Pornchai Moontri: From Prison Blues to Poetic Muse!
. . . In the post, I made a brief mention of a letter from Father Neuhaus to Pornchai Moontri, and of how that letter was among the forces that caused Pornchai to become a Catholic. What surprised me was the number of comments mentioning my brief paragraph about Pornchai. He was certainly not central to that post, but lots of people mention him in their comments on several of my posts. In fact, I've noticed a pattern. It might be just my imagination, but when I mention Pornchai, readers seem to comment more. I showed the comments on that post to Pornchai and told him about my theory. He readily concurred. "If you don't mention me," he said, "no one reads it!" Well, I doubt that's true. At least, I HOPE it isn't true! . . .
Disperse the Gloomy Clouds of Night
. . . Some prisoners have very little outside of here. Last year on Christmas day, I just had to get outside. It was cold, and it had snowed, but I went to the small, caged-in yard in front of this building anyway. A guard closed the gate behind me, locking me in the snow-covered yard for an hour. The only other person there was a young man I did not know. He sat on a frozen wooden bench staring at his shoes. It was a sad sight on Christmas Day. I walked over and sat next to him. "JJ" was hostile and angry, but under that - it's almost always so - was a world of hurt. In an hour on Christmas afternoon I learned that JJ was twenty-two years old, had grown up in Boston in seventeen foster homes, had ADHD, and is now in prison for the first time because it's where his incredibly poor judgment took him. Before prison, JJ was homeless, drifting from shelter to shelter. On this Christmas Day, he came face to face with the empty wreckage of his life. He was outside in the cold alone because he had to get away from the seven other prisoners in whose cell he had landed just the day before. JJ had not had a single contact beyond these prison walls. . . .
A Day in the Life
. . . Still a regimented life, to the extent possible, is essential. So many prisoners give in to the throes of depression by sleeping half the day and ruminating most of the night. Such depression feeds itself and leads to an empty life devoid of meaning. It is tempting to fall into it at times, but it is spiritually toxic.And so no matter what keeps me awake at night, and that list is sometimes long, I am out of my steel bunk with its two inch thick mattress every . . .