Visit to Sing Sing Prison, Osinning, NY

The full beige moon hung like a Eucharist in the dark sky. It floated, just in my view, as we drove the long stretch of 80E through Pennsylvania towards New York. The landscape was stark, the shadows of trees stripped of their foliage, ready to cradle winter snow. It seemed a beautiful metaphor for what God had done in my life. Tomorrow I would speak inside a New York State Prison on gratitude and forgiveness. This opportunity came decades after my stripping through tragic violence, and now I cradled the inexplicable graces in my own life.

It was late when we arrived in Tarrytown, New York. We settled in quickly for the night. I was tired and tomorrow was a big day. I was quickly asleep.

The next morning I sat, my hands wrapped around a warm mug of strong, hot coffee, pondering what this day might bring. Expectant, the day had dawned bathed in white winter sunlight. Bundling up, my husband and I stepped outside for a walk outdoors. By tomorrow I would have a new appreciation for my freedom to step “outdoors”. My arm wrapped in the crook of my husband’s we walked, a natural gesture of comfort after so many years together. We are quiet, each in our way preparing to meet the prisoners this evening. My usual swell of anxiety which propels me through my presentations is absent today, replaced by both a calm peacefulness and a steely conviction to deliver a message of mercy in the most unmerciful of environments.

Late afternoon we pull up to Father Ron’s house. I am full of contradictions, but God knits together the unlikely scenarios of my life, weaving the paradoxes together into my heart. All of it seems impossible; I have begun an unlikely ministry of “beauty”, tonight I will march into the hell and ugliness of a prison to share my story. Many years ago my mother was murdered, yet today I will speak on forgiveness to men who have committed the same crime. I spent a good deal of my twenties as an angry young woman, drinking and smoking pot, yet through a conversion of my heart I now fully embrace the Catholic faith. I grew up in the California sunshine, yet tonight I am in New York on a winter night. A friend of mine’s theological insight on all of it makes me laugh, “God must have done this, you couldn’t make this s%& t up!”

Standing on his front porch is a Roman Catholic priest and the prison Chaplain for Sing Sing. Father Ron, I will learn, also shares an unlikely story. A musician, raised by a father who was a Baptist preacher Father Ron has discovered his life work inside a prison as a Catholic priest.  I impatiently jump out of the car and quickly climb the steps and then hesitate, unsure quite what to do next. But Father Ron settles it and pulls me into a warm hug. He looks a bit like Santa Claus, a graying beard and twinkling eyes, but his speech is not wasted. He speaks in staccato like statements, economically getting to the point, listening more than speaking.  My husband helps with the trunk full of items I have brought; a painting, a basket of fruit, boxes of Christmas cards and envelopes, prayer cards, and some banana bread.

We talk for a few moments and Father shares miraculous stories about the prisoners, told with an unspoken, but resounding love he has for these men. It reminds me of the love with which Mother Teresa seems to speak about the “poorest of the poor”. I had planned to ask him how he does what he does, but his very presence is an answer to my question, he sees Christ inside those prison walls. He shares too, the reality of evil. It is found surprisingly more within the prison system itself, which uses the prison as a cash cow to line its own pockets, than within the prisoners, who are often the victims of poverty and addiction. And it is done,  with no accountability. The recidivism rate is tremendously high,  with seemingly little done towards rehabilitation, or humane caring for the most basic and human of needs.

A quick glance at his watch and he directs us to depart for the prison.  We will follow his car up the hill, passing a sign, “Ossining, New York”.  Yesterday’s moon is nowhere to be seen tonight; dark clouds cover it as we wind our way up the hill to Sing Sing. We park in the garage at the top of the hill and walk to the entrance.  It is pitch black except for the flood lights shining on the barb wire fences in a tinny, glint of cold, silver light. As I look down the hill where the quiet Hudson River snakes along the edges of concrete prison buildings, it is blacker yet.  Over the next four hours I will see iron gates, barbed wire, and cement. The only living things are the people locked inside.

 Two guards coming on duty are entering the front gate with us and the five of us stand impatiently outside the heavy black iron gate.  We wait until a large and surly female guard unlocks the black gate and ushers us in. We are instructed to remove anything we can before going through the scanner. No jewelry, purse, cell phone, belts, shoes, glasses. “Walk through the scanner.” “Now sign the book. “ “Here is your visitor tag.” “Go.” No social amenities here, not that I had expected any.

We follow Father Ron through winding hallways and the opening and closing of heavy barred gates. There are guards at each point, big guards with Billy clubs, pepper spray and a dangling set of large keys. Rare was the window in any of the tunnels. Sing Sing is an old prison, built in 1825 and I felt the isolation and desperation in its very walls that had contained lost lives lived out in the despair of its confines. At yet another check point the guard stops Father Ron and tells him that someone in Housing Block 7 has asked for a priest. We are told to stand and wait with the guard as Father disappears into housing block 7. The large iron door swings open twelve inches or so, and I can hear the din of human voices shouting and momentarily see tiers of concrete and men moving among the layers of cell blocks. The door closes and we wait. My husband tries chatting with the guard.  A few moments later we see another glimpse of the same scene inside and the door shuts again behind Father Ron. We continue our walk up and down stairs and along the long, dark tunnels with an occasional small, barred window.

