Christmas in the Valley and on the High Places

On a Christmas morning buried in snow a young man in prison took a first trusting step from the valley of humiliation to seek the high places and a season of grace.

Christmas by Fr Gordon MacRae

’Twas the night before Christmas, 2007, when a winter storm descended upon Concord, New Hampshire. I awoke that Christmas morning to a shroud of heavy snow that masked this prison world of concrete and steel under pristine whiteness. A howling wind encased the walled prison yard in drifts of snow while saner men hibernated through the long, cold Christmas trapped inside.

I don’t know what came over me that Christmas morning. By 9:00 AM my claustrophobia was in high gear. Still a source of anxiety after all these years, it reached its usual crescendo with a near panic-driven urge to be outside. Prisoners here have a brief hourly window to move from point A to point B, but it was Christmas. We were snowed in, and there was simply no place to go. But I had to try.

Our friend, Pornchai Moontri had been here with me for about two years then, and we had just landed in the same place. “Where are you going?” he asked as he saw me bundled up against the wind and the snow. I told him I wanted to get an hour outside and asked if he wanted to join me. “Brrrrr!” he shivered, shaking his head. So I boldly made my way alone to a guard station to ask if the outside yard might be open. “Are you nuts?” came the gruff reply.

Thinking it a rhetorical question, I just stood there. The guard grabbed some keys and I followed him outside to a caged in area buried in snow drifts. “You’ll be stuck out here for an hour,” he said as the gate closed behind me and a key engaged the frozen lock with grinding reluctance.

And I thought prison was only hostile on the inside! The wind was howling, snow was blowing wildly, and it was freezing. The yard was empty except for an old picnic table half buried in snow, and a solitary downcast hooded figure sitting there like a silent sentinel. He kept a wary eye on me as I decided to give him a wide berth and walk the perimeter of the yard through the drifts of snow. Had I taken in the scene a little sooner, I might have changed my mind and headed back inside.

Battling the drifts got old really fast, so I made my way through the snow to the opposite side of the table, cleared a wet section of bench, and sat down. His bare, freezing hands were balled into fists and his hooded stare fought against eye contact. It was up to me to break the ice. Literally!

My own wariness lifted as the balled fists and attempts to look fierce were betrayed by streaks of tears interrupted by my uninvited presence. There were over 500 prisoners in that building, and I had never before seen this menacing but frightened kid. So I asked his name. “James,” he said through a struggle to sound gruff.

I noticed that James’ fists were tightly balled not because he was planning to smack me, but because his hands were freezing. The two-dollar gloves sold to us back then were next to useless against the cold so I was wearing two pairs. I quietly removed the outer gloves and handed them over. It’s against the rules here to give a freezing fellow human a used pair of gloves, but it was long ago. The statute of limitations for that offense has likely expired. I doubt they’ll throw me in prison for it.

James stared at the gloves for a moment of silent defiance, then quickly put them on. There was no holding back what I sensed was coming next. His face fell into his newly gloved hands, and I spent the rest of that hour a cold silent witness to this young man’s torrent of grief. Then the guard appeared to ask whether I was ready to come back in. “No, I’m good,” I said. “I’ll stay for another hour.”

Though I Walk Through the Valley of Shadow

James, it turned out, did not even know it was Christmas. At 21, he had never before been in prison. He arrived just weeks earlier, and on the morning of Christmas Eve he was moved from the receiving unit to the eight-man cells on the top floor of that prison building. He had been there only a day and one overnight when we met that cold Christmas morning in the snow.

In the midst of tears, James asked, “Why would they put someone like me up there?” By “someone like me,” he seemed to mean that life for him was a lot more fragile than for most young men his age in prison. James is part African-American, part Asian, and part God-knows-what. In the racially sensitive world of prison, he did not feel like a comfortable fit anywhere. He had been assigned to a tough place where practiced predators zeroed in quickly upon his inner vulnerability.

James entered young adulthood with an acute social anxiety disorder and panic attacks. This, coupled with severe ADHD — Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder — made him stand out here as a marginal figure among marginal figures. “I can’t go back up there,” he sobbed. I told him that refusing to go might have consequences that would only make the matter worse. I told him that it was very difficult to get anything done about his plight on a Christmas morning. So I made a precarious promise that from the moment I made it I wondered if it could actually happen. I promised to try to get him moved to a safer, saner place.

