“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

— Deacon David Jones

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/31/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/31/24

A Catholic League White House Plea Set Pornchai Moontri Free

January 2021: In the last days of President Trump’s first term in office, a petition by Catholic League President Bill Donohue led to Pornchai Moontri’s freedom.

January 2021: In the last days of President Trump’s first term in office, a petition by Catholic League President Bill Donohue led to Pornchai Moontri’s freedom.

July 31, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

This post has been a long time in the making. It’s the result of an epiphany, a sudden realization of truth that radically changed my perception of what had previously been to me just a painful memory. Then I stumbled upon something entirely new. To convey this thunderous awakening, I have to first ask you to return with me to a time not long ago that was painful and confusing for us all: the rise of the Covid pandemic of 2020 and 2021. The virus, the masks, the closures, the lies, the “mostly peaceful” protests that were actually riots, the burning cities each night on the news, it was all just awful.

Then there was Covid itself. I had it twice, the first time in the month after my friend, Pornchai “Max” Moontri, was taken away in the custody of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, after 36 years in America and 15 years as my roommate. Prisons are not known for having empathy about the human side of things. There was not a single concern about what happens to Pornchai or where I go from there. For over 15 years Max lived in the bunk above me where we were engaged in an epic spiritual battle to reconcile his past and secure a future. Then at 0700 on the morning of September 8, 2020, he was gone. By 0900, a stranger was living in his place.

And as I struggled to regain my sense of autonomy and balance, dark forces chose that very moment to bring down this blog. The only means I had to communicate with the outside world. I had to set all this aside to focus my meager resources and attention on the biggest crisis at hand: how to help Max cope with the hellish vortex of being lost in ICE detention with little hope and no means to communicate at all.

I seem to never learn to trust, however. I instinctively lean back on to my own resources and rely on no one else. That was certainly not working and it was not going to work. Then our late friend Claire Dion revealed an ingenious plan. Pornchai Max and I could not call each other, but we both could call Claire. She cared very much for us, and being a retired RN, she put her ingenuity to work. She devised a plan that I described not long after her death from cancer this year. That post was “Claire Dion Has Fallen into the Hands of the Living God.” Here is our treasured photo of how Claire put us back together.

The ICE Follies

As you know, Pornchai Moontri was taken from Thailand at age 11 in 1985 and brought to America. This forced him into a devastating and traumatic life from which there was but one escape. So he fled from it, again and again, the last time leaving him all alone in this world, a homeless teen at age 14 in a foreign country with a language and customs he could not comprehend.

Fleeing the trauma of exploitation, Pornchai fell into life on the streets where he trusted no one. He would steal food to survive, and sleep in doorways, shelters, and sometimes on the floor in the home of a friend. One day he stole a few cans of beer from a store. Fleeing across the store parking lot in 1992, Pornchai was tackled and pinned down by a much larger man. He could not be in that situation again. He could not be someone’s victim. He snapped, and that man died over a few cans of beer.

Ironically, just as I began typing this post I received a message from “Melissa.” Nearly 40 years ago at age 12 she had been a classmate of Pornchai in the seventh grade in middle school in Bangor, Maine when he first arrived in the United States. Melissa’s comment was both caring and brave, and it struck me that the trauma to which Pornchai was subjected has echoes all around him and across the years. Here is an excerpt of Melissa’s comment:

“I met Pornchai in seventh grade. I remember him as a sweet boy who was always smiling. However, a ‘foreigner’ he was not going to be accepted into the ‘in crowd’ though I don’t recall anyone that didn’t like him. How could they not? He had a great disposition … . I was upset to learn of Pornchai’s arrest back in 1992 because I knew the kid never stood a chance. We had all heard about the abusive home in Bangor. Over the years I would check to see if he had yet been released and was infuriated to learn that he had not. He had stolen beer, was chased into the parking lot by a grown man who confronted him. Pornchai reacted as the scared, cornered boy that he was. It was a tragedy for both. However, this boy, barely a legal adult, was locked up and forgotten. His American dream was a living nightmare. He became Bangor’s forgotten son. America, Bangor, Penobscot County Courts, DCF, teachers … . We all failed him.”

Years later, Pornchai emerged from over a decade in solitary confinement. Then our lives converged, clearly by design. I drew the entire story of his life out of Pornchai including all the madness that had been inflicted upon him.

What sparked me to write this post in 2024 was something that I did not know until very recently. I stumbled upon a plea from Catholic League President Bill Donohue addressed to the White House in 2021 in the final days of President Donald Trump’s first term in office. Dr. Donohue published this petition in the January 2021 issue of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League, under title “White House Petitioned on ICE Detainee”:

We took up a very serious case at Christmastime, hoping to bring relief to a man who has paid his dues and has been through enough. We asked Catholics to appeal to President Donald Trump to release Pornchai Moontri from the custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He deserves to be repatriated to Thailand.

We were encouraged by news that the embassy in Thailand was contacted by ICE just days after we made our request; Pornchai’s case showed movement for the first time. Right before Christmas we asked our email subscribers to redouble their efforts making one more push.

Bill Donohue has known of the plight of Pornchai for many years. It was Fr. Gordon J. MacRae — he is another victim of injustice — who brought Pornchai’s story to his attention. Pornchai rightly credits Fr. MacRae with mentoring him. More than that, MacRae brought him into the Catholic Church.

We explained why Pornchai deserves to be released.

Pornchai was born in Thailand in 1973 and was abandoned by his mother when he was two-years-old. She intended to sell him, but a young relative came to his rescue and brought him into his home. When he was 11-years-old his mother reemerged with a new husband; they took him to Bangor, Maine, against his will. His stepfather, Richard Bailey, immediately started raping him, and did so for three years. At age 14, Pornchai escaped (it was his second escape) and became homeless. When he was 18, he got into a fight with a much bigger man while he was intoxicated and took the man’s life during the struggle (he was so drunk he does not recall stabbing him).

While awaiting trial, Pornchai’s mother came to visit him in jail, warning him that if he disclosed to the authorities what his stepfather did to him, she would suffer the consequences. Fearing for his mother’s life, he prudently decided not to speak, even to the point of not defending himself in court. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Maine has no parole.

In 2000, his mother attempted to leave her husband; they were living in Guam. That is where she was beaten to death. The only suspect was her husband, but there was no evidence to convict him. Subsequently, many things changed.

In 2005, Pornchai was sent to a New Hampshire State Prison. That is where he met Fr. MacRae. Five years later, Pornchai became a Catholic; he soon became a fan of the Catholic League.

