Yoo hoo! We're ready! Where are you?

Eight in the morning and the ground is frosty. We move the altar away from the wall and into its celebration spot. Someone moves the pulpit and sets up the crib scene on a small table in front of it. Worship sheets are out and so are the song sheets (swiped from a Lutheran Bell Choir service that happened last week). New candles are lit, bread and wine on the altar. I even remembered the sacramentary and opened it to the appropriate page. All the readings have been claimed by volunteers. We are ready.

Almost. Even as the clock points to eight-fifteen, we are looking for Fr. Joe. He's not here yet.

The officer at the front desk calls the officer at the entrance to the prison: Any sign of Fr. Joe? Not yet.

The first rule of prison life, among many, be ready to punt.

So we sing the opening carol, "O Come, All Ye Faithful." We bless ourselves, pray the Gloria for the first time in weeks, and settle in for the readings. Fr. Joe will join us.

We listen through all the readings. I homilize. "Don't be afraid. Shepherds got the word first, not the governor, not the emperor, not the high priest. Shepherds. They were afraid, much like we are, afraid to believe that this grand message was for them." Then I tell them the story about Baby Jesus getting stolen from our manger scene a few years ago, and coming back to us with inked tattoos. They laugh at the story, but there is some keen recognition in their eyes: God became like us.

We pray. We exchange Peace. We share communion (thanks, St. Leo parish for being such a steady connection for us) and we go out singing, "Joy to the World."

Fr. Joe will celebrate Epiphany with us. We'll have a chance to be a bit counter-cultural. I'm betting the lights and trees will be down before next Sunday, but we'll still be celebrating Christmas. This is the feast I get to celebrate every day: the immense gift of human life that God chooses to inhabit.

"We are as ready as we're going to get."

That was Fr. Jim at the beginning of the fourth Sunday of Advent Mass last Saturday night in my home parish. As soon as he said it I thought, "You're right!" and felt the worry and concern dissipate. No matter how much I prepare, comes a time to say, "Enough is enough."

This Advent, a purple cloth covered whatever table stood in for our altars: a typewriter table, a recycled table in a classroom, a steel dining table bolted to the floor with seats that do considerable damage to the unsuspecting knees. Four white French Vanilla candles in frosted glass holders brought new scents to each room. A strand of fake holly (nothing too pointed to be considered a weapon) was fashioned into a circle for three weeks and then straightened with the candles lined up across the table. We sang "O Come Emmanuel" in English and Spanish each week.

Everything is mobile, temporary. It can all be put away in a few minutes. Not unlike our lives.

The more permanent things: the heartbreak and longing in voices and on faces of men missing their kids, wishing they'd made other choices. There were last minute requests to be part of the Angel Tree Program (part of Prison Fellowship, they connect local churches with the children of incarcerated parents to provide presents for the kids). It's a great program, but it has become so popular that their deadline for signing up was September 1st, when many of the men I see today were still sitting in county jail waiting to go to court.

Today we logged the 104th death notification for 2009. Three of them came yesterday.

There were two Christmas plays presented by the men in one unit last Monday. Lots of laughter and cheerful faces as people left the chapel--and discovered we had some Christmas cards for them to include in letters home.

We Catholics will celebrate Christmas on our traditional day: the Sunday after Christmas, another chance to make the point that it really is a season, not a day.

"We are as ready as we're going to get," Fr. Jim said. "Now we just have to be ready to recognize Jesus however he comes to us." He comes to me in prison and I can't think of a better place to be.

Happy Christmas, everyone.

Things You Don't Hear in the Parish Church

"Let's offer each other a sign of peace. No bruising!"

"And behold, the angels appeared, praising God and saying---MOVEMENT! MOVEMENT!"

(In the midst of some equisite quiet one evening) "Pill line!"

"No bruising?" I can see your head shaking from here. "What does that mean??"

The second service of my Sunday is held in the dining room of a unit that houses a number of gang members, Surenos to be exact. The other unit having a service at the same time houses Nortenos--but most of them have gone to gym.

