He trudges down the stairs from his cell a little rumpled, carrying a sheet of paper. “Something I wrote for you,” he quips as he sits near me on the metal seats at the table in the cellblock. His square face, dark buzz-cut hair, lips that make funny grimaces when he speaks, broad shoulders which I hit lightly sometimes as we converse, and endearing manner though he robbed his grandmother for drug money, make me love him like one of God’s lost sheep, even though when I walk away I think he may actually be hopeless.

We get increasingly communicative as we spend the half hour together in view of the female Correctional Officer and the other inmates who are milling around. At times he runs back to his cell to get pictures of his family (never shown to me in the past three years) and a book he offers me to read about a guy who carried a full-size crucifix around the world as his mission. Tom tells me he feels like giving up at times as he lays on his bunk with nothing to do. I draw him out about the depression he has spoken about before. Words like “empty” and “lonely” come up. I go for them, ask him about trying to write to his father who is a “mean old guy but I love him.” Tom says his dad is not the kind of guy whom you write your feelings to, this 50 year old truck driver who left his wife when Tom was seven years of age and the oldest of three, the mother a heroin addict and who died soon after. “No wonder you feel an emptiness,” I say, searching for his feelings. He doesn’t show any.

We get to talking about his fears of not making it when he gets out, maybe going to a half-way house. “Didn’t you do that the last time?” I ask. “Yeah,” he gives me a rueful look. I remind him of how he told me about his running wild in the drug scene, “how you would hustle while your girl friend waited.” I wanted him to remember that he had told me these things before. “Yeah, and then I made her get into a car while I waited.” “What do you mean?” I ask. “I know she belongs to me, even though she has sex with a john to get us drug money,” he explains, though his grimacing lips show me he realizes how crazy that is. “Oh man!” I hit him on the shoulder.”

This reminds me of something I read in Scripture this morning. I pick up his Recovery Bible he has with a few paper stubs marking key passages for him. “Hey, let me see if I can find something I read this morning. It reminds me of you.” I then tell him partly–with him picking up the thread–of the story of the birth of Ishmael. “A wild ass of a man,” I tell him. “What’s that mean?” he asks. I then find the passage and read it to him, while he looks over my shoulder:

You are with child, and shall bear a son; you shall call him Ishmael, because the Lord has heard of your humiliation. He shall be a wild ass of a man, his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him; he shall dwell apart, opposing all his kinsmen.

I repeat, “You are like that Tom, a wild ass of a man.” Not sure he gets this or likes it, but I explain a little, “You’re always running wild, running to fill up the emptiness…” He continues for me, “…and doing drugs to escape it.” “Yeah!” I punch him on the shoulder, then blurt out, “It’d kill me if you died from drugs, you know?” He looks at me quizzically. I think this was the point when he ran to get the pictures of his family.

He shows me the pictures, faded color copies on thin paper with curled edges, and I see his good- looking dad and Tom’s brothers and sisters and their little ones. He points them out and names them. I ask their ages. His father, he explains, raised a few other kids as well as his own three. “They’re the children of his second wife. He’s been going with her a while but they just got married a couple of years ago. She doesn’t like me.” Tom is holding up one picture of his younger brother with a little child at his cheek. “That’s good to see a man holding a kid so close,” I say, “like a father’s love should be for his child.” Tom gives me his wide-open look.

I remember another Scripture passage and try to paraphrase it, “God is describing himself as a father here, holding up Israel….no, he’s holding Ephraim, to his cheek.” I make a gesture with my hands against my cheek. With excitement now, and while making a joke about how I am not as good as the Baptists who can remember the precise citations for these passages, I grab Tom’s Bible again and search. “It’s from Hosea, I think.” I begin to page through the minor prophets. Miraculously, I find the passage in a few minutes. “Hosea, Chapter 11,” he says, pointing to it as I begin to read:

When Israel was a child I loved him, out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the farther they went from me, sacrificing to the Baals…(“false idols,” I explain to him.)…and burning incense to idols. Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, who took them in my arms; I drew them with human cords, with bands of love; I fostered them like one who raises an infant to his cheeks; yet though I stooped to feed my child, they did not know that I was their healer…

