In a City on a Hill: Lent, Sacrifice, and the Passage of Time

Sacrifice is at the very heart of being a priest and being a Catholic. This Lent, restoring sacrifice is the key to being a Church in a sinful and broken world.

“Put your lamp upon a stand so that others who enter may see the light.”

— Luke 8:16

Most of our readers know that I have a full time job in this prison. I work as a legal clerk in the prison's law library, the last bastion for the poor who seek justice, that every prison is mandated to maintain. I earn $2.00 per day in this position. Early last week I was walking across the large library and was stopped by two young men seated at a table. “What is Fat Tuesday?” one of them asked. I explained that it is the day before Ash Wednesday, and the day that people may indulge in things that they are about to give up. They both looked perplexed. “What is Ash Wednesday?” the other asked. So I responded that it is the first day of Lent. The next question was predictable. “What is Lent?” they both asked. So I explained to them that Lent is a time of personal penance in which Christians discipline themselves toward higher goals in life by making sacrifices.

It is a challenge to have to couch religious terms in secular language so that I not run afoul of the purely secular nature of a law library. But these guys were fascinated by these concepts. So I sat down and explained it a bit further. I was inspired by the depth of their interest, but also saddened that they had never before heard any of this in life. I promised that on their next library day, I would explain Lent and sacrifice a bit further.

Today, Ash Wednesday, I mark 10,736 days and nights in prison. I didn’t tally this with scratch marks on my cell wall, and I don’t actually keep an ongoing count in my head. I won’t wake up tomorrow and tell myself it’s the start of day number 10,737. At least, I hope I won’t. That would be really awful. But two or three times a year I pull out my calculator and tally the days I have been in this place. I’m not even sure of why we do this, but everyone here does. When my friend Pornchai Moontri was here with me, he told me one day that he was observing day number 7,275 in prison. Others of our friends have been “inside” a lot less time. Recalling this on Ash Wednesday 2024 makes me want to rejoice in my friend’s freedom.

Sometimes I discover some strange coincidences when I count the days. For example, my 5,000th day in prison was also my 26th anniversary of priesthood ordination. The numbers don’t mean much except to convey a sense of the drama of time as it plays out in such a place.

Time is experienced differently here than anywhere else. Back in 2012 The New Yorker Magazine had a very good article by Adam Gopnik entitled “The Caging of America” (Jan. 22, 2012) about our ominous and burgeoning prison system. He wrote that “a prison is a trap for catching time” and described the trap thusly:

“It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes
 prisons unendurable for their inmates… That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, or watchful paranoia — anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog.”

It is not a pretty picture, and I think the pain of living in prison is experienced proportionately to one’s mental capacity. Prison is the one place on Earth where intellect is a handicap, and possibly even a source of deep personal anguish. I took on “A Day Without Yesterday:” Father Georges Lemaitre and The Big Bang a while back because I feared my brain cells might atrophy from lack of use.

Perhaps I am in good company in this suspension of time. A great comment by my friend Carlos Caso-Rosendi mentioned that God lives in the ”nunc stans,” a place where there is no passage of time at all. Carlos is exactly right that God lives outside of time. Psalm 90 gives a hint of this, and it’s a good Ash Wednesday message:

“You turn man back to dust and say ‘Turn back, O children of men!’ For a thousand years in your sight are as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.”

— Psalm 90:3-4

I know the feeling. My time here has not been experienced as thousands upon thousands of days, but as one very long day still awaiting its final sunset, a sort of long Lent with no Easter in sight — except, perhaps, in hope. I guess it’s really that way for all of us. Without hope, there can be no Easter, only Lent. The reverse is also true. To be a Catholic Christian is to live in hope despite all appearances to the contrary.

A City on a Hill

I’m showing my age, but I can hear Roger McGuinn from The Byrds intoning the musical version of Ecclesiastes (3:1): “For everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.” I don’t mean to lecture you, but “doing time” — “doing Lent” — qualifies me to write about both. This Lent is our time to ponder freedom, and what we do with it, and all the dire threats to it.

It’s a time to wake up, a time to take stock of who and what we are, and most importantly of what we are becoming. It’s a time to measure our civic duty as Catholic members of the human race in this place at this time. It’s a time to account for what it means to live as humans are meant to live, in God’s image and likeness in a society and culture we are supposed to add to and not just take from. It’s a time to discern whether we as Catholics shape our culture more than it shapes us. Even a prisoner can enter into that discernment.