So later that day I spoke discreetly with someone in a position to help. I explained what took place, and he said, “I’ll look into it.” Just hours later on that Christmas afternoon, I saw James out the window carrying his meager belongings to the cellblock next to the one where I lived. I knew most of the men there, so I passed the word to go easy on him. They did. It was Christmas, after all.

When you rescue someone lost at sea, a sort of bond forms of its own accord. I eventually learned of all the baggage in life that brought James to that Christmas day. Like many who land in prison, James was missing most of the infrastructure of a life that might help prevent such a thing. He was like a tree without roots, swaying into whatever direction the winds of life blew.

I learned over time that James was removed from his home as a young child because of a history of abuse and neglect. He grew up in the foster care system, moving from place to place, even state to state. Not many people could cope with his racing thoughts, lack of control, and craving for attention.

From age ten to seventeen, James had been in six foster homes, some better than others, but none leaving him with a foundation and a sense of family. At age 17 he simply walked out the door, emancipating himself to the streets where life descended on a steady downward spiral.

James’ crime was as bizarre and misunderstood as the rest of his life. Having broken into a vacant building for a place to sleep, he fled as a police officer approached him. The chase ended in a scuffle, and on the way to the ground, the officer’s weapon fell from his holster. James picked it up. What happened next is a matter of controversy. Some, including the officer, thought James was pointing the gun at him. Others, including James, say he was just a panic-stricken kid trying to give it back.

Either way, just a month before this incident, a terrible tragedy occurred in Manchester, New Hampshire that, justly or not, became a frame of reference for James’ offense. A career police officer, Michael Briggs, was shot and killed in the line of duty by a young, African American man who is today the sole prisoner on New Hampshire’s death row.

I once wrote about that tragedy and its aftermath in the life of John Breckinridge, Officer Briggs’ partner who was present in that Manchester alley on that night. John Breckinridge himself wrote courageously of his new opposition to the death penalty based on his recent reversion to his Catholic faith. But James was also a part of the fallout of that story. His fumbling crime of picking up an officer’s dropped weapon resulted in a ten year sentence.

Hinds’ Feet on High Places

I have served that sentence with him. Most people here find it very difficult to be around James for any length of time. When James discovered that I am a Catholic priest, he thought little of it. “I was Catholic in one of my foster homes,” he said. It was an odd way of phrasing the only religious experience he has ever had in his young, unpredictable life. “You’re like my father now,” he said. “You’re the only person I feel safe with.”

I got James a part-time job in the prison library where he earned a dollar a day. He helped return books and put them back on the shelves. Sometimes, he even put them back in the right place. He seemed to think that the rest of his job description was to make certain that everyone else knew he was my friend.

James was released a few years ago. On another Christmas morning, a decade after that sorrowful mystery of our first Christmas encounter, I spent another Christmas morning with James — that time at a Mass to honor the Birth of Christ the King. The tears of sorrow in the bitter cold that life dealt him were gone. He smiled a lot then, perhaps too much for a young man in prison. He didn’t even realize that all my other friends vie for space to make sure James sat on the other side of me so none of them had to sit with him. He smiled and fidgeted and tried to get my attention all through Mass, but I’ll take that over the oppression of bitterness and sorrow any day.

I had an odd experience with James shortly after that Mass. During a quieter moment in the prison library, James asked me if I remembered the first time we met. I told him that I remembered it very well, that it was Christmas morning nearly a decade earlier. James said, “I was in a real deep, dark place then. Now I feel like I’m in the high places.”

What he said reminded me vividly of a strange book I read fify years ago, Hinds’ Feet on High Places by Hannah Hurnard. It was first published by Christian Literature Crusade in 1955, but I read it in 1975. At the time, I was a Capuchin novice preparing for simple profession of vows, and I came across the book “by accident” on a shelf one day. It was fascinating. Hannah Hurnard was a native of London who became an Evangelical missionary in Palestine and Israel for fifty years.

