Life Still Goes on Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls
Historic Concord, New Hampshire Post Office
Two years and 102 posts after the resurrection of this blog as Beyond These Stone Walls, the challenges of prison writing continue to be overcome week after week.
November 9, 2022 by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae
The United States had a most crucial national election this week. What I am writing now will be posted just one day later so I cannot imagine anyone paying any attention at all to me. But I’m used to it — at least, I thought I was.
I owe many of you an apology. You might recall that two years ago this week, These Stone Walls, the older version of this blog, had to be taken down. I wrote about the circumstances behind its collapse in our first publication under its new name on November 11, 2020. That post was “Life Goes on, Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls.”
Two years and 102 posts later, we discovered something about the newer blog that we had previously overlooked. It came with its own email address for subscribers to contact us. Being locked away from ever being able to interface with technology, I had no idea. Just two weeks ago, our editor stumbled upon this internal email system along with hundreds of your unread and unanswered comments and messages dating back two years. For all this time, I thought you were all just ignoring me. The internal address is FatherG@BeyondTheseStonewalls.com.
And many of you must have thought the reverse. For two full years, subscribers had been clicking the “Reply” button on our weekly subscriber message to send me messages, comments, and reflections on my posts, but without any reply or even an acknowledgment from me.
Our editor’s discovery of the cache of hundreds of your emailed messages required two long marathon sessions by telephone over two days to hear them read to me and respond — up to two years late — to as many as I could. Our volunteer editor risked carpal tunnel syndrome typing all my dictated replies. Some messages were just too old for any reply to make any sense. Anyway, we apologize for the oversight.
A Voice in the Wilderness
It is humbling. Before becoming a guest of the State in 1994, I was known for being somewhat of a computer geek. I coached many other priests back then who were struggling to embrace the computer age. Now my prison barriers place me in Techno-caveman status relegating me to the technological Stone Age. Sometimes our editor is surprised when, sight unseen, I walk her through posting something at Linkedln, for example, without ever having even seen it. I read a lot about technology, but that is not quite the same as hands-on experience.
When I began writing from prison at the urging of Cardinal Avery Dulles and others, I had no idea what a blog was. They did not exist when I dropped off the face of the Earth in 1994. According to the latest estimates of Google, there are over 600 million registered blogs worldwide publishing 2.5 billion blog posts a year. So mine is literally a tiny voice in the wilderness.
It is difficult to say how many blogs identify themselves as “Catholic” blogs. For a time, a site called “Top Catholic Blogs” featured posts from me almost weekly, but it seems to have become inactive. Another site, The Big Pulpit, moderated by Tito Edwards for the National Catholic Register, featured an occasional post from me, but had not done so since our change of name two years ago. Then on the day before this is posted, The Big Pulpit proved me wrong by posting, “Catholic Priests Falsely Accused.” So in terms of promoting a message, it seems entirely up to me — and you, if you are willing.
When You Write to Me
While the nation is celebrating or regretting the outcome of this election and analyzing all of its implications, I want to address a few housekeeping items about Beyond These Stone Walls. I wish I could say that I have been more responsive to your snail mail than I was to your neglected email messages.
Mail to me in prison now goes through a process that will seem like an insult to all of your good intentions. There were all sorts of rules in place requiring that mail be either typed or hand written in plain black or blue ink. Now that has all been scrapped. Effective a few months ago, prisoners here no longer receive any original mail at all.
Letters and any enclosures are now photocopied in black and white, and I receive only the copy. The original is held for ten days and then shredded. There have been lots of problems with this, the most frequent being double-sided originals that are copied on only one side. When that happens, I have ten days to request re-copying of the original before it is shredded.
Despite all the obstacles, I still get a lot of mail. Please do not misunderstand me. Mail is the lifeblood of the psyche for any prisoner. There are many here who do not even bother to show up for mail call. My biggest heartache, however, is being unable to answer most of your letters in a timely manner. Sometimes mail piles up for so long that any reply just feels insulting. I am so very sorry that many of your letters and gifts have gone without response. It would help if you include an email address in your letters. It would be easier for me to send a reply in that way.
Part of this problem is that I have to handwrite each and every letter I send. I can purchase only six typewriter ribbons per year and therefore must reserve them for publishing posts. In addition to Beyond These Stone Walls, I am also occasionally asked to write for other venues. The latest is an article published at a U.K. site, False Allegations Watch. I hope you will look at it because it lets site administrators know that an article is important. My article there is “Did Police Misconduct Turn a False Allegation into a Wrongful Conviction?”
Facebook refused to allow that link to be posted. Ironically, the leftist media was eager to report about police misconduct until doing so helped the cause of a wrongly imprisoned Catholic priest. This latest experience with Facebook drove home for me the importance of what Elon Musk now plans to do with Twitter: No more cancelling conservative views; no more cancelling pro-life voices; no more cancelling Catholic fidelity. By the way, we have a Twitter account. Just go to Twitter.com and search BeyondTheseStoneWalls to follow us.
A Corporal Work of Divine Mercy
Sending an occasional monetary gift to me has been most helpful, but also somewhat of a heartache. Gifts cannot be sent to me directly, but my brother-in-law, a lifelong friend who somehow married my sister when I wasn’t looking 42 years ago, maintains a power-of-attorney account for my needs. Please see our “Contact and Support” page to help if you wish and are able. Modest gifts to that account help a good deal with annual expenses for this blog and with food and clothing costs.
I have an expense coming due just after Christmas that I hope to find some help with. It’s my $650 annual subscription to The Wall Street Journal which helps me immensely to stay in touch with the world and write about it. It is my one and only extravagance and the subscription fee is a bargain compared to other newspapers. I was shocked to learn from a reader that annual subscriptions to The New York Times and The Boston Globe are both over $1,200. In my opinion, the WSJ is a far superior newspaper (and not just because it has published about me!).
Some people have helped by using PayPal. We have an account, but PayPal has become problematic for many. On October 8 this year, PayPal sent an update to its Terms of Use Policy that alarmed many users, causing some to terminate their accounts. PayPal reserved the right to confiscate up to $2,500 from users’ accounts if PayPal determines that a user posted “misinformation” on the Internet. Paypal also blocked accounts in the UK such as Free Speech Union and the Daily Sceptic.
After global protests, many closed accounts, and a big selloff of PayPal stock, the company thought better of it and issued a retraction while restoring the closed accounts. There are many, however, who simply don’t trust PayPal going forward now. We receive few gifts through PayPal, but the annual total is almost enough to keep this blog afloat. If donors use that means, please always send me a message that you have done so using our PayPal donor email, FrGordonMacRae@gmail.com. This will better enable me to send you a message of acknowledgment and thanks.
Please also pay some attention to our Special Events page for information on how to help me with two causes that are most important to me: the support and rehabilitation of Pornchai Moontri, and the Vietnamese Refugee Project of Father John Hung Le, SVD. American funds go a long way in Thailand, and thanks to your help I have been able to help sustain them both. This means more to me than any endeavor on my own behalf .
The elections are over. May sanity, fairness and justice now reign. May Twitter be actually free from partisan censorship. May the woke finally go back to sleep. May God resume His hallowed place in our discourse. And may the Lord be with you.
+ + +
Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: We assimilate much more of the message of the Gospel when its intended meaning is more fully understood. The Gospel from St. Luke at Mass this coming Sunday (Luke 21:5-19) is a prediction of terrible persecutions for which Jesus tells all of us to prepare. I previously wrote of this alarming Gospel text in the posts: