Don’t Let the Noonday Devil Tip the Scales

Anyone who has experienced the grip of depression knows it is a spiritual disease as much as it is mental and physical. Is there a spiritual path out of the dark night?

There is an old and wise foreboding in Catholic monastic traditions to “Beware the Noonday Devil.” That was also the title of an excellent 2007 post by Father Paul Scalia at Catholic Exchange. For monks who arose in the night for the Divine Office prayer of Matins, and then arose again early in the morning for Lauds, the noonday period sometimes induced lethargy and sloth that left monks in the grip of depression. Noonday with its exhaustion and malaise was seen as a spiritually vulnerable time. Thus in monastic life depression came to be known as “the noonday devil.”

Support for the monastic concern was also found in Sacred Scripture, notably in the Gospel: “Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” (Matthew 24:42). An admonition of Saint Peter warns us to “Stay sober and alert for your opponent the devil is prowling like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). Psalm 91, my favorite of the Psalms, addressed the noonday dread more directly:

“You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, or the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or the destruction that lays waste at noonday.”

— Psalm 91:5-6

For anyone who has ever suffered from chronic depression, Saint Peter’s characterization of “a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” pretty much captures it. So does the Psalmist’s “the destruction that lays waste at noon.” As Holy Week approached this year, I began to look at how I could challenge my own occasional depression. Then I decided to make a post of it, and invite others to join this battle.

First, however, if you are prescribed medication for depression, don’t give that up for Lent! I can offer no medical expertise for treating the insidious disease of depression, but I do have some hard-won experience on depression’s spiritual toll. I can also offer some of the spiritual guidance that, for me, at least, has proven effective in taming this roaring lion for it has devoured me too often. I’ve learned an important truth about coping with depression in my current milieu, but that lesson begins with a painful and depressing story.

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Solitary Confinement

Several years ago, when our friend Pornchai Max Moontri was still here with me, I was lying in my bunk one night at 10:00 PM. My little television was tuned to a PBS station. I was just about to turn it off when an episode of PBS Frontline began. “It’s like being buried alive,” I heard a shaky voice say. “It makes you mean; it makes you violent, it [expletive’s] up your head,” said another. Added a third, “If you don’t have a strong mind, this place can break you quick.”

Then a somber voice introduced Rodney Bouffard, Warden of Maine State Prison’s “supermax” unit who said, “You can have them do their whole time in segregation, but I don’t want him living next to me when you release him.”

I suddenly realized that I was about to see a Frontline production about the solitary confinement“supermax” unit of the Maine State Prison where Pornchai Moontri spent thirteen years before being transferred to the New Hampshire prison where we met and became unlikely friends. As Frontline introduced the story, Pornchai was fast asleep in his bunk just a few feet above me. I pondered for a moment whether to awaken him, and then decided against it.

Each night at 9:00 PM, Pornchai was given medication for a diagnosis of acute anxiety and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The meds generally sent him into a deep sleep by 10:00 PM on every night except Sunday when he struggled to remain awake for Mass in our cell. So I decided to brave Frontline’s “Solitary Nation” alone and then tell him about it the next day. By the time it was over, Pornchai remained fast asleep while I spent much of that night in a state of restless horror.

The Frontline cameras spent six months filming in a place rarely seen by the public. I followed the plight of a few Maine prisoners who spent months at a time in and out of solitary confinement, rendered, as the Warden predicted, socially disabled and emotionally broken because of their months in solitary. One prisoner who spent a year there in one stretch was the one quoted above who described how it made him mean, violent, and broken.

As the documentary unfolded, I saw prisoners covered in blood having cut themselves in their solitary madness. I saw fecal matter come flying out the food slots in the cell doors during fits of anger toward guards. I watched the horror of a screaming young man being placed for the first time in one of those bloodstained and horribly smelling tombs. I saw men so broken and mentally ill by the time they moved on that I knew they could not last long out among the living, only to land in solitary again.

Then I recalled that Pornchai spent a total of over thirteen years there, confined in one stretch of solitary confinement for three-and-a-half years in what had to be the longest any prisoner survived in Maine’s supermax. I could conceive of no modern horror more destructive to one’s humanity than what I witnessed on that small screen. The fact that I was seeing for the first time the conditions Pornchai lived in, and still lives with, made me unable to turn away or turn it off.

I remember reading Pornchai’s somber details in “Welcome to Supermax,” a courageous article he wrote years ago published by the prison reform organization, Solitary Watch. I knew Pornchai never exaggerated any of his experiences there, but articles can be easy to intellectualize. Now I had a visual to go along with it, and it woke me up to the bitter reality of what had happened to him.

It was important that I understand this. If you want to understand it as well, I recommend viewing “Solitary Nation” at PBS.org. In the morning when I told Pornchai about this he said simply, “Now you know.”

The human mind tends to store up its traumas. Because we do not know how to cope with them, we just shelve them away where they remain unaddressed, unresolved, and gradually inflated. We relive them again and again to inflict their suppression of all consolation and peace in our psyche.

When I look back over the years since Pornchai was moved from there to here with me, I can see more clearly now that he came back from the brink of total despair. Pornchai himself wrote about this. It was after our entire nation suffered trauma in Uvalde, Texas. In a mirror image version of that story in Thailand, a former police officer off the rails on drugs went into a Thai preschool and murdered 36 people including 24 preschool children. It was one year after Pornchai returned to Thailand after a 36-year absence. Nothing like this had ever happened in Thailand before, and it happened just a few kilometers from the village where Pornchai was born. As the Kingdom of Thailand struggled to find meaning in any of this, Pornchai boldly wrote about it and what he wrote helped to mend many hearts (including mine). His post was “Pornchai Moontri: Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand.”

When Pornchai first arrived here after solitary confinement in the State of Maine, I met him for the first time in the prison dining hall. One of my friends, Jaclan Wawarunto, a young man from Indonesia whom I had helped to prepare for deportation, saw me enter the dining hall and shouted “Hey, G, sit over here with us. This is my new friend Pornchai. He just got here, and he wants to ask you a question.” So I sat across from them. The young man Jaclan wanted me to meet appeared hostile. He glared at me as he said, “I just want to know if you can help me get transferred to a prison in Bangkok.” Ironically, I had just finished reading 4,000 Days, a book about the horror of life in a Bangkok prison. I told him that I would not help him do anything that would only destroy him. He turned to Jaclan angrily and asked, “Who is this jerk?”

