Pornchai Moontri: A Night in Bangkok, A Year in Freedom

Pornchai Moontri marks one year since his return to Thailand after 36 years away, and one year in freedom after 29 years in prison. Divine Mercy has won this day!

February 23, 2022 by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri

Sawasdee Kup, my friends. The photo that you see below is my first moment in freedom in Thailand after a 36-year absence and 29 years in prison since age 18. As many of you know, the last 16 of those years were in the company of Fr. Gordon MacRae. Without him, none of the rest of this post would ever have taken place.

In the photo, that’s me on the left. It was the 24th day of February in 2021. I think I was the only person in Thailand to wear a pair of western jeans that day. It was all I had, and it was a very hot 40-degrees Celsius which is about 104-degrees Fahrenheit and extremely humid. The three people with me are (L to R): Khun Chalathip, a supporter and benefactor of the Divine Word Missionary work in Thailand; Yela Smit, co-founder of Divine Mercy Thailand and the person who worked with Fr. Gordon to prepare for my return; and Fr. John Hung Le, SVD who you already know well. Father G is not in the picture, of course, but he was still very much present.

There are many others who made this picture possible. Because of Beyond These Stone Walls, an international effort formed to move a mountain. This included Yela Smit and Father John Le in Thailand, my legal advocate Clare Farr in Australia, Viktor Weyand in Michigan, Dilia E. Rodríguez in New York, Fr. George David Byers in North Carolina, Charlene Duline in Indiana, Bill Wendell in Ohio, Claire Dion, Carol Slade, Judith Freda, and Samantha McLaughlin in Maine, and Mr. Narongchai at the Royal Thai Embassy in Washington. All made a mighty effort to bring me home. Many of you contributed to my support in the great challenge of starting life over. I do not have adequate words to thank you all.

After the above photo was taken, I had my first meal in a Thai restaurant, and then we went shopping for clothes. Father John took me to the biggest, busiest shopping mall in Bangkok where I had to fight off a panic attack. It was a very long time since I was in the presence of so many people, and in a city as huge as Bangkok. It felt overwhelming.

Father G and I had talked a lot about what my first moments of freedom might be like, but living them was another matter. So many competing feelings rushed through my mind: excitement, terror, gratitude, terror, happiness, terror. It is not easy to describe how freedom feels after spending 60-percent of my life in a U.S. prison. Did I mention terror?

Samsung to the Rescue

The photo above was my first “selfie.” It was taken when I figured out how to use the camera on a smart phone. There is a little rosary and cross hanging from the mirror. That was made for me out of foil candy wrappers by a 19-year-old Honduran young man who I helped during five awful months in ICE detention. From the moment I arrived in Thailand, everything I did, saw, or touched that day and the days to follow was completely new to me. I feared that I will never be able to fit in. During these 14 days of quarantine in a hotel room alone for the first time in 29 years, Father G called me every day. For the rest of my life I will always remember that first phone call. It was the morning after my arrival.

We spoke about my first anxious night in that room. It was small, but still about three times bigger than the 60-squarefeet where I lived with Father G. I could not see anyone during my two weeks in quarantine, but our friend, Yela, left a Samsung Galaxy smart phone in the hotel for me. I looked at it like it was left behind by space aliens. It took me a while to figure it out, but I somehow managed to find Beyond These Stone Walls.

I wish you could have felt my heart thumping with excitement. This blog that had been so much a part of our lives, reaching out from a tiny prison cell to the whole world, was now right in front of me. I realized with deep emotion that I am now seeing it while Father G never has. It struck me that almost everyone I will meet in Thailand in coming days will already know about me. Then I found Father G’s Documentary Interview and listened for the next two hours as he talked while I fell asleep. “Just like old times,” I thought, but don’t tell him I said that.

One year ago, on February 24, 2021, Father G wrote about that first night in Thailand and my embarrassing encounter with a 21st Century toilet. It was “Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom.” I remember thinking that this Samsung smart phone that now connects me to the world is a miracle, and that BTSW was an even greater miracle. I felt for the first time that I am not among strangers. I am home, and Father G came with me.

Pictures of Freedom

Father G and I still speak by telephone each day. He calls me with his GTL tablet from the same prison cell where we both lived. Sometimes it is for just ten minutes and sometimes longer. Every time I tell him about what is going on in my life now, he says the same thing: “Send me photos! We need photos.” Now I can see the reason for that. He suggested that the best way to tell the story of my first year in freedom is with photographs and links to what he and I have both written. So here goes!

Free at Last Thanks to God and You

I wrote this post just a few weeks after my arrival. I was living then in the Divine Word Community House with Fr. John Le and some members of his Order in Nontha Buri. Father G and Father John spoke often. It is with deep gratitude that I thank both of them. No one knows how difficult it is to re-enter society after almost thirty years in isolation. On the day I arrived at Father John’s home, he and Yela had a photo taken with me in the presence of the One most responsible for bringing me there. So that photo is posted above.

For Pornchai Moontri, A Miracle Unfolds in Thailand

Just a week later, Father Gordon wrote this amazing post after talking with me. It turned out that the headquarters for Father John’s Community in Thailand were located in the Province of Nong Bua Lamphu in the Northeast of Thailand, about a nine hour drive from Bangkok. That was the place of my birth and the place from where I was taken at age eleven. Just a few kilometers from a special home and clinic operated by Father John’s Order for Thai children, the Aunt and cousins I lived with as a child were still there. It was a most painful but also joyful reunion.

I spent my first night there in the unfinished home my mother was building before she was killed on the Island of Guam in 2000. All her things were still there. The next morning, I visited and prayed at her tomb for the first time. I was so thankful that Father John was with me. Though most of Thailand practices Buddhism, and so did I as a child, I am now a Catholic, and I asked Father John to bless my mother’s tomb. I will be going there again in April for Chakri, the annual Buddhist Water Festival when family members clean and honor the tombs of their loved ones.

Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri

Father Gordon has told me many times that this was his favorite post of my first year in freedom. He told my story combined with the story of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael from the Book of Tobit. There is a mysterious dog in the Tobit story, and during this same journey my dog, Hill, adopted me. This was a very special post. Hill and I have had similar lives in which we both got battered around a bit. He started following me as soon as I first arrived in the village of Phu Wiang (Poo-vee-ANG) just as a dog followed Tobias in the company of Raphael in the Book of Tobit. Whenever I return there, Hill comes running and howling as I give him a special treat. Then he never leaves my side.

Beyond These Stone Walls in Thailand

Father G helped me to write this post which describes my long and difficult adjustment. In the photo above, Father John and Khun Chalathip, who took on the task of helping me to learn Thai again, brought me to a day of prayer at an Oblate retreat in Bangkok. Much of this post was written while I was there. Back at the New Hampshire State Prison, the Lieutenant of the unit where I lived saw it and had it posted on the wall outside his office. He asked the 300 prisoners there to all read it and he included it in a prison newsletter. Father G says that they especially liked this last paragraph and wanted other prisoners to read it:

“Sometimes I get impatient with myself. I wish I could be further along in learning Thai language, history and culture, the metric system, driving on the left side of the road, and not having to “report in” every time I go anywhere or do anything. After 29 years “inside” I am now out of prison but I still have to get prison out of me. The name, Thailand, after all, means ‘Land of the Free’.”

Pornchai Moontri: Citizen of the Kingdom of Thailand

Every Thai citizen is presented with a Thai National ID at the age of 16. But I was not in Thailand then and never received it. So returning at age 48 with my citizenship not yet fully established was a burden for me. There have been times in my life when everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I made multiple trips up to the village of my birth to visit with my family and my dog, Hill. Each time, I applied for my Thai ID and each time I was told that it is still pending.

In late October, much to my relief and Father G’s as well, I was summoned to Phu Wiang. I told Father G that I was buying a new dress shirt for the ID photo. Surely they could not turn me away with this beautiful new yellow shirt. Father G scoffed, but I had faith. (Now that’s a twist!) But this time I was successful and I wanted all of you to see my Thai ID. So Father G had my ID number blocked out and posted it.

This was my birthday reunion with my cousin and his family. He was eight years old and I was eleven when we lived as brothers. Now he is an officer in the Royal Thai Navy. While being with him and his family at the Gulf of Thailand, the struggles of the past just evaporated for a time.

A Year in Photos

One of the things that I looked forward to was swimming. I had not been immersed in water for thirty years. I lived with my cousins as a child, but 36 years had passed before I saw them again. On my first visit with them, they took me to a lake. I was not sure I even still knew how to swim so they put some little flotation devices on me. I did not even know how to get into the water the first time. When Father G saw the picture of me floating he wrote, “This is what freedom looks like.”

Visiting with my Aunt and cousins during the rice harvest was humbling for me. I am no stranger to hard work, but they feared I would be too unaccustomed to the relentless Thai heat so they gave me the easy job of collecting bundles. It was a great blessing to be with them during this most important time.

When Father G wrote about our Advent project with Father Tim Moyle and Saint Anne’s Parish in Mattawa, Ontario, and Father John Le here in Thailand, I got to experience first hand what it means to take part in a Corporal Work of Mercy. Visiting the Vietnamese refugee families with Father John and helping to distribute food is an unforgettable experience for which I am most thankful. I greatly admire Father John’s ministry in Thailand, which Father G has described at our Special Events page.

Here in Thailand, far beyond those stone walls, my heart aches that Father G is still behind them. I thank you for continuing to visit him in prison by reading these posts. I will always be indebted to you all for your acceptance of me, your kindnesses toward me, and the support of your prayers. I know that I would not have experienced this year in freedom without you. Father G will always be a part of my life and so will this wonderful blog.

May God bless you. With love to you all from me and Father G and from Hill too!

Pornchai Maximilian Moontri with his dog Hill. The tattoo on his arm is from a portrait of his Mother etched on his arm by an artistic prisoner after Pornchai learned of her death. It was his only means to memorialize and mourn her.

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

The Gospel of Luke issues a difficult challenge before Lent. The mother of a murdered young man heeded it and rose to become an advocate for her son’s former enemy.

February 16, 2022

Like most human beings, and entirely unlike Jesus, I have enemies. This needs some clarification. There were some who made themselves enemies of Jesus, but never did Jesus perceive them as such. I have as of yet been unable to rise to that Gospel challenge. That much became clear in our recent posts, “Predator Police: The New Hampshire ‘Laurie List’ Bombshell,” and its sequel, “Police Misconduct: A Crusader Cop Destroys a Catholic Priest.” That latter post, by Ryan MacDonald, took a surprising turn. Several days after it was posted, it had been shared only about 200 times on social media. Then, on Monday, January 31st, it suddenly exploded, gathering 2,300 shares on Facebook, thus placing that post before hundreds of thousands.