I pause. I so want to make sure this young man from the streets, whose mother was a heroin addict and whose father and family won’t talk to him, gets the connection with him and God. I shift my face closer to his, look in his eyes. “So, even if you have done things you are ashamed of, or feel empty and hopeless, let God go down there to that place and love you, claim you Tom…he wants to, don’t you see?” He nods his head slightly. “Even if you are a wild ass of a man like Ishmael, God can’t bear to lose you…see?” I read further, particularly wanting him to hear the feelings of God shown in this Bible passage. “Look! It says God roars,” I tell him. Clenching my fists and widening my eyes, I show him what I imagine God’s passion is for him, for us. “It’s not just an angry roar, Tom; it’s a hurt roar, the roar of a man in love whose been left…he doesn’t want to be like humans and simply destroy what has hurt him, left him, thrown away his love. He will roar until we return to him. “I point back to the passage, “…like trembling sparrows and doves,”

Our time was getting short. He asks if we can pray before I leave. We join hands in our fashion, he gripping my fingers intensely with his head down. I ask if he wants to pray first. “Yeah,” he says. I joke and say he’s the only one who does. “All the others want me to do it first.” He prays for his family, then for me and the other guys in the jail, and finally for himself. Soon we end. As I leave he asks if I could bring him a copy book to write in. “I’ll try.” We shake hands. “I’m gonna get a cup of coffee now, Father Paul, and go back to my cell and read those passages.” “Good.”

Later that night I remember him and our time together. I had felt some hopelessness in his regard as I walked away earlier. Over three years now working as a prison chaplain. I recognize Tom’s addictive patterns and how drugs destroy even the best of intentions of these inmates. “It is a spiritual disease, a hole in the body, the heart, the soul,” explained one of them as he showed me the Big Book of AA recently. I pray anyway, “Please Lord, bless Tom. I love him as you do.” Making a gesture as of a father pulling his child up to his cheek, I say, “I beg you Father, don’t let my son be lost.” I’ll roar later…

-Fr. Paul Morrissey, OSA

Violence in the City of Brotherly Love

“We live in two worlds—they only notice each other when they collide.” The new play about violence at the Interact Theater is worth attending.  Those who are shot to death in Philadelphia and those who shoot them collide these two worlds. The story is told of one young man, who came to Philly last year to be a teacher and was shot to death for his Ipod. It makes one weep. He was white, from Minnesota. His murderer was Black, from a Philly ghetto. Victims and victimizers. Two different worlds. Sometimes.

There were 305 murders in 2009, down from 333 the year before (Philadelphia Inquirer, 1/5/2010). Approximately 70% of those who are killed in Philadelphia are Black people killed by Black people. Mostly these are young men. Numbers. And increasing day by day as we lock them up out of sight. Lock their bodies up, and their hearts and souls too—until they serve their time and get out. To do what?

This is not a just sob-sister story about the basic humanity of prison inmates. Voices of victims cry out too. Victims often in the same world as those who harm them–ghetto worlds where children grow up on the street and learn to fight to stay alive.  Sections of the city—some black, some white, some Hispanic—where a common poverty creates the environment for selling drugs to make a living. Selling bodies too. Selling souls if the devil offers you the right price. What would you want for your body? Your soul?

This play shows the “numbers” racked up each year in Philly of the murdered and the murderers. It is powerful when it gets inside the heads and hearts of those who are in prison for these crimes. Thugs?  Brutal inhuman bastards? Heartless killers? More like you and me than we would think. The cry of the victims through the mouths of their survivors, pierce one’s heart as well. My son just wanted to teach, to help…

Numbers… None of them are simply ‘numbers,’ though the statistics treat them that way. They are flesh and blood. They are you and me. They are ‘Jesus Christ in prison’ if you have eyes to see (Mt. 25:36).

On the street you can be free as a lark, yet chained in the prison of your heart.

You can be chained in a prison dark, yet free as a bird in your heart.

Philadelphia is the City of Brotherly Love. We live in two worlds here—we only notice each other when we collide. Where are you in these numbers? What can you do to reach across the divide?

-Fr. Paul Morrisey, O.S.A

But, Why Not Me?