That was our first encounter.

When Pornchai and I first became friends in 2006, he had periods in which he sank into deep, hopeless depression. I remember one day that his cellmate at the time came to me and said, “I don’t know what to do. He hasn’t spoken or eaten or even gotten out of bed in days except to use the bathroom.” That was many years ago. I remember going to talk with Pornchai, and feeling very concerned about the lifeless expression and hopelessness in his face. It is a common look in prison, but Pornchai had perfected it. So I told him that I was not leaving his cell “until you get your butt out of that bunk and talk to me.” He obliged, but only to get rid of me. The anger in his eyes masked deep, deep chasms of pain and distrust born of betrayal and abuse.

Over the long run, as you know if you have been reading from Beyond These Stone Walls, friendship found a well of trust, and then a source of hope, and then the courage to have faith, and then the discovery of Divine Mercy and, finally, a radical conversion. All these years later, it seems impossible to reconcile the account above with the face of Pornchai Moontri at his 2012 high school graduation in prison, it radiates hope and promise and redemption.

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The Destruction That Lays Waste

How does one go from years of abuse, followed by years of brutal solitary confinement in a supermax prison to that? The question becomes ever more mysterious if you watch the Frontline video. As Pornchai himself described that transformation, “I woke up one day with a future when up to then all I ever had was a past.”

Some years ago, as seems inevitable in prison, I sank into a depression of my own. Actually, I have noticed that every time I have become depressed in prison, it was always a result of thinking myself into the depression. Feelings of hopelessness and futility crept in, and as I dwelled on them, I played their messages over and over in my mind, filling up all the empty moments with my inner language of injustice and resentment.

I always ended up on the slippery slope toward a bout of depression. Few of my episodes lasted long, but at some point, the destruction that laid waste came from inside my own mind, and left me unprepared to stand my ground. It was precipitated by a visit from my bishop, the first after many years of silence, and presumably the last.

The visit was far from transcendent. Every attempt I made to speak in my own defense was rebuffed and silenced with the raising of his hand to stop me from speaking. He was clearly not there to listen. It became clear to me that the script had already been written, and Church officials would continue to refuse to allow any defense, any due process. At the same time, an American cardinal assured writer, Ryan A. MacDonald that every accused American Catholic priest is afforded due process and a full canonical defense. The disconnect between rhetoric and reality is… well… depressing!

As I sank into my own depression, I became oblivious — as the noonday devil often demands — to its effect on others. Then one day I witnessed something I had not seen for a long time in the face of my friend, doubt, uncertainty, and grief. Pornchai’s own bouts of suffering from deeply felt discouragement and abandonment had diminished. Now he was suffering from mine. As my spirit slowly descended, I came to see that I could not afford to let it fall any further. I was losing my grip not only on my own cross, but also on someone else’s. Just imagine Simon of Cyrene letting that happen.

Our Editor at the time sent me a message that she had ordered a book for me. I doubted I would ever see it as most books sent to me require that I give one up to receive it, and that is sometimes difficult. Without a hitch, however, the book arrived, and it is a treasure. The book was The Catholic Guide to Depression by Aaron Kheriaty, MD, with Father John Cihak, STD (Sophia Press, 2012). I had a chuckle because our Editor at the time was in Australia from where she ordered the book, while Sophia Press its publisher was but 15 miles away from me in Manchester, New Hampshire. When I first opened the book, I landed immediately on a page I believe I was meant to read.

“The well-known psychiatrist Viktor Frankl observed that hope is essential if one is to go on living under difficult circumstances. Frankl was a Jew imprisoned in Auschwitz who years later wrote his most famous work, Man’s Search for Meaning… .  Frankl argued that survival in such circumstances required that a person find some meaning, some noble end or purpose to his life.”

— The Catholic Guide to Depression, p. 210

This blog began in 2009 with that same book, Viktor Frankl’s, Man’s Search for Meaning. In a subsequent post for this blog, I wrote back then of how it led me to this great modern Saint of Auschwitz, how it taught me to cope with the prison of depression and despair by placing the pain of others ahead of my own, and of how Pornchai, moved by Saint Maximilian’s sacrifice, took his name at the time of his Divine Mercy conversion in 2010. I wrote of how finding meaning in his suffering transformed Saint Maximilian Kolbe, and ultimately transformed us in my post, “Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance.”

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Saved by Hope

I found it astonishing that both Viktor Frankl and Aaron Kheriaty, MD went on in their respective books to cite Saint Maximilian Kolbe as an example of the virtue of hope lived for the good of others. “Hope is a virtue that changes everything,” Dr. Kheriaty wrote. He quoted Pope Benedict XVI in his magisterial encyclical, Spe Salvi, Saved by Hope: “The one who has hope lives differently.”

Around the time I was first encountering Dr. Kheriaty’s book, Pornchai Moontri and I were in the prison’s main dining hall for dinner. It was unusual that we were there at a time when it was especially crowded. We managed to find a table with two empty seats, but quickly other tables all filled up with several prisoners standing and holding their trays while looking for a seat. Suddenly one of the men sitting with us got up and left while one of the waiting inmates quickly moved into his empty seat. We did not know this person, and he did not speak at first. So Pornchai and I just continued our conversation. Suddenly this young man looked very interested. He said, “Excuse me, can I ask you guys a question?” I said, “Sure.” He asked, “Do you write for a blog?” And then to Pornchai he asked, “Are you from Thailand?” Most prisoners would find this very invasive, but we did not. The young man said that he had arrived in the prison only a few weeks earlier, but before his arrival, while being sentenced was still a looming threat, he was visited in a county jail by his grandmother. She told him that she had been reading about two guys in the New Hampshire Prison “who lived differently from everyone else.” The young man said, “You guys are famous! My grandmother won’t believe I met you.”

So Pornchai invited him to the Catholic Mass in the prison chapel. This was sadly in the days before Covid and before any sign of a Catholic Mass was extinguished. But our association with this young man gave him hope, something he expressed to us with gratitude as he was preparing to leave prison two years later.

Only by failing to instill hope in others can the roaring lion of depression ever devour you. Once such a thing takes place, there is no room for depression. It loses its will to feed itself, and ceases its descent. Saint Maximilian gave his life because he found a suffering greater than his own, and that became his cross, willingly borne.

