Inside Out
Twice a month for ten years, I took part in a conversation with men in the state prison at Attica. The program, run by a Franciscan brother, offered no inducements to come to the group—no awards for attendance, no course credits, no promise of letters to the parole board. A man returned to the group only because he wanted to.
How You Function When You Can’t Breathe
There is so much that is broken down in American society, in one sense it is easy to understand why so many are in denial. People are overwhelmed. Yet the denial is dangerous. Denial that racism bedevils us. Denial that police brutality is systemic. Denial of...The Discipline of Death
Did the dead really come to life at the touch of Elisha? I don’t know. But I know this. If my faith hung on whether these stories are facts, faith would not be faith. If these stories just had to be scientifically so, else I lose my trust in God, then my religion would be thin and brittle and ideological and small. We have these stories not because we know they happened but because, in their extremity of need, people said, Tell us that one again, master . . .
Coming to Our Self
We are incarceration nation, apparently so full of hatred for certain people that, like crazed animals, we severely damage our whole tribe with this giant prison industry that fosters the very corrupt and violent behaviors it purports to control. Like a dragon waiting inside a cave to devour the next generation of young black and brown men, we do not see that our mouth-parts are fastened on our own body. Yet hardly any political leader of any stature or color, and hardly any religious leaders, are ever heard to say of our (very) criminal justice system that we have a problem—all of us . . .
All Fall Away
Now, though the hour is night and many are deep in the sleeps of denial and cynicism, of fear and self-betrayal, know this: Beneath the last garment that covers our life with kindness and community; at the base of bereavement; in the basement beneath the broken beams of all a person built or dreamed, there yet a mystery awaits: Your being, your eye, You absolute: irreducible, precious without price: being.
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