our longest stride

Diane Pendola has put out another wonderful reflection in her season essay called Earthlines:

Can we destroy evil by destroying a person who incarnates evil? Or are we all diminished by this choice,  sinking us as a community towards the evil we seek to eliminate? Jesus said, "Those whose sins you forgive are forgiven. Those whose sins you retain are retained." I wonder, if by championing the death penalty we do not continue to retain the sin in our own communal body? In a cosmotheandric reality we are not a collection of individuals, we are a community of persons. As a community of persons, intrinsically interconnected with one another, can we choose to live by the higher values of our human natures?  Can we lift up the most wounded members of our body rather than seeking to destroy those parts of ourselves that stubbornly resist destruction (as history demonstrates) but which still remain an open possibility of transformation? I am not saying that the perpetrators of this horrible crime should ever be on the streets again. But can I - we -see them as human, as  human beings capable of great evil,  perpetrators of great evil but more than the evil within them? This is very difficult. But it goes to the heart of who we understand ourselves to be as human beings. Human consciousness is  responsible for the greatest evils in the world- and the greatest love. Do we believe that evil is an ultimate power? Then there is no possibility of forgiveness and the law of karma eventually devours us.  Do we believe that Love is the ultimate power? Then forgiveness is possible. Then we can re-invent what it means to be human.

...  I am engaged in an experiment that demands the longest stride of soul I ever took. Those relegated to the dark cells of our prisons and the rejected corners of our minds are us. We rise or fall together. We cannot deny the evil that is within us any more....

    The human heart can go to the lengths of God.

            Dark and cold we may be, but this

            Is no winter now.

            The frozen misery

            Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move,

            The thunder is the thunder of the flows,

            The thaws, the flood, the upstart Spring.

            Thank God our time is now when wrong

            Comes up to face us everywhere,

            Never to leave us 'til we take

            The longest stride of soul one ever took.

            Affairs are now soul size.

            The enterprise

            Is exploration into God.                             (Christopher Fry, The Sleep of Prisoners)

I suggest reading the whole essay and getting on her email list! 

Haola and Happy Holidays

Death Row Prayer Cards

Today I discovered this story on the Death Penalty Focus website that told  of Ray McKeon's  creation of the prayer cards for Death Row inmates in 2002.  Having one of these prayer cards on my dash board for a year or so was a powerful experience as I would pray for the Death Row inmate, his family, the victim and their family. It was me that was transformed.  Prayer by prayer I opened to the humanity both suffering and healing.  The power of these simple cards really is at the root of this current Call to Prayer.  Thanks Ray!

Work of unimaginable significance

Today I was at a local Restorative Justice Meeting and had a deep inquiry conversation with my co-author of the phamphlet and then this opens up in fromt of me in my inbox.... four steps forward today!

 There's Nothing "Magical" about Societal Healing by James O'Dea

"Yet we know that our collective wounds can be addressed and that societies can make progress in healing the most virulent wounds of the past. Social healing tools involve learning about the role and practice of deep dialogue; learning from the basic insights of mind/body health and healing; drawing from contemporary insights into the nature of consciousness and human capacities; testing new approaches to collective trauma recovery; practicing modalities of listening including compassionate and integral listening; promoting forgiveness and atonement; learning about different cultural approaches to restorative justice; exploring the process of truth-telling and mutual acknowledgment; and exploring the interface of personal narrative and historical narrative where subjective experience is empathically honored. None of these approaches is particularly fast-track.
...
This is work of unimaginable significance for humanity, requiring the ability to access reservoirs of courage and compassion. It is work on the long road of healing. The miracle is that it is able to encompass any past horror and resolve it in a way that it no longer ends up in the hearts of future generations.
Maybe, just maybe, a day will come when a wave of love will enter unhampered into the hearts of coming generations with such power that it washes away all the toxins of hatred.
And not unlike the hundredth monkey who learned to wash the mud off her yams and started a revolution, whose innovative behavior entered the field of awareness for other monkeys to copy, maybe reconciling love in enough humans will tilt the whole human enterprise away from its contagiously wounded past. Until then, one healing step at a time, and then another, and another."