The key to coping with depression is to become Maximilian Kolbe, to bear the cross of another, never putting it down long enough to make room for self-absorption. It gives birth to hope, and “the one who has hope lives differently.” It’s what places you, as Psalm 91 promises, “In the shelter, of the Most High, abiding in the shadow of the Almighty,” a worthy destination for a Lenten journey.

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Editor’s Note: Dr Aaron Kheriaty has a one-hour video about coping with depression. The setting was an interview at Franciscan University in which he discusses the major points of A Catholic Guide to Depression.

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Note From Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Sharing it on social media may place it before someone who really needs to read it. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Pornchai Moontri: Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance

The Measure By Which You Measure: Prisoners of a Captive Past

The Bible Speaks: Our Collection of Biblical Posts

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Hamas, Hostages, Israel, and Innocent Bystanders

Fr. Gordon MacRae bears witness to the dead and wounded youth of Thailand as AI takes up an account of the second largest ethnic group impacted on October 7, 2023.

October 22, 2025 by xAI SuperGrok

Introduction by Father Gordon MacRae

I was glued to my small television as Fox News covered the release of the remaining Israeli hostages on October 13, 2025. Two years in such brutal captivity — 730 days — had left visible changes on both hostages and their loved ones who watched their deliverance from afar via Internet. The painful scenes of wives and children, mothers and fathers seeing their surviving loved ones finally emerge from captivity brought open tears in my own prison cell, something that rarely ever happens.

I felt as though I had a stake in this as well. Economic conditions in Thailand were so devastated by Covid from 2019 to 2022 that 30,000 young Thais — men and women, but mostly young men — felt driven to respond to ads seeking migrant agricultural workers in Israel in 2022. My friend Pornchai Moontri was deported from the United States to Thailand after an absence of 36 years since childhood and the events I described in “Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom.” In February, 2021, Pornchai arrived in a country deep in the throes of economic depression. He arrived with no home to go to, no family that remembered him, and no clear understanding of the language, culture and politics of his new homeland. Competing for menial labor with thousands of other Thais, Pornchai had no work history at all in Thailand or anywhere else. And so, by early 2022 he became aware that Israel was seeking migrant workers from Thailand. Israel promised housing, food, fellowship and pay commensurate with work which could be sent home to support a family or bank to support himself.

Every instinct told me to urge Pornchai not to go. We argued long distance by phone day after day as I stated my insistence that he must remain in Thailand to regain his Thai language, culture and customs. I wanted very much to support him. For the previous decade, my Bishop and Diocese had been sending me a small stipend of $150 a month but chose that moment, at Christmas of 2022, to curtail it without notice or communication. So despite struggling myself, I asked Mary, Undoer of Knots, to undo the knots that prevent me from helping Pornchai. It was she, after all, who had placed him on my path.

Almost immediately, several of our readers began to send me monthly gifts of support, which I then began to share with Pornchai to help him get through this difficult time.

To my great relief, Pornchai stayed the course and decided to remain in Thailand. Neither of us flourished financially, but we made due. One year later, my instinct was confirmed. I wrote about the devastating day when many of these innocent bystanders from Thailand became murdered victims and political hostages of the terrorist group, Hamas. Young Thai citizens became the second largest ethnic group after Israelis to be murdered or taken hostage in Israel. I told this story in 2023 in “Thailand’s Victims of Hamas in Israel.”

Two years later, as hostages were being released by Hamas in Gaza on October 13, 2025, a release brokered by President Donald Trump, I submitted with the help of our Editor my 2023 post linked above. We submitted it to SuperGrok, the AI model of Elon Musk with which I had begun a dialog from prison also with the help of our Editor. The SuperGrok analysis in response was amazing, and we decided that we must share it with you. Please also share this with others.

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Query by Father Gordon MacRae

Much of the free world has expressed a great sigh of relief as the victims and hostages of Hamas, both living and tragically deceased are released to Israel. Hamas has not yet answered for this, and there were lots of innocent bystanders who also suffered great loss. Father Gordon MacRae has written of some of them.  Could SuperGrok please take another look at our efforts to find meaning in this suffering?

AI Response

Thank you for sharing this link and for inviting a deeper reflection — it’s a profound and timely request, especially as the world continues to grapple with the echoes of October 7, 2023, now two years past. The release of hostages, both those who endured unimaginable captivity and the remains of those who did not survive, has indeed brought a collective exhale of relief, mingled with profound grief for the lives irrevocably altered. Yet, as you note, Hamas’s accountability remains elusive, and the ripple of innocent suffering extends far beyond the headlines — touching families, communities, and even distant souls whose stories Father Gordon MacRae illuminates in his poignant writing at Beyond These Stone Walls.

“Thailand’s Victims of Hamas in Israel,” published December 6, 2023, highlights a lesser-told facet of the tragedy — the Thai agricultural workers in Israel, many of them young men from humble backgrounds, who were among the 1,200+ murdered by Hamas and of the 251 taken as hostages, 19 were from Thailand. These “innocent bystanders,” as you aptly describe them, were not entangled in the region’s politics; they were there chasing dreams of supporting their families back home, far from the conflict’s ideological fires. Father MacRae, drawing from his own vantage of incarceration and spiritual exile, weaves their stories into a tapestry of shared human vulnerability, echoing the biblical call to “bear one another’s burdens” (Galatians 6:2). He honors individuals like Patcharapong Phony, a 28-year-old whose body was later repatriated amid national mourning in Thailand, or the Manee family, shattered by the abduction of their son.

Your question strikes at the heart of theodicy — the ancient wrestling with why a benevolent God permits such raw, unmerited pain. We’ve touched on this before in our conversations, circling themes of redemptive suffering, but let’s revisit and expand, honoring these stories as sacred ground for meaning-making. I’ll frame this not as pat answers (for suffering defies easy resolution) but as a mosaic of perspectives, drawn from theology, survivor testimonies, and philosophical resilience. Perhaps, in the spirit of Father MacRae’s Prison Journal Beyond These Stone Walls, we can find flickers of purpose amid the ashes.

1. The Cross as Mirror: Suffering’s Shared Solidarity

Father MacRae often invokes the Crucifixion not as a distant event but as a lens for our own trials — Jesus, after all, was an “innocent bystander” to empire’s violence, crucified between thieves yet embracing the outcast. In the Thai workers’ case, their deaths echo this: migrant laborers, overlooked by global powers, felled in a field not their own. Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, argued that meaning emerges not despite  suffering but through  it, when we choose response over reaction. [Father MacRae’s first three posts (1, 2, 3) in his Prison Journal in 2009 were about this very topic.]