In recent weeks and months, there have been many assaults and other attacks on police officers. The vast majority of police are couragous and honest men and women who do their jobs heroically. The posts linked above are not at all about them. They are about a deceitful and self-righteous crusader who used sleazy and dishonest tactics to frame and entrap people, including me. Now, just weeks after those posts were published, I am confronted with a Gospel passage two weeks before Lent that I would rather not hear. But I did hear it.

Should a priest have enemies? It is not exactly a good look, but priests are human beings and most humans do not respond well to being hated or hunted, or falsely accused. The words “enemy” and “enemies” (for those who sadly have amassed more than one) occur in Sacred Scripture 526 times. What would the opposite word be to contrast it in Scripture? It isn’t “friend.” I know many people who are neither friends nor enemies to me. I even have some ex-friends who are certainly not my enemies. There is no word for an ex-enemy. But as I pondered all this, the Gospel for the Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time smacked me:

“Jesus said to his disciples, ‘To you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.’”

— Luke 6:27

I started splitting hairs upon reading this. Jesus said “To you who hear,” so what if I simply pretend I didn’t hear it? I could not handle the dishonesty that would entail, but I just don’t know what to do with what I heard. I tried praying for my enemy, but my prayer became corrupted: “I pray that my enemy will one day stand in the Presence of the Lord. Sooner rather than later might be nice!”

It isn’t a good prayer. I will have to try harder. The whole passage for this coming Sunday’s Mass ends, however, on a more reachable note. It is a statement that now haunts me with a call to arms. In this case, however, I am taking up arms not against my enemy, but against myself. It seems on first reading to be a lot easier than deciding to love my enemy and pray for him. Maybe that will come some day. Not today. But this final statement of Jesus concludes the Gospel for the Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time. Let it sink in. It's not for my enemy. It is for me:

“The measure with which you measure will in turn be measured out to you.”

— Luke 6:38

Way to go, Jesus! Please pass the Tylenol.

Divine Mercy Calls Forth Unexpected Role Models

I wrote a post back in 2012 that was one of a few that contained the photograph above. That post was “Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being.” It has been on our list of posts from the older version of this blog that had to be restored for you to read them anew. I asked that it be moved to the top of the list so you could read it for this post. No need to do so now. I will add a link to it at the end. It’s very important.

The young men in the photo above all graduated from high school in this prison after putting in years of hard work and even more years of struggle with themselves. The obstacles against learning the right things in this environment are very great. With the right kind of support, each one of them overcame these obstacles. The result was this triumphant photograph above. I am very proud of it, and the men who are in it — all gawking at me on the other side of the camera. With their diplomas in hand, they are victorious.

In the photo, my friend Alberto is hunched down just behind and to the right of Pornchai Moontri. For the previous two years, he had been a student of mine in a pilot program for exceptional prisoners to enroll in courses for college credit even while working on their high school diplomas. I was recruited for the program by a local community college to teach two courses in which I had earned degrees before prison in Philosophy and Behavioral Science.

Alberto was my student for four semesters, taking one course at a time. He failed both courses in the first two semesters. Alberto hinted that, with the stroke of a pen, I could rescue him with a “C.” But I did not. So he re-registered to take both courses again. He passed both the second time around with a respectable “B+.” I was very proud of him both when he failed, because he made an effort, and when he came back and excelled because he would not accept yet another defeat in life.

Alberto became a good friend to me and to Pornchai. When he wasn’t in trouble and hauled off for a stint in the hole, he lived where we lived. I mentioned him long ago in a 2010 post, “Angelic Justice: St. Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed.” Alberto read a hard copy of it because he was in it, and it became a turning point in his life. I cannot take credit for that because credit is rightly owed in equal measure to Pornchai Moontri and St. Michael.

In the Absence of Fathers

Alberto was 14 years old when the gun in his hand fired severing the artery of an 19-year-old with whom he struggled. It was a vicious end to a late night drug deal gone very bad in a dark Manchester, New Hampshire alley. It happened in 1994, the same year that I was sent to prison. It seemed a flip of a coin which combatant would die that night and which would survive only to wake up in prison. At 14, Alberto had lost himself. Sentenced to a prison term of 30 years to life, he spent his first years in solitary confinement. The experience extracted from him, as it also did from Pornchai, any light in his heart, any spark of optimism or hope in his eyes.

Then, when finally age 18, Alberto was allowed to live in the prison’s general population where the art of war is honed in daily spiritual and sometimes physical battle. It is a rare week that a City of Concord Fire Department ambulance doesn’t enter these prison walls shutting down all activity while some young man is taken to a local hospital after a beating or a stabbing or a headlong flight down some concrete stairs. The catalyst for such events is the same here as it was in the alley that sent Alberto here. There is no honor in any of it. It is just about drugs and gangs and money.

Alberto’s path to prison seemed inevitable. Abandoned by a father he never met, he was raised by a single mother who lost all control over him by age 12. Drugs and money and avoiding the law were the dominant themes of his childhood. By age 14, he was a child of the streets and nowhere else, but the streets make for the worst possible parents. Alberto became a textbook example of a phenomenon that I once wrote about to much public fanfare, but little public action: “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.”

In “Big Prison” it was discovered that there is more to Alberto than the violence of his past. He was 32 when he earned his high school diploma here. He will one day soon be released after having spent more than two-thirds of his life behind bars.

I wrote about Alberto’s life in “Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being.” Now I want to challenge you to go read it because at the end of it at the very top of its many comments is one by the mother of the young man Alberto killed. She read it too. In just a few short sentences, Mrs. Rose Emerson became a role model for pondering what Jesus says in the Gospel on the Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time:

“The measure with which you measure will in turn be measured out to you.”

Luke 6:38

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: The post that I suggested above — “Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being” — is now posted under the “Prison Journal” category of our BTSW Library. I would like to leave Mrs. Emerson’s comment as the final word on that post. If you wish to comment further, and I hope you will, please return here to place your comment on this post. In coming weeks or months we hope to present other powerful stories of hope and Divine Mercy encountered in prison.

Please share this post.

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Jesus calls forth Lazarus from his tomb.

To Christ the King Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary

The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception and the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe are both set during Advent. They are harbingers of the greatest story ever told.

December 8, 2021

For most of my life as a priest, I treated the visions at Lourdes, Fatima and other elements of our collective beliefs about Mary and the saints with entrenched skepticism. I considered myself to be a sort of scientist-priest. All knowledge had to be sifted by the scientific method using concepts such as objective scientific study with experiments that can be replicated in a laboratory.

Armed with studies of cosmology and astrophysics, and degrees in behavioral science, my inner world was both predictable and provable. I scoffed inwardly at the pious notion that the Mother of God has appeared in visions to some of the poorest people in some of the most unlikely places on this planet. I also, to my shame today, dismissed openly the notion that the wounds borne by Padre Pio were anything but psychosomatic evidence of an intense psychological focus on Christology.

Then came my Great Comeuppance. It was 1992 and I was living in New Mexico where I was Director of Admissions at a facility for spiritually and psychologically troubled priests. During those years I made regular pilgrimages to the Very Large Array, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the high desert of Socorro.

In 1992, I was visited by two priest friends, one from Maine and one from New York. I wanted to bring them to the desert observatory but they wanted to visit a Catholic shrine in the opposite direction north of Santa Fe where some sort of Marian miracle had once supposedly taken place there. I was not the one driving which really irked me all by itself — so their votes prevailed.

Sitting in the back seat of the car as we approached the shrine, I scoffed in silence and arrogantly dismissed their interest as spiritually immature fluff. What happened next I have never really been able to articulate with any clarity. I was stricken with a momentary inward vision of how small I am next to the immense power of grace that God has bestowed upon Mary.

It lasted only a moment. I could not see her with my eyes, but she became a momentary presence in the deep recesses of my mind. I could not have withstood more than a moment. And like an intense light, it left me with an echo of itself that has never left me. It cast me then into a state of inexplicable interior collapse. It was not fear, but rather overwhelming awe. It lingers nearly three decades later.

There was nothing about that experience that gave me any sense that I am anyone special, for I am not. Instead, it forced me to reinventory the tools necessary to see and encounter life as it is, and not as I would have it. I was wrong to think that the required tools of life are all intellectual, and I was wrong to think that I had them. Up until that day, I was missing the most essential of receivers and didn’t even know it.

Radio waves fill the atmosphere, but without a receiver, they remain silent. A spiritual life is our receiver. We ignore it, or just go through the motions, to our spiritual peril.

There have been other instances when I felt that I had been spoken to. I described two of those instances in two special posts that left me feeling that it just makes more sense to believe than not. Newer readers may not have seen those posts. They were: “A Shower of Roses” and “A Corner of the Veil.”

Inmates Pornchai Moontri (left) and Fr. Gordon MacRae (right) make their consecration to Jesus through Mary on Nov. 24, 2013, the Solemnity of Christ the King, in New Hampshire State Prison for Men. They pray to become instruments in Mary’s “immaculate and merciful hands for bringing the greatest possible glory to God.”

An Encounter with Christ the King

In a post some months ago, “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner,” I wrote of the years I spent in empty exile in prison before anything like a spiritual life began to manifest itself. For twelve years, from 1994 to 2006, I did little more than survive here with no sense of a purpose for the heavy cross I carried. As that post linked above reveals, my friend, Pornchai Moontri, spent those same twelve years in prison in the torment of solitary confinement in the neighboring state of Maine. In 2006, our lives converged.

From there, looking back with hindsight, it seems as though our parallel lives were meant to cross. Today, I am certain of that. As our lives converged, we were set — apparently by “accident” on a path that led Pornchai to a Divine Mercy conversion and led both of us to a relationship with a persistent Patron Saint. St. Maximilian Kolbe entered our lives in prison in mysterious ways, and then led us on a path to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

I would have scoffed at and dismissed such a story thirty years ago, but now I cannot because it has captured me in far greater ways than any unjust prison sentence. Over the course of our long walk along the path of Divine Mercy, other events began to unfold in our lives leading me to believe that everything that happened to me — though evil in and of itself — was somehow hijacked by Divine Mercy to bring about a great and wondrous good.

About sixty miles from this prison, Fr. Michael Gaitley, MIC, had been working on a book called “33 Days to Morning Glory.” It’s a self-directed retreat program that Father Gaitley used to develop a superb DVD presentation for a course in Divine Mercy which culminates in consecration of the self to Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The very language of this would likely have turned me away as a younger priest. My theology was far beyond such pious nonsense. That was all before my Comeuppance, however.

I did not know Father Gaitley then. Had never even heard of him. But because I had been writing about our story and Pornchai’s conversion, someone at the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Massachusetts took notice. As Father Gaitley’s 33 Days to Morning G1ory began to sweep the country with profound popularity, someone at the Shrine suggested that this retreat should be offered in a prison. Then they chose this prison, and invited me and Pornchai Moontri.

