The Measure By Which You Measure: Prisoners of a Captive Past

The Gospel of Luke issues a difficult challenge before Lent. The mother of a murdered young man heeded it and rose to become an advocate for her son’s former enemy.

February 16, 2022

Like most human beings, and entirely unlike Jesus, I have enemies. This needs some clarification. There were some who made themselves enemies of Jesus, but never did Jesus perceive them as such. I have as of yet been unable to rise to that Gospel challenge. That much became clear in our recent posts, “Predator Police: The New Hampshire ‘Laurie List’ Bombshell,” and its sequel, “Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest.” That latter post, by Ryan MacDonald, took a surprising turn. Several days after it was posted, it had been shared only about 200 times on social media. Then, on Monday, January 31st, it suddenly exploded, gathering 2,300 shares on Facebook, thus placing that post before hundreds of thousands.

In recent weeks and months, there have been many assaults and other attacks on police officers. The vast majority of police are couragous and honest men and women who do their jobs heroically. The posts linked above are not at all about them. They are about a deceitful and self-righteous crusader who used sleazy and dishonest tactics to frame and entrap people, including me. Now, just weeks after those posts were published, I am confronted with a Gospel passage two weeks before Lent that I would rather not hear. But I did hear it.

Should a priest have enemies? It is not exactly a good look, but priests are human beings and most humans do not respond well to being hated or hunted, or falsely accused. The words “enemy” and “enemies” (for those who sadly have amassed more than one) occur in Sacred Scripture 526 times. What would the opposite word be to contrast it in Scripture? It isn’t “friend.” I know many people who are neither friends nor enemies to me. I even have some ex-friends who are certainly not my enemies. There is no word for an ex-enemy. But as I pondered all this, the Gospel for the Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time smacked me:

“Jesus said to his disciples, ‘To you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.’”

— Luke 6:27

I started splitting hairs upon reading this. Jesus said “To you who hear,” so what if I simply pretend I didn’t hear it? I could not handle the dishonesty that would entail, but I just don’t know what to do with what I heard. I tried praying for my enemy, but my prayer became corrupted: “I pray that my enemy will one day stand in the Presence of the Lord. Sooner rather than later might be nice!”

It isn’t a good prayer. I will have to try harder. The whole passage for this coming Sunday’s Mass ends, however, on a more reachable note. It is a statement that now haunts me with a call to arms. In this case, however, I am taking up arms not against my enemy, but against myself. It seems on first reading to be a lot easier than deciding to love my enemy and pray for him. Maybe that will come some day. Not today. But this final statement of Jesus concludes the Gospel for the Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time. Let it sink in. It's not for my enemy. It is for me:

“The measure with which you measure will in turn be measured out to you.”

— Luke 6:38

Way to go, Jesus! Please pass the Tylenol.

Divine Mercy Calls Forth Unexpected Role Models

I wrote a post back in 2012 that was one of a few that contained the photograph above. That post was “Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being.” It has been on our list of posts from the older version of this blog that had to be restored for you to read them anew. I asked that it be moved to the top of the list so you could read it for this post. No need to do so now. I will add a link to it at the end. It’s very important.

The young men in the photo above all graduated from high school in this prison after putting in years of hard work and even more years of struggle with themselves. The obstacles against learning the right things in this environment are very great. With the right kind of support, each one of them overcame these obstacles. The result was this triumphant photograph above. I am very proud of it, and the men who are in it — all gawking at me on the other side of the camera. With their diplomas in hand, they are victorious.

In the photo, my friend Alberto is hunched down just behind and to the right of Pornchai Moontri. For the previous two years, he had been a student of mine in a pilot program for exceptional prisoners to enroll in courses for college credit even while working on their high school diplomas. I was recruited for the program by a local community college to teach two courses in which I had earned degrees before prison in Philosophy and Behavioral Science.

Alberto was my student for four semesters, taking one course at a time. He failed both courses in the first two semesters. Alberto hinted that, with the stroke of a pen, I could rescue him with a “C.” But I did not. So he re-registered to take both courses again. He passed both the second time around with a respectable “B+.” I was very proud of him both when he failed, because he made an effort, and when he came back and excelled because he would not accept yet another defeat in life.

Alberto became a good friend to me and to Pornchai. When he wasn’t in trouble and hauled off for a stint in the hole, he lived where we lived. I mentioned him long ago in a 2010 post, “Angelic Justice: St. Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed.” Alberto read a hard copy of it because he was in it, and it became a turning point in his life. I cannot take credit for that because credit is rightly owed in equal measure to Pornchai Moontri and St. Michael.