Spontaneous Evolution

Last night I saw Swami Beyondananda and purchased the book, Spontaneous Evolution his alter ego Steve Bhaerman wrote with Bruce Lipton.  It looks like an excellent chance to dialogue on the evolution of the prison system.  Even if this is a conversation solely between the book and myself, I feel good about it being in the common.

In the introduction they lift up the biological example of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly.  Both have the same DNA but are receiving and responding to a different organizing signal. From within the dying cells of the caterpillar, a new breed of cells energy called imaginal cells emerges and creates an entirely new form.

Those of us deeply engaged in awakening the potential of our prisons to become a healthy, healing environment contributing to the betterment of our collective human story on this planet, are the imaginal cells, it is from us that an entire new form will emerge.  Our prayers send the signal and collese the energy the (our) imaginal cells need for the transformational process.

As Swami Beyondananda enjoys saying, "we are the answer to our own prayers!"  And even as we may not have an articulated vision for what that answer might be, we offer up our prayers.  We can trust that the information for the new way forward is in our collective DNA.  Every spiritual tradition calls us to move from fear to love, this is the overarching evolutionary process of human life. All life forms seek their free flowing nature.

As we pray for the prisons to become places of healing and peace we are taping into the deep evolutionary nature of life it self seeking its own true nature.  As we pray for the prisons we are activating this natural desire and energizing the millions of imaginal cells seeking the new way.

As we pray for the prisons, we naturally shift away from old beliefs focusing on the worst in people, and begin to believe in the possibility of transformation for everyone and every institution. The stronger our beliefs, the greater the opportunity for this shift to occur within our lifetime.

Radical change in mindset (for example shifting to a belief that slavery is immoral) has taken centuries, and decades (shifting belief that tobacco is unhealthy), and now years (global warming). In our interconnected world we can shift very quickly towards fear and love (9-11).

Prisons as a special kind of health care delivery is very possible, we have the information, we have the creativity, we have the skills, all we need is the desire.  Prayer takes the desire hidden in our hearts into the collective field. Prayer is an act of empowerment, for such an effort will only manifest as a result of the shifting of our collective will.

Clues inside a community of fellow seekers

Everywhere I read these days, I see clues to the overarching question that runs through my veins.... How does energy collect and harmonize around the purpose of transformation of our prison system (indeed criminal justice system) into a system dedicated to healing, a system that is live giving, that releases the creative potential of all the individuals involved and our society ...

I want to capture these clues, these slights of hands, in hopes that in the collecting we might discern creative ways forward.  But one clue does not make a good blog post, and often when I discover them, all I see is their twinkling.  Each twinkle seems unlikely to illumin much of the way forward, and yet perhaps collected ...  so this blog post will be a cumulative effort, a little here and there, and perhaps it will be a reader that slips behind the clues into the mystery.

Lets start with the one that I just found.  

"To become a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King, Herrymon suggests, we need to base our activism not on an intellectual analysis or on a personal desire to "save the world," but rather on a deep commitment to the Way of Truth. This commitment requires giving up our ego-centered perspective and joining in a community of fellow seekers."  Source

This clue right now seems to be about joining together with others who care deeply, and committing our selves to the deeper way of Spirit's desire for us, vs my desire for the prisons. Learning to pray less from my personal agony over conditions and challenges, and to pray more from within the Big Heart that holds us all and all potential ways forward.


The article continues: "Non-violence springs from a recognition that my neighbor is just as important, just as sacred in the eyes of God, as I am."  and I substitute: Non-violence springs from a recognition that every prisoner & every victim is just as important, just as sacred in the eyes of God, as I am. 


and sites Isaiah: "All they that take up the sword shall perish by the sword" (Matthew 26: 52), and Isaiah, "Your hands are full of bloodshed, wash yourselves clean, banish your evil doings from my sight, cease to do wrong, learn to do right, make justice all your aim, and put a check on violence" (Isaiah 1:15-17).