In 2018, after new evidence emerged — advocates for Pornchai pursued Bailey — and justice was finally done. Bailey was convicted on forty felony counts of child sexual abuse against Pornchai.

On September 11, 2020, Pornchai, after serving his full sentence, was released at age 47 to the custody of ICE for deportation to his native Thailand. He is still in custody, with no end in sight.

Pornchai has served his time and has suffered enough. He should now be set free.

— William Donohue, PhD, Catalyst, January 2021

A White House Intervention

When Bill Donohue published the above, and Catholic League members sent it to the White House, Pornchai had already been held by ICE in an ICE detention facility in Gena, Louisiana for five months. It was the peak of Covid contagion and he was living 70 to a room with no protection and lights blazing around the clock. Despite my daily assurances that we were working hard to get him out, he was showing signs of extreme stress and depression. While I was shielding Pornchai from false hopes and promises, I was unaware that others were also shielding me about their own efforts. I thought I was a lone ranger doing my best each day to reach out to anyone who would take a call from a prisoner — and they were few — to plea for relief from Pornchai’s plight. The Covid pandemic had the world locked tightly in its grip and the riots across America were evidence of how tightly wound our world had become. Pornchai believed that he would remain trapped in ICE until the Covid crisis was over and that could take years. So in the meantime, I asked Pornchai to try to reach out to others who were also trapped in ICE, but even less fortunate than himself. He did exactly that, and ended up saving 17-year-old Trepha, a Vietnamese teen who ended up in the same ICE facility as Pornchai, but surrounded mostly by young men from Latin America. Trepha had stowed away on a container ship departing Vietnam and then his unplanned world tour ended in Mexico.

Smugglers took what little money Trepha had saved and then led him across the Rio Grande and locked him in the trunk of an abandoned car. When Border Patrol agents found him, they made no distinction between migrants from Latin American countries and those who had come from abroad. Pornchai protected Trepha by keeping him away from the Central American gangs at Gena and then tasked me with reaching out to the Vietnamese Consulate to try to get Trepha returned home. I still hear from him on occasion. He is back in Vietnam with his grandmother and has promised me that he would not undertake any more world tours. In December 2020 we posted “An Open and Urgent Letter to President Donald Trump” asking for an intervention to move Pornchai’s relocation along despite the Covid pandemic and its international restrictions. What I did not know at the time I wrote that post was that Catholic League President Bill Donohue also reached out to the White House greatly magnifying our voice.

I learned of this only recently, three years later in 2024. I stumbled upon some fascinating paperwork from my friend Fr George David Byers in North Carolina who had been helping me then behind the scenes in this blog. Father George printed a few pages of a BTSW traffic report showing visitors to this site and what they were seeing in December 2020 and January 2021. I did not make much sense of it then, so I just put it aside out of sight and out of mind. Three years passed and I discovered it again just weeks ago. I could see that many of the site views were from ICE Headquarters in New Orleans and then in January 2021 from Homeland Security in Washington and then finally from the White House. This was the culmination of the interest of thousands of Catholic League members who intervened to assist Pornchai Moontri.

Then, upon discovering the above, I went to the prison law library where I work. I keep there a collection of the many issues of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. I began to look through them, and then found one breathlessly in the January 2021 edition entitled “White House Petitioned on ICE Detainee.”

It did not just move the needle, it moved a mountain. Just two weeks after its publication Pornchai was aboard a Korean Airlines flight bound for Seoul along two plainclothes ICE officers who accompanied him. From there they boarded a connecting flight to Bangkok. The flight was 23 hours.

It turned out that the ICE officers read a good deal about Pornchai and as a result treated him very well. In fact, they saved the day. Upon their arrival after midnight in the Customs area at Bangkok International Airport, an exhausted Pornchai found himself surrounded by Thai police who were waiting for him. They demanded to know why he was being deported from the United States. The two ICE officers quickly intervened telling Pornchai not to answer. The ICE officers said that Pornchai had done nothing wrong, that he was being repatriated to his native country in cooperation with the Thai government and was entirely a free man. The Thai police went silent. Pornchai had never seen anything like it. Much later Pornchai wrote of his arrival in “Free at Last Thanks to God and You!”

Pornchai learned from me this week that Catholic League President Bill Donohue, and likely also then-President Donald Trump, were instrumental in a worldwide effort to restore him to freedom. He marveled at this, and so do I. “The Hand of God was on them both,” I told him, “and on you as well.”

“I could not see that then,” said Pornchai, “it took a priest and two presidents, but I see it now.”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Catholic League President Bill Donohue has a riveting and timely new book that I hope to soon review in these pages. It is Cultural Meltdown: The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights is the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization defending individual Catholics and the Church against defamation. No one in the U.S. Catholic Church has done more to assist me and Pornchai Moontri than Catholic League President Bill Donohue. Join forces with us at www.CatholicLeague.org.

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.”

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/24/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/24/24

God, Grant Me Serenity. I’ll be Waiting

The Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr is much more than a few verses on the walls of a Twelve Step program. It’s a vital petition to recover from spiritual wounds.

The Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr is much more than a few verses on the walls of a Twelve Step program. It’s a vital petition to recover from spiritual wounds.

“Forgiveness is to give up all hope for a better past.”

For the last several years where I live, greeting cards of any sort have been banned. It was somehow determined that some people on the “outside” found a way to separate the card stock on which greeting cards are made, and then insert narcotics between the layers of the card. I hear that there were machines that could detect all this, but the cheaper and more expedient way of dealing with it was to simply ban all cards from friends and families of prisoners. This was a morale bombshell especially around Christmas which is already sanitized to be virtually unrecognizable in prison. The draconian measure has been resolved a bit, but not for the better. We now get no mail at all. We receive only a photocopy of any mail that you send while the original is shredded. Bah, humbug!

The word “draconian” is an interesting word. Some people spell it with a capital “D” because it’s one of those words that came into English from the name of an actual historical person. Though technically the capital isn’t necessary, the word refers to the application of harsh laws such as those codified by Draco, a legislator in the city-state of Athens, Greece in the Seventh Century, B.C. Draco was notorious for imposing the death penalty for both serious and trivial crimes, thus giving rise to “draconian,” a rather uncomplimentary word named after him. When I explained all this some years ago to my friend, Pornchai-Max, he said, “maybe in a thousand years, going off on long, boring explanations about history will be called ‘gordonian.’” HMMPH! He lives in Thailand now and out of my reach, except by telephone.