We must have walked for ten or fifteen minutes, with two stops; the first at Housing block 7 and the second as Father Ron pointed outside to the cement hill which slops down into the Hudson, the river darker than the night. The glistening barb wire again and a small “house” sits at the bottom near the water, with a green light. It is pointed out as the “death house” where 614 executions were performed before the death penalty was removed in the state of New York in 1963. Father states that Texas is still big on executions. We return to more tunnels, stairs, and gates.

Up the last set of stairs, where another large guard sits behind a desk. He directs us to sign our names again in a book. We sign and turn where an entrance is marked with a sign “Our Lady of Hope Chapel”.  Immediately I sense that this is an “oasis of beauty in the midst of hell” just as Father had described it to me in an email. It seems entirely different, an anomaly amidst all the darkness, hopelessness, and sadness.  I imagine that the walls have heard desperate prayers, repentant confessions, and witnessed miracles. It is a different country in this room; an unlikely language is spoken here. These walls hold the whispered prayers and desolate cries of the human heart.

My husband and I sit down in one of the pews and Father Ron is busied preparing for the mass, as a few prisoners begin to come in. I didn’t realize until afterwards, but there were no guards in the chapel.  The man in front of us introduces himself and for a moment I forgot he was a prisoner, until he reminded me when he commented how much he misses his family in here.  Slowly others come, two of the men sit in the front row with guitars they began tuning, another priest comes in, another passes out song books, and somebody is putting on the coffee machine in the back. The men smile, some came over and introduce themselves and talk with us for a bit. It is surprisingly easy to forget you are in a prison in this chapel. Soon Father Ron is playing the organ and the mass is beginning... 

Eventually Father Ron introduces my husband, who then introduces me. I don’t remember the words, but I do remember the way the room felt.  I know I floated to the microphone, buoyed by the prayers of others, the Holy Spirit, the knowledge that God had me wait three decades while He worked on my heart, taught me a little about mercy, humility, kindness and love, before He would have me speak.  “How carefully He chose my audience,” I thought.  But the most astonishing thing about speaking at “Our Lady of Hope” was the absolute joy I felt.  My voice, usually not very loud or full, tonight conveyed conviction, joy, mercy and love all at the same time. I could hear it—as if someone else was speaking with such gratitude.  Yet at the same time I don’t know if I have ever been so fully present in my own body, present to these men, present in the moment, and present to the Holy Spirit. I looked into the faces of the men, occasionally looking down at some notes, but most of it was from my heart.

Supreme Beauty was found in the love exemplified in the Crucifixion. I was a young woman that night in San Francisco when my mother had been brutally murdered. That night was my descent into the ugliness of evil, and tonight, miraculously, I could tell these men that I knew, really knew and understood God’s love for us in the crucifixion. Jesus was a criminal—He had been murdered and from His horrific death God has manifested His love to each and every one of us.

Certainly not a lot in the lives of these men would indicate that they knew much about this love, or any love for that matter. But then a lot in my life did not indicate I knew too much about God’s mercy and love either. There are a thousand petty slights, grievances, gossip, and anger, whatever—where I forgot….again. But tonight—I remembered, I was infused with it and I was filled with joy because I could share it. God delivered an astonishing and staggering revelation—beauty and love are shining forth here, tonight, inside an old, dark prison in the tragic wrongs, sins and hell of every person in this room—me included! Beauty and love were spilling over in the most unlikely, impossible, paradoxical circumstances I could imagine. This was a miracle and I was convinced by the time I left, that there were would be others.

I sat down, buoyed by a mystifying joy, as free inside this prison as I had ever been. Julian of Norwich said, “Joy is when you see God in everything.” Well—here it was.  

Advent is the season of waiting, of expectation. Prisoners live in a perpetual state of “waiting”, waiting for their hell to end, waiting for a visitor, waiting for their release. But we live in prisons too, waiting for our sentence to somehow end. How many of us are imprisoned by anger, vengeance, greed, addictions, hatred, sickness,  loneliness….imagining that we will know God’s love and freedom only when we experience the miracle of our release. Expect the miracle now. It is coming, but it is also happening. Each of our lives are pregnant with paradox, we live with both promise and pain at any given moment. But God can take all the contradictions, the impossibilities of our lives and weave them together in our hearts, giving birth to the miracle of Christ’s presence in your heart now.

 God’s eternal time breaks into the present moments of our lives if we but see His beauty, see God in e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g!