I once wrote of one vivid example that happened here, and I feel driven to write of it again for it is astonishing. It’s a typical prison story with a very atypical outcome. It involved my friend, Joseph. One of Joseph’s many disputes with other prisoners erupted into a fight. Both were hauled off to spend some time in “the hole.” Months later Joseph emerged first, then a week later, his enemy. News of their ongoing combat spread throughout the prison, and the peer pressure was intense. “Fight — Fight — Fight” was the sole message they heard from both friends and foes. The prison was abuzz with the inevitable. Joseph ducked all my efforts to intervene. This was about a month after our friend, Pornchai Moontri, whom everyone here admired, was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010.

Seated in the prison chow hall one day, Joseph awaited his opponent for the big scene. Pornchai was sitting with me as usual as hundreds of prisoners poured in for dinner and a show. I decided I would have no choice but to try diplomacy. Then Pornchai suddenly stood up. In the presence of hundreds of anticipating prisoners, Pornchai walked to the door to meet up with Joseph’s enemy.

I groaned as I saw diplomacy fly right out the window. Then Pornchai gestured to the young man to follow him. Together they walked to the table where Joseph was seated. With all eyes riveted upon this scene, we could hear a pin drop. They sat down, and the three of them had a conversation. I watched from across the hall as Pornchai spoke and the two enemies stared at their shoes.

I don’t think the Treaty of Versailles entailed such drama and a sense of impending doom. Then suddenly — in the sight of all — the three of them stood up. Joseph and his enemy shook hands, gave each other a fraternal smack on the back, then parted company. The war ended and a treaty was struck. I was very proud of Pornchai. Gandhi could not have done better.

There is a Gospel declaration for the age we live in, and Pornchai exemplified it that day. It’s a worthy goal for Lent for all of us who have been waiting for some light in the darkness while sometimes forgetting that we are the ones who are supposed to bring it:

“You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand where it gives light to all in the house.”

— Matthew 5:14-15

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Important announcement from Father Gordon MacRae:

Some fights must continue despite Lent. Our dear friend Claire Dion in the State of Maine is in a fight that she cannot allow herself to set aside or retreat from. She has long assisted me and Pornchai Moontri in this prison and beyond. Claire had a distinguished career as an obstetrics nurse. Forty-four years ago she delivered my oldest niece, Melanie. In her retirement she became a dedicated prolife activist. In recent weeks Claire has been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and additional tumors on her spinal cord and pelvic area. As I write this, she is receiving her first dose of radiation treatment in an effort to shrink the largest of the tumors which is causing her immense pain. She is offering some of that pain for me, but I will never be worthy of it. In coming weeks she will begin to also undergo intensive chemotherapy. The goal is not to cure the cancer, for it has no known cure, but it is hoped that its inevitable route will slow down and enable her to live life as she has known it for as long as possible. No one who knows Claire can understand how or why she is facing lung cancer. She has never used tobacco products in her entire life. In fact, she has never been known to inhale anything but clean air and the grace of Divine Mercy.

Claire is a woman of deep faith, and she has handed her life over to the care of God and service to us. She wants to continue helping as long as she is able. Please keep Claire and her family in your prayers.

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My own fight continues.

Readers also know that I too am in a fight from which I must not retreat. There is no foe here for my friend Pornchai to meet at the door and talk some sense into. It is an attack not just on me, but on the entire priesthood and our Church.

Ryan A. MacDonald, who has been a courageous ally for truth in this fight, has revised and updated an article he wrote some 12 years ago. His updates shed new light on what has gone on in this fight, and this week he has decided to put that light on a stand for all to see. It is published at our “Voices from Beyond” feature under the title “Judge Arthur Brennan Sentenced Father Gordon MacRae to Die in Prison.”

It is not as bleak as it may sound. Grace has accomplished much within this story, and the evil that lurks in the hearts of some has not yet ruled the day nor has it had the last word.

Those who are able, and feel inclined to assist in this fight may do so, but we have a new address for that purpose. It is:

Fr. Gordon MacRae
Beyond These Stone Walls
PO Box 81
Fayetteville, NY 13066-0081

Assistance using PayPal or Zelle is also available at FrGordonMacRae@gmail.com. Both of these are managed by Claire Dion who wishes to continue in that role for as long as she is able. My prayer is that Claire will be in no hurry to journey Home. This world is a better place with Claire still in it.