..."Lao Tsu’s purpose, which was to avoid "naming things and cogitating theories."  To this I hear to stop calling the current system names in a childish way saying this is bad, this is wrong, I hate that!"  and to stop seeking a theory of change that arises out of the existing conditions and approaches to what I call the problem. Ambiguity is an essential part of the way.


In the footnotes:  6. Herrymon’s tone is uncompromising and bleak: "It is essential to grasp the nature of the destruction that we may indeed bring upon ourselves: a destruction not just of evil places or of evil people, but a destruction of all places, all people. For the torment of our times, for the evil in them, for our wars, for our fears, we are all responsible. The pacifist is as responsible for war as the militarist, the doer of good works as responsible for poverty as the oppressor, the man of prayer as responsible for ignorance of Truth as the blasphemer. If but a handful among us were completely given to the light of Truth, our world could not remain sunk in torment. But there is no such handful. There is no remnant. All are responsible; each one is responsible. There is no purely personal salvation; if we do not seek to be joined in Truth with every living human person (and, in a sense, with every one who is dead) we shall be damned separately. There is no indication that the Kingdom of God is to be won by merely personal initiative" (The Power of Truth, pp. 7-8).

These comments came while reading:   Quaker Theology #6 -Spring 2002, "Herrymon Maurer and the Tao of Quakerism"  by Anthony Manousos

Evin in his sin...

Love a man, even in his sin, for that love is a likeness of the divine love, and is the summit of love on earth
-Dostoevsky

Daniel Beatty - 'Knock Knock' (Def Jam Poetry)

Prisoners for Peace

Prisoners for Peace

Here are some of the men that share the Spiritual Insight Meditation group with me inside New Folsom Prison.  They have taken the praying for the prisons message on and worked it in their own spirit, congratulations!  I got their photos off their web site, go visit and enjoy their stories... Please add your prayers to theirs! Prisoners for Peace

Powerful Photographs of Prisoners

 From NPR:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128212442&sc=emaf

This murder victim turned to the power of her camera to open her heart and our hearts to the humanity inside the walls of our prisons.  Images like these make praying easy.

Healing stories in womans prison

A powerful blog essay from Diane Pendola, Summer, 2010 came today and I really recommend reading the whole piece, here are a few snippets:


Granted, these women are not doing these kinds of sentences because they are saints, but that is precisely why we should be teaching sainthood!  Reality is cosmotheandric, interconnected.  Do we want evil and sadness and brokenness to continue to reverberate through the whole, rending the fabric of the real?  If so, then let us continue along this retributive path that breaks the human spirit and erodes the human soul.  Let us continue the penitentiary and all it represents, returning evil for evil, and an eye for an eye that, as Gandhi said, makes the whole world blind.  If we take seriously our cosmotheandric vocation, to participate in creating reality true to its fundamental goodness and unity, then our freedom consists precisely in walking this path, and liberation, (which is not for myself alone but for the community which constitutes my personhood), is deepened with each step along the way.
....
 It is my hope that a freeing wind may begin to stir through us on the outside, to those in prison, and from them to us, so that the diabolical may be transformed into truly symbolic participations in healing, wholeness and forgiveness.
...
What allows me to walk into a maximum security prison, to gather a circle of 12 women, some of whom have already spent 20 or more years of their lives in prison; some of whom have no hope of parole or seeing the world outside the razor wire fences again, some of whom will have spent their entire adult lives in this place and will die in this place, is this trust in the  harmonious nature of reality. It is what Raimon calls cosmic confidence. The ultimate ground for this cosmic confidence lies in the almost universal conviction that Reality is ordered- in other words is good, beautiful and true.[8] I am confident that these women are not outside this reality. They are not on the margins. They are at the very center. And in the midst of an inherently violent and dehumanizing system that would relegate them to the status of non-persons, they can claim their person-hood.  By virtue of their participation in the cosmotheandric nature of reality, learning how to become receptive to the rhythm of the ultimate structure of the universe, they become not the victims of a degrading system but the very instruments of its transformation.
  ...