In the Absence of Fathers

Alberto was 14 years old when the gun in his hand fired severing the artery of an 19-year-old with whom he struggled. It was a vicious end to a late night drug deal gone very bad in a dark Manchester, New Hampshire alley. It happened in 1994, the same year that I was sent to prison. It seemed a flip of a coin which combatant would die that night and which would survive only to wake up in prison. At 14, Alberto had lost himself. Sentenced to a prison term of 30 years to life, he spent his first years in solitary confinement. The experience extracted from him, as it also did from Pornchai, any light in his heart, any spark of optimism or hope in his eyes.

Then, when finally age 18, Alberto was allowed to live in the prison’s general population where the art of war is honed in daily spiritual and sometimes physical battle. It is a rare week that a City of Concord Fire Department ambulance doesn’t enter these prison walls shutting down all activity while some young man is taken to a local hospital after a beating or a stabbing or a headlong flight down some concrete stairs. The catalyst for such events is the same here as it was in the alley that sent Alberto here. There is no honor in any of it. It is just about drugs and gangs and money.

Alberto’s path to prison seemed inevitable. Abandoned by a father he never met, he was raised by a single mother who lost all control over him by age 12. Drugs and money and avoiding the law were the dominant themes of his childhood. By age 14, he was a child of the streets and nowhere else, but the streets make for the worst possible parents. Alberto became a textbook example of a phenomenon that I once wrote about to much public fanfare, but little public action: “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.”

In “Big Prison” it was discovered that there is more to Alberto than the violence of his past. He was 32 when he earned his high school diploma here. He will one day soon be released after having spent more than two-thirds of his life behind bars.

I wrote about Alberto’s life in “Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being.” Now I want to challenge you to go read it because at the end of it at the very top of its many comments is one by the mother of the young man Alberto killed. She read it too. In just a few short sentences, Mrs. Rose Emerson became a role model for pondering what Jesus says in the Gospel on the Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time:

“The measure with which you measure will in turn be measured out to you.”

Luke 6:38

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: The post that I suggested above — “Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being” — is now posted under the “Prison Journal” category of our BTSW Library. I would like to leave Mrs. Emerson’s comment as the final word on that post. If you wish to comment further, and I hope you will, please return here to place your comment on this post. In coming weeks or months we hope to present other powerful stories of hope and Divine Mercy encountered in prison.

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Jesus calls forth Lazarus from his tomb.

Pandemic in Prison: When the Caged Bird Just Can’t Sing

When Covid-19 threatened to breach prison walls, the effort to repel it turned prison into a fortress of solitude to silence even a prolific writer — well, almost!

You may have noticed, or at least I hope you noticed, that we did not publish a post on our usual post day on December 30. I wrote one, and I even liked it which is somewhat rare for me. Because I must finish typing a post and mail it ten days in advance of its post date, I really struggled to finish it by the deadline. Due to restrictions of movement imposed by the pandemic, I could not bring it to the Library to purchase a copy of what I typed. So into the mail it went on the night of December 20. From there, it simply disappeared.

It was only mailed 200 miles away to New York, but it took 15 days to get there. So we published it on January 6, 2021 with the title, “A Year in the Grip of Earthly Powers.” The day it was finally published, as you know, was a hellish day in the U.S. as our politics erupted into violence in Washington, DC. I expected that no one would pay attention to that post at all given all that was happening, but it turned out to be one of our most read and shared posts of the year.

In a chapter in his great Divine Mercy book, Loved, Lost, Found, author Felix Carroll referred to me as “a prolific writer.” The chapter was not at all about me, however. It was about the powerful conversion story of Pornchai Moontri subtitled, “Mercy Inside Those Stone Walls.” Felix gave us permission to reprint it and I highly recommend both the chapter and the book.

To be called a prolific writer by a prolific writer made me a bit self-conscious. Felix is currently the Executive Director of Marian Helper magazine. He was twice awarded “Writer of the Year” by the New York Press Association and has received multiple awards from the Catholic Press Association. I, on the other hand, write blog posts on an old typewriter in a prison cell and use snail mail to get them published.

The only thing “prolific” about it is the amount of White-Out on the typed pages of the post before it goes into the mail for scanning. In a prison pandemic, even my supplies of White-Out, paper, and typing ribbons are not guaranteed commodities. The uncertainty of the future here conspires with the pandemic to create pandemonium.

It’s hard to believe that those two words — pandemic and pandemonium — are not at all related to each other. “Pandemic” comes from a combination of the Greek terms, “pan” and “demos” meaning, “across people.” “Pandemonium” comes from the Greek, “pan” and “daimon” which literally means “among demons.” It was first used in the Seventeenth Century epic poem, Paradise Lost by John Milton to describe the fallout from the Fall of Man.