You likely know elements of this story from past posts about it, but there is a point that I must stress. Pornchai and I had, at the time, been through a series of grave disappointments and discouragement. It seemed at the time that prison was winning the battle for our souls and we felt powerless to interrupt it. We declined the invitation. In the days to follow, St. Maximilian Kolbe intervened, and we reluctantly agreed, but with my usual skepticism. There was, however, a nagging inner sense that we were being led to something of great importance.

It was the fall of 2013. The “33 Days” retreat ended with Mass in the prison chapel on the Solemnity of Christ the King on November 24 that year. It ended with our consecration to Christ through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a consecration I have renewed ever since on the Solemnity of Christ the King. Here is Fr. Michael Gaitley’s Consecration Prayer that we used:

“I,_____, a repentant sinner, renew and ratify today in your hands, O Immaculate Mother, the vows of my Baptism. I renounce Satan and resolve to follow Jesus Christ even more closely than before. Mary, I give you my heart. Please set it on fire with love for Jesus. Make it always attentive to His burning thirst for love and for souls. Keep my heart in your most pure Heart that I may love Jesus and the members of His body with your own perfect love. Mary, I entrust myself to you: my body and soul, my goods, both interior and exterior, and even the value of all my good actions. Please make of me, of all that I am and have, whatever most pleases you. Let me be a fit instrument in your immaculate and merciful hands for bringing the greatest possible glory to God. If I fall, please lead me back to Jesus. Wash me in the blood and water that flow from His pierced side, and help me never to lose my trust in this fountain of love and mercy. With you, O Immaculate Mother, you who always do the will of God, I unite myself to the perfect consecration of Jesus as he offers Himself in the Spirit to the Father for the life of the world. Amen.”

The Immaculate Conception

Why should anyone enter into such a personal consecration of the self? I have renewed this consecration on the Solemnity of Christ the King every year since 2013. Each time, I was carried back to that strange day at a New Mexico shrine in 1992 when Mary Herself knocked on the door of my soul. I have no other way to put it. Like Mary, I have since pondered these things in my heart (Luke 2:13), and they took over my heart.

The answer to why we should make such a consecration rests in the very identity of the Immaculate Conception. It is not a mere coincidence that at Mass for the Immaculate Conception, the Church chooses as the proclamation of the Gospel St. Luke’s account of the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38). I wrote of the same passage in “St. Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us.”

In that exchange between the Angel of the Annunciation and Mary, Gabriel, one of the Angels who stands in the Presence of God, refers to Mary with a term never before used in all of Sacred Scripture. Never before had an angel referred to a human being with a title and not a name: “Hail, Full of Grace, the Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). When translating the New Testament Greek into Latin, St. Jerome interpreted the Greek title used by Gabriel as “gratia plena” which, in English is rendered “full of grace.” No English words can fully capture the meaning of the original Greek.

The term in St. Luke’s original Greek is “kecharitōmenē,” a title unique in Sacred Scripture. It refers to a vessel that is, and always has been, filled with divine life. St. Maximilian Kolbe developed a fascinating identification of the Holy Spirit as the “Uncreated Immaculate Conception” and of Mary as the “Created Immaculate Conception,” living in an interior union, from the first moment of her existence, a “union of essence” with the Holy Spirit.

Some Catholics (I was once one of them) and some fundamentalist Protestant Christians rebel against such an interpretation as assigning a state of divinity to Mary. That is not the case. Another Greek phrase used of Mary by the Church Fathers is “Theotokos,” the “bearer of God,” a term that identifies Mary as the New Ark of the Covenant. It makes complete sense that God, from the moment of Mary’s bodily existence, created within her a union with the Holy Spirit. The same Protestant Christians also stress vehemently the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture. There is simply no other way to interpret what the Archangel Gabriel says to Mary — and says to us about Mary — in Luke Chapter One: “Kecharitōmenē” — one who lives in a union of essence with the Holy Spirit. Among all human beings, Mary lives a unique existence in the Presence of God.

At the beatification Mass for Maximilian Kolbe on October 17, 1971, Saint Pope Paul VI addressed this: “A mysterious communion unites Mary to Christ, a communion that is documented convincingly in the New Testament ... The Church is faithful to honor Mary, her most exceptional daughter and her spiritual Mother.”

Our Patron and friend on this path, St. Maximilian Kolbe, gave Mary another name: The Immaculata. He honored her with his life, and he handed over that life in the horror of Auschwitz to free another prisoner. While writing this post, I spoke by telephone with Pornchai Moontri in Thailand who also has been pondering.

He told me that he knows he would not be free today — in every sense of that word — if not for me. And it troubles him greatly, he said, that I remain unjustly in prison. He is wrong about this. If Pornchai is free, so am I. I know without a doubt today that the powerful grace instilled in my heart was for this singular purpose. I know this for two reasons. On the Solemnity of Christ the King in 2013, when Pornchai and I first entered into Marian consecration, Marian Helper magazine editor Felix Carroll wrote of it in “Mary Is at Work Here”:

“The Marians believe that Mary chose this particular group of inmates to be the first. That reason eventually was revealed. It turns out that one of the participating inmates was Pornchai Moontri who was featured in last year’s Marian Press Title, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions.”

However, the strongest hint came as I pondered all of this in my heart. It came as somewhat of a bombshell. I did a deep dive into the events I describe here and realized with astonishment that the inexplicable event I experienced at a New Mexico shrine in 1992 is what set this story in motion. It was during Holy Week in 1992. Just days before, some 2,000 miles away in Bangor, Maine, a desperate teenager fleeing a horror inflicted on him committed the act of despair that would send him to prison. Fourteen years later, our paths merged, and set us upon a road to Divine Mercy.

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A Note to readers from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Please share this post, and please visit our “Special Events” page to assist with an important Advent project and mission of Divine Mercy. This was the subject of my important Advent post, “A Struggling Parish Builds an Advent Bridge to Thailand.”

Marian Helper Editor, Felix Carroll invited me to write for the Jubilee Year of Mercy in 2016. That article, “The Doors That Have Unlocked,” is the featured post this week at “Voices from Beyond.”

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“O Come, Thou Key of David, come,

And open wide our heavenly home,

Make safe the path that sets us free,

And leads us on the road to liberty.

Rejoice! Rejoice! O Israel

To Thee shall come Emmanuel”

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Photo by Dennis Jarvis

Pornchai Moontri, Citizen of the Kingdom of Thailand

Pornchai Moontri waited 29 years for the image atop this post. His citizenship in the Kingdom of Thailand and his life in Divine Mercy have now come full circle.

November 3, 2021

High school and college students from Chile to China have accessed and downloaded one of my most-visited posts, “Les Miserables: The Bishop and the Redemption of Jean Valjean.” When I wrote it, I did not intend it to be a source for book reviews, but I'm happy to be of service. With over a century of reflection on this longest and most famous of Victor Hugo’s works, the redemption of a former prisoner and the Catholic bishop who set it in motion are what many people find most inspiring.

Jean Valjean is the main character in Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, Les Miserables, about injustices in Nineteenth Century French society. At the time he wrote it, Hugo had been exiled by Emperor Napoleon to the Isle of Guernsey. Like the Amazon “woke” of today, Napoleon censored and suppressed many writers and their works.

After 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread, Jean Valjean was condemned to live on-the-run with self-righteous Inspector Javert in constant pursuit. Near starvation himself, Valjean stole two silver candlesticks from the home of a Catholic bishop. When caught, the bishop stated that the police were misinformed: “The silver was a gift,” he said. That set in motion a story of two of literature’s most noble figures, Jean Valjean and Bishop Bienvenue.

One of the great ironies of the novel is something I wrote about in the above post. After reading a draft, Victor Hugo’s adult son wanted the character of the bishop replaced with someone whose honesty and integrity would seem more realistic in Nineteenth Century France. He wanted the bishop replaced by a lawyer.

I hope most of our readers have by now divested themselves of the notion that everyone in prison is a criminal. It is not true and has never been true. And I hope readers recognize that there is nothing more essential for someone emerging from prison than a sense that he or she belongs somewhere. Being lost without hope in prison only to become lost without hope in freedom crushes all that is left of the human spirit.

This is something that, 16 years ago, I vowed would not happen to my friend, Pornchai Moontri. We were faced with the prospect that he would emerge from prison, and in a foreign land, after nearly 30 years incarcerated for an offense committed as a youth, an offense that someone else set in motion. The clear and compelling evidence for that is laid out in my post, “Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri.”

You know the rest of what happened. It is terribly painful to read, but no one should let that story pass by. Pornchai’s “going home” was far more complicated than most. He had a home as a poor but happy eleven-year-old. Having been abandoned by his single parent mother at age two, he grew up with an aunt and cousins who lived a simple, but by no means privileged, life. They loved him, and that counts for an awful lot in life. Then at age eleven he was suddenly taken away by a total stranger.

Pornchai at age 12 just after his arrival in America, and just before the events of this post took place. To the right, Pornchai prays at the tomb of his mother for the first time upon his arrival in Thailand in March 2021.

Home Is Where the Heart Is, Even If Broken

If you have been a regular reader of these pages, then you already know the circumstances that took Pornchai Moontri, at age 11, from the rice paddies and water buffalo of his childhood in the rural north of Thailand to the streets of Bangor, Maine. America was dangled before him with a promise that he would never be hungry again. The reality was very different. He was a victim of human trafficking. His mother, the only other person who knew of the horrific abuse inflicted on him, was murdered.

At age 14, Pornchai escaped from his nightmare existence into life on the streets of Bangor, Maine, a homeless adolescent stranded in a foreign land. On March 21, 1992, at age 18, he was attacked in a supermarket parking lot for trying to drown his sorrows in a shoplifted can of beer. In the struggle, a life was lost and Pornchai descended into despair. He was sent to prison into the madness of long term solitary confinement. Then, 14 years later, broken and lost, he was moved to another prison and was moved in with me.

In 2020, Pornchai was taken away again from his home — this time “home” was the 60-square-foot prison cell that he shared with me for the previous 15 years. During those years he had a dramatic Catholic conversion and committed himself and his life to Divine Mercy. He graduated from high school with high honors, earned two additional diplomas, and excelled in courses of Catholic Distance University. He became a mentor for younger prisoners, and a master craftsman in woodworking.

After 29 years in prison since age 18, 36 years after being taken from his home at age eleven, after five months in grueling ICE detention despite all the BS promises of a “kinder, gentler President” in the White House, Pornchai was left in Bangkok, Thailand on February 9, 2021 at age 47.