This question, in the mouth of a friend of Augustine’s, is the key to understanding Augustinian Spirituality. In Book Eight of his Confessions, Augustine describes himself in a garden in Milan before he finally took the step to commit himself wholly to Jesus Christ and to be baptized. In one of the most dramatic conversion stories in Christian history, Augustine describes how he is struggling with all of his sexual passions; he can not become chaste as he wishes. While in the midst of this inner struggle, he tells us, “a mighty storm arose in me, bringing a mighty rain of tears.” He leaps up and runs into a remote section of the garden. While sobbing out of control under a fig tree, he hears a child’s voice singing over and over again, Tolle, lege, tolle lege, which means “Pick it up and read it.” Augustine experiences this as a message to him from God. He returns to the bench where he had been reading St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. He seized the book, opened it, and read silently the first text he found: Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and envy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provisions for the flesh in its concupiscenses. (Romans 13:13) “A light of utter confidence shone in my heart,” he tells us. “All the darkness of uncertainty vanished.”

It is a stunning story, perhaps even polished up to grab our attention and lure us in as we read it. Except for the opening line, there is one significant feature left out of this summary. I believe it to be at the heart of understanding Augustine and Augustinian Spirituality. During this dramatic encounter with God, Augustine’s dear friend, Alypius, was sitting on the garden bench nearby. To ignore this, or to erase the conversation between Augustine and Alypius which followed, is to miss the unique gift to the Church that Augustine and Augustinian Spirituality offers.

“Then leaving my finger in the place or marking it by some other sign, I closed the book and in complete calm told the whole thing to Alypius and he similarly told me what had been going on in himself, of which I knew nothing.” And I here paraphrase what Alypius asked his friend in so many words: But, why not me? He asked to see what Augustine had read. Augustine showed him the passage from St. Paul. “He looked further than I had read,” Augustine tells us, “I had not known what followed. And this is what followed: Make room for the person who is weak in faith.” (Romans 14:1, tr. Boulding) Alypius applied this to himself and told Augustine so. “And he was confirmed by this message, and with no trouble wavering gave himself to God’s good will and purpose.” Augustine and Alypius are converted together.

Except possibly for the Emmaus story (Luke 24:13), this is the only story I have heard of where two people are converted together. It offers a model of a spiritual journey that is of great importance to the Church today. In contrast to the individual person or soul’s journey to God–the classic model of the spiritual life made famous by St. Ignatius and St.Teresa of Avila—the Augustinian way is to travel together to God. In fact, Augustine describes earlier in the Book Eight mentioned above how he and Alypius were told a similar story of two young men who were converted by reading the book of St. Antony of the Desert together, and how they had given up everything to follow Christ. It seems very likely that Augustine wanted to evoke the same reaction in the readers of his Confessions. Hearing another person’s story of how God changed his once lost heart can be the flame that ignites the hearer to discover God calling him or herself. This is how the Gospel has moved people through the centuries. It is how Augustine changed. It is even more powerful when two are changed in this way. And so Augustine hopes that in ones and twos we will be touched by his conversion as we hear the story of his exploding heart. Together to God—the Augustinian Way.

To make this point unforgettable, in Book Nine of his Confessions, Augustine describes how he had a similarly profound religious experience with his mother, Monica, at his side. They too were near a garden. The famous painting by Ary Scheffer even portrays the two of them hand in hand. Isn’t it clear that, for Augustine, sharing our faith journey together in the deepest way is the path to God? This is the main rationale for the liturgy. We worship together in community to experience God together. There are many other examples of how we are already doing this, but the present moment in our Church’s history seems ready-made to claim the Together to God image for Augustine, and for ourselves as his followers. The more we understand and practice this pathway to continuing conversion, the more we can help others use this image to complement the classic conversion models of an individual soul and God. Finally, for those of us who take vows to live as Augustinians, we have to admit that living together in “community,” and praying together, does not necessarily mean the deep and Scriptural sharing of souls and hearts that Augustine demonstrates in his Confessions—Anima una et cor unum in Deum. But we can identify this path as our ideal, and we can try.

Together to God—but, why not me?

Why not us?

-Fr. Paul Morrissey, OSA

Jesus
Luke 17:3-4

Muhammed
The Sayings of Muhammed, 209

Robert D. Enright, PhD
Forgiveness is a Choice, 2001

Jesus
Matthew 6:14-15

W. Somerset Maugham
A Writer’s Notebook, 1949

Friedrich von Schiller
William Tell, 3.1, 1804

Robert Ingersoll
The Foundations of Faith