Hinds’ Feet on High Places is a small allegorical novel (158 pp) about the spiritual journey. The central character is a young woman named “Much Afraid” who heard a call to leave the Valley of Humiliation where she lived imprisoned. She wanted to journey to the High Places of the Chief Shepherd, and was accompanied on her difficult journey by two other allegorical characters, Suffering and Sorrow. At the end of the journey she was transformed with a new life and a new name. It’s an odd, quirky, but beautiful novel. Fifty years later, I remembered every character and facet of the book.

On the day after James made me think of it back then, Pornchai-Max Moontri handed me something he received in the mail that day from our friend and BTSW reader, Mike Fazzino in Connecticut. It was the Winter 2016 issue of GrayFriar News, the quarterly newsletter of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, the order founded by the late Father Benedict Goeschel, CFR. For perspective, I once wrote of him when I too was lost in shadow in “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night.”

The cover of the newsletter had an excellent article by Father John Paul Ouellette, CFR, entitled “The Humility of Christ Is Coming Down Joyfully for Others.” In it, Father Ouellette cited Hannah Hurnard’s Hinds’ Feet on High Places:

“A surprising character plays an important role in the transformation of Much Afraid: the water that flows down from the heights to the depths. As it makes its way down the mountain, the water constantly sings, ‘from the heights we leap and go, to the valley down below, always answering the call to the lowest place of all!’”

That’s what Christmas is. It is Christ descending from the heights to the lowest place of all. That Christmas morning in the freezing cold with James is now like a ghost of Christmas past. I’m re-reading Hinds’ Feet on High Places now, fifty years after picking it up for the first time. It’s a Christmas gift given for the second time.

For Christ to call James out of the depths to the heights, someone had to go down to that valley to meet him there. As Father Ouellete concludes from his analogy of the living water leaping from the heights, “Humility is not only a coming down, but doing so joyfully.” The joyful part has been missing for me, but I’m working on it. The key is knowing that Christ has come, and when you enter the Valley of Humiliation, you will only have to stay long enough to journey with someone else to the high places.

Angels we have heard on high, sweetly singing o’er the plains, and the mountains in reply echo back their joyous strains: “Gloria in Excelcis Deo! Gloria in Excelsis Deo!”

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You might also like these related Advent and Christmas posts from Beyond These Stone Walls.

The Music of Eric Genuis Inspired Advent Hope

Christmas for Those Bowed Down by the Fatigue of this World

The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God

How December 25 Became Christmas

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.”

Don’t Defund Police. Defund Unions that Cover Up Corruption

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is against defunding police departments. He instead wants to disarm police officers who can then “de-escalate things.”

This was to be the post I wrote for These Stone Walls  two weeks ago. Most of America was in the throes of protest and urban riots over the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin while other officers passively looked on. To the horror of once-civilized America, life was crushed out of Mr. Floyd with an officer’s knee on his neck in full view of cameras in a nine-minute video. I first covered this story in these pages in “The Death of George Floyd: Breaking News and Broken Trust.”

This threw America into political, social, and moral chaos in the final months of a contentious and volatile presidential election year. This nation was already reeling from a global pandemic that took over 110,000 American lives in a matter of months. As a direct consequence of the pandemic, economic recession choked the life out of businesses and terminated millions of jobs in what had been the strongest economy since World War II. And then the George Floyd injustice happened and millions of Americans who have just “had it” took to the streets.

It also drew the problem of police abuse and other misconduct into the public forum, but not for the first time. Cooler heads will eventually prevail, but as of this writing, movements like the tone deaf “Defund Police” are gaining momentum. You might imagine that behind these stone walls I am surrounded by men who would be right on board with such a movement, but that is not so.

It may seem surprising that some of the “cooler heads” we need to prevail are right here in prison and none of them want to put police out of business. As the Law Clerk in a prison law library, I have fielded hundreds of George Floyd related questions and comments in the recent weeks. Prisoners watch the news. Many compensate for being separated from the world by watching the news relentlessly.

Every prisoner where I live is aware that New Hampshire currently has one prisoner on death row even though the state repealed the death penalty a year ago, and outvoted the governor’s veto of the repeal effort. The one prisoner on death row is an African American man who shot and killed Manchester, New Hampshire police officer, Michael Briggs. Officer Briggs and his assailant were both armed in that Manchester alley.