Sitting in my prison cell one night in late September 2021, a tiny number “1” suddenly appeared above the message icon on my GTL tablet. Unlike your email, the GTL tablet system for sale to prisoners is all about enhancing the GTL Corporation, not the prison or the prisoner. At $150 for the tablet, $.40 for each short message, $1.00 for a photo attachment, and $2.00 for a 15-second video, it feels exploitive. But after 27 years without electronic communication, the sight of that tiny number at the icon makes my heart jump a bit.

The message was from Pornchai Moontri in Thailand. It had a 15-second video clip that I wish I could post for you. We will have to settle for my description. In a dark prison cell in Concord, New Hampshire, I reached for my ear phones hoping that the brief video also had audio. It did. When I opened it, I saw my friend, Pornchai seated at a table in the dark with a small cake and a few lit candles illuminating his face.

Several people stood around Pornchai chanting “Happy Birthday” in Thai. There was a unified “clap-clap-clap” after each of several verses of the chant. Then, surrounded by the family of his cousin whom he last saw when they lived as brothers at age 11 in 1985, Pornchai distinctly made the Sign of the Cross, paused, and blew out the candles. There was an odd moment of silence just then. A sense that some hidden grace had filled the room. His cousin looked upon him with a broad smile, captured in the images below.

In my own darkness many thousands of miles away from this scene, I choked up as I took in this 15-seconds of happiness. I miss my friend, but my tears were not of sadness. They were of triumph. This was Pornchai’s 48th birthday and his first in freedom from the heavy crosses of his past.

And the Sea Will Surrender Its Dead

With the help of a few readers who contributed to the cause, I sent Pornchai some birthday funds to enable him to travel a few hours away for a week at the Gulf of Thailand to see the ocean for the first time in his life, and to connect with his cousin, now an officer in the Royal Thai Navy. As children in 1985, they lived together in the village of Phu Wiang (pronounced “poo-vee-ANG”), the place of Pornchai’s birth in the far rural northeast of Thailand. This seaside reunion with his cousin after 36 years was like a balm on the pain of the past as though the sea had surrendered its dead.

As I write this post, Pornchai is back in Phu Wiang, a 9-hour drive from Bangkok, accompanied by Fr John Hung Le, SVD and Pornchai’s Thai tutor, Khun Chalathip. Since his arrival in Thailand in February of 2021, this is his third visit to the shadowy memories of the place he once knew as home. I described his traumatic first visit there accompanied by Father John — to whom I am much in debt.

Then there was a second trip, again nine hours north accompanied by Father John whose order’s Thai headquarters were just a few kilometers from Pornchai’s place of birth. It is mind-boggling to me that the Holy Spirit had previously drawn together all these threads of connection. That second visit was his second attempt to secure his National Thai ID. It is generally issued at age 16 in Thailand to ratify citizenship and entry into adulthood, but through no fault of his own, Pornchai was not present to receive it.

The first trip to apply for the Thai ID was met with bureaucratic disappointment. I described that first pilgrimage to home in, “For Pornchai Moontri a Miracle Unfolds in Thailand.” Discouraged, Pornchai was told that he will have to return at some future date while documents are again processed through Bangkok and the Thai Embassy in Washington.

The second journey seemed more hopeful. Pornchai was accompanied by not only Father John, but by someone I wrote about in “Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri.” Pornchai was still told to come back later to apply again. He felt like the Tin Man standing before the Wizard of Oz pleading for his heart. Then, on October 11, 2021 the third pilgrimage was a success. Pornchai was elated to have the image atop this post, and so was I. It represents an accomplishment for which we both struggled for 16 years from inside the same prison cell where I sat that night watching the video of his first birthday in freedom.

That was 16 years together in a place not exactly known for happy endings, redemptive outcomes, and a state of grace. Pornchai and I handed our lives over to Divine Mercy. In the end, as you know if you have kept up, it turned out that even in prison Saint Paul was right. In a place “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” (Romans 5:20)

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A Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Please visit our Special Events page for information on how to help me help Pornchai in the daunting task of reclaiming his life and future in Thailand after a 36 year absence. I am also doing all I can to assist Fr. John Hung Le, SVD, who delivers rice to impoverished families during the pandemic lockdown. Thailand’s migrant families have been severely impacted since the Delta variant emerged there.

You may also wish to read and share these related posts:

For Pornchai Moontri, a Miracle Unfolds in Thailand

Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

Don’t forget to visit our new feature Voices from Beyond.

Pornchai, Father John Le, and Pornchai’s Thai tutor Khun Chalathip after Mass at the village Church of Saint Joseph in Phu Wiang, Thailand, October 24, 2021.

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

A Parable of Divine Mercy: Pornchai Moontri had a first birthday in freedom on September 10. One third of his life passed in a prison cell with a Catholic priest.

September 8, 2021

Jesus taught in parables, a word which comes from the Greek, paraballein, which means to “draw a comparison.” Jesus turned His most essential truths into simple but profound parables that could be easily pondered, remembered, and retold. The genre was not unique to Jesus. There are several parables that appear in our Old Testament. I wrote of one some time ago — though now I cannot recall which post it was — about the Prophet Jonah.

The Book of Jonah is one of a collection of twelve prophetic books known in the Hebrew Scriptures as the Minor Prophets. The Book of Jonah tells of events — some historical and some in parable form — in the life of an 8th-century BC prophet named Jonah. At the heart of the story, Jonah was commanded by God to go to Nineveh to convert the city from its wickedness. Nineveh was an ancient city on the Tigris River in what is now northern Iraq near the modern city of Mosul. It was the capital of the Assyrian Empire from 705-612 BC.

Jonah rebelled against the command of God and went in the opposite direction, boarding a ship to continue his flight from “the Presence of the Lord.” When a storm arose and the ship was imperiled, the mariners blamed Jonah and cast him into a raging sea. He was swallowed by “a great fish” (1:17), spent three days and nights in its belly, and then the Lord spoke to the fish and Jonah “was spewed out upon dry land” ( 2: 10) . ( I could add, as a possible aside, that the great fish might later have been sold at market, but there was no longer any prophet in it!)

Then God, undaunted by his rebellion, again commanded Jonah to go to Nineveh. Jonah finally went, did his best, the people repented, and God saved them from destruction. Many biblical scholars regard this part of the Book of Jonah as a parable. Jesus Himself referred to the Jonah story as a presage, a type of parable account pointing to His own death and Resurrection:

“Some of the scribes and Pharisees said to him, 'Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.' But he answered them, 'An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given except the sign of the Prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days in the belly of the giant fish so for three days and three nights, the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.”

— Matthew 12:38-40

What I take away from the parable part of the story of Jonah is that there is no point fleeing from “the Presence of the Lord.” God is not a puppeteer dangling and directing us from strings. Rather, the threads of our lives are intertwined with the threads of other lives in ways mysterious and profound. I have written several times of what I call “The Great Tapestry of God.” Within that tapestry — which in this life we see only from our place among its tangled threads — God connects people in salvific ways, and asks for our cooperation with these threads of connection.

The Parable of the Priest

I was slow to awaken to this. For too many days and nights in wrongful imprisonment, I pled my case to the Lord and asked Him to send someone to deliver me from this present darkness. It took a long time for me to see that perhaps I have been looking at this unjust imprisonment from the wrong perspective. I have railed against the fact that I am powerless to change it. I can only change myself. I know the meaning of the Cross of Christ, but I was spiritually blind to my own. Ironically, in popular writing, prison is sometimes referred to as “the belly of the beast.”

After a dozen years of railing against God in prison, I slowly came to the possible realization that no one was sent to help me because maybe I am the one being sent. My first nudge in this direction came upon reading one of the most mysterious passages in all of Sacred Scripture. It arose when I pondered what exactly happened to Jesus between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, the three days He refers to in the Sign of Jonah parable in the Gospel of Matthew above. A cryptic hint is found in the First Letter of Peter:

“For it is better to suffer for good, if suffering should be God's will, than to suffer for evil. For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit, in which he also went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison who in former times did not obey.”

— 1 Peter 3:17-20

The second and much stronger hint also came to me in 2006, twelve years after my imprisonment commenced. This may be a familiar story to long time readers, but it is essential to this parable. I was visited in prison by a priest who learned of me from a California priest and canon lawyer whom I had never even met. The visiting priest was Father James McCurry, a Conventual Franciscan who, unknown to me at the time, had been a postulator for the cause of sainthood of St. Maximilian Kolbe whom I barely knew of.

Our visit was brief, but pivotal. Father McCurry asked me what I knew about Saint Maximilian Kolbe. I knew very little. A few days later, I received in the mail a letter from Father McCurry with a holy card (we could receive cards then, but not now). The card depicted Saint Maximilian in his Franciscan habit over which he partially wore the tattered jacket of an Auschwitz prisoner with the number, 16670. I was strangely captivated by the image and taped it to the battered mirror in my cell.

Later that same day, I realized with profound sadness that on the next day — December 23, 2006 — I would be a priest in prison one day longer than I had been a priest in freedom. At the edge of despair, I had the strangest sense that the man in the mirror, St. Maximilian, was there in that cell with me. I learned that he was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982, the year I was ordained. I spent a lot of time pondering what was in his heart and mind as he spontaneously stepped forward from a line of prisoners and asked permission to take the place of a weeping young man condemned to death by starvation. I wrote of the cell where he spent his last days in “Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance.”

On the very next day after pondering that man in the mirror on Christmas Eve, 2006 — a small but powerful book arrived for me. It was Man’s Search for Meaning, by Auschwitz survivor, Dr. Viktor Frankl, a Jewish medical doctor and psychiatrist who was the sole member of his family to survive the horror of the concentration camps. I devoured the little book several times. It was one of the most meaningful accounts of spiritual survival I had ever read. Its two basic premises were that we have one freedom that can never be taken from us: We have the freedom to choose the person we will be in any set of circumstances.

The other premise was that we will be broken by unending suffering unless we discover meaning in it. I was stunned to see at the end of this Jewish doctor’s book that he and many others attributed, in part, their survival of Auschwitz to Maximilian Kolbe “who selflessly deprived the camp commandant of his power over life and death.”

The Parable of a Prisoner

God did not will the evil through which Maximilian suffered and died, but he drew from it many threads of connection that wove their way into countless lives, and now I was among them. For Viktor Frankl, a Jewish doctor with an unusual familiarity with the Gospel, Maximilian epitomized the words of Jesus, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)

I asked the Lord to show me the meaning of what I had suffered. It was at this very point that Pornchai Moontri showed up in the Concord prison. I have written of our first meeting before, but it bears repeating. I was, by “chance,” late in the prison dining hall one evening. It was very crowded with no seats available as I wandered around with a tray. I was beckoned from across the room by J.J., a young Indonesian man whom I had helped with his looming deportation. “Hey G! Sit here with us. This is my new friend, Ponch. He just got here.”