Anyway, back to mail call. Of course, every prisoner loves mail, but when it comes to replying to it all, I get a D+ at best. A part of my excuse is that I can purchase only six Smith Corona typewriter ribbons per year, so that means having to handwrite most mail. So I find myself writing much of the same things over and over. It’s especially difficult to respond to overseas mail because the prison commissary sells only U.S. First Class 73¢ stamps, and has a purchase limit of twenty per week. Writing overseas takes three of them which costs much more than a day’s pay here. So some of my mail tends to pile up until I am able to respond.

I am so very sorry for this, but prison is one reality I wish I could change, but can’t. I hope it doesn’t discourage you from writing. Sometimes I try to incorporate responses to letters in some of my posts, and hope that readers can detect some of their letters between the lines. As an example, this excerpt is from a letter received just before Christmas last year from an Ohio reader (but still in a pile in my cell):

“Dear Fr MacRae: I first learned about you when I read the book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions [by Felix Carroll]. I am always so inspired by other people’s conversions! When I read the chapter about Pornchai Moontri I was very touched by his story and remarkable conversion and, frankly, I was shocked by your story. I became very concerned when I looked you up online and found your blog and read some of your articles… It did not take me long to have your blogs come right to my inbox and I gobble up everything you write. You inspire me to want to be a better follower of Christ and to accept the things I cannot change in my life.”

The writer added, in a paragraph later, “You are doing so much good despite what was done to you. Your light is still shining.” On the same day, I received another letter from a reader in the U.K. in which he wrote that my posts remind him of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous Letters and Papers from Prison. Talk about pressure! This resulted in a post by me on my birthday, “Resistance: A Birthday in the Shadow of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

I had long been aware of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famous Lutheran pastor condemned to prison in Hitler’s Germany because of his writing. Both of the letters described above made me think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer although the first one never mentioned him. He never knew in life the profound impact that his writings from prison would have on others for generations to come.

I once read a superb interview with Eric Metaxas by Kate Bachelder in The Wall Street Journal entitled “The Death of God Is Greatly Exaggerated”. In it, Eric Metaxas

“recalls how in 1939 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was sitting safely in New York at Union Theological Seminary. He elected to return to Germany, what Mr. Metaxas calls ‘the great decision.’ What would animate someone to leave comfort and security for the depraved Nazi Germany, where he would surely be arrested for supporting the Jews?”

The Serenity Prayer

There is an answer to that question, but first let’s get back to the pre-Christmas letter cited above from an Ohio reader. She mentioned that my posts inspire her “to want to be a better follower of Christ and to accept the things I cannot change in my life.” You might instantly recognize the latter half of that sentence as a reference to what is now commonly known as “The Serenity Prayer.”

It’s one of the most iconic prayers in common use in Western culture, and a portion of it adorns the walls and literature, of every meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in the world, as well as most other self-help endeavors based on the Twelve Steps of A.A. The prayer was written in 1926 by Lutheran pastor and theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, but most people know it only by the few verses adopted by A.A. Here is its original form:

God, grant me
Serenity to accept the things
I cannot change;
Courage to change the things
I can, and
Wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
Enduring one moment at a time;
Accepting hardship
as a pathway to peace.
Taking, as Jesus did,
this sinful world as it is,
and not as I would have it.

Trusting that You
will make all things right
if I but surrender to Your will;
That I may be
reasonably happy in this life, and
supremely happy with You in the next.

— Reinhold Niebuhr, 1926

Courage to Change the Things I Can

The famous prayer begins with a request for the grace of serenity, but in my current location, as it was in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison, there is little of it to be found on the outside. I received a letter from a reader recently who told me of the imprisonment of his wife of some fifty years. It is not a physical prison, but it is no less of a prison than the one I am in. Having lost and buried their own son from cancer, she finds herself in a prison of distrust and resentment over the losses of the past. It’s the sort of prison that has so many of us under lock and key.

“Forgiveness is to give up all hope for a better past.” I began this post with that quote, but I do not know its origin. A fellow prisoner whose mother died while he was in prison, stood in my doorway one morning to tell me that someone sent him that quote. It made me realize how much serenity requires the grace of surrender for the events of the past. It’s a real challenge where I am, but it’s a real challenge wherever any of you are too. Dare we hope? Dare we believe? Both take serenity, courage, and wisdom in the present moment. Our crosses of the present cannot be an excuse for retreating into the past.

The prisoner whose mother died spoke with me at length about the death of his mother, and about the painful letting go that it required of him with no opportunity for goodbye other than from within his own heart. I gave him a copy of “A Corner of the Veil,” about the death of my own mother during my imprisonment. But it’s really about more than that. It’s about my own letting go of the things I cannot change. The prisoner kept that post and read it several times. He said that he was profoundly affected by my challenge not to reduce the present to a litany of losses in the past.

Through this discernment, he made a decision to reconsider one part of his past: his Catholic faith that he long ago had abandoned. Through the loss of his mother, he opened himself to the one thing he has left to share with her, a faith that spans a bridge between his life and hers. He later attended Father Michael Gaitley’s “33 Days to Morning Glory” retreat when it was offered in this prison.

The wounds of the past surface in times of loss. Like the wife of the reader mentioned above, the struggles and wounds of life accumulate into a litany of loss until it is life itself that we now distrust. Sometimes it is life itself that requires our forgiveness. To do so, then, is to surrender all hope for a better past because such a hope is futile. No matter how you spin it in your heart and mind, no matter who you blame for it, no matter how long you have lived with it, you will never have a different past. Eric Metaxas alluded to this in his WSJ interview:

“One of my favorite Bible verses is Philippians 4:6” ‘Be anxious about nothing.’ Nothing. Now what does that mean, ‘nothing’? It means ‘NOTHING.’ [So] ‘Rejoice in the Lord always.’ That’s a command.”

The Wisdom to Know the Difference

Both Maximilian Kolbe and Dietrich Bonhoeffer died in prison. And yet the entire world today is shaken up by the wisdom that emanated from their prison writing.

Over the decades here in my own imprisonment, I have been tempted by the prospect of simply giving up on the present and retreating into the past. On the night before writing this post I had a long talk by telephone with my friend Pornchai Maximilian Moontri in Thailand. He also spent 30 years in prison for a crime set in motion by someone else. When I told him about this post he reminded me of something said in a homily by the late Father Bernie Campbell, a Capuchin priest who offered Sunday Mass in this prison for decades. Pornchai told me that Father Bernie once said in a homily that “life is like toilet paper. It goes by a lot faster toward the end of the roll.” We both laughed at the truth of that.

I was so very struck by the reader at the beginning of this post who wrote that this blog reminds him of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. The letter caused me to return to Bonhoeffer’s writings. Reinhold Niebuhr, who composed “The Serenity Prayer” was on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in New York where he had a profound influence on Bonhoeffer at the time he arrived at “the great decision” that Eric Metaxas described. The great decision was to return to Germany because “He who believes does not flee,” no matter the cost.