Officer Briggs’s partner, John Breckinridge, was also there. His description of what took place is a riveting account in which he spoke of his insistence upon the death penalty for Michael Briggs’ killer. Mr. Breckinridge also told the story of how his long road to Catholic reversion led him to Divine Mercy and a reversal of his position on the death penalty in “A Matter of Life and Death” (Parable, Jan/Feb 2014).

From what I have read, I know of the chilling likelihood that two police officers may have died on that night in Manchester, New Hampshire if they were the only ones there who were unarmed. Turning all this into political theater, former Vice President Joe Biden stated his opposition to the “Defund Police” movement. He suggests instead that officers should be disarmed so they can “deescalate things.” No one should take up that hapless solution without first talking to John Breckinridge.

Police Misconduct Takes Many Forms

I have seen no evidence of any glee among prisoners in any of this. Not one has spoken in favor of defunding or in any way diminishing police in our society. On the contrary, few Americans have a more accurate sense of what would happen in this nation without police. Believe it or not, prisoners want their families well protected. Like most, prisoners want crime prevented when possible, investigated when not, and perpetrators prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

They just want it done justly and evenly. They want police who are colorblind, without manipulation or entrapments, without planted evidence, without beatings, without coerced plea deals, without “testilying” or any of the other malfeasance with which some police — but certainly not all — have abused their power without a physical knee on someone’s neck.

Michael Gallagher’s recent TSW  guest post, “A Teacher’s Worst Nightmare,” was an eye-opener for many and a painfully familiar account for me. Too many people believe that protecting the civil rights of those accused of crimes just provides the guilty-accused with an avenue to “get off” on a technicality. But what about the innocent-accused? They exist in greater numbers than most Americans know. Mike Gallagher’s haunting story presents a compelling case for protecting the rights of the accused.

The police misconduct in that case was not as glaring as in the case of George Floyd, but the story leaves no doubt that it was destructive, and not only for Mike Gallagher and his family. The erosion of trust in the American justice system is the most enduring fallout of stories like Mike’s.

Court rulings have upheld the practice of some police to lie to the accused during the investigation of a suspected crime. When teacher Mike Gallagher took and passed a polygraph test, for example, he was told by police that he had failed it miserably. As dirty as the tactic was, it is not technically considered police misconduct because it is not against their rules.

But it was a different story when the police told the District Attorney prosecuting the case that Mike failed the polygraph. The police in that case, as in so many other accusations of child sexual abuse, justified the lie because they presumed from the start that Mike must be guilty.

From that point on, the search for evidence in the case was filtered through a powerful bias in favor of guilt. There are volumes of studies showing how “investigator bias” among police leads to wrongful convictions. When the police officer lied to the District Attorney by stating that Mike failed the polygraph test it could have had only one cause. The police bias was so strong that any evidence to the contrary was suppressed.

As unfortunate as that case was, Mike Gallagher himself is a very fortunate man. The case fell apart of its own accord because an honest District Attorney had doubts and tested them out. If the case remained in the hands of the biased police, Mike would only just about now, some 25 years later, be emerging from prison.

There are many more nefarious examples of police misconduct that lead directly to wrongful convictions. This includes a long list of illegal infractions like withholding exculpatory evidence, inventing fictitious crimes, planting evidence, and the widespread practice of “testilying,” a term police use instead of perjury to describe lying under oath to bolster their case.

Coercive plea bargaining is then used by over-burdened or unethical prosecutors to get a conviction without having any of the above practices exposed and tested in court. Of nearly 80,000 defendants in federal criminal cases in 2018, just two-percent of them went to trial. The other 98-percent were resolved by plea bargains.

In the Southern District of New York in 2018, the plea bargain figure was almost 95-percent. This holds true in almost every jurisdiction in America. The real danger is that innocent defendants will end up spending much longer in prison than guilty defendants who are well motivated to take the deal.

About 25-percent of the DNA exonerations in America involved cases in which innocent defendants were coerced to plead guilty to avoid spending the rest of their lives in prison. This is a practice I wrote about in “Plea Deals or a Life Sentence in the Live Free or Die State.”

