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?

Running Into Famous People

Sunday afternoon, the final service of the day. I'm looking out the classroom window at the garden below. It is half harvested now. Still hundreds of pounds of potatoes, tomatoes, carrots and cabbage yet to be pulled, but close to 9,000 pounds of vegetables have gone to the kitchen and to four local foodbanks already.

Into the classroom comes a young man. "Catholic service?" It is. He sticks out his hand. "I'm Chuck Norris." I bite my tongue and resist making a crack about his famous namesake, certain that he's heard it all his life. He's bright, chatty, full of questions. The room fills up.

Later I run across Gary Cooper who has decided he is Pagan this time through prison. Who knew?

Today, I got to talk to Carole King. Turns out she's the mother of one of my guys. No, not that Carole King.

Names are a great fun thing around here. Perhaps because I was a teacher for 10 years, I tend to notice names and can make a fairly good guess at how they have been mispronounced over the years. Growing up, my last name was Cain. Every English teacher I ever had in high school, on the first day of class, would take roll and get to my name and say, "Cain? Where's Abel?" And there was an Abel. Carol Abel. Junior year she sat two rows over and one back. She probably got the same question in other classes.

I've made phone calls for guys whose entire family had names beginning with T. (Note to self: Do not ask if their dad is "Mister T.")

More fun is trying to extricate the name of "my baby's momma's momma's sister." Does she have a name? Or does she go by "Hey you?"

Some of the Hispanic men are impressed when I can spell their names after hearing it the first time, but I grew up in Southern California and it isn't such a parlor trick as it might seem. One of my brothers had a good friend while we were growing up. We often came home to a message that read, "Geoff, Jesus called."

"What am I supposed to call you?" The man was truly puzzled as he was leaving my office today. There are so many choices! Twenty years ago, my students in New Orleans called me "Ms. O." These days I answer to "Chaplain," "Sister," "Shannon (or Sharon or Janet)."

But I do love running into famous people. Gary, Chuck, nice to meet you.

Discovering Nature

I'm infamous for not "doing" nature. Going for a walk in the woods or on the beach is not a meditative or restorative experience for me. Chalk it up to physical awkwardness or just plain fear that I will fall and not be able to get up. Whatever. I found a kindred spirit in a pastor named Kathy last year. Kathy said she was a couch potato and couldn't understand why one would want to "go for a walk and talk" when one could just as easily sit on the couch and talk.

I do the "ooooh and ahhhhh" thing from time to time, but it is rare.

A pastor I once worked for was going on about his summer vacation, a month on the coast of Oregon. I looked at him and said, "I couldn't do that. The ocean never shuts up!" True.

I live in a beautiful part of the country, and April to June is wonderful with waves of new colors appearing. The streets can be awash with rain and looking quite dreary, then one day the cherry trees blossom--and there's never just one standing alone, groups of cherry trees in shades from white to almost red.

At the prison, there's a severe lack of nature. Much of the campus is paved over with cement. There are great stretches of green, but it is not lawn. It is yard. By mid-August it is brown and stiff and there are deep grooves where the softball games have gone on too long. The only green left is around the flower beds which are relentlessly cheerful in color and variety. And the green of the vegetable garden which holds thousands of pounds of the good stuff for the local food banks.

Lately, though, I've been sending guys "out into nature" to get a new perspective on things. It feels like a strange suggestion.

If you stand anywhere on the prison grounds, you can see the evergreen trees that surround us. The ground itself was once covered with trees, but they were cleared out to build the prison back in the 1960s. The evergreens that are visible are far outside the perimeter, across the road (and you wouldn't dare go hiking in those woods because they are covered with treated sludge from our wastewater treatment plant). The Olympic mountains are visible, snowcapped for a good part of the year. But there are no trees within the fences. The flower gardens start their journey in the greenhouse, as do the vegetables. One day there is nothing, the next day, flowers and vegetables.

If you stand anywhere and look out at the horizon, you see concrete. You see chain link fences. You see something standing in your way of the view. I think those visual limitations cramp the soul, but most people don't realize it. I can't send restless men out to "take a walk." Too often that's just an invitation to be in the wrong place and get a write-up for doing it.

So I've been telling them to find a spot in the big yard and lay down. Look up at the sky. Watch the clouds for a while. See the big expanse that can't be seen when standing vertically. Shift the horizon.

The suggestion has been met with quizzical looks. I'm not surprised. But after I'd given that direction to the 12th or 13th person, I added, "You won't be alone out there staring at the sky, I promise."

And they haven't been.

I'm on vacation this week and listening to the rain outside my window falling onto the broad leaves of whatever-it-is growing out there. I like the sound. It's peaceful. It's about as close to nature as I get. But it's good.

"I'm a Bootist."

When on emotional overload, paperwork looks like a good thing. Specifically, recording the religious preference(s) of newly admitted offenders. Most are fairly mundane. Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic (or "Chatolic"). The Protestants occasionally spell out Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian. Okay, I'm lying about the last one. The guys can't spell Presbyterian. And want to guess what "Progispant" is connected to?

And these are all the normal ones, the single religion guys. I may have to squint, cross my eyes, pull out the secret decoder ring, but usually I can interpret what I read.

Today, however, I went to the Religious Preference Forms after:
--playing referee between the kitchen and the men who are fasting during Ramadan. (Note to religious policy people: Starting a major fast on a weekend is a bad idea.)