May the Lord Bless you and keep you in this Season of Lent, Sacrifice and the Passage of Time.

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.”

Veterans Day: War and Remembrance for Freedom Was Not Free

Omaha Beach during the Invasion of Normandy

Veterans Day and Remembrance Sunday first honored the great sacrifices of the First and Second World Wars, and freedom from a global tyranny too easily forgotten.

“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.”

— Thomas Paine, 1776

What we today honor as Veterans Day (November 11) in the United States, and Remembrance Sunday (the Sunday nearest November 11) in the United Kingdom, began in Europe as Armistice Day. This history is worthy of a reminder, for we forget the fine points of history to our own peril. The armistice that ended hostilities in World War I, culminating in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, was signed on November 11, 1918. In 1954, Armistice Day was expanded to become Veterans Day in the United States and Remembrance Sunday in England to honor all who served in the two World Wars. Today this memorial is expanded to honor the veterans of all wars.

The quote from Thomas Paine above was a criticism of American colonists who became comfortable in their isolation and failed to heed the growing oppressions that would eventually end up at their doors in the War for Independence. At a time when the American footprint is fading from the paths to tyranny throughout the world, it’s perilous to forget the high price that was paid to win and preserve our freedoms. The freedom from tyranny that we sometimes take for granted in America was won at the price of our brothers’ blood which today cries out to us from the Earth. We are free thanks to them. War is futile without remembrance.

World War I engulfed all of Western Europe, pitting the Central Powers of Germany and the Austria-Hungarian Empire against the Allies: Great Britain and its Dominions, France, Russia, and then later Italy and the United States. All was not quiet on the Western Front of that war which extended all the way from the Vosges Mountains in Eastern France to Ostend, Belgium.

America entered World War I in 1917 in response to Germany’s use of submarines to destroy commercial vessels crossing the Atlantic. This tipped the balance of the war which ended a year later. The First World War cost the lives of ten million people by the time an armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. World War II, which began with Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and ended with the surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945, took the lives of fifty-five million people. Freedom was never free.

Dates with Destiny

We citizens of a civilized society remember significant dates for a reason. But the Internet generation is causing us to lose some of our collective cultural memory. Today, we rely too much on a Google search to provide meaning to our existence. There’s something to be said for having at least a basic framework of meaning for dates we observe and why they are of some cultural importance to us. Anniversaries that lend themselves to our social or cultural identity are in danger of being lost for subsequent generations.

Perhaps the most modern example of a date with cultural meaning in Western Civilization is September 11, 2001 a date that today lives in infamy on a global scale. At Beyond These Stone Walls, I marked its twentieth anniversary with “The Despair of Towers Falling, the Courage of Men Rising.” That post was a vivid description of how that day unfolded from a very unusual perspective, that of a prison cell, and of its far reaching impact even here.

But most people in the Western world are not conscious of the whole story behind the significance of that date. Knowing why America became a target of al Qaeda on that date gives the event a whole new meaning, and human beings engage in an innate search for meaning in the events of our lives. That is the very purpose of religion. It seeks and finds meaning in our individual and collective existence. In human history, no culture has survived for long without religion, or a substitute for religion.

And it’s the substitute for religion — for real religious meaning — that we should most fear. Those who set the infamous day of September 11 in motion were themselves marking the anniversary of events they retained in collective consciousness for over 300 years, events that much of the rest of the world had forgotten. What happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001 began in Europe more than three centuries earlier during the Siege of Vienna on the night of September 11, 1683.

The story was described by the late Christopher Hitchens in “Why the suicide killers chose September 11” (The Guardian, October 3, 2001). Then it was expanded upon by Father Michael Gaitley in a great book entitled, The Second Greatest Story Ever Told.” In the book, Father Gaitley wrote of the historic significance of September 11:

“For some 300 years, an epic struggle raged between the Ottoman (Muslim) Empire and the Holy Roman (Catholic) Empire. The Battle of Vienna marked the turning point in this struggle as it stopped the Muslim advance into Europe…. On the night of September 11, [1683], the Muslims launched a preemptive attack on Austrian forces…”

— The Second Greatest Story Ever Told, p.45

By the next night, September 12, 1683, after a night of fierce battle, the Islamic forces were repelled and routed by the Polish cavalry led into battle by King Jan Sobieski himself. But victory also brought the knowledge that 30,000 hostages, mostly women and children, were executed before the Islamic retreat on orders from the Moslem commander. The Polish king wrote in a letter of his horror at the savagery of the fleeing invaders. Then, writing his post-victory letter to his nation, King Sobieski paraphrased in Latin Caesar’s famous words of victory: “Veni, Vidi, Deus Vincit” — “I Came, I Saw, God Conquered.”