Pornchai sat in near silence as J.J. and I spoke. I was shifting in my seat as Pornchai’s dagger eyes, and his distrust and rage were aimed in my direction. J.J. told him that I can be trusted. Pornchai clearly had extreme doubts.

Over the next month, Pornchai was moved in and out of heightened security because he was marked as a potential danger to others. Then one day as 2006 gave way to 2007, I saw him dragging a trash bag with his few possessions onto the cell block where I lived. He paused at my cell door and looked in. He stepped toward the battered mirror and saw the image of St. Maximilian Kolbe in his Franciscan habit and Auschwitz jacket and he stared for a time. “Is this you?” he asked.

Within a few months, Pornchai’s roommate moved away and I was asked to move in with him. Less than four years later, to make this long and winding parable short, Pornchai was received into the Catholic faith on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010. Two years after that, on the Solemnity of Christ the King, 2012, we both followed Saint Maximilian Kolbe into Consecration to Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Most readers likely know by now the depth of the wounds Pornchai experienced in life. He was abandoned as a child in Thailand, suffered severe malnutrition, and then, at age eleven, he fell into the hands of a monster. He was taken from his country and the only family he knew, and was brought to the U.S. where he suffered years of unspeakable abuse. He escaped to a life of homelessness, living on the streets as a teenager in what was to him a foreign land. At age 18, he accidentally killed a much larger man during a struggle, and was sent to prison.

Pornchai’s mother, the only other person who knew of the years of abuse he suffered, was murdered on the Island of Guam after being taken there by the man who abused him. In 2018, after I wrote this entire account, that man, Richard Alan Bailey, was brought to justice and convicted of forty felony counts of sexual abuse of Pornchai. After the murder of his mother at that man’s hands, Pornchai gave up on life and spent the next seven years in the torment of solitary confinement in a supermax prison in the State of Maine. From there, he was moved here with me.

Over the ensuing years, as I gradually became aware of the enormity of Pornchai’s suffering, I felt compelled to act in the only manner available to me. I followed Saint Maximilian Kolbe into the Gospel passage that characterized his life in service to his fellow prisoners: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)

I asked the Lord, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, to free Pornchai from his past and the seemingly impenetrable prisons that held him bound. I offered the Lord my life and freedom just as Maximilian did on that August day of 1941. Then I witnessed the doors of Divine Mercy open to us.

This blog began just then. In the time he spent with me, Pornchai graduated from high school with honors, earned two additional diplomas in guidance and psychology, enrolled in theology courses at Catholic Distance University, and became an effective mentor for younger prisoners in a Fast Track program. He tutored young prisoners in mathematics as they pursued high school equivalency, and, as I have written above, he had a celebrated conversion to the Catholic faith, a story captured by Felix Carroll in his famous book, Loved, Lost, Found.

Pornchai became a master craftsman in woodworking, and taught his skill to other prisoners. One of his model ships is on display in a maritime museum in Belgium. His conversion story spread across the globe. After taking part in a number of Catholic retreat programs sponsored by Father Michael Gaitley and the Marians of the Immaculate Conception, Pornchai was honored as a Marian Missionary of Divine Mercy. So was I, but only because I was standing next to him.

One of the most beautiful pieces of writing that has graced this blog was not written by me, nor was it written for me. It was written for you. It was a post by Canadian writer Michael Brandon, a man I have never met, a man who silently followed the path of this parable for all these years. His presentation is brief, but unforgettable, and I will leave you with it. It is, “The Parable of the Prisoner.”

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Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Gift of Noble Defiance

Book: Man’s Search for Meaning

Book: Loved, Lost, Found

The Parable of the Prisoner

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: On September 10, Pornchai will mark his 48th birthday. It is his first birthday in freedom. In 2020 on that date he was just beginning a grueling five months in ICE detention awaiting deportation. For the previous 29 years he was in prison. For the four years before that he was a homeless teenager having fled from a living nightmare.

I asked him what he would like for his birthday, and this was his response:

“I have never seen the ocean. I would like to go to the Gulf of Thailand and visit my cousin who was eight years old when I was eleven and last saw him. He is now an officer in the Thai Navy.”

Please visit our “SPECIAL EVENTS” page, and our BTSW Library category for posts about Pornchai.

Beyond These Stone Walls in Thailand by Pornchai Moontri

Brought to America as a child victim of human trafficking, Pornchai Moontri was deported to Thailand 36 years later. This is his progress in a life starting over.

July 21, 2021

In the photo above, Pornchai Moontri, Fr. John Hung Le, SVD, and Pornchai's Thai language teacher, Mea Thim Chalathip, escape the heat after a day of recollection with the Bangkok Oblates of Mary Immaculate community.

Editor’s Note: This is Pornchai Moontri’s second post since his arrival in Thailand in February, 2021. His most recent was “Free at Last Thanks to God and You!” These are no longer “guest posts.” Beyond These Stone Walls is now Pornchai’s home away from home.

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To all my friends Beyond These Stone Walls, Sawasdee Kup! That is the traditional Thai greeting. I am writing to you from just a few kilometers north of the City of Bangkok, Thailand. In Thai, Bangkok is called Krung Thep meaning, “City of Angels.” (I’m not kidding! It was called that even before I got here!)

Father Gordon MacRae and I have been talking about another post from me. It is not easy for me to write because there is too much to say to fit in one post. I will send this to Father G first so he can fix it up a little. I am struggling right now between multiple confusing languages, but I will tell you more about that in a minute.

What someone wrote about Beyond These Stone Walls being sort of my “home away from home” makes me smile. It is a long time since I had a home. I told Father G once that the only place I remember feeling “at home” was in a prison cell with him for 15 years. A lot has happened since the day I said that. I left Concord, New Hampshire where I last saw Father G on September 8, 2020. The five months after that were spent in ICE detention while waiting for deportation. That was really awful and I will tell you more about it. In the five months since my arrival here, I have mostly just felt overwhelmed.

Father G wrote about the day I left in a very moving post, “Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls.” It tells the story of how, through my Godfather, the late Pierre Matthews, Padre Pio became one of our two patron saints. I will never forget the morning I left that Father G wrote about in that post. When I arrived in Thailand, I read in tears about the rest of Father Gordon’s first day without me.

I want to tell you about all the challenges I face now. Just like the local news, I will start with the weather. Thailand is south of the Tropic of Cancer and stretches down the Malay Peninsula almost to the Equator. After 36 years of my life a lot farther north on the far side of the world in Maine and New Hampshire, the tropical heat of Thailand is at the top of my list of things that take some getting used to.

On the day I am writing this in July it is 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) and very humid. Converting to Celsius has not been easy. I am used to the other scale, so I never know what the temperature is. The choices are hot, very hot, and sizzling. The air conditioner where I live broke down a few weeks ago so I have been making do with a fan. While trying to write this, I shivered when I got my bill for a new air conditioner — 26,000 Thai baht — which thankfully turned out to be only $800. Whew!

Handling money has been another challenge. For 29 years in prison in America, I never even saw money. There is not much in the way of practical living skills that are taught to prisoners, most of whom end up with no idea of what things cost. In Thailand, that adjustment has been doubled. The Thai unit of money is the "baht," and the rate of exchange varies from week to week. Right now one U.S. dollar equals about 32 Thai baht. I was shocked once when dinner in a Thai restaurant cost 256 baht, but turned out to be only $8.00.

Technologically Challenged

Another big adjustment has been the metric system. As most of you know, I was taken from Thailand sort of traumatically at age eleven. A long and winding road brought me back at age 47 with only shadowy memories of Thailand and the people left behind here, and no memory at all of the metric system.

Father G once wrote about an episode of Family Guy in which Stuey went back to school as an adult. When the teacher handed out a math test, the students reached into their desks for calculators. But Stuey pulled out an Asian boy and poked him with his pencil saying, “Do Math. Do Math.” I am naturally good at math so whenever someone asked for help, Father G would poke me with a pencil saying, “Do math!” I was proud of the fact that I usually had the answers even before Father G could turn on his calculator.

But now the constant conversions are a way bigger math test. I walk around with calculations blazing through my mind to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit and the English system to metric. This is second on my “big adjustment” list. There are no longer inches or feet or miles, no ounces or quarts or gallons, not even pounds or tons. I lost a lot of weight in my five months in ICE. I started off at 195 pounds. Now I weigh 80 kilograms. When I work out I used to bench press 360 pounds. Now I can only manage 165 kilos.

With help, I have been learning to drive here which is also a double adjustment. I never drove a car, of course, in the 29 years I was in a U.S. prison (15 of them with Father G). Learning to drive now means learning it in reverse of what I had known. Thailand drives on the left side of the road with the steering wheel on the right side of the car. I have had a lot of help with this so far, and for that I am thankful.

But nothing is as big a challenge as technology. Father G used to joke that we will be like techno-cavemen when we leave prison. After 36 years away from my homeland and 29 years in prison, everything I do or touch is new to me. When I arrived, I had to spend 14 days in a Bangkok Holiday Inn, a period of Covid-19 quarantine required by the Thai government. Our friends here left me a really cool Samsung smart phone so I could communicate with Father G and others. I had never in my life used or even seen a smart phone.

Father G marveled at how fast I learned how to use the phone, but it was a matter of survival. I felt so alone and stranded that I spent my first night in Thailand in the hotel room finding and exploring Beyond These Stone Walls for the first time. I watched the two-hour Video Documentary Interview with Father G. It was wonderful and comforting to see and hear my friend and spiritual father again.

Father G is still behind those stone walls, and that makes me sad, but we talk for about a half hour every day by telephone. He calls me at 9:00 PM which is 8:00 AM the next morning for me. That also takes some getting used to. I am up before 6:00 AM each day which is 7:00 PM the night before for Father G. I spend the first two hours of each day working out. I have found this to be very important for my physical, mental and even spiritual well-being. So my first investment in Thailand was a weight set, mats and power bench. Father G helped me to purchase it. He calls each day right at the end of my workout.

Using the phone app on his GTL tablet, he calls me from the cell where we once both lived, and where he lives still. GTL allows internet-based calls from prison to Thailand at a cost of about 96 Thai baht for thirty minutes. That is about three U.S. dollars. It is not a big expense. Even after ten months since I left Concord, this is still an important part of my day and Father G’s.

I sometimes get impatient with myself, but Father G reminds me that I “just got here.” I feel as though I should be further along in learning Thai language, history and culture, the metric system, driving on the left side of the road, and not having to “report in” every time I do anything or go anywhere. The name, Thailand, means “Land of the Free,” but even that became part of my adjustment. I often have to remind myself that I am free. Few of the people around me understand this. The list of adjustments goes on and on but I guess I am the last to notice my progress.