Both men also had a very great influence on my late friend and mentor, Father Richard John Neuhaus. Along with Cardinal Avery Dulles, Father Neuhaus urged me to write and was instrumental in my starting this blog in 2009. His own great decision to pave a path from Lutheranism to Rome by becoming a Catholic and a priest — took great courage and wisdom.

You do not have to read very far into Bonhoeffer’s words and actions to see Reinhold Niebuhr’s “the courage to change the things that I can” reflected there. I think serenity itself was more of a challenge. Bonhoeffer freely chose to return to Nazi Germany from the comfort of Reinhold Niebuhr’s New York seminary knowing — very much like Father Maximilian Kolbe — that his own moral compass would not permit him to cease writing the truth.

And like Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Bonhoeffer wrote knowing, and fearing, that the truth would land him in a Nazi prison, but he wrote that truth anyway. Finding serenity along such a path is an immense spiritual challenge, and its only source is grace — and the conditions in which such grace is found are often surprising.

True courage does not mean the absence of fear. It means to do the right thing, to act morally, in spite of fear. There are some things which have terrified me — decades in prison being one of them— but terror alone was not sufficient cause to take up an easier cross. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and for Maximilian Kolbe, prison was no obstacle to grace.

The powerfully riveting book by Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (2011) presents Bonhoeffer’s very life as a profile in courage. His writings and actions led inexorably to the sacrifice of his life on April 9, 1945, eight years to the day before I was born. Just imagine then the irony of my own introduction to prison. Standing in court facing prison on September 23, 1994, I was forced to be silent while prosecutor Bruce Elliot Reynolds asked Judge Arthur Brennan and my jury to disregard any good I have ever done, because “for some people, even Hitler was a nice guy.”

Over the years between his imprisonment and his execution by hanging upon the orders of Hitler himself, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote his Letters and Papers from Prison. When what he wrote was posthumously published, those who knew him found some of it shocking. One of his most pointed criticisms of his own church during those years in prison was its tendency to limit faith and the requirements of faith to the “otherworldly,” focusing on the next life at the expense of this one. Though that is a part of all faith — certainly Catholic faith — we are now in this life, “taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, and not as I would have it.”

It was in the unjust imprisonment imposed upon him through the corruption of others that Dietrich Bonhoeffer found the core of his Christology. It could be summed up in three words: “life for others.” And it was in that same circumstance that Maximilian Kolbe discerned that “Love alone creates,” the center of his life in Christ that drew him toward surrendering his life that another may live.

In both men, in the struggles between courage and wisdom, in the midst of great suffering, trial, and loss can be found inspiration for the greatest challenge and adventure of our lives, that most essential part of Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous prayer: “God, grant me Serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post as an example of “the courage to change the things that I can.” You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Resistance: A Birthday in the Shadow of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance

On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

Eternal Life Matters: Spiritual Survival in Trying Times

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/17/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/17/24

Trump at Mount Rushmore, Lincoln at the Emancipation

Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican President of the United States. If the progressive woke earthly powers had their way, Donald Trump may have been the last.

Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican President of the United States. If the progressive woke earthly powers had their way, Donald Trump may have been the last.

July 17, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Over the fifteen years that I have been writing a weekly post for this blog, the month of July has always been a bit of a disappointment. As many readers know, there is no air conditioning where I live. Residing on the top floor of a four-story dormitory setting where 24 grown men must share one bathroom with two toilets, the stifling heat, lack of activity and seasonally subdued reader attention have all combined to strip away much of my enthusiasm to write in July.

So I chose an older post as a summer rerun for this week. July is also often a slow news time. I chose this post just before the events of July 13 when a political rally for Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania exploded in news across the globe. I had wrestled with whether I should rethink my choice for this week’s post.

After I first wrote it a few months before the 2020 election, I was assailed in messages from a few readers for having the audacity to write of him without the usual vague sense of vitriol that so much of the rest of the media utilizes for all things Trump.

“Vitriol” is an interesting word with a strange etymology that results in nearly opposite usages. It refers to bitter or corrosive feelings about someone or something. In chemistry, vitriol is another name for sulfuric acid which can corrode metal. But in another usage it refers to having the properties of glass, transparent and resilient.

I hope you don’t have the impression that I like Donald Trump, or that I now endorse him for president. Priests should probably refrain from such things even though we all have opinions like everyone else. What I do like is the idea of Donald Trump, of the fact that a non-politician with no apparent appreciation for Washington, DC politics-as-usual can be elected president against overwhelming odds. Only in America!

What I do not like, at all, is a mindset that has grown in U.S. politics that is mercilessly set against him. If you turned on MSNBC News anytime of day or night before the assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania you would witness exactly what I mean. Even MSNBC has lightened up just a bit, but only because it is politically insensitive to attack a presidential candidate who has just been shot.

I support the right of U.S. citizens to resist a domineering woke agenda that seeks to nullify your vote with its own prejudice by denouncing Donald Trump at every turn. It is for voters, and not the elite of Washington politics, or the entrenched progressive news media, to decide this coming election. Every possible subversive effort has been employed to confiscate your will and turn your vote against this man. It is not right and it is certainly not American. And when all the lawfare and rhetoric failed to circumvent the will of the people and steal this election, the unthinkable happened. Those subversive earthly powers utilized a delusional young man with a rifle and a bullet to ultimately do what all the pundits could not do.

Donald Trump survived — seemingly miraculously — and now it seems that the rest just enters into history. History is the real subject of this 2020 post that I have chosen to rewrite and update for this 2024 summer rerun:

Trump at Mount Rushmore, Lincoln at the Emancipation

American psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 for his research into the power of “availability bias,” a sort of groupthink in which a proposition is widely accepted as true merely because it has been repeated in the media. Kahneman’s research challenged the long-held view that people make decisions rationally, based on their own self-interest. His research demonstrated that groupthink can result in irrational decisions that are contrary to self-interest.

The threat of groupthink, though not in so many words, was at the heart of George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, about a future totalitarian society in which human will is controlled by established norms. Since Orwell wrote his landmark novel, studies have shown that decision-making groups often fall victim to groupthink, a phenomenon that excessively demands group concurrence and condemns dissent. Members blindly convince themselves that the group’s position is correct by suppressing all evidence to the contrary. It sounds very familiar.

We have heard a multitude of examples in recent months. Some of our leaders have embraced the groupthink, for example, that Covid-19 is easily spread among Catholics at Mass but not at all among mass protesters, plunderers, and rioters in a “woke” demand to cleanse history. Any dissent from the approved doctrine is met with group condemnation.

