“Tom” is on my mind. As a chaplain, I saw this 26 year old inmate at The House of Correction today. One of my guys who has returned to jail again….

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