In prison, however, these two words became interchangeable in the last year. Every passing day as the virus spreads brings an ever-tightening spiral of regulations designed to stop the inevitable. It was clear from the first signs of arrival of the virus in early 2020 that prisons would be especially hit hard without stringent precautions. So the first line of defense from prison officials was to curtail all physical contact with the outside world.

For nearly a year now, all prison visits with family and friends have been eliminated. All programs staffed by outside volunteers have been cancelled. Most religious gathering and programs came to a halt, and outside medical appointments and consults were curtailed. No one gets in, and no one gets out.

As much as prisoners and their families disliked these policies, I cannot deny that they were effective at keeping the virus at bay. For almost all of 2020, there was but a single case of a Covid infected prisoner who was kept isolated until he recovered. In that same time, eleven staff tested positive and were placed on leave. But as the year progressed, the number of staff exposed to the virus on the outside increased dramatically. First, all staff were required to wear masks at all times in our presence. By mid-summer, the mask requirement was imposed on prisoners as well. It began as a requirement to wear a mask at all work sites and medical visits. By September, it expanded to wearing a mask for whatever length of time prisoners leave their cells.

The Prison Unemployment Line

During the summer of 2020, many prisoner work sites were shut down leaving their prisoner-staffs idle. Both Pornchai Moontri and I were fortunate to have positions deemed “essential to prison operation.” Pornchai was the Safety Trainer in the Recreation Department training prisoners on the use of weight machines in the gym and woodworking machines in the Wood Shop. I was the Law Clerk in the prison Law Library which every U.S. prison is required to maintain.

I considered myself fortunate to have someplace to go beyond my cell for six hours a day. The job also gave me access to a photocopy machine so I could purchase a copy of my posts before they went into the mail for scanning. By later in the summer, even our jobs were cut to less than two hours per day as new rules for contact tracing were put in place. I was still required to wear a mask, but I was the sole person in the Law Library filling al requests sent through inter-office mail. No one else was allowed in.

Plexiglass barriers were built and installed to shield me from exposure on the day when we would all return to business as usual, but business as usual never returned. Then round two of the virus came in the fall, and with a vengeance. Absolute non-contact rules were adopted for the various prison units to stop the spread, but the virus had other plans. By November, dozens of staff were infected and placed on leave, and hundreds of prisoners were placed in quarantine. Some members of the New Hampshire National Guard were brought in to help staff the prison.

At the time Pornchai Moontri completed his sentence and left for ICE detention in September, bunks were being placed in unused dormitories and the gymnasium in case they were needed for medical quarantine. Over the next two months, one unit after another saw infected prisoners taken for isolation in an effort to control the contagion. The unit in which I live was unscathed and the last standing until early December. Then it came. One pod after another saw infected men taken away while the pods were then locked in for fourteen days of quarantine. By Christmas, eight of the twelve pods here were in quarantine status.

Going Viral Behind Prison Walls

The place where I live was still untouched until just hours ago. On Sunday morning (January 10) a prisoner in the cell next to mine was taken away for medical quarantine after testing positive. We then became the ninth pod here to be locked in for quarantine. Apparently the person taken was ill but tried to hide it. I am told that he will recover, but being in quarantine now severely limits my movements and possibly my ability to write for the next two weeks.

But the picture might be even worse than that. When someone on the pod next to us became ill, the entire pod was tested for Covid, and to our shock the entire pod — all 24 men — tested positive. It is likely to be no different here. For now, we are merely subjected to daily temperature checks. So far, no one has a spike in temperature. My daily temperature has been the same each day: 97.1 degrees. I am surprised to discover that I am one of the cool guys on the pod. Who would have known?

Ironically, just as this all occurred, I discovered that I am on a short list of prisoners considered most vulnerable to Covid and therefore scheduled to receive an early vaccine. Because I have an autoimmune disorder, it can cause what is known as a cytokine storm if I become infected. It is known to be far worse than the infection itself. So far, however, there is no sign of it.

I hope we will have a post next week. I hope I will not end in a Covid-infested dormitory. But if that happens, I just received a really great book sent to me by a friend. It is Volume One of the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell. If I am taken away I will take it with me, and it will give me lots to write about when I return.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Well, so far 2021 has not exactly been the age of enlightenment that some came to expect. It can only get better. Before that happens, for an understanding of the science, including political science, behind the pandemic, please see my post: “The Chinese Communist Party & the True Origin of Covid-19.”

You may also like the related links that appear in this post:

A Year in the Grip of Earthly Powers

Pornchai Moontri: Mercy Inside Those Stone Walls by Felix Carroll

The Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell, Volume One

Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province

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