History would call this “The March of Folly.” My favorite among the many historians I have read is Barbara Tuchman, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize. And my favorite among her books is The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. In it, Dr. Tuchman analyzes four turning points in history that illustrate a group’s actions against self-interest.

Her choices for this analysis were: (1) the Trojan War; (2) the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance Popes (I wrote of this one in “Michelangelo and the Hand of God: Scandal at the Vatican”); (3) the loss of the British loss of the American Colonies by King George III, and (4) the United States’ folly in Vietnam. Barbara Tuchman’s Introduction contains a wise caveat that should be the hallmark of every historian:

“Nothing is more unfair than to judge men of the past with the ideas of the present.”

— The March of Folly, p.5

Were Barbara Tuchman alive in some distant future, I wonder if she might add a fifth turning point: The folly of 2020, the point at which America turned on itself by destroying its monuments to history, committing on a national scale the same unfair judgment of the past that Tuchman described above.

History must be clearly understood by every generation lest it repeat itself. When the Third Reich came to power in 1939 Germany, it was all about amassing power by convincing the people that certain of their neighbors, and certain of their neighbors’ ideas, were dangerous. Books were burned. Monuments were destroyed by fired-up mobs. Businesses were looted and burned to the ground. The past was stripped away from the present.

An Independence Day Address at Mount Rushmore

The usual critics were loudly vocal, but not exactly truthful, about President Trump’s speech on the eve of Independence Day 2020 before a crowd gathered at Mount Rushmore. The memorial features the heads of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. The impressively massive sculpture was carved into the granite rim of Mount Rushmore 500 feet above the valley floor. Each face is 60 feet tall. The monument was begun in 1927 and completed in 1941 as the United States entered World War II.

The rhetoric surrounding President Trump’s appearance there has been astonishing. The vile disparagement that took place among much of the U.S. news media is evidenced in these headlines:

“At Mt. Rushmore, Trump Uses Fourth of July Celebration to Stoke a Culture War”

— Los Angeles Times

“Trump Uses Mount Rushmore Speech to Deliver Divisive Culture War Message”

— New York Times

“Trump Pushes Racial Divisions, Flouts Virus Rules at Rushmore”

— Associated Press

“At Mount Rushmore, Trump Exploits Social Divisions, Warns of ‘Left-Wing Cultural Revolution’ in Dark Speech Ahead of Independence Day”

— Washington Post

“What really struck me about the speech... was that [Trump] spent more time worried about honoring dead confederates. [He] spent all his time talking about dead traitors.”

— Senator Tammy Duckworth at CNN

The claims from Senator Duckworth seemed the most puzzling of all. Even The New York Times, no fan of this President, reported that Mr. Trump “avoided references to the symbols of the Confederacy.” In a later article, the Times added, “[Trump] avoided specifically mentioning anything related to Confederate monuments!” He never mentioned any of the “dead confederates” cited by Senator Duckworth who appears not to have actually heard the speech.

During the presidential primaries of 2016, some of the same media reported on Senator Bernie Sanders’ visit to Mount Rushmore. Of the monument itself, Mr. Sanders was quoted: “It really does make one proud to be an American.” When Mr. Trump spoke there on the eve of Independence Day 2020, a CNN reporter characterized it as a speech “in front of a monument to two slave owners on land wrestled away from Native Americans.”

Somehow between 2016 and 2020, Mount Rushmore — and America itself — became a symbol of oppression to the media left. So did Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal’s assessment was vastly different, however.

In “Trump at Mount Rushmore,” a lead editorial of July 6, 2020, editors commended the President for delivering “one of the best speeches of his presidency”:

“Contrary to the media reporting, the America Mr. Trump described is one of genuine racial equality and diversity. He highlighted the central idea of the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal.’ As he rightly put it, ‘These immortal words set in motion the unstoppable march of freedom’ that included the abolition of slavery.”

In a published Letter to the Editor on July 6, 2020, one Wall Street Journal reader wrote that after following all the anti-Trump Facebook rhetoric about the Mount Rushmore speech, he conducted a little experiment. He posted an excerpt of the speech on Facebook, but without attribution. The passage was:

“We are the country of Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Frederick Douglass. We are the land of Wild Bill Hickock and Buffalo Bill Cody. We are the nation that gave rise to the Wright Brothers, the Tuskegee Airmen, Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Jesse Owens, General George Patton, the great Louis Armstrong, Alan Shepherd, Elvis Presley, and Muhammad Ali. And only America could have produced them all. No other place.”

The passage merited a barrage of Facebook “likes” from the same people who had been condemning the President’s Mount Rushmore speech — obviously without ever actually hearing or reading it.

The Emancipation Memorial

Another debate has been raging over a longstanding Washington, DC monument in Lincoln Park known as the “Emancipation Memorial.” The monument was dedicated on that site in 1876 by Frederick Douglass, a former slave who campaigned for the abolition of slavery. His widely celebrated autobiography described his life as a slave in the South, as a fugitive in the North, and as a prominent African American orator, journalist, and antislavery leader.

In later life Frederick Douglass worked for full civil rights for African Americans while holding several U.S. government positions. Despite his dedication of the Emancipation Monument, he had misgivings about its design. The current controversy over the monument unearthed a previously unknown letter in which Douglass wrote that the former slave depicted there, “while rising, is still on his knees.”

Two Letters in The Wall Street Journal (July 7, 2020) captured the opposing views of the controversial monument. One writer knew its history. The other judged it solely by impressions of the present when separated from its history. I leave it to you to decide which expresses the monument’s original meaning:

WSJ READER 1: “The image shows a clear hierarchy of power — Abraham Lincoln with elegant clothes dominating Archer Alexander [a former slave] wearing only a piece of cloth... No back story, facts or prestigious titles you wave in our faces will convince people to see ‘emancipation’ there. What might have been questionably allowed in 1892 isn’t acceptable now.”
WSJ READER 2: “The scene depicted actually happened. Admiral David Dixon Porter accompanied President Lincoln to Richmond to accept the surrender of the Confederacy, and recounted the story in his 1885 memoir. Lincoln was recognized by hundreds of newly freed slaves who crowded him. When one fell to the ground at his feet, Lincoln said, ‘Do not kneel to me. You must kneel only to God and thank Him for your liberty. Liberty is your birthright. God gave it to you as he gave it to all others. It is a sin that you have been deprived of it for so many years.’ It was Admiral Porter’s account that inspired the statue’s design. Little more than one week later, Lincoln was assassinated.”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this important and timely post. We also recommend these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Neither Donald Trump nor I Should Wear That Scarlet Letter!