Tears of Gentle Love

May I not increase the ignorance of wrongdoers by my intolerance or vindictiveness.  Inspire me to help them by my forgiveness, prayers, and tears of gentle love. 
Paramahansa Yogananda, "Whispers from Eternity"

Seek to do brave and lovely things that are left undone by the majority of people.  Give gifts of love and peace to those whom others pass by.
Paramahansa Yoganda, SRF Lessons

Prophets needed

A good book I'm reading, God and the Evolving Universe, speaks of prophets as spiritual antennae, taking their nation to task for its failings, measuring its realities against sacred ideals and offering moral critique to the highest of worldly powers (p39).  Prophets are an essential element of a just society. Who today is calling the world to recognize that "every human being, simply by virtue of his or her humanity, is a child of God and therefore in possession of the rights that even kings must respect." (Huston Smith quoted).
... and a few chapters later this quote from Ohiyesa, a Dakota Sioux medicine man caught my eye, " In the life of the Indian there was only one inevitable duty - the duty of prayer."
... and at the end, in discussing the transformative practice of prayer" -- "(prayer) actually exerts an influence, raises our centre of personal energy and produces regenerative effects unattainable in other ways."

So let us all do our duty as humans, as children of God, and pray.  And may our prayers raise up our own energy and apply a regenerative effect upon our prison system.  May our praying lift up the prophet in each of us to call for a just society.


.

Bishop Quinn's Grace

                                                                    At the Capitol Awards Banquet on March 26, 2010 at joint celebration of Death Penalty Focus and Friends Committee on Legislation (CA), Bishop Francis A Quinn gave this beautiful invocation:

Loving God:  We ask you to bless our honorees this evening: Christine Thomas, Sister Catherine Connell, SSS and Pat Hardy.

 We believe that through evolution you have brought into existence the highest form of creation----the human being.

 Lately, we have begun to treasure and protect our environment---all nature surrounding us.

 But we confess that, in anger and in fear, in law enforcement and in war, in the name of public safety we still destroy the pinnacle of your creation---humans made in your image and likeness.

 With minds that comprehend quantum physics, black holes and parallel universes, in detention policy we have not yet found the way or the will to rehabilitate rather than kill.

 Gentle God, give us the wisdom to understand the authentic reasons and causes of criminal behavior, and the courage to join other developed nations of the world in employing more enlightened methods of dealing with crime.

 In the Quaker tradition, we will now have a moment of silence……….

 Lord, we ask your blessing on all those gathered here who are working toward the abolition of the death penalty.  Amen.

Free

Tonight's Passover, a holiday of freedom. This came from the California Corrections crisis blog a powerful blog to follow when interested in prison reform...

FREE
This Spring and onward, may we all be free to sit on city sidewalks without being cited or arrested.
May we be free to choose a rewarding, enriching life path, without poverty constraints.

May we be free from victimization and domestic violence.

May we be free from draconian legislation, excessive mandatory minimums, and the Three Strikes Law.
May we be free to provide for our families and to live with dignity, honor and good health.
May those of us who work in the law enforcement system be free to connect with our community and help it without animosity and danger.
May the prosecutors among us be free to do our jobs exercising discretion and compassion, released from constraining legislation and a punitive organizational culture.
May the defense attorneys among us be free to provide our clients with the best representation, released from budgetary constraints.
May those of us who work in corrections be free to do a correctional job that respects our safety and the human dignity of the people entrusted to our care.
May those of us within walls be free from prison rape and abuse.
May those of us within walls be free from boredom, narcotics, the endless chatter on TV.
May we be free to choose education, vocational programs, and avenues of life within walls that will help us rebuild bridges with our loved ones outside upon our release.
May those of us in juvenile care be free to choose a bright future.
May those of us who work in parole be free to furnish our parolees with hope and possibility, rather than oppression and supervision.
May those of us on early releases be free to rebuild our lives.
May those of us who have just been released from prison be free to find a home and a job without discrimination.
May all of us, as a society, be free from prejudices, biases, and irrational fears of the "other".

