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.
Many men I have met inside prison had more inner freedom than citizens outside who do not see the iron bars they live within. On those visits at Attica, I bore witness to more focused desire to grow than I have ever seen outside—not in churches, or seminars, or therapy groups.
“To gain control of the attention is the sole aim of all spiritual disciplines.”
When in the main a culture is unwilling or unable to ask the question of God’s absence, that people is unwilling and unable to be just, or even to hold the question, What is just?
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.
But we are going there, to a place so far from the mere troubles of institution and organization which have vexed us. Hungering after our own experience of God, we will make the last appeal on behalf of the littlest and lost, the deceived and the dead, and thus we shall meet God anew on holy ground in the faith of the future.
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