The brotherhood of the gang is thick and at the Kiss of Peace, there are handshakes, hugs, and the Thumping of the Back. Thus the admonishment, "No bruising!"

Of course there are things I don't hear in my prison parish:
--cell phones ringing
--kids
--announcements about coffee and doughnuts available in the social hall

In both places, the deep hunger for belonging and connection exists. We are not so different.

Hurry up and get here already!

I'm not one for patient waiting. It's not that I lack patience. Mostly I lack the ability to remember just what I'm waiting for. Life gets in the way. Things happen. I get distracted.

Right before Thanksgiving, I got a letter in the mail from Seattle University. Inside was a copy of the question I was asking in the fall of 2008 as I began a program in Pastoral Leadership. I read through it, wondered about the woman I was back then, and went on to the rest of the mail. The question: "What am I really hungering for?" Later that morphed into, "What if God isn't?" It wasn't a crisis of faith, just a question that had to be out on the table, under consideration.

You know my answer? Eh!

There were grieving people to comfort. There were celebrations with guys who passed a section of their GED. There were families to find. There were conspiracies and grade-school drama all year long. There was a job situation that ended up being so strange I'm still befuddled. Bottom line: there's still the rumbling activity of the Divine afoot in the world and I've got work to do.

Advent in prison--where waiting is an art form unto itself.

Some people sit in county jail, waiting to go to court. If convicted, they wait to be sentenced. Then they get sent to our place.

Once they arrive here, more waiting. At least everyone here has been convicted, or agreed to a plea. (I'm not saying everyone is actually guilty, but when they get off the bus, it's because there are orders from a judge back in the county saying the state has to take responsibility for them.)

Now a new kind of waiting: waiting to get tested and classified, waiting for the physical and dental exams, waiting for the psych eval and the school assessment. If he's in Unit 1 or 3, he's waiting to go to Unit 4 or 5. Waiting for mail. Waiting for a visit. Then waiting for an actual contact visit, but that has to wait til he's in another unit. Waiting for his access code to the phones. Waiting for the delivery from inmate store. Waiting for the Saturday movie, for the rain to stop so he can go to yard, for someone to get off the phone so he can try again to reach the phone that doesn't accept collect calls.

Mostly waiting to go to another institution, to get out of the grey or orange jumpsuits.

The holidays roll around and waiting gets physical. Fights happen more often, vicious words get said.

In church we talk about the reign of God and all anyone wants is a key to the front gate. Please.

It's easy to forget what we're waiting for. Too easy.

I don't believe in waiting for the reign of God. I think Jesus was right. It's already here. Maybe God's just waiting for me to notice.

The Temptations Abound

I don't know if it's a result of working in prison or just the warped sense of humor I have, but the greatest temptation is look at my work and see blog titles.

For instance, Tuesday's gem was "Two Days, Three Dead Grandmas."

Not funny at all, especially to the three men who lost a grandmother in those two days, but the juxtaposition of events, and their similarities... my brain just went in that direction. It's partly a defense mechanism. Work with several people in crisis situations within a close period of time and the connections are blazingly clear some days. The twisted humor is one way to stay at arm's length from my own memories.

Breaking the news to a man that his grandmother has died does several things. First, there is the concern about how he'll take the news. Was he close to his grandma? Did she raise him when his parents wouldn't or couldn't? Did she support him through thick and thin or did she finally draw a line and tell him enough was enough? Were they estranged for years, but he'd written her a letter recently, pledging to remake his life so she'd be proud of him? Will he try to staunch the tears with his jumpsuit or will he get mad and start throwing things?

Meanwhile, the chaplain brain goes in several directions: memories of my own grandparents and the circumstances of their deaths, the imminence of death in general, the precariousness of life and how it intrudes on people living in prison who didn't imagine that death would touch them here. The practical questions rise up: was the death in state? Will he want to go to the funeral? Will the family want him there or will there be problems? Who is his counselor so I can get the paperwork started? Who is the unit supervisor so I can call with an update as soon as the man leaves my office?