The late Fr. Seraphim Michalenko, MIC, was a postulator for the cause of sainthood of St. Faustina. He interviewed Pornchai and Fr. Gordon in prison.

Suffering and Divine Providence

As most readers know, I became a Catholic in 2010 due to living with an extreme example of what that means. My journey to the Catholic faith was centered around Father G and Divine Mercy. I learned about Divine Mercy thanks to him and to my friendship with Father Michael Gaitley, Felix Carroll, and Eric Mahl. The Catholic League president, Dr. Bill Donohue, also had a hand in this.

Father Gaitley invited me to become a Marian Missionary of Divine Mercy. Felix Carroll drew me into the Association of Marian Helpers, and wrote about me in a chapter in his book, Loved, Lost, Found. Bill Donohue gave me honorary membership in the Catholic League, and also wrote about me several times. Father G and I joined St. Maximilian’s Militia of the Immaculata and Knights at the Foot of the Cross. It is a lot to take in, and all of it very much influenced my faith journey. Divine Providence was another matter. I never understood it until I found myself face to face with it.

Father G says it is hard to believe that I have been gone for ten months. I have actually been in Thailand for only five months. The other five were spent in ICE which he has written about. (See “ICE Finally Cracks! Pornchai Moontri Arrives in Thailand.”) The five long months awaiting deportation in ICE detention were a terrible ordeal, but for me and Father G it turned into a story of Divine Providence. I did not understand that at all until Father G and I had a phone conversation about it. Here is what I learned.

When a person has been deprived of good things in life, like parents, family, safety, a home, acceptance, love, freedom, even at times food and shelter, then the bad things in life become normal. When I was handed over to ICE and became buried in another overcrowded prison with total strangers in Jenna, Louisiana, all I could think of was all the good things I once had. I began to feel that I lost them all. Trust was the first thing I lost.

Father G saw to it that I had numbers to call no matter where I was. It took time for him to find me and be able to speak to me. Thanks to Claire Dion in Maine, a way was devised for us to speak each day even for a few minutes. The promised ICE flight to Thailand was delayed again and again for weeks and then months. I began to despair because of the awful circumstances in which I was living. I could not have made it through this if not for Father G.

By the fifth month of my detention, my call to Father G became routine. I was bitterly thinking that the delays will never end and he would say to me the same thing every day: “The day will come when you will walk out of there to a new life.” At first I was clinging to that, and then I started to no longer believing it. Each day, we both prayed deeply for an end to this suffering. Father G challenged me to try to help others. I did try.

Over the last eleven years since my conversion, Father G and I worked hard to come up with a plan for my future survival once we knew that I would one day be sent back to Thailand. In my mind, it was all like a big black hole. All I knew was America, and all I really knew about America was its prisons. The promise of Heaven for someone who has only known Hell can feel empty and too far beyond reach. I blocked out any expectation of good things because of my past experiences of bitter disappointment.

Then one day, in my daily call from ICE, Father G dropped a bomb with great reluctance. He told me that our plan for housing and support that we had spent years building suddenly fell apart. The founder of Divine Mercy Thailand, the man who was to take me in and give me a home, fell critically ill and was hospitalized. I prayed daily for him, but he passed away. In my mind, this was a crushing blow.

Father G did not want any surprises so he told me all of this. He said he did not want me to hear of this from anyone else. For me, it seemed as though all hope had gone out of the world. Then Yela, our Bangkok friend from the Divine Mercy apostolate, told Father G in an email that Father John Hung Le from the Missionary Society of the Divine Word had been reading about us and offered his home to me. My strongest feeling was that I did not want to be a burden for anyone, but my choices were gone.

Father G said that when everything we hope for feels gone, the only task left is trust. Father John turned out to be a very good priest and a very great friend. He is also a carpenter so we have a lot in common. He has become a good friend to Father G as well.

Some of Father John’s community and friends rallied around me when I arrived. Mea Thim, a retired Thai language teacher, began to tutor me daily in Thai language studies and has been very patient with me. She is also teaching me to drive and to acclimate to Thailand. Not having even heard Thai spoken in 36 years, and having never learned to read or write Thai, my progress feels slow but others say I am improving right on track.

Thailand is now in the middle of another strict shutdown due to a new Covid variant outbreak from India. Father G just told me that the Wall Street Journal has reported that the Thai government has lost confidence in Sinovac, a vaccine from China and the only one available in Thailand. All gatherings have been prohibited and a stay-in-place order is enforced. My required national Thai ID has been delayed for months so I cannot yet work, open a bank account, obtain medical care or a vaccine, or even board a train. Father John and I help each other, and I am busier than ever.

Strangely — Divine Providence again — the Thai headquarters for Father John’s Order are in Nong Bua Lamphu Province, nine hours drive north near the very village I was taken from 36 years ago. We have traveled up there three times for Father John’s missionary work with Vietnamese refugees, seminarians and migrant workers. We stay at the house my mother began to build before her death in 2000. My Aunt and cousins are there and I have reunited with them. After 36 years, they are now my family again. I have two families now, at opposite ends of the Kingdom of Thailand that I now call home.

And Father G, the man who showed me the Path to God, is still with me every day. He has told me that if our prayers were answered, if I had not suffered those five months in ICE, if God had given in to our pleas for my deliverance, then all would now be different and none of what I have just described in this post would be my reality.

This, he says, is the work of Divine Providence and I am astonished by it. On the day I left Father G, I said to him, “Thank you for giving me a future.” I had no idea how promising it would be.

The odds against all of this coming together are mathematically astronomical. When I come face to face with God, I want to poke Him with my pencil and say, “Do Math! Do Math!”

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A Postscript to readers from Pornchai:

I want to express my very deep gratitude to all of those who have assisted me over these months of transition. Your gifts for food, shelter, and the expense of starting life over have moved me profoundly. Please accept my apology for being unable to write to each one of you personally. You know who you are, and so do I. I pray for you every day.

With love and gratitude, Pornchai Moontri

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Editor’s Note: Please share this post. The Wall Street Journal has been reporting about recent events in Thailand. A new variation of Covid is creating havoc for the country, its economy and especially the well-being of its people. If you wish to help our friends, please also visit our “Special Events” page.

And you may also like these important related posts:

Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri

Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls

Free at Last Thanks to God and You!

After Mass at the OMI Center near Bangkok. (Pornchai Moontri and Fr. John Hung Le, SVD, are third and fourth from the right. On the far right is Pornchai’s Thai teacher Mea Thim Chalathip.)

Spring Cleaning for the Cover of Better Cells and Gardens

Inspection time means cleaning and decluttering life in sixty square feet while two men simultaneously live in it. We are decluttering Beyond These Stone Walls too.

Having used it twice in the above description for this post, it troubles me that “declutter” is not actually a word. It should be. I cannot think of another way to describe the process of making a disastrous-looking space look as though no one actually lives in it. It’s an annual process in prison called spring inspection and it takes place this week.

“Clutter,” all by itself, is an interesting word. It means “a confused or disorganized state,” or “to litter a space in a piled or disorganized manner.” It comes from the Middle English word, “cloteren” meaning “to clot or lump together, as in a pile.” I am writing a shorter than usual post this week because I must spend a few days decluttering, sanitizing, and humanizing the 60-square feet in which I live with another person.

In the sixteen years in which I lived with Pornchai Moontri, who is much missed, he happily left most of the decluttering to me. My current roommate had the idea that decluttering simply means moving most of his clutter around in the room. So I am honoring a past tradition and taking command of the process. It cannot be any other way. Two grown men cannot declutter such a space at the same time and still be speaking at the end of the day.

I am not controlling by nature, but most prisoners are packrats. I am the rare exception. So instead of having to call for a one-to-one vote on every empty plastic container that made its way into this cell for some unknown possible but improbable future use, I have assumed the task of decluttering while discerning treasure from trash.

The Clutter of a Patron Saint

The process is made worse this year due to the long periods in pandemic lockdown. We spent a lot more time trapped in this cell among our clutter. I am no paradigm of neatness either. Whereas my assigned roommate’s treasure of choice is plastic, mine is paper: newspaper, writing paper, photocopies, clippings, articles, just about everything I have come across in my ravenous reading that I thought I might someday write about.

Last year, a reader sent me a printed photo of the personal desk of St. Maximilian Kolbe just before he was taken to Auschwitz. His desk, pictured above, made me feel more accepting of my clutter. The reader wanted to know if my desk looks like this. I don’t actually have a desk so I thought it safe to ask Pornchai-Max about my neatness. “Your bed sometimes looks worse than that desk,” he said.

Pornchai was right. I pile onto my bunk everything I am working on each day. By the end of the day, I must either finish a post or pile everything somewhere else so I can sleep. When I type a post, I place a trash can next to my bunk. Then I place on top of it a large covered clear plastic storage box about the size of a 50-gallon aquarium. It holds the sum total of my life’s work. Then I place my typewriter on top of the box on top of the trash can and sit on the edge of my bunk to type. It makes for a wobbly typing desk, but so far we have avoided any catastrophes.

So before the day of reckoning arrives this week, I have two trash bags ready, one for plastic and one for paper. “I can’t watch!” said my roommate, John, as he shuddered at the coming decluttering. I know he will want to measure the results. The amount of discarded plastic had better not be greater than the amount of discarded paper. I recall the words of Jesus: “The measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.” (Luke 6:38)

Decluttering Beyond These Stone Walls

September 23, 2020 marked the completion of my 26th year in prison. On that same day, we posted “Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls.” It was to honor our other Patron Saint whose Feast Day is also the date I was sent to prison. I will never be able to forget all that was happening as I wrote that post. Two weeks earlier, on September 8th, Pornchai Moontri was taken away by ICE agents to commence what neither of us knew would be a grueling five months in ICE detention awaiting deportation during a global pandemic.

Early on that day, I stood on the walkway outside my cell high above the prison yard. After sixteen years as friends and roommates through many trials and crosses, I saw Pornchai down below in what was to be my last glimpse of him in this life. I shouted the traditional Thai greeting and farewell, “Sawasdee kup, Khun Pornchai.” It echoed off the walls as he turned and waved, and then he walked through the gate and was gone.

In that same week, I learned that something strange was happening in the background of These Stone Walls, the blog for which I had written for eleven years. Posts that were very important to me were being altered and images removed without explanation. Not long after my post on Padre Pio appeared, These Stone Walls had to be taken down.

It was some weeks before I was able to speak with Pornchai held in gruesome circumstances in ICE detention in a private, for-profit facility in Louisiana. I told him the awful news that TSW had come to an end. “It can’t end!” he insisted. This venue for reaching out to the world had become of critical importance to both of us. I wrote of all that happened next in “Life Goes On Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls.”