Cardinal Bernard Law on the Frontier of Civil Rights

Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables

The Hamas Assault on Israel and the Emperor Who Knew Not God

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/10/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/10/24

Neither Donald Trump nor I Should Wear That Scarlet Letter!

Convicted felon is a label bestowed like a scarlet letter solely to shame another. The real shame is when it is used selectively as cover for one’s own inadequacies.

Convicted felon is a label bestowed like a scarlet letter solely to shame another. The real shame is when it is used selectively as cover for one’s own inadequacies.

July 10, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

The famous New England author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, published The Scarlet Letter in 1850. In its time, it was a lurid Puritan New England soap opera that became classic American literature. In its pages, which shocked the Puritans of Hawthorne’s time, the young Hester Prynne was found to be with child, but the father was not her husband, a much older and morally ruthless Puritan man. The real father was the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, the local Congregational minister. Refusing to reveal that truth, Hester Prynne was placed on display in the market square each day to be publicly shamed and shunned while adorned with a scarlet letter “A” for “adulterer” prominently on her dress. Nathaniel Hawthorne was well versed in the Puritan prejudices that shaped New England. His great grandfather was one of the three judges who presided over the 1692 Salem Witch Trials.

Today, the scarlet letter takes many other forms. We made it almost to the end of the now infamous June 27, 2024 Presidential Debate before President Joe Biden declared to the American people that Donald Trump, his opponent in the upcoming election, is a “convicted felon.” It seemed much more an act of desperation than inspiration. “What was the point of it?” a commentator asked. Everything about it told me that its only point was to lay shame upon the opposing candidate when all other rhetoric was failing.

It told us nothing about Donald Trump that we did not already know. It told us nothing about the New York trial that mysteriously transformed questionable misdemeanor charges into felonies to bestow that dubious title upon him for strictly political purposes. But it spoke volumes about the desperate state of the one who said it. It was the clearest thing said by President Biden that night, and likely the most rehearsed.

I, too, am a convicted felon, and if you are not reading this blog for the first time then you know, or at least suspect, that the term has been unjustly imposed. So I have a legitimate gripe about its use and misuse. Just about every fair-minded person familiar with this blog knows that even a cursory look under the hood of my 1994 trial leaves its outcome in serious doubt. Only those with bias and hidden agendas of their own still point to the “convicted felon” millstone around my neck.

Dorothy Rabinowitz, a longtime columnist and member of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her bold series of concience-stirring revelations about some of the most notorious witch-hunts sex abuse trials of modern times. My trial was one of them. In regard to my “convicted felon” status, Ms. Rabinowitz wrote: “Those aware of the facts of this case find it hard to imagine that any court today would ignore the perversion of justice it represents.” (“The Trials of Father MacRae,” The Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2013).

To those who read and share my posts, I am grateful for your openminded conclusion that justice failed on the day that scarlet letter was imposed on me. And not only on me; the late Cardinal George Pell also refused to wear the “convicted felon” label before he was finally exonerated after 400 days and nights in solitary confinement in prison. Fortunately, the Australian justice system ultimately delivered him from that injustice. American courts differ from Australian courts in this respect. In modern times, American courts have developed a barrier to the pursuit of justice that grants to the justice system itself the last word and a right to finality. Experts described the dynamics behind this in an article, “Why This Falsely Accused Priest Is Still in Prison.”

There have been thousands of proven wrongful convictions in U.S. courts during the 30 years I have spent in prison for refusing to willfully accept the Scarlet Letter label. I could have left prison 28 years ago if I accepted the deal the State of New Hampshire tried to impose upon me. There are an estimated tens of thousands still wrongfully in prison in the United States because they are unable to “prove” their innocence even when no one had to prove their guilt.

Our incarceration nation leads the world in imprisonment with five percent of the world’s population but twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. So it would follow that it also leads the world in conviction errors, forty-percent of which are attributed to police and prosecutor misconduct.

A “Convicted Felon’ in the White House?

On the night before beginning this post, I had a long distance discussion about it with my friend, Pornchai Moontri in Thailand. He is, as most readers know, a real survivor of the very sort of crimes for which I was falsely accused. He is also a survivor of almost 16 years in a prison cell with me. In our recent discussion, Pornchai told me that my only crime was being a Catholic priest and then letting it cost me everything I had. I guess I have to let that sink in. I could have devoted my life in this injustice to building a monument of volcanic bitterness. There is plenty of that to go around where I live. “Thank God you didn’t,” Pornchai said.

So instead of weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, I write. I do not just write about the state of my own injustice. I also write about injustice that has befallen others. I write about the state of our freedom, and what is at stake when we take it for granted. I write about the state of our character, about our Church, our politics, our descent into evil and our capacity for good. I write about the senseless impact of prison, and about some, like my friend Pornchai, who overcame it, became redeemed from it, and now faces the challenge of avoiding debilitating labels like the one imposed on me and Donald Trump.

Pornchai Moontri added his belief that I would not be in prison today if I were not a Catholic priest. Then he said that Donald Trump would not have faced those charges in New York if he were not a Republican candidate for President. Mr. Moontri is right about this, and he zoomed in on the one thing that I find most disturbing about Trump’s candidacy: the elitist view that a political outsider has no business running for President of the United States. This prejudice has been evident in mainstream news media since his election in 2016. It has been nothing short of an attempt at voter nullification and egregious election interference.

I know that some of our readers do not like Donald Trump. Back in 2021, we lost some readers when I wrote “Biden and the Bishops: Communion and the Care of a Soul.” It is globally one of our most read posts and it was also recommended by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. But some of our slightly left-leaning readers concluded that any criticism of President Biden is an ipso facto affirmation of Donald Trump. That post is a classic example of the sometimes vague boundaries between politics and morality, and why no priest should be afraid to write or speak about the latter.

I have never promoted Donald Trump, and do not do so now. That said, I have never demoted him either. But as an American, I resent all the one-sided rhetoric denouncing his candidacy based on his character. That is a matter for voters to decide, not the courts, and not the news media, and certainly not the elite holding office in Washington, DC. In 2020, it was insisted to me that the whole Hunter Biden laptop story that emerged and was covered up before the election of 2020 was Russian disinformation. I know that I ruffled feathers when I wrote “Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell.” I was lied to then, and so were you.