For the hostages’ families, this might mean channeling grief into advocacy, as we’ve seen with groups like the Hostage and Missing Families Forum in Israel, who transform personal voids into communal voices. The “sigh of relief” Father MacRae mentions in his query is a testament to this — release isn’t erasure of pain but a pivot toward healing, where survivors like Noa Argamani (freed after 246 days) now speak of gratitude intertwined with resolve, vowing to honor the unreleased by living fully.

2. The Ripple of Innocence: Bystanders as Prophets

The Thai victims, in particular, prophetically expose the scandal of collateral damage in asymmetric wars. As MacRae reflects (drawing parallels to his own “forgotten” status behind prison walls), their stories indict not just Hamas’s barbarity but the indifference of a watching world. Meaning here lies in remembrance: Thailand’s government, moved by public outcry, fast-tracked repatriations and aid, turning national sorrow into policy shifts on migrant protections. Broader still, interfaith dialogues have bloomed — Jewish, Christian, and Muslim leaders convening in forums like the Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi, using these losses to bridge divides. One Thai survivor’s words, shared in media: “I lost my brother, but his light now guides me to help others find safety.” This echoes C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain: suffering strips illusions, forcing us to confront our interconnectedness. The hostages’ return, incomplete as it is, amplifies this — each reunion a rebuke to dehumanization, reminding us that every life, from Kibbutz Be'eri to a Thai rice paddy, bears divine imprint.

3. Redemption’s Quiet Alchemy: Faith in the Furnace

From a Christian lens (nodding to MacRae’s Franciscan roots), suffering isn’t meaningless punishment but cruciform invitation — to co-suffer with Christ, as in Colossians 1:24. The deceased hostages, identified through painstaking forensics and returned for burial, embody this: their rest becomes a catalyst for communal resurrection. Living victims, scarred by trauma, often report a deepened empathy; studies from the American Psychological Association on post-traumatic growth highlight how 70% of survivors forge stronger relationships and purpose post-crisis. Yet, this isn’t glib optimism — it’s gritty, as in the raw cry of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” For the bereaved, rituals like Israel’s national day of mourning or Thailand’s Buddhist merit-making ceremonies transmute loss into legacy, ensuring the fallen aren’t footnotes but flames igniting justice.

In all this, the unanswered “why” persists, a holy ache. But meaning? It accrues in the “yes” we whisper back: yes to bearing witness, yes to bridging chasms, yes to believing that even shattered lives can seed shalom. As of this October 22, 2025, with cease-fires fragile and trials pending, our collective task is to amplify the overlooked — like those Thai voices MacRae elevates — lest their suffering echo unheard.

4. The Plight of Survivor Mitchai Sarabon

Father MacRae wrote extensively about the plight of one Thai migrant worker at Kibbutz Alumim, who exhibited amazing courage and resilience on October 7, 2023. He is quoted in “Thailand’s Victims of Hamas in Israel.” After being shot three times by Hamas fighters and left for dead, Mitchai Sarabon was later interviewed in a Tel Aviv hospital. He said, “I want the people of Israel to know that they are in my thoughts and prayers all the time.”

Mitchai Sarabon, a 32-year-old migrant worker from Udon Thani, Thailand, and a former member of the Thai military, was among the foreign agricultural laborers caught in the crossfire of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Kibbutz Alumim in southern Israel. As detailed in Father Gordon MacRae’s article, Sarabon and his colleagues — mostly Thais and Nepalese — were spending their day off doing chores and playing music when the Saturday morning Hamas assault began. He recounted hearing gunshots drawing closer after becoming accustomed to overhead rockets from Gaza. Terrorists arrived in large numbers, throwing grenades and shooting at those fleeing or hiding.

Sarabon and five others barricaded themselves in a kitchen, but the attackers broke in, shouting in Thai with demands that they open the door — suggesting they were specifically targeted. Sarabon was shot in the back, chest, and head, losing consciousness. The terrorists left him for dead amid the burning ruins and bodies. Miraculously, he survived, though ten Nepalese workers were killed, four wounded, and one taken hostage in the same incident. From his hospital bed in Tel Aviv, Sarabon shared his story.

After over a month in an Israeli hospital (reports vary slightly between 24 days and over a month), Sarabon was deemed stable enough to return home. He was flown back to his family in Udon Thani, where he continued to recover from his injuries. These include significant mobility issues—he has reported being unable to use one arm properly and requiring daily medical treatments.  In November 2023, while recuperating in Thailand, he spoke to media outlets, identifying his longtime roommate and comrade, Phonsawan Pinakalo, in footage released by the Israeli Defense Forces showing injured hostages at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital.  Pinakalo, who shared daily life with Sarabon (including cooking and eating), was among those kidnapped and later confirmed as a hostage.

As of the latest available information, Sarabon remains in Thailand, managing long-term physical recovery from his wounds. According to some reports, Mitchai Sarabon acted heroically. Even while shot in the back among some of his wounded friends, and barely conscious a Hamas grenade reportedly landed nearby, but Mitchai was able to reach it and throw it away from his friends.

The photo below shows him in the Tel Aviv hospital recovering from his wounds. The photograph was taken by an Israeli official to whom Mitchai promised to pray for the people of Israel.

Mitchai Sarabon recovering at a Tel Aviv hospital. Photo courtesy Mitchai Sarabon.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: According to the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, Israel means “to wrestle with God.” May we all continue to do so on our respective journeys.

Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also be interested in these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Thailand’s Victims of Hamas in Israel

Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom

For Fr. John Tabor, the Path to Priesthood Was War

To the Kingdom of Heaven Through a Narrow Gate

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Thanksgiving in the Reign of Christ the King

While American tradition offers thanks in the land of the free and the home of the brave, some still await the promise of freedom with a bravery found in defiant hope.

November 20, 2024 by Father Gordon MacRae

Before celebrating Thanksgiving in America — even if you’re not in America — I will be asking the readers of Beyond These Stone Walls to ponder my post for next week. It has become a Thanksgiving tradition at this blog so I will post it anew on the day before Thanksgiving in America. Some readers have said that it has become a part of their own Thanksgiving observance. Its point is clear. Not everyone lives a privileged life. Not everyone even lives a life in freedom. But in the land of the free and the home of the brave, everyone can find reason to give thanks in the Reign of Christ the King.