Within a day of that phone conversation with Pornchai, all had changed. I learned that a mysterious reader in New York had a premonition that caused her to copy over to her hard drive eleven years of writing and other content on These Stone Walls. The reader, who chooses to remain anonymous, contacted me with a request that I allow her to find another hosting venue to allow this blog to continue. After reviewing several website builders, she settled on one called “Squarespace.” She then meticulously built the framework for Beyond These Stone Walls.

So far, readers seem to like the new format. Most find it easier to read, and the graphics are inspiring. However, in the process, all the posts I wrote before September 2020 retained their content but lost all formatting. If you find a past post in a search on Bing or Google, chances are that it will just appear as one long narrative with no paragraphs.

So, in addition to formatting and preparing each new post for publication, the new volunteer editor has the daunting task of reformatting some 600 past posts one by one. She tells me that she has made this her new hobby, and loves the mission of Divine Mercy this has become. For me, however, the last seven months have been a nail biting series of losses and drastic changes. But each step of the way, just the right person seems to enter orbit to provide just the right assistance with just the right set of skills.

The BTSW Library Is Open

I want to invite readers to use the new Library feature at Beyond These Stone Walls. Instead of just having a long chronological list of past posts as they are being restored, they are sorted into categories such as you might find in a card catalog of a real library. We have thus far developed and labeled 28 categories. The first two are “Father Gordon MacRae Case” and “Pornchai Moontri.”

I am most grateful for the inclusion of that second category. It features posts both by and about my friend, but it also serves as a way for Pornchai to remain involved in this blog, a welcome measure that helps to keep us connected. He now heads up the Bangkok bureau of Beyond These Stone Walls.

We will be able to add new categories as needed. We have a current set into which most of the content at BTSW will be listed with links that you can click on to review a past post. To date, fourteen of the categories now have restored content. We will be adding much more as past posts are restored. Among the categories ready for perusal are Sacred Scripture, Mysteries of History, and Vatican News. We have identified and labeled fourteen additional categories that await restored posts and links. Our Library is now open, but is still a work in progress with much more content to come.

Most blogs and websites have some sort of “About” page describing what can be found there and the nature of the site. Beyond These Stone Walls has a much-expanded “About Page” with a summary of the site, links to important related articles by Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal and a must-see ten minute video interview with her. There are additional articles by journalist Ryan A. MacDonald and some powerful and very useful content by David F. Pierre Jr. of The Media Report. There are also audio interviews on my story with Catholic League President Bill Donohue and Teresa Tomeo, and a two-hour video documentary interview with me that most readers describe as “compelling.”

That interview got our friend, Pornchai, through a very painful first night in quarantine in Bangkok. Alone and quite overwhelmed, a Samsung smart phone was left for him by our contacts there. He had never before used one, or even seen one, but he managed to somehow find his way to that interview. It eventually calmed his frayed nerves enough to put him to sleep. I can only hope it does not have the same effect on you!

Many of our older posts are being restored with inspiring new graphics. In the chaos of our partisan politics and a pandemic, Beyond These Stone Walls is a comforting place to hang out for awhile. I hope you will, and I hope you will invite others to have a look as well. I will only have a voice for as long as someone out there is listening.

May the Lord Bless you and keep you.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I have just learned that everyone living in the prison unit where I have lived for the last nearly four years will be relocated to a large dormitory on May 2 in order to accommodate a construction project in this building. We are told that we will be returning to our current housing when the project is completed about two weeks later. During this time, I will be unable to write. We are selecting two older posts for readers to revisit, and hopefully also a guest post from a prominent writer. May the Lord Bless you and keep you, Father G.

I also invite you to read and share the related posts metioned herein:

Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls

Life Goes On Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls

The Milky Way Galaxy seen over the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array west of Socorro, New Mexico. Photo by NRAO/AUI/NSF, Jeff Hellerman

Free at Last Thanks to God and You!

Left to right: Pornchai Moontri, Yela Smit, Father John Le, SVD, and behind them the one who brought them together.

The following is our first guest post by Pornchai Moontri in Thailand with a message of thanks and hope for our readers Beyond These Stone Walls.

Introduction by Father Gordon MacRae : I will be forever in debt to our readers who have opened their minds and hearts to the plight of my friend, Pornchai Max Moontri. The task now ahead of him is immense. It was an ordeal getting Pornchai out of prison. Now we face the task of getting prison out of Pornchai. He needs the help and prayers of all of us to conquer this adjustment.

If you have read Pornchai's traumatic history best captured in “Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri” — then you know that the last real home he knew was at age 11 before he was removed from Thailand. Fleeing from a nightmare existence in Bangor, Maine, he became a homeless teenager and then, at age 18, a prisoner.

For the last 29 years, his entire world consisted of a prison cell and a 300-yard walk to a woodshop where he became a proficient craftsman. Now he is dropped into the middle of Bangkok, Thailand. The adjustment ahead is immense.

Sensing his anxiety in a recent telephone conversation, I asked Pornchai what he is feeling and experiencing. What he said in response nearly brought me to tears. He said, “People have to understand that the only home I have ever had was in a prison cell with you.”

I choked on those words. In one sense, it is a testament to grace. Only Divine Mercy could make a prison cell feel like a home. But now Pornchai has the daunting challenge of leaving the traumas and trials of the past behind and living life in the light of Divine Mercy, a light that has captured him — has captured us both — in the great adventure of faith and hope.

I asked Pornchai to write candidly about this turning of the tide in his life. These are his words:

A Letter from Pornchai

To My Dear Friends Beyond These Stone Walls: I am at a loss for words, but I will try my best to tell you about where I am right now, and how I got here. A couple weeks ago, my friend, Father G, wrote about my return to Thailand after being away for 36 years. His Post was “Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom.” It made me laugh in parts, and it also made me cry.

Father G left something out. This is something that I told him about in a phone call right after my first night in hotel quarantine solitary confinement. I have to first say that it was a lot nicer than my last stay in solitary confinement which lasted seven long years. Then I was sent to another prison where I ended up in a cell with Father G.

Sixteen years have passed since then. The story of all that happened in those years is filled, as Father G says, with pain and suffering but also with triumph. He says that he feels sad about my leaving, but more than anything, he says he feels “triumphant.” I feel that too, but I also feel deep gratitude. Both of those are sort of new to me.

I told Father G last week that as I lay on my bed in my first night in Bangkok on February 9 after 30 years in prison and a 25-hour flight to Bangkok, I was exhausted in every way you could think of, but I could not sleep. I was overwhelmed with many emotions. All I could think about was where I would be right now if I never met Father G.

There were so many “what-ifs” raging through my mind that night. What if Father G had never been sent to prison? What if he took the easy way out with the plea deal they tried to con him into 27 years ago? We would have never met. What if I was sent to some other state besides New Hampshire? What if Father G and I never ended up in the same place? What if he never started writing to the world Beyond These Stone Walls? What if all of you never even heard of me? What if Father G had been a weaker man? What if he moved away after all my efforts to block anyone from ever entering my life? If any one of those things happened, I know today, I would be lost forever.

Every one of these questions, and many more were answered in advance by God. My head was spinning that night as I thought of all the times in the last 16 years when I was turning down one road only to find Father G pointing me toward another. Prison also brought many low points in our story that could fill these pages and depress anyone reading them. That is the nature of prison, and 30 years of it means 30 years of low points.

Prison is a humiliating, empty, meaningless existence, but Father G and I changed that. As I lay sleepless in bed pondering my freedom in my first night in Bangkok, only the high points filled my mind. There are so many of them, too many to tell you about in a single post. You already know about many of them, but I will try to tell you again about the ones that changed my life the most.

The Sacrifice of Fatherhood

I will always remember the first time I walked into Father G’s cell before we became roommates. The first thing I saw was the mirror. There was a strange card with a balding man dressed half as a priest and half as a prisoner. I asked Father G, “Is this you?” That’s when I was introduced to Saint Maximilian Kolbe who became the source of how we lived as prisoners.

When Father G and I became roommates, I was not able to trust anyone. My life’s experiences imposed that on me. I would always be in my upper bunk so I could see anyone coming in and could get to them before they got to me. Life in homelessness on the streets followed by life in prison does this to you.

Once a week, late on Sunday nights after all the prisoner counts and the lights went out, Father G had this weird ritual. I would pretend to be asleep and would watch with one eye open. What on Earth is this strange guy doing? In a corner of the concrete countertop in our cell, he would set up a little book light, some books, and put something around his neck. Then he would take a round piece of bread and a few drops of something and hold them up before eating them.

So one day I asked him about this and he said he was offering Mass. Why? I asked him. He said that it is the one time and place where Heaven touches us. I asked him if I could also do it and he said, “Only if you agree to be the lector.” So Father G told me all about the Mass and I would from then on stay awake to join him. I would do the Mass readings as well. Without my knowing it, profound changes began to take shape inside of me.

Also in 2007, I was visited by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement who told me that I would be having a court hearing that could end with my deportation to Thailand. I was summoned to a place where video hearings are held in the prison. A Judge Shapiro told me that I am ordered deported to Thailand at the end of my sentence. I had nothing in Thailand, and no one. As Father G once wrote, I had no future, no hope, and no God. There was only Father G who never wavered.

Beyond These Stone Walls

And there were times when we became separated. Prison is set up to always demonstrate that we are powerless over our lives. We were sometimes pawns in what Father G described as “spiritual warfare.” Sometimes the agendas of others were imposed on us. One time, some unknown prison official added a note to Father G’s file saying that he has a history of violence. It was not at all true, but the note sat there for six years before some official spotted it and decided I should be moved away from him.

Such things are never reversed in prison, but he asked me to trust in God. I was forced to live with a transgender man while some gangster with a real history of violence was moved in with Father G. I prayed. Within 24 hours, it was exposed as a big mistake and I was moved back with Father G. Every time this sort of thing happened, and we were separated, it was reversed in just a few days. I began to feel that we had an invisible shield around us. Father G told me that our Patron Saints are our allies in spiritual warfare. I went from doubting this to very much believing it. I saw this with my own eyes.

When I was told that I must be deported to Thailand at the end of my sentence, it was hard for me to find any hope. I told Father G that in my own mind I had what I called “Plan B.” I thought my only option was to make sure that I never left prison. It was all I knew and I could not imagine another existence. Father G asked me to set “Plan B” aside because another plan will come along to take its place. He said, “We will just have to build a bridge to Thailand.” “Yeah, Right!” I thought. How are we going to do this from inside a prison cell? “Get real!”

Then one day in summer of 2009, Father G came into our cell after talking with someone on the telephone. He told me that someone asked him to write on a weekly basis for a blog from prison. I was sent to prison in 1992 and Father G in 1994. Neither of us knew what a blog was. He said it would be a sort of prison journal and people around the world would read it.