The clincher in my decision to write this post about Donald Trump’s legal woes came from reading the June 21, 2024 issue of the National Catholic Reporter. It is a far left-leaning “independent” newspaper that I stopped reading decades ago. Another priest gave me a gift subscription to it, and I have wondered ever since what I did to offend him. The front-page headline in the June 21 issue is “Does the Catholic Vote Still Matter?” It was followed by this highlighted text: “A majority of Catholics are trending toward voting for Donald Trump — even after conviction.” Should that fact alone be evidence that the Catholic vote no longer matters just because it doesn’t fit NCR’s ideology?

… and to the Banana Republic for Which It Stands …

I am much informed by a recent Wall Street Journal article, “Why Republicans Don’t Abandon ‘Felon’ Trump” by Michael W. McConnell (June 20, 2024). The author is a Stanford Law School professor, a retired judge on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He dissected the various charges lodged against Mr. Trump during this election cycle. His conclusions are an eye-opener. Only one of these cases has gone to trial, and after a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings, it appears that many of the other claims perhaps never will. Of the supposed felonies for which a New York State court declared Trump guilty, Professor McConnell wrote:

“Most Democrats I know persuaded themselves of the righteousness of criminally prosecuting Donald Trump to keep him from becoming President again. How, they ask, can any respectable person defend Mr. Trump now that he is a felon? Many Republicans … believe that Democratic prosecutors are waging lawfare against Mr. Trump [and] now consider the legal crusade against Trump to be as threatening to democracy as what happened on January 6, 2021. The charges against Mr. Trump in New York were bogus.”

The article lays out in compelling terms how New York DA Alvin Bragg’s prosecution was an attempt to influence voters and the electoral process. DA Bragg had also been a donor to the Biden campaign and should have disqualified himself from prosecuting the case. Instead, according to Professor McConnell he “openly campaigned on a vow to hold Mr. Trump and his family accountable.” The attention grabber for me was what followed in Professor McConnell’s article: “Mr. Bragg didn’t pursue particular crimes of concern to the public. He pursued a particular defendant who happened to be the other party’s candidate for President.”

That analysis is so vastly unlike almost all other news coverage of that trial that is shocked me, and for good reason. The “suspect in search of a crime” motif was exactly what happened to me. No one ever went to Keene, NH Detective James F. McLaughlin with a complaint about me. Instead, this sex abuse crusader targeted me for no reason other than my being a Catholic priest. Then, armed with a fraudulent claim that he himself manufactured, he manipulated — sometimes with monetary bribes and threats — dozens of troubled adolescents and young adults in places where I had been assigned. He did this relentlessly for five years until he found some who would accuse me for money. (See the “Statement of Steven Wollschlager.”)

The “ lawfare” pursuit of Donald Trump was political, but it never reflected American justice. Its sole purpose was the imposition of a scarlet letter that would most likely be overturned on appeal. According to the purposes of D.A. Bragg, it need only hold up until the November election. After a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Presidential Immunity, New York State judge Juan Merchan delayed Mr. Trump’s sentencing until September 18, 2024.

Meanwhile, President Biden’s son Hunter Biden, now also a “convicted felon” has been serving in the role of a senior advisor to the President during both family and staff negotiations about his future political life, negotiations in which Hunter Biden has a clear conflict of interest. The hypocrisy is stunning.

In his first term as 45th President of the United States, President Donald Trump sponsored the First Step Act. A major tenet of it was a call for the removal of “the box,” a prejudicial feature of federal job applications that kept thousands of former prisoners from finding meaningful work. Permanent “Convicted Felon” status is unjust, demeaning, useless and sometimes even baseless. Recall the words of Sheriff Beauford Puser in my post, “Walking Tall: The Justice Behind the Eighth Commandment”: “If you let ‘em get away with this, you give ‘em the eternal right to do the same damn thing to anyone of you!”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this timely post. You may also like these related titles from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Hamas Assault on Israel and the Emperor Who Knew Not God

Miranda Devine, Cardinal Pell, and the Laptop from Hell

Why This Falsely Accused Priest Is Still in Prison

Walking Tall: The Justice Behind the Eighth Commandment

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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

Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/3/24 Fr. Gordon J. MacRae 7/3/24

The Birds and the Bees Behind These Stone Walls

Fr Gordon MacRae wrote this post for Independence Day 2012 when he lived in a far more confining space. We are updating this summer gem about the meaning of liberty.

Fr Gordon MacRae wrote this post for Independence Day 2012 when he lived in a far more confining space. We are updating this summer gem about the meaning of liberty.

July 3, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Okay, relax! This isn’t going to be a soap opera about the lurid things you’ve heard about prisons — most of which are not true at all. And I’m not going to San Francisco wearing flowers in my hair or anything. I don’t even have any hair, let alone flowers. So before you unsubscribe or delete BTSW from your blog lists, let me deflate your expectations. My title is far more boring than it sounds.

This is being posted on Independence Day in the United States, the peak of vacation season in the Northern Hemisphere. So I expect a lot of BTSW readers will be outside barbecuing and not stuck inside reading this post. Of course, in an age of iPhones and iPads — neither of which I have ever seen — you could be lounging at the beach while reading of Independence Day in the slammer. Actually, I hope most of you somehow manage to do both!

This post really is about birds and bees — real ones, not the metaphorical ones parents lectured us about growing up. This is about the great outdoors, which, from my perspective, is mostly experienced through a two-by-three-foot, sealed and heavily barred window in a concrete and steel prison cell. Through that window, I have seen 18 years of summers come and go. I was never one for hanging around bars, but now I have little choice. I have been a devoted observer of the rhythms of life through a small barred window for a long, long time.

Sometimes I receive letters from readers who tell me they’re hesitant to write of their vacations and travels, their celebrations and family gatherings, their liberties. They write that they fear making me depressed by reminding me of places I cannot see, things I cannot have, and freedoms I can no longer embrace. Please don’t ever feel this way. I do not see most things in terms of myself. I don’t think there is anyone who revels in your freedom more than I do.

Hebrews 13:3 tells us to “Remember those who are in prison as though in prison with them.” I much appreciate that so many of you fulfill this admirably. But I can also remember freedom, and I can celebrate yours. Perhaps there are things you can also learn about appreciating life and liberty from someone unjustly in prison. On this Independence Day, if you can log off Beyond These Stone Walls with some new appreciation for freedom, I will be the happiest writer in cyberspace.

The Inside-Out Aquarium

“Contentious Convicts” was one of my earliest posts on BTSW. (We later republished it as the third of three short posts, so if you click on it, just scroll to number three.) It was brief, so I hope you’ll take a few moments to read it anew because it is closely related to this post. Since I wrote it, I’ve had a recurring dream in prison that I live in a reverse aquarium. In the dream, I live inside the tank and all the water and life are on the outside. My view out my cell window is a lot like that, and is perhaps even the source of my disconcerting dream.