King Sobieski had entrusted that battle to the intercession of Mary, Mother of God, and it was in honor of this victory that the Pope established the date of September 12 as the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary. What had thus been the date that began an event of glory and great sacrifice for Christendom was a date of infamy for fundamentalist Islam, a date remembered for over 300 years. It was for this reason that September 11 was chosen for an attack on the West by al Qaeda terrorists in 2001.

From the cover of A Pope and a President by Paul Kengor

Swords into Plowshares

Lord Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth, described the West’s lack of awareness of that significance as being “among the worst failures of political intelligence in modern times.” In “Swords Into Plowshares,” an essay in The Wall Street Journal (October 3-4, 2015), Lord Sacks wrote that our lack of awareness was not accidental, but “happened because of a blind spot in the secular mind: the inability to see the elemental, world-shaking power of religion when hijacked by politics.”

That story of the significance of September 11 told above is not war in the name of religion as some would today have you believe. It is what takes the place of religion when it is suppressed in the human heart and soul, and overshadowed in the public square until man’s search for meaning is hijacked by politics.

One of the great victories of the First and Second World Wars — great victories won at great price — was freedom of religion. In our era of forgetfulness, this has been twisted into a guarantee of freedom FROM religion, and the result has been an agenda to park religious voices somewhere outside the American public square. By America, I mean all of the Americas. What happens in the U.S. does not stay in the U.S. Lord Jonathan Sacks has composed a wise and well informed caution for America:

“The liberal democratic state gives us freedom to live as we choose, but refuses, on principle, to guide us as to how we choose…. Religion has returned because it is hard to live without meaning in our lives… [but] the religion that has returned is not the gentle, quietist and ecumenical form that we in the West have increasingly come to expect. Instead it is religion at its most adversarial and aggressive. It is the greatest threat to freedom in the post-modern world.”

— Jonathan Sacks, “Swords Into Plowshares,” WSJ.com, October 3-4, 2015

It is only when religion is denied a voice in the public square that such a hijacking happens. Humanity will seek meaning then only in what is left. There is a broad assault on religion in Western Culture today with the goal of just that — of removing voices of religion from the public square by the process of selective memory, of blaming war on faith. The reality is very different. An analysis of 1,800 conflicts for the “Encyclopedia of Wars,” by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod determined that fewer than ten percent had any real religious motivations.

It’s very interesting that today Lord Jonathan Sacks cites the Western intellectuals’ belief that the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of European Communism in 1989 was “the final act of an extended drama in which first religion, then political ideology, died after a prolonged period in intensive care…”

“The age of the true believer, religious or secular, was over. In its place had come the market economy and the liberal democratic state in which individuals, and the right to live as they chose took priority over all creeds and codes.”

The fall of the Berlin Wall and European Communism was, therefore, “the last chapter of a story that began in the 17th Century, the last great age of wars of religion.” What makes this theory so interesting is that it blatantly overlooks the fact that one of the greatest religious figures of the 20th Century — Saint John Paul II — is also the person most responsible for setting in motion the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. That is what Father Michael Gaitley unveils as an essential element in The Second Greatest Story Ever Told, but first it has to look back upon Armistice Day.

Religious faith was never a cause for war, nor was it ever an excuse. But for those who survived the Great Wars of the Twentieth Century — and for 65 million lives lost in the face of Godless tyranny, faith was all that gave it meaning, and without meaning, what’s left?

Don’t let your religious freedoms and your voices of faith be so easily parked along the wayside of America and the rest of the free world, for thus it will not remain free for long. People died to give us that voice, and today is a good day to remember that, and to honor their sacrifice. To distance ourselves from war and remembrance — from the price of freedom — is to give witness to Thomas Paine’s dismal foreboding on the eve of war:

“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.”

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Please join us in prayerful remembrance for those who served and especially those who gave their lives to secure and preserve our freedom. None of those who speak today about political threats to democracy have any real idea of what freedom cost.

You may also be interested in these related posts:

From Hong Kong to America Freedom Is under Siege

Beyond Ukraine: The Battleground Against Tyranny Is Us

The Despair of Towers Falling, The Courage of Men Rising

Left in Afghanistan: Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS-K, Credibility