--doing the marathon Open Chapel sessions from 9-11am and 12:30-3pm where the line outside my office stretched to 25 and people were asking for rosaries (need to fill out a special form for that), Qu'rans (another special form), address of a discipleship ministry that might take someone coming out of prison, zip code for "the last business where I worked so I can fill out my tax return," five phone calls to a single family all with the same result: "The number you have dialed has been disconnected," and a few prayers with some very humble people.

--trying to find that one piece of paper in that chaos-pile on my desk, the one that had the information about two new volunteers coming into the prison on Saturday who have to be put on the Authorized Visitor list.

--realizing I forgot to bring anything for lunch, but there was popcorn.

--sorting the mail, some 75+ pieces today, into piles: tasks for the chapel workers, completed forms for the Transitioning Offenders Program, requests for the Lutheran Pastor, mail for the former Volunteer Coordinator who is now a Mental Health Counselor and in another building, returned mail, and mine. Guess whose pile was the largest?

--double-checking the cell assignments of 30+ offenders on the "Ramadan Dailies" list. Since we're a receiving prison with a mobile population, the names and locations shift. Every day. Sometimes they change cells or buildings. Other times, they've moved to a new institution.

Mind-numbing idiot work is a part-time craving when the interactions with live people have been too numerous. It's routine, satisfying because the stack of papers get done. It's mind-numbing when I have to enter the number and then click on another screen, scroll down, and 50% of the time discoverthat someone has already entered the religion. But then again, I often find the Wiccans have been classified as "Other" even though the correct path is "Pagan" and then "Wiccan." But even idiot work has its benefits because I don't have to think too hard.

It was while working through 150+ forms that I came across "I am a Bootist." I stopped. I looked. I frowned. I sounded it out. Oooooooooohhhhhhhh.

I entered his number, clicked on the next page, scrolled down to "Religion," clicked on "Edit," and then clicked on "Buddhist" and the date and the prison name. Then I saved it.

I answered the phone twice.

And then I went over to Unit 6 to tell one man that his girlfriend had the baby, but the baby died right away. And to tell another man that his fiancee jumped from a bridge over the main freeway in Bellingham last Friday. She was hit by several vehicles. "Is she okay?" Of course he asked that. And of course she wasn't.

The supervisor of Unit 6 put the grieving father on the phone with his wife. He sat in the office and sobbed, his tears a puddle on the floor.

At the opposite end of the hall I was with the man who sobbed on the phone with his father, "It's all my fault. I talked to her Friday morning and told her I couldn't be with her if she kept doing drugs."

When they were ready to return to their cells, I gave them both a packet of Kleenex and told them to come see me in the morning. I went back to my office, looking for some idiot work.

I read my email and went on the hunt for yet another man from yet another unit. He turned out to be sitting in the chapel next door. His 21-year-old stepson had been shot nine times by the police. He's in the hospital in critical condition, but he's going to make it. I put the dad on the phone to his wife and they talked a long time.

That's when I did the paperwork, punching in numbers, turning over forms, passing the Kleenex when it was needed.

I am a "Bootist." Boy, I could use one of those about now.

Chaplain or Pastor?

The question was the first of ten in the interview on Friday: What's the difference between a chaplain and a pastor?

A chaplain is a pastor with a slightly different hat.

Most pastors have a specific congregation. They come out of a specific belief system and organized group and they serve a particular group. They work with people who may be as diverse as anything on the planet, but there are some things they agree on and they're traveling the road in the same general direction with a shared history and at least some shared goals.

A chaplain may come from a specific faith tradition, and may be assigned to serve a particular congregation--like me in my role as the Catholic chaplain at the prison. The Catholics in my care differ wildly in background and faith practice, but they generally identify themselves (or Grandma) as Catholic. Granted, I don't think there are any all-male Catholic congregations pastored by a woman outside the prison, but you wouldn't find our practices too different from what you'd see in the average parish.

A chaplain in a prison is shaped and trained in a particular tradition, but is pastor to all: those with faith, those with many, those with none. A chaplain knows something about every faith group and cares about the spiritual journey of everyone who comes through the door. A chaplain is tuned into the nuances of how different faith groups name God, experience loss and grief, express repentance and renewal. A chaplain listens to the words beneath the jargon and finds common ground. A chaplain isn't threatened by a different point of view.

A good pastor is all those things, but a pastor is far more likely to be dealing with a somewhat homogeneous group of folks. The only thing all the guys in prison have in common is that they are guys. [Nope, don't even go there. Everyone at the prison was sentenced as a male, never mind what medical procedures they were pursuing.]

There were nine other questions. Three qualities of leadership? Vision, empathy/compassion, flexibility. Ever been told to do something that is against your faith principles? Not yet. Usually it's more an opportunity for education in Catholic ways and beliefs. --Though a good friend who had long been a Catholic chaplain at another prison in the area left his job when the Attorney General's office said that offenders could be whatever and however many religions they wanted to be, even if they were contradictory.

It does get a little strange at times. Every now and then we have a rash of people signing up for a kosher diet (and Jewish religion) in segregation, some of them with all sorts of Nazi symbols tattooed on their head, arms, back. Or like the man who claimed he was Muslim: Sunni, Shi'ite, and Sufi. (I was tempted to get him Islam for Dummies so he could learn something of the differences.) There was a man in that segregation unit last winter who sent more than 20 requests for different religious material, each request claiming to be a different religion, including Catholic and Rastafarian. I finally had to tell him I didn't have the resources to fill his requests and that he'd have to make up his mind as far as his requests went.

I won't know until next Friday what the outcome of the interview is. It will be a change, in some ways, to be a Department of Corrections chaplain rather than the Catholic chaplain. Truth is, I've been doing the job for quite a while. I've learned a lot in 10 years. I hope I can stay for 10 more.