison with him in both Maine and New Hampshire and are now free. All of them have struggled, but have been inspired by how Pornchai’s faith has inspired his journey and helped him face obstacles. One young man, John, was in Maine’s notorious “Supermax” solitary confinement prison with Pornchai 20 years ago. It did much damage to them both. John has written to me of how following Pornchai’s story has informed his own survival. Many others have said the same.

A Road with Many a Winding Turn

In the eleventh hour, just a week before Pornchai’s liberation from ICE and his flight to Thailand, the longer term plan we had for Pornchai’s housing diminished due to illness. Immediately, Father John Le, SVD, contacted me with an invitation for Pornchai to live with him and two other priests from his order in the city of Nontha Buri about one hour’s drive from the center of Bangkok.

Father Le’s principal ministry is the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees in Thailand. Father John is no stranger to the world of displaced persons. At age 15, he was one of the Vietnamese “Boat People” rescued at sea after fleeing a communist regime when American forces vacated Vietnam in the early 1970s. He made his way to Thailand and eventually became a Catholic priest. After twenty years of ministry in Papua New Guinea, his Order assigned him to Thailand six years ago.

In a recent phone conversation, Father John told me that he will soon drive Pornchai up to the northern city of Khon Kaen, an eight-hour drive, where Pornchai’s birth records are located. While there, they will obtain his official Thai citizen ID which he would have received at age 16 had he been in Thailand at that time.

From there, Father John said, they will spend a few days at his Order’s residence north of there where they manage a home and clinic for Thai children suffering from HIV. It is in the village of Nong Bua Lamphu.

This left me awestruck and speechless. It was in that very village that Pornchai lived as a young child with his extended family. He has shadowy memories of water buffalo and a rice paddy there. It was also from that very place that Pornchai was taken at age 11 setting in motion a long and traumatic odyssey from which he now returns full circle 36 years later.

For my part, my place in this amazing story is the most important thing I have ever done as a man and as a priest. The challenges ahead are many for me and for Pornchai, but I am left with no lingering doubt that the light of Divine Mercy has been a beacon of hope and trust for us both.

Sawasdee, my friends. Thank you for being here with us at this turning of the tide.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I am most grateful to Yela Smit, Father John Le, and Viktor Weyand for helping to prepare a path for my friend’s long awaited journey home. On the day this is posted, Father John will pick up Pornchai from his required quarantine and they will drive together to Nontha Buri on the eastern side of the Bay of Bangkok. There, Pornchai will be a guest of Father John Le and two other priests from the Missionary Society of the Divine Word. Father John’s community struggles to meet its needs so I have pledged to assist by providing some modest room and board for Pornchai’s stay there. If you are inclined to assist as well, I explain how on our Special Events page.

You may also like these related posts referenced herein:

The Shawshank Redemption and its Real World Revision

Human Trafficking: Thailand to America and a Cold Case in Guam

Some of our friends nearby, who have helped to bring about Pornchai's transition, gathered for a Christmas prison visit last year. Here are left to right: Pornchai Moontri, Judith Freda of Maine, Samantha McLaughlin of Maine, Claire Dion of Maine, Viktor and Alice Weyand of Traverse City, Michigan, Father Gordon MacRae, and Mike Fazzino of Connecticut.

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