Chicken Soup for the Prisoner's Soul now available to the Public

Tom Laguna's books are a powerful source of inspiration for the creative potential alive inside our prison system.  He taps in so well with his strong story-telling background.  I met him years ago at a New Directions in Corrections conference, and am so inspired by how far he has taken his vision, and the contribution he has made to offering an alternative way of perceiving our prisons and human transformation.
Previously available only through free distribution to prisons, this life-changing book is the result of charitable donations from sales of Chicken Soup for the Christian Family Soul and gifts from thousands of individuals.
In the spring of 2000, over 100,000 copies of Chicken Soup for the Prisoner's Soul were distributed to prisoners, prison libraries and prison ministries throughout the United States. The hope was that this collection of stories would touch the hearts of prisoners and offer them hope and encouragement, as well as inspire them to transcend the limiting thinking and behaviors of their past.
The book was so successful that the co-authors soon found themselves flooded with requests for the book from family members, correctional officers, prison volunteers and others. Because of this huge demand, the decision was made to also release the book to the general public.

Also by Tom Laguna:
Serving Productive Time: Stories, Poems, and Tips to Inspire Positive Change from Inmates, Prison Staff, and Volunteers 

Serving Time, Serving Others: Acts of Kindness by Inmates, Prison Staff, Victims and Volunteers

I have been having a email conversation with a man of strong faith and a former correctional officer who has great concerns about the evils being committed within the prison system. When he asked more about my own faith, I realized that perhaps I should post my response. Where I as the holder of this blog container for this Call to Prayer come from, might serve in some small way:
I am a Quaker, the nickname for the Religious Society of Friends, a Protestant denomination. We Quakers have a long history of prison reform and advocacy work. Our tradition's journey began because we were so often locked up as we rebelled against the Church of England in the 1600's declaring that the Light of God was available for all, in all, and no one class of people (priests for example) had an exclusive on communion with Jesus or the teachings of the Bible. 
In this time, our lobbyists at the CA and Federal levels are long-standing and earnest proponents of prison reform, well respected for their faith based advocacy (See FCL Friends Committee on Legislation and FCNL Friends Committee on National Legislation).
When I speak out about prisons and prayer, I seek to speak in a voice that people of all traditions can hear and sense how to apply the practices of their particular way of viewing the Holy, so we can act in consort, even as our prayers take on different language and forms.
So far I have not yet found a way to speak about the evil. My heart and jaw clench to the strangle hold that evil has (appears to have) on this most spiritually vulnerable* part of our human brotherhood. Evil on so many levels -- the evil of our society's abandonment and rejection of those who need healing most, the evil of the crimes, the evil of manipulation of the victims, the evil of stripping any healthy sense of purpose from those incarcerated, the evil of gaining from another's suffering, and on and on -- 
Still in my prayers, Christ guides me to seek the Light, to know that these are not his ways, to focus on increasing the Light through out the system and especially in societies turning away from seeing of the evil and perpetuating the story that only takes us collectively further towards "hell on earth".
When I am in a state of prayer, I feel so blessed and confident in this Call. Then I have times when I feel I am taking the "feel good" way, and avoiding the real need "to speak truth (of the evil) to power". I trust I will be taught, perhaps through conversations such as these, in a voice filled with Love.
May the blind see. May we not turn our heads any longer. May the Light of Christ flow through our hearts and voices. May the energy of evil in all times, places, people, and systems dissolve into the ocean of God's love. May we each do our part to enable this cross we bear collectively to be the opportunity for our collective resurrection.
* vulnerable spiritually, as most crime arises from an estrangement from God, not "Loving Thy Neighbor", not honoring the divinity of all life, acting out of a God-less sense of self.  When we live our lives from this isolated sense of ourselves, we are most vulnerable to the forces of evil, both as correctional officers and inmates.