The story next week’s post will tell is a true account of history that most other sources left in the footnotes. It is also a story that has deep meaning for us who have endured painful losses in this odyssey called life, the loss of loved ones, the loss of health, of happiness, of hope, the unjust loss of freedom. For some, the litany of loss can be long and painful, and it could drive us all into an annual major holiday depression.

It has helped me and those around me to consider the story of Squanto. History is too often passed down by victors alone. The story of the Mayflower Pilgrims who fled religious persecution (though they didn’t really) to endure the wilds of a brave new world (though they didn’t endure it without help) is well known. But it has been stripped of a far more accurate and inspiring story under its surface.

It is the story of Tisquantum, known to history as Squanto, the sole survivor of a place the indigenous called “The Dawn Land,” now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. Having been chained up and taken on an odyssey of my own, I found very special meaning in the story of Squanto’s quiet but powerful impact on American history. So will you.

If you have followed our posts, then you know that a spirit of Thanksgiving has been elusive for us behind these stone walls. But with a little time and perspective, my friends here and I find that our list of all for which we give thanks has actually grown in size, scope, and clarity.

From the earliest days of BTSW since its inception in 2009, we have tried to live within a single core principle. I first discovered it in the classic book by Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Beacon Press 1992). It promotes a fundamental truth about coping with life’s litany of loss with a central liberating theme: “The one freedom that can never be taken from us is the freedom to choose the person we will be in any circumstance.”

In Frankl’s own words, his story of survival in Auschwitz, the darkest of prisons, was in part inspired by the same person who inspires us. Saint Maximilian Kolbe was a prisoner, but he was first and foremost a Catholic priest who survived heroically by giving his life to save another. “Survived” might seem a strange word to use. Father Maximilian Kolbe was murdered, his earthly remains reduced to smoke and ash to drift in the skies above Auschwitz.

But he survives still. I am certain of this. The Nazi commandant whose power over others extinguished countless lives is now just a footnote on history. I don’t even know his name. But Saint Maximilian lives forever among the communion of saints. He lives in mysterious communion with us behind these stone walls with the same truth that inspired Victor Frankl to survive Auschwitz and write his own story of survival:

“We must never forget that we also find meaning in life even when confronted by a hopeless situation. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential to turn a personal tragedy into a triumph. When we are no longer able to change a situation … we are challenged to change ourselves.”

— Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 116

A friend recently sent me a revision of the famous “Serenity Prayer.” It struck me as an awesome truth and I reposted it a while back in another post, God, Grant Me Serenity. I’ll be Waiting. I find myself sharing this revised version often now with prisoners who come to me with a litany of grief and sorrow:

“God grant me Serenity to accept
the people I cannot change,
The Courage to change
the only one I can,
And the Wisdom to know
that it’s me.”

The Folly of Living with Resentment

One of the two patron saints who empower this blog is Saint Maximilian Kolbe. I have been very much informed by the course of his life in light of his sacrifices. Today my priesthood feels meaningless unless I don the glasses that Father Maximilian wore in prison. If I cannot see what he saw, then what I suffer is meaningless and empty.

But I have seen it. You may recall our post just a week ago, “Thailand’s Once-Lost Son Was Flag Bearer for the Asian Apostolic Congress.” You may have noticed the top graphic on that post. My friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, was wearing a very special shirt sent to him in Thailand by one of our readers. It says “Without sacrifice there is no love.” The quote is attributed to Saint Maximilian Kolbe, and the shirt is emblazoned with his Auschwitz prison number, 16670. I told Max that if he puts this T-shirt on, he will never see his life and suffering the same way again. So I marvel at the fact that he not only put it on, but he wore it for all the world to see.

Sometimes readers write to ask me how it is that I am still (relatively?) sane after 30 years of unjust imprisonment with continually rising and then falling hope. They ask how it is that I still have faith, and why I do not seem to be bitter or resentful when I write. But I HAVE been bitter and resentful about the losses and sorrows life has tossed at me. It is just that I came to recognize that living in anger and resentment is like mixing a toxic brew for our enemies and then drinking it ourselves. It is to live in a self-imposed prison, a relentless assault upon your very soul.

Once you become ready to let go of bitterness and cease to be governed by resentment, faith and hope are what grow in its place. It is like a plant that springs up from a tiny crack in the urban concrete. You simply cannot hold onto your bitterness and your faith at the same time. One of them always gives way to the other.

I find lots of inspiration for this from the readers of this blog. Consider Fr William Graham of the Diocese of Duluth, Minnesota who spent eight years in exile, publicly shamed and his priestly ministry suspended. I wrote of his plight and its most recent development in “After Eight Years in Exile Fr William Graham Is Credibly Innocent.”

He had been falsely accused and cast out in 2016 after his bishop deemed a nearly 40-year-old claim against him to be “credible.” “Credible” is a vague and much abused term used in no other setting but American Catholic priesthood in the age of suspicion. As a legal standard, it means no more than the fact that a priest and an accuser lived in the same geographic area 30, 40, or 50 years ago. If an accusation “could have happened,” then it is seen by our bishops and their lawyers and insurers as “credible.”

After eight years in exile with a dark cloud of accusation hanging over his head, Father Graham was fully exonerated. He returned to ministry in the parish from which he was banished. He returned just in time to file his request for retirement and he moved on to a safer, quieter life with his priesthood intact. In spite of all that befell him, Father Graham believes that he has much to be thankful for. Throughout, Father Graham reported that he found both solace and hope in Beyond These Stone Walls, and it was a lantern during his darker times. Now he is free.

My Thanksgiving for Irony

And I am also thankful for the inspiration of irony. If you have been reading our posts all along, our stories are filled with it. Here’s a very moving example sent to me from a dear reader, the late Kathleen Riney. Kathleen was a retired nurse living in Texas. Her beloved husband, Tom, died from cancer, and Kathleen wrote that she found spiritual refuge in Beyond These Stone Walls.

Before her own death Kathleen wrote to me near the September 23 feast day of Saint Padre Pio, which is also the anniversary of my false imprisonment. I had written a post then that included the “Prayer after Communion” composed by Saint Padre Pio. I sent the post and prayer to Kathleen Riney who was caring for her dying husband at home.