The more we are denied something as basic as the great outdoors, the more we long for it, and are fascinated by it. The patch of grass I can see is not really grass. It might have been at one time. Today, it is a few square yards of weeds interspersed with grass and a few wildflowers. My cell is on the bottom floor of a four-story cinder block prison containing 96 cells and 504 prisoners. It is one of six housing units in this prison complex. All surrounded by a 20-foot wall.

Some prisoners in this building live eight to a cell, a horror I endured for over six years. Some prisoners live stacked in dayrooms and recreation areas with no windows at all. So today I count myself blessed to live on the ground floor, with only two to a cell, and a window but a few feet from the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees that I can see so closely, but never touch.

You might be amazed at the varieties of life I’ve seen in just the small patch of grass and shrubs that separates this window from the towering prison wall dominating my field of view from ten yards away. At night a family of skunks somehow manages to tunnel into the prison (Go figure!) to forage for grubs among the weeds and grass. Early one morning last summer, a beautiful red-tailed hawk perched for an hour atop the prison wall just beyond my window. It seemed as though he was watching me on this side of the bars and thick Plexiglas. Then his three-foot wingspan spread out. He swooped toward me, and caught a field mouse just two feet from my window. I was shocked at how quickly he devoured it. The experience really put me off field mice for breakfast. I’ll stick with Cheerios, thank you!

I’ve had a close-up view as the dandelions open to greet the dawn. I’ve watched the bees just a few feet away as they fly from flower to flower. There is a ficus tree about twenty feet from my window. I first spotted it years ago when it was just a foot tall. It grows up the center of a dense spiral of razor wire that descends from a corner of the prison wall just outside my window. Over a few years the ficus tree slowly engulfed the spirals of razor wire and completely obscured them. It was a drama about the victory of life played out in slowest motion. I cheered that tree on! Then one morning, my spirits fell.

Through a security grate under the window I awoke to the sounds of saws and clippers. Was it four summers ago or five? Years in prison tend to blend together. Anyway, I watched in silent mourning as the ficus tree was cut down to its very roots. Someone had declared it a security hazard because it had grown so tall, blocking the view from atop a nearby guard tower. I missed that tree, and I resented the spirals of razor wire back in full view. My tree lost that battle.

Prison: 1 — Ficus Tree: 0

For the rest of that summer, I stared out the window at the small bare stumps left behind among the grass and weeds beneath the razor wire. I thought sure the tree was dead. Then three summers ago, I noticed a few shoots with tiny buds protruding from the stumps and the grass around them. Day after day the buds unfolded into leaves and a small bush slowly took shape.

Over each succeeding summer the ficus tree emerged anew, and grew bigger and stronger. It took on a different shape than it had in its first life, growing wider and taller. It became a host for birds and a way station for all manner of living things. The birds and the bees seem to thrive around it. I never before witnessed something cling so tenaciously to life.

Prison: 0 — Ficus Tree: 1

Photo by Francesco Pradella — **CC BY-ND 2.0**

Emily Dickinson on Poetic Justice

In a week or so, our friend Pornchai Moontri will commence a course in American Literature, his final class before earning his full high school diploma from Granite State High School, an accredited high school program inside prison walls.

Pornchai earned his GED equivalency years ago, and has since completed a few college level classes in theology at Catholic Distance University. But he decided to take on the challenge of finishing high school the hard way, and with this one last class he will graduate. (Note: In 2024, I wrote of this 2012 graduating class in “Evenor Pineda and the Late Mother’s Day Gift.”) I’m proud of Pornchai’s undaunted effort like I’m proud of that ficus tree.

I’m looking forward to Pornchai’s American Lit class mostly because I’ll be able to steal a few hours with his textbook. I once wrote of my third year at Saint Anselm College in 1977. I had written a term paper entitled, “Emily Dickinson, Recalcitrant Daughter of Abraham.” The paper focused on Emily Dickinson’s reputation as a recluse and cynic in her poetry. Here are a few paragraphs that I wrote about her in a previous post:

“As I sat here yesterday morning thinking of a title, I heard something unusual through the open grate. It was a song, and it came from a red-breasted robin perched atop the spirals of razor wire on the twenty-foot wall that had been my view of the outside world for years. I watched the robin for a long time, and listened as he sang. It instantly made me think of Emily Dickinson and one of her most pessimistic poems:

“ ‘I dreaded that first Robin, so,
But He is mastered, now,
I’m some accustomed to Him grown,
He hurts a little, though — ’ ”

I won’t depress you with the rest. I could just imagine the reclusive Emily Dickinson pondering with a grimace the signs of life that spring brought to her window — the very idea of cracking it open a bit to let some spring air clear the foul mood of her winter.

I understood her though. It’s hard to be depressed while listening to a robin sing. Her’s must have sung a lot, for she changed her own tune with a later poem:

“Hope is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the Soul —
And sings the tunes without the words —
And never stops — at all.”

My robin sings the latter song, and he was back again this morning. I don’t dread this robin at all. I just dread not being able to open this window so I can hear him better!

If you’re not planning some time outside, consider this: A recent study found that youngsters in America now spend more than four hours a day in front of computer screens of one sort or another. As a result, there’s no longer time for nature. Over the last few years, childhood outdoor recreation fell another 15 percent. In another study, psychologist Ruth Ann Atchley gave 60 backpackers a standard test of creativity before a hike. She gave the same test to a different group four days into a hiking trip. The latter group scored fifty percent higher on the creativity test across the board, and these results were consistent for all age groups. Without a doubt, exposure to the outdoors is good for us.

So as soon as the realities of prison allow it, I’ll get away from this window and take a long walk around the baseball field. I wrote about that field in a very special article published at LinkedIn entitled, “At Play in the Field of the Lord.”

To get to that field, I have to stare beyond the ficus tree to wait for a door to open in that prison wall. Then I have to wait to be buzzed through three sets of locked doors, wait in a long line at a guard station for a “movement pass,” wait for passage through two more security checkpoints, and then walk the walled path around the back of this building right past that “resurrected” ficus tree now consuming all the prison razor wire in its slow dance of victory over prison and death.

Your friends behind these stone walls offer some of our days and nights in prison for you. So on this Independence Day, honor life, and let freedom ring! Then resist with all your might the forces in our world now seeking to squander or squash them both.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts at Beyond These Stone Walls:

Faith and Freedom at the Twilight’s Last Gleaming

Contentious Convicts (scroll to the third section)

Evenor Pineda and the Late Mother’s Day Gift

At Play in the Field of the Lord

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

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