Multi-tasking happens. It has to. I place the tissue box within reach without being obtrusive. I take notes as I listen to the conversation. I look up information on the computer and begin to draft a letter with death and funeral details to go to the counselor.

I try to extricate my own experiences from the front of my mouth and I just shut up. I ask a few questions when he is off the phone. I invite him to write his grandmother's name in the Book of Memories I keep on my desk.

And there are times, like last Tuesday, when my mind goes down that road and thinks, "Two Days, Three Dead Grandmothers. What a great title for a blog post." I whack myself up the side of the head and get back to the business of chaplaincy.

It's always a good marker for me, a sign on the road that I need to do something not related to prison work so that my perspective is more broad, a sign that I'm a bit too enmeshed in work that I love. If I'm seeing blog titles and not the people in front of me, it's time for me to do some soul-searching and brain-cleaning.

Or I need a good laugh.

The Seasons Turn

It's the last week of October and I'm bracing myself. While we don't have to endure the onslaught of Halloween inside the prison, October 31st marks the serious beginning of the holiday season. Every year it's a bit different, but like it or not, here it comes.

Starting with Halloween, men start to get nostalgic about their kids. They want cards to send to them, they start talking about going trick or treating with them, they remember great costumes or antics of their own pasts. Some of it is true.

Not all of it is. Some of it is wishful thinking. A fair number are talking about kids who are now 7, 8, 9 whom they haven't seen since shortly after birth, if they were around for the event. Apart from a few pictures, they haven't been anywhere near that kid. They'd like to be. They should be, if they fit into the Righteous Daddy mode, but too often, it's wishful thinking.

And that's where it gets sad. As hard as we work to get ready to go back into the community, the reality is that there are bridges that got burned, roads that weren't taken, promises left empty, and there is no going back.

If Halloween is a bitter-sweet time, imagine the Thanksgiving spread, happy homecomings, presents under the tree, all those seasonal images with harsh edges around them. It's no wonder people retreat to their beds and pull the covers over their heads. I get it. I'm one of them.

On the other hand, Sunday we'll celebrate All Saints and that's a fine and wonderful feast day, a great one for someone with a Lint Trap Brain when it comes to knowing weird things about the saints. Sunday I'll tell the story about Sr. Marion, my fifth-grade teacher, who was the genius who told me to never mind the people who accused me of not having a "Christian" name, and encouraged me instead to become the first Saint Shannon.

I'm not there yet, but as St. Teresa of Avila once said, or should have, if she didn't: "We won't get there until we all get there."

Happy Feast Day!

Pace e Bene! (Peace and all Good!)

When I was twenty and a junior in college, I fell in love. It was a resounding thump that has echoed through the decades since then. And a Jesuit was responsible, no kidding.

I was in Rome at Loyola University (Chicago) Rome Center on Monte Mario. Some three hundred of us lived in a former tuberculosis sanitarium with wonderful balconies, too much espresso and Coke, and far too many cigarettes. We came from all over the United States. I was surprised to find a first grade classmate there. That year was exceptional and it sometimes sneaks out in a Chicago-accent that still sounds strange coming from a Northwest mouth.

It was 1973-74. Spiro Agnew resigned while we were gone. Streaking was a hot fad. (One of our classmates went home after the first semester and showed up in the newspaper streaking at a baseball game in Chicago.) Nixon resigned when we got home. There was homegrown terrorism in Italy. The son of someone famous was kidnapped and his ear was sent to his parents. I rode a train through Bologna. At the station, I stared out the window at a pile of bricks, leftover destruction from a bombing the week before.

All the news we got about the US came from a newspaper with two pages of news, more of sports, and the comics. It wasn't much. We learned instead how others saw the US. And we learned of the concerns of people in Europe who had to live in the shadow of US and USSR politics. I never saw my own country the same.

But I was talking about falling in love. In early October 1973, Fr. John Crocker took a group of us on the train to Assisi. It was three hours from Rome. The train was packed. I sat on a wooden fold-out seat in the corridor and was grateful for it. We spent the weekend in Assisi.