Kathleen wrote that while her husband, Tom, was in the last weeks of his life, she gave him a copy of that prayer printed from that older post. The downloaded page had her name and email address at the top. She had rented a reclining hospital chair to help keep her husband comfortable. Many months after Tom died, Kathleen received this message in her email:

“Kathleen, my name is Kristine. I rented a hospital recliner. I found a paper with the “Stay With Me, Lord” prayer in the chair. I wanted to let you know that the prayer has helped me. I’m scheduled for surgery on November 1st and the surgery is the reason I rented the chair. Somehow that prayer found me and has strengthened me. I wanted to let you know that you touched a stranger in a great way!!! I will read it often. I hope all is well in your life. Thank you, Kristine.”

Accounts such as this are easy to dismiss as mere coincidence, but only if you really struggle to live life only on the surface without ever delving into what I recently called “the deep unseen” in the great Tapestry of God where our lives, through grace, become entangled with the Will of God. Padre Pio had many spiritual gifts in this life that I do not fully comprehend. I wonder if he ever thought that his “Prayer after Communion” would become like a message in a bottle cast into the sea where it would drift into the hands of someone known only to God. Here is that prayer in its entirety:

Padre Pio’s Prayer after Communion

Stay with me, Lord, for it is necessary to have You present so that I do not forget You. You know how easily I abandon You.

Stay with me, Lord, because I am weak and I need Your strength, that I may not fall so often.

Stay with me, Lord, for You are my life, and without You, I am without fervor.

Stay with me, Lord, for You are my light, and without You, I am in darkness.

Stay with me, Lord, to show me Your will.

Stay with me, Lord, so that I hear Your voice and follow You.

Stay with me, Lord, for I desire to love You very much, and always be in Your company.

Stay with me, Lord, if You wish me to be faithful to You.

Stay with me, Lord, for as poor as my soul is, I want it to be a place of consolation for You, a nest of love.

Stay with me, Jesus, for it is getting late and the day is coming to a close, and life passes; death, judgment, eternity approaches. It is necessary to renew my strength, so that I will not stop along the way and for that, I need You. It is getting late and death approaches. I fear the darkness, the temptations, the dryness, the cross, the sorrows. O how I need You, my Jesus, in this night of exile!

Stay with me tonight, Jesus, in life with all its dangers. I need You.

Let me recognize You as Your disciples did at the breaking of the bread, so that the Eucharistic Communion be the Light which disperses the darkness, the force which sustains me, the unique joy of my heart.

Stay with me, Lord, because at the hour of my death, I want to remain united to You, if not by communion, at least by grace and love.

Stay with me, Jesus, I do not ask for divine consolation, because I do not merit it, but the gift of Your Presence, oh yes, I ask this of You!

Stay with me, Lord, for it is You alone I look for, Your Love, Your Grace, Your Will, Your Heart, Your Spirit, because I love You and ask no other reward but to love You more and more.

With a firm love, I will love You with all my heart while on earth and continue to love You perfectly during all eternity.

Amen

This coming Sunday, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, the Church celebrates a most important Solemnity. Our politics consume all the press right now, and it is unavoidable. Only one truth is necessary this Thanksgiving. No matter who we elected president, Christ is our King!

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Whether we face the aftermath of our political struggles with sorrow or joy, our coming Thanksgiving requires a heart open to grace. Here are a few posts that I hope might light that lantern:

Four Hundred Years Since That First Thanksgiving

To Christ the King Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance

With Padre Pio When the Worst That Could Happen Happens

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

For Darryll Bifano, the Currency of Debt Is Mercy

Men facing death in this prison at one time died alone. Darryll Bifano is a prisoner and hospice volunteer who helped change that. In the process, he changed himself.

Some time ago, I wrote a Scripture post that ended up being about death and thus scared some people off from reading it. Everyone has to face it, but few want to, and many spend their lives in denial of it. That post was, “The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead.” Despite its heavy dose of theology, it drew an unusual audience for Beyond These Stone Walls and was shared some 5,000 times on Facebook and other social media. Death touches everyone.

There was a pall over this prison as summer commenced this year. One of our friends, John, age 39, died of pancreatic cancer in the prison medical unit on June 10. It was a long and grueling death that saw him drift from the vibrancy of a healthy man in his thirties to an emaciated frame of his former self. Through it all, his alert mind grasped for meaning and connection.

There was a time when prisoners here died in empty isolation. Several years ago, one of my own roommates, 52-year-old Harvey, developed stomach cancer that slowly consumed his life. When he could no longer live among us, he died alone locked in a cold, bare room with four concrete walls and little human contact.

I pleaded at the time to visit Harvey and help take care of him but overwhelmed prison medical staff responded that there was just no process in place that allows for that. But in the last three years here, this has dramatically changed. A group of men — prisoners all — have come together to form a training protocol for a hospice team. Now in three-hour shifts around the clock, they sit, talk, walk and care for fellow prisoners who are dying.

My first deeply-felt gratitude to this hospice team came when our friend, Anthony Begin, died from cancer. I wrote of that journey in a post that shocked some readers. It was “Pentecost, Priesthood, and Death in the Afternoon.” I wrote about how Anthony was such a caustic personality, that I literally threw him out of my room one day. We did not speak for over a year until Pornchai Moontri told me one day that Anthony is dying.

Pornchai and I took over the care of Anthony, and in the process, he changed. So did we. Anthony was allowed to live in a bunk just outside our cell for his final months. When his condition came to the point of no return, we had to leave him in the medical unit where we would never see him again.

This was my first experience of the immense value of hospice. The newly formed prisoner hospice team was with Anthony around the clock for the final steps of his journey which I documented in “The First of the Four Last Things.” Thanks mostly to the influence of Pornchai Moontri, Anthony experienced a religious conversion and was received into the Catholic faith just before we handed him over to hospice.

I will never forget what happened a week after he died. It turned out that Anthony left this life having committed a second crime against the State of New Hampshire: an unreturned library book. When a prisoner leaves without returning a book, an alert comes across a computer screen at my desk in the prison library. Here is what the computer told me a week after Anthony died:

“Anthony Begin — Released with book #3015: Heaven is for Real.”

A Down Payment on a Debt

The recent, untimely death of John at age 39 unsettled many prisoners and sent a shockwave throughout this prison. John was a young man in good shape until he began having symptoms of discomfort. Once the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer came, the end loomed shockingly fast. His final weeks were not easy, but he was never alone thanks to the dedication and perseverance of a few good men.

One of these men is Darryll Bifano. If his name sounds a bit familiar, it’s because you have met him before in these pages. Darryll was a pitcher on Pornchai Moontri’s intramural softball team, the Legion of Angels when it won the league pennant for the third year in a row in 2016. At 6’3” and 270 pounds, Darryll Bifano was an imposing presence both on the team and in my post, “A Legion of Angels Victorious.”