Defund Public Sector Unions That Cover-up Corruption

A lot of ink is now being invested in an analysis of what happened to General Michael Flynn. In 2016, he served just 24 days as President Trump’s National Security Advisor before being ensnared in an FBI probe about fictitious Russian collusion now entirely dismantled as a fraud heavily hyped by the get-Trump-at-all-costs media.

General Flynn’s decision to accept a plea deal, which was also a fraud, was coerced with lies and threats from the investigating FBI agents that they would arrest and charge his son. The nation today can agree on only one thing. The FBI used to be better than this, and could be again if and when this whole truth comes out.

In the case of the late George Floyd of Minneapolis, the officer who killed him had 18 prior abuse complaints in his record. They resulted in just two letters of reprimand in his personnel file, a file that is beyond the reach of citizens thanks to the “progressive” city’s collective bargaining with the police union.

One of those cases involved a 2006 case in which Derek Chauvin was one of six officers who fatally shot 42-year-old Wayne Reyes. The prosecuting attorney in the case was Amy Klobuchar who reportedly declined to place the matter before a grand jury for indictments. Ms. Klobuchar is now Senator Klobuchar, a former Democratic presidential candidate and potential running mate for Joe Biden.

In fairness to senator Klobuchar, she explains that she was elected to the U.S. Senate before that case was resolved without prosecution by her successor. She added that she in hindsight believes that using the grand jury to decide prosecution of this and multiple other cases of alleged police misconduct in Minneapolis was a mistake. The point I want to make is that all of this was kept from the public by levels of secrecy secured by the police union.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey exhibited leadership and courage when he stood up to a chanting mob recently in opposition to defunding and disbanding his police department. He was screamed at, taunted, called names, and violently harassed by the mob as he walked through them after courageously stating views considered heresy by the mob. The Minneapolis City Council caved in completely with a call to dismantle their police force.

Even before the protests and riots this year, several other Democrat-controlled “progressive” cities saw marked increases in violent crime. In the first six months of 2020, shootings in Minneapolis had risen 60-percent. In New York City shootings had risen 18-percent; in San Francisco, 19-percent; in Philadelphia, 51-percent. Mr. Biden would have the police as the only unarmed characters in these urban dramas. We all know how that would end.

There were 492 homicides in Chicago in 2019. Only three of them involved police. The vast majority of others involved crimes perpetrated by young African Americans upon other young African Americans. This points to a serious problem in American cities, but not necessarily the one CNN and other venues are telling you.

This does not mean racism does not exist. It certainly does, but in my world it is overshadowed by something much more subtle: racial bias. The current President’s appointment of General Charles Q. Brown to be the first African American to serve as Air Force Chief of Staff has raised a discussion about racial bias. It was raised by General Brown himself whose appointment was in the works well before the current racial tension in America. In a brilliant video address on June 5, General Brown stated:

“I’m thinking about my Air Force career, where I was often the only African American in my squadron, or as a senior officer the only African American in the room. I’m thinking about wearing the same flight suit, with the same wings on my chest as my peers, and then being questioned by another military member: ‘Are you a pilot?’ I’m thinking about how some of my comments were perceived to represent the African American perspective when it’s just my perspective…”

— General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., June 5, 2020

[ Editor’s note: please watch the following video for the full context. ]

That such subtle bias still exists in the blind corners of our attitudes should be a cause for soul searching for all Americans. I am proud to be in a nation that can look past such bias and recognize greatness in General Brown. We are a better — and safer — nation for his service.

As for Disarming the Police …

One widely Tweeted solution to police misconduct was this: “Almost every role in our community a police officer fills would be better handled by a social worker.” I asked other prisoners about Mr. Biden’s idea that police should be disarmed, and about the suggestion that police could be replaced by social workers. I never got any straight answers. They could not stop laughing.

The real criminals around me — they are not all real criminals but the real criminals are in the majority — sneer at these suggestions. Then they express worry about their families who still live in the same Blue State broken communities from which their offenses were committed.

But what they sneer at the most is the revelation that the City of Minneapolis received over 2,600 citizen complaints about just a small percentage of abusive police officers since 2015 and took action in only twelve of those cases thanks to the public sector police union’s political clout. If real reform is the real goal of protesters, #DefundPublicSectorUnions, and not #DefundPolice, would be our antiphon to the memory of George Floyd.

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