It's a beautiful medieval town with rosy colored stone from the quarry off the back of the hill. The Basilica of St. Francis anchors one end of town and you can walk to the upper part of the town by following the souvenir shops. At the upper end is the Basilica of St. Clare with the cross from San Damiano hanging in a chapel. (That's the cross that's on the left side of this blog, in case you hadn't recognized it.)

That cross once hung in a ruin of a church down below the city. In the early days of his conversion, Francis used to pray there and heard God telling him, "Go, rebuild my church, which you can see is falling into ruins." Francis started picking up stones and rebuilding the walls of that church. Later he would figure out that his mission was bigger than what he'd first imagined, but he started with those few stones. The church of San Damiano is where the Poor Ladies lived, where St. Clare lived out her long life. It was from this place that she prayed that the Saracens might leave Assisi alone. A bouquet of flowers marks the spot where she slept and finally died.

That weekend in Assisi, we tromped all over the place. We saw more than the usual tourists see in their three-hour lunch stop on the way to Florence. "Here's where Francis was born, where his father locked him up for being rebellious, where he stripped off his clothes in front of the bishop's house...." We went up the mountain to the Hermitage. We discovered little archways with a notation that he'd been there. We heard the story about Assisi's war with Perugia and understood the ambition to give everything to a great cause. We sat in an amphitheatre hidden in an upper neighborhood.

That weekend, history blasted alive for me. Here was a place affected by the Crusades. Here were people who'd been caught between pope and emperor. Here was a young man who didn't want to sell cloth but wanted something more. Here was someone willing to risk it all and was the first guy canonized by his nickname, "Frenchy"! (I have to thank a Franciscan sister who told me that, although my given name was not a saint's, it was my responsibility to become St. Shannon.)

History was finally about real people who struggled with the demands of their day and believed. They thought God was telling them one thing, and learned, by making mistakes, that God would ask more of them. There was plenty to be ranted about, and even more to be awed by. I learned that every age can be holy.

It was the same lesson I'd learned a few years earlier when I'd started going to church again. When I left in 8th grade, Mass was in English but that hadn't seemed to make a difference in the town where I lived. By the time I went again as a freshman in college, I had the profound understanding that every language is holy. Even the words that I strung together were heard by God, not because they were in fancy packages, but because they were my own. And all those stories I'd heard and read in Catholic grade school? They were true.

I fell for Francis, and by falling for him, for Jesus as well. I thought I had to be a nun in order to follow Jesus completely--and cloistered, like Clare, seemed the only way to go. I was enamored, for a brief time, by some sisters in Philadelphia who wore pink habits and rollerskated in their enclosure, but in the end, it was going to be the Poor Clares for me.

And like Francis who picked up rocks to rebuild a crumbling church, it wasn't the Poor Clares in the end. Whether it was my deep-seated extraverted nature, or the way I really like being around both men and women, or because I didn't have it in me, I didn't become a Poor Clare. I went into teaching, thinking that the Poor Clares would surely ask if there was anything else I'd ever wanted to try, and I'd be two steps ahead of them... But the abbess didn't think I was called and I discovered I loved teaching. (And that's neatly stepping around the BIG elephant in the room where I thought that since the Poor Clares didn't want me, it was clear that God didn't either.) I loved teaching. And then I loved parish work. And now I love the prison.

In my office, there is a poster of the Cross of San Damiano and Cimabue's painting of Francis. In my heart, I carry the words that Francis wrote to one of the Friars Minor:

There should be no friar in the whole world who has fallen into sin, no matter how far he has fallen, who will ever fail to find your mercy for the asking, if he will only look into your eyes. And if he does not ask for mercy, you should ask him if he wants it. And should he appear before you again a thousand times, you should love him more than you love me, so that you may draw him to God.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:San_Francesco_Cimabue.jpg It's this picture that is in my office--minus all the glory-toting angels. Isn't that just like Francis, a character off to the side and setting a match to the revolution?