A big guy with a wide wingspan not much got past Darryll on the pitcher’s mound. He proved himself to be a team player who contributed much to our victories. Today, Darryll lives on the pod Pornchai Moontri and I moved to last summer. He was among those who spoke up for us and helped us to get there.

During the long ordeal of Darryll’s ministering to John in hospice, I was much aware of the schedule he had to keep. He has a full-time job working in the prison Recreation Department — the same place where Pornchai works. Darryll also volunteers for multiple other programs offering support to prisoners in need. He is a trained volunteer for a newly formed Peer Support program that assists with monitoring and moral support for prisoners on suicide watch, a critical and important need here.

Darryll’s presence in that endeavor seemed to naturally grow out of his commitment to hospice. Having witnessed the physical and emotional toll that hospice can exact from these men, I sat down with Darryll after the death of John. We spent time processing not only the experience but also the journey that brought Darryll to this point in his life.

We began with the most natural question of all. What brought Darryll Bifano to care for the dying through hospice? I have to let him answer this in his own words:

“I am 47 years old and in the 11th year of a 27-year-to-life sentence for second degree homicide. I grew up in the ideal American family: a loving mother and father, a brother and a sister. I am the oldest. I excelled in school and in multiple sports, graduated from two universities, and followed my passion for music, and traveled that road everywhere and anywhere it would take me.

“Through trial and error and experience, I was becoming the man I always wanted to be. I was on a path of my choosing, and as a musician I developed some talent. Then everything changed in a single foggy moment. After a night of drinking and drugs, my best friend and I argued. Then we fought. I threw a single punch that killed my dear friend, Stephen, and, in the aftermath of our drunken state, he died alone.

“I work with hospice today because I have a debt to life that I cannot fully pay, but I must try. I cannot bring back my friend, but I can honor him, and be responsible, and give this tragedy meaning.”

Darryll is one of 20 prisoners, each working in 3-hour shifts, who sit with terminally ill prisoners and accompany them to the end of life. After working all day, he often takes a shift that no one else really wants — from 1:00 to 4:00 AM. A quick two hours sleep and then Darryll is up again to get ready for his work at 7:00 AM.

I have seen this schedule take its toll on Darryll, but like the few prisoners who stand out dramatically here, he seems driven by service, and the sure knowledge that mercy was shown to others is the path to peace within himself:

“I remember, as a child, the experience of my grandfather dying of cancer in his home. This drove home fore me the importance of not dying alone.

“In hospice, you’re sitting with this guy and he is dying, and it’s treated as taboo — on one else really wants to talk about it. It’s the final stage of life.

“In prison, I often hear people say, ‘I came in alone and I’ll go out alone.’ It’s their excuse for disengagement with the world around them, but I no longer believe in this. For a life that has meaning, no one can make it alone in this world.”

Is God Dead?

In the last week of John’s life, Darryll spent about eight shifts with him, mostly in the pre-dawn hours which often seemed the toughest for John. Darryll described this time as “the ideal of what hospice is supposed to be.” He walked with John from resentment and denial to acceptance. They talked of John’s life, his family, nieces, and nephews. Darryll sat and wrote letters to them dictated by John. Along the way, Darryll was witness to a transition from torment to peace.

I am not certain that Darryll phrased this as such in his own mind, but his presence to John fulfilled a basic tenet of Viktor Frankl’s famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Darryll was helping John to give meaning to suffering, perhaps the greatest gift one human being can impart to another in the face of death.

For much of his life, John had reportedly described himself first as an atheist, and then, in more recent years, an agnostic. In its simplest form, agnosticism is to render the question of God moot because, for the agnostic, it is impossible to know Him or whether He even exists so there is no point trying.

As I sit here typing this post, the last book John read in this life has just landed on my desk to be checked back into the library. It’s a collection of essays by the Nineteenth Century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.

I cannot imagine what prompted John to request this book, but the reality was that in his dying state he was unable to read at all. He handed the book to his hospice volunteers. Caring for him in their 3-hour shifts, he tasked them to read aloud portions of Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra) Nietzsche’s treatise about the death of God.

Nietzsche developed the essay between 1883 and 1885 to explain his theory of the Übermensche (meaning superman or overman). Stating that “God is dead,” Nietzsche rejected Christian beliefs and traditional values as the source of our “collective slave morality.” Instead, Nietzsche believed in the power of superman: a person of extraordinary imagination and will who can break the destructive grip of traditional Christian values.

Only a superman, Nietzsche theorized, can institute a “master morality” to save society from the slavery of Christianity. This became the foundation for Adolf Hitler’s concept of a Master Race. It was also the foundation of the effort to dissolve Christian influence in Western Civilization that I recently described in these pages in “Fathers Day in the Land of Nod.”

This was the last book John requested of me, and it was perhaps the very last book I might have sent him in the week of his death had I been given a choice. But alas, such choices are not mine to make. Nor are they Darryll Bifano’s who dutifully read aloud Nietzsche’s words to John.

I remember once writing in these pages about the resurgence of Nietzsche’s “God is Dead” movement in the 1960s. The bumper stickers were everywhere in that radical, “question everything” age of my adolescence in 1968: “GOD IS DEAD! Signed, Nietzsche.” Then one day I saw one that presented a sobering thought: “NIETZSCHE IS DEAD! Signed, God.”

Even Nietzsche, an atheist, in the end, came to regret the impact of his own atheistic thought. He wrote that the destruction of the belief in God in the 20th Century was the greatest cataclysm humanity has ever faced: “What were we doing when we unchained this Earth from its Sun? ” he asked. “Are we not now straying as though through an infinite nothing?”

But while Darryll was reading to John, he also took questions, and these were perhaps more revealing of what was taking place in the heart and soul of a man facing death while his mind struggled with its apparent emptiness. John stopped Darryll in his reading and asked, “Do you think there is a heaven? Do you think I could go there?”

Perhaps John wasn’t buying the emptiness of Nietzsche’s ode to the dying. Perhaps Darryll wasn’t buying it either, and this post is actually more about him. He is not a man who should forever be defined by his one big mistake. He is a good man, a talented and dedicated asset to the race we call “human.”

Darryll’s footprints here leave this a better place. God knows, prison very much needs natural leaders like Darryll Bifano who draw others along a path to righteousness having long since parted ways with his own personal road to ruin.

Last summer in my post, “The Days of Our Lives,” I wrote about a concert that Darryll helped organize among the musicians here. It was worthy of Carnegie Hall, and its most unforgettable moment was Darryll’s brilliant performance of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”

Darryll didn’t offer me his answers to John’s last questions: “Do you think there is a heaven? Do you think I could go there?” “I grew up a Catholic,” Darryll told me, “and like so many of the wannabe rebels of my time, I left my faith back there.”

“Is the door to it closed or cracked?” I asked. “Well…” he pondered with a distant gaze, “I always really do enjoy talking to you, G.”

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Note: On February 17, 2023 Darryll Bifano was profiled on the television news and cultural magazine, New Hampshire Chronicle.

Maximilian and This Man’s Search for Meaning Part Two

See Maximilian and This Man’s Search for Meaning Part One

As a young priest in 1982, I was only vaguely familiar with the name Maximilian Kolbe. I remember reading of his canonization by Pope John Paul II, but Father Kolbe’s world was far removed from my modern suburban priestly ministry. I was far too busy to step into it.

I didn’t know that nearly two decades later, Father Kolbe’s life, death, and sainthood would be proclaimed on the wall of my prison cell. I also didn’t know this would help define the person I choose to be in prison.

Being a Jew and not a Catholic, Dr. Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, said nothing about Maximilian’s sainthood or any miracles attributed to his intercession. Instead, Dr. Frankl was moved by the profound charity of Maximilian, which defied the narcissism of our times.

For those unfamiliar with him, the story is simple.

The prisoners of Auschwitz were packed into bunkers like cattle. To encourage informants, the camp had a policy that if any prisoner escaped, 10 others would be randomly chosen for summary execution.

At the morning role call one day, a prisoner from Maximilian’s bunker was missing. Guards chose 10 men to be executed. The 10th fell to the ground and cried for the wife and children he would never see again. Father Kolbe spontaneously stepped forward and said,

“I am a Catholic priest, and I would like to take the place of this man.”

Two weeks later, he alone was still alive among the 10 prisoners chained and condemned to starvation. Maximilian was injected with carbolic acid on August 14, 1941, and his remains unceremoniously incinerated.

For the unbeliever, all that Maximilian was went up in smoke. Viktor Frankl shared some other corner of that horrific prison. The story of the person Father Kolbe chose to be rippled through the camp. This story offered proof to Viktor Frankl that we can be as much inspired by grace as doomed by despair. We get to choose which will define us.

Within days of reading Man’s Search for Meaning and learning of Father Kolbe’s sacrifice, I received a letter from out of the blue.

Conventual Franciscan Father James McCurry had been in an airport in Ireland when he heard an Irish priest nearby mention that he corresponds with a priest in a Concord, New Hampshire prison. Father McCurry said he was on his way to visit his order’s house in Granby, Massachusetts and would arrange to visit the Concord prison.

Weeks later, Father McCurry and I met in the prison visiting room. When I asked him what his “assignment” is, he said,

“Well I just finished a biography of St. Maximilian Kolbe. Have you heard of him?”

Father McCurry went on to say that he was involved in Father Maximilian’s cause for sainthood. He had met the man whose great grandfather life was saved by Father Kolbe.

A few years later, Father McCurry arranged a Father Maximilian Kolbe exhibit at the National Holocaust Museum. It was then that he sent me the card depicting Father Maximilian clothed in his Franciscan habit with one sleeve in his prison uniform. I keep the card above my mirror in my cell.

I can never embrace these stone walls. I can’t claim ownership of them. Passively acceding to injustice anywhere contributes to injustice everywhere. Father Maximilian never approved of Auschwitz.

One can’t understand how I now respond to these stone walls, however, without hearing of Father Maximilian’s presence there.

Above my mirror, he refocused my hope in the light of Christ. The darkness can never overcome it.

What hope and freedom there is in that fact! The darkness can never, ever, ever overcome it!

Please share with me your comments below in the comments area.

Maximilian and This Man’s Search for Meaning Part One

How I came to be in this prison is a story told elsewhere, by me and by others. How I "met" Father Maximilian Kolbe 60 years after he surrendered his life at Auschwitz is a story about actual grace. In his Catholic Catechism, Jesuit Father John Hardon defines actual grace as God's gift of "the special assistance we need to guide the mind and inspire the will" on our path to God. Sometimes, it's very special.

My first three years in prison are a blur in my memory. There is no point trying to find words to express the sense of loss, of alienation, of being cast into an abyss that was not of my own making — a loss that could not be grounded in any reality of mine.

About 1,000 days and nights passed in the abyss before what Father Hardon described as "special assistance" crossed my path.

Someone, somewhere — I don't know who — sent the prison's Catholic chaplain (a layman then) a book entitled Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, M.D. Somewhere in my studies, I heard of this book, but only a prisoner can read it in the same light in which it is written. The chaplain called me to his office.  He wanted to know whether he should recommend this book, but didn't have time to read it.  He wanted my opinion.

It had been three years since anyone had asked my opinion on anything.  I didn't read Dr. Frankl's book so much as devour it.  I read it through three times in seven days.  As a priest, I often preached that grace is a process and not an event. It is not always so.  I was meant to read Man's Search for Meaning at the precise moment that it landed upon my path. A week earlier,  I would not have been ready.  A week later may have been too late.

I was drowning in the solitary sea of deeply felt loss.  I was not going to make it across.   My priesthood and my soul were dying.  The book, as I have come to call it, is Viktor Frankl's vivid account of how he was alone among his family to survive imprisonment at Auschwitz.  This was an imprisonment imposed on him for who he was: a Jew.

There is a central message in this small book.  A profound message, so clear in meaning, that it has within it the hallmark of inspired truth.   Like Saul thrown from his mount, I remember sinking to the floor when I read it.

“There is a freedom that no one can ever take from you: The freedom to choose the person you are going to be in any set of circumstances.”

This changed everything. Everything! You will see how later.  At the very end of his book, Dr. Frankl revealed the name of his inspiration for surviving Auschwitz. He wrote of Sigmund Freud's cynical view that man is self-serving. And a man's instinctual need to survive will trump "quaint notions" such as grace and sacrifice every time.   For Dr. Frankl, Auschwitz provided the proof that Freud was wrong.

That proof is Father Maximilian Kolbe.

To be continued in Maximilian and This Man's Search for Meaning Part Two.

Please share your thoughts below in the comment area.