Father G found a British poem that he liked called “Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make.” He said we need a name for this blog so I suggested “These Stone Walls” so that’s what we called it until I left in September. Then it became “Beyond These Stone Walls.” Father G would sit at his typewriter on a Saturday morning with no idea what to write, then he would type all afternoon and mail his posts to Father George David Byers for scanning.

We could never see the site, but we got a monthly report which was a total mystery to us. In the first month we had 40 readers. In the next month, four times that, then month after month it turned into many thousands in many countries. We could not figure this out. In my writing class, I wrote a poem about his constant “tap-tap-tap” in our cell every Saturday. Here it is:

---

“My roommate is a rabid writer.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
He types until my mind winds tighter.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
He never has an unpublished thought.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
He types and types til my nerves are naught.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.

My roommate’s also a real good friend,
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
And stays that way to the bitter end.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
And we all like the result, you see,
Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.
Cuz some of what he types is ’bout me!”
TAP, tap. Tap, TAP, tap. Tap, TAP.”

---

Our Summons to Divine Mercy

From here on, my life began to change with what I once thought was just my own hard work. Not so. Today I see a powerful grace at work in that cell. I did not have a name for it then, but I do now. It’s called Divine Mercy. I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame.

In the time to follow, I earned my high school diploma with top honors. Then I earned two continuing education diplomas from the Stratford Career Institute in psychology and social work, and excelled in theology courses from Catholic Distance University. I became proficient in woodworking and model shipbuilding. You can see some of my work at “Imprisoned by Walls, Set Free by Wood.”

I never had much in life to brag about except maybe for one thing. Despite all the darkness, when I finally saw some light I walked toward it. I decided to become Catholic. Father G never even mentioned this to me. It was just the sheer force of grace. To honor him, I chose his birthday (April 9) as the date for my conversion, but the prison chaplain, a Catholic deacon, asked me to postpone it until the next day. It was Divine Mercy Sunday, something that would become the very center of my life.

Everything changed. Marian Helper Editor Felix Carroll read our blog (yes, it’s now “our” blog!) and he contacted me for an interview. He included my conversion story in his now famous book, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions. You can read the chapter about me at “Pornchai Moontri: Mercy Behind Those Stone Walls.”

The book made its way to Thailand, and now, so have I. The bridge that I once thought was impossible was built right before my very eyes. I thank you, my friends, for I would not be here without you. It was your reading and sharing these writings around the world that made this story possible. You have been the instruments of a miracle.

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A Post Script from Father Gordon MacRae: I have been able to talk with Pornchai daily since his arrival in Thailand. This has helped much to ease him into this new chapter in his story. It is an immense task to go from 30 years in prison to a foreign land.

I have deeply felt gratitude to Yela Smit, Co-Chair of Divine Mercy Thailand, and Father John Le, SVD, from the Society of the Divine Word. Father John and his community have offered sanctuary to Pornchai to help in this transition. It is a great gift to which I have pledged some monthly support. Want to help? See how at our SPECIAL EVENTS page.

You may also want to read and share the posts referenced herein:

Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom

Imprisoned by Walls, Set Free by Wood

Please share this post!

Life Goes On Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls

After eleven years in publication, These Stone Walls begins life anew as “Beyond These Stone Walls” in order to lend some volume to a wrongly imprisoned voice

I cannot put into words the gratitude I feel for the voice from behind these stone walls that has been given to me. I will always be grateful to God and to those who set my voice free when TSW began in 2009. A lot has happened in recent months that now calls for a change of direction and a broadening of our scope. For whatever remaining time God allows me to have this voice, These Stone Walls will have a change of name and venue to become “Beyond These Stone Walls.”

This new site will contain all the content of the old, but if you have found your way here then you have already noticed a substantial change in format and appearance. We ask for your patience as this is a work in progress that will require time to rebuild. Each week, we hope to present not only my new post for the week, but also related content from this and other sources. The idea for a “spin off” of sorts began when a reader came upon TSW one day in a Google search for Pope Benedict XVI which brought the reader to one of my posts, and then to others.

This reader is a person of deep faith and a broad background in science and technology, but chooses to remain anonymous. The reader also discovered scattered among the Internet a broad range of articles, commentary, blog posts, and a few published books about me, Pornchai Moontri, and These Stone Walls. A suggestion was made to allow this content to be collected in one place and call it, “Beyond These Stone Walls.”

As most readers know, my friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri has been a part of this endeavor since my very first post in 2009. It was he who first came up with the name, “These Stone Walls.” As you know, Pornchai’s prison sentence ended on September 8, 2020. After 14 years as roommates, he was released to return to his native Thailand. You must not miss this story told in “Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri.”

As you might imagine, life was not easy behind These Stone Walls after Pornchai left. Since that day two months ago, I have been at the hub of a rescue mission. We had developed a promising new life for Pornchai in Thailand. That was entirely the work of TSW and its readers. We were well prepared for the day he was taken away, a day I described in a post about one of TSW ’s Patron Saints, “Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls.”

The rescue mission began because Pornchai’s departure should have been a simple affair that was filled with hope. All his necessary documents had been carefully prepared in advance. He left here with us both expecting that his stay in ICE detention would be brief — a matter of days, two weeks at most. Instead, he was thrust ever deeper into a nightmare of for-profit ICE detention while he was dragged across the country from one overcrowded facility to another. That whole story must be told, and it will be told.

So for much of the last two months since Pornchai was taken away, my prison cell became a center of operation for giving support to my friend and coordinating the efforts of people on three continents to secure his release and repatriation. Like all spiritual warfare, this battle was waged on many fronts. It was at this most difficult time that unwelcome changes began to take place with These Stone Walls. One technical difficulty after another surfaced over the last two months, and I finally decided that the new site currently being considered had to take on a larger role. The content on These Stone Walls was being manipulated.

Imprisoned Voices on a Global Scale

Complicating all of the above was our global confrontation with Covid-19, its latest series of outbreaks, and the near civil war taking place between left and right in America. There are those in our midst who know just what buttons to push and when to push them. The stories you have heard and read about people being silenced — even in the Church — are real, and I was nearly silenced as well.

Through grace, and with the help of advocates and your prayers, I think I have survived the onslaught for now. Pornchai is also surviving, though in horrible conditions, and is offering what he endures for our readers. I had hoped that by the time you read this his ordeal would be over and he would have arrived intactly in Thailand.  But even after 70 days in ICE detention, that is not the case.  I will write a full account of this story when that time comes, and I will count on you to make it known.

The photograph atop this segment demonstrates the enormity of the obstacles we face on a daily basis to maintain a voice from behind these walls and bring it to you. The most basic forms of human communication that we all take for granted must overcome many obstacles here. Even though Pornchai is no longer a prisoner, but merely an ICE detainee, I had to go to extreme lengths to reach out to him. One of our friends, Claire Dion in Maine, had to utilize two phones with separate lines and configure them so that their microphones and speakers were opposite each other. She added our photos for effect. Welcome to our world!

The real founder of These Stone Walls is Saint Maximilian Kolbe. When spiritual fatherhood beckoned him to secure the salvation of another prisoner, it cost him his life. He knew that going in, but self-preservation was overcome by heroic virtue. I do not lay claim to any of that, but I was beckoned by Divine Mercy to set my quest for freedom aside to help secure freedom for another. That did not end when Pornchai left these stone walls. Even in our disposable culture, spiritual fatherhood has no expiration date.

Others of our friends who were here with me behind these walls are now free, and restored to their homelands. They write to me, and read what I write, from Japan, China, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Each of these countries, and also Thailand, have seen recent dramatic increases in visits to These Stone Walls. Divine Mercy is powerful, and prison walls were no match for it.

Beyond These Stone Walls

It has been interesting to hear from some of our friends in Asian countries where Catholicism is a small minority faith. Our friend in Japan wrote that he had no idea what I had been typing during all those years he was here with us. He said he was astonished to look up me and Pornchai from Tokyo and discover These Stone Walls. He spent weeks devouring posts that he knew were written during some of our most trying times. He finds them to be not only meaningful, but powerful. He is in awe of the back story of Pornchai, and finds the account of how we were thrown together, of all we endured, and of Pornchai’s conversion to be life-changing.

I think that what our friends around the world have found so enthralling is that they expected what I write to mirror the deprivation of prison. But it doesn’t. Just like real life, there are many sordid things here to write about, but what a waste that would be. The fact that we believe, and continue to believe even in the face of adversity and loss, is an affirmation of the Gospel. At a time when Americans are at each others’ throats in the most recent election cycle, this little voice from behind these prison walls has grown in magnitude abroad.

About seventy percent of our readers are in the United States. Canada, England, and Australia have always comprised the majority of others. In the last year or so, this has changed. In the weeks before making this transition to Beyond These Stone Walls, people from many other nations have flocked to these pages. Routinely now, India, Nepal, Japan, Thailand, China, Nigeria, and South Africa show up here in large numbers. Meanwhile, much of the European Union has drifted down the ranks of visitors. This mirrors almost exactly the weakness of Catholic practice and presence in historically Catholic countries while it thrives in Asia.

I like to think that the growing presence of readers from Beyond These Stone Walls is not because they relate to my imprisonment, but rather to the power of the Gospel and Divine Mercy to break through it. I hope you will continue to come here as we venture further Beyond These Stone Walls. We will need your help as this new adventure finds a foothold in the vast wasteland called the Internet.

A Necessary Postscript

Father Richard Heilman at the site, RomanCatholicMan.com has published a little book, the United States Grace Force Prayer Book. Claire Dion sent one each to Pornchai and me. It is a potent little book with a collection of the very prayers and devotions that I would have chosen had I composed it. My friend, Father Michael Gaitley, MIC, has a presence in its pages. His Prayer of Consecration to Jesus Through Mary is found there along with the Consecration Prayers of Saint Louis de Montfort and Saint Maximilian Kolbe. I sure hope that doesn’t go to Father Michael’s head, but I doubt that it will.

But none of that is the final point I want to make. If you ever doubt the power of Divine Mercy to invade your life with a not so-always-easy-to-see abundance of grace, then consider this: as I write this first post for Beyond These Stone Walls, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri is living in a cramped room with eighty ICE detainees in a chaotic place with the blazing lights on 24/7.

As he was preparing to leave here on September 8 for what we hoped would be a short stay in ICE detection during this global pandemic, we prepared a box of his books and other personal belongings to ship to Thailand ahead of him. Before sealing the box, he removed his copy of the United States Grace Force Prayer Book. He said he would rather risk losing it than not having it.

I had to pause while typing this because he contacted me through a friend to ask if we could send him another copy. “Did you lose it?” I asked in our phone call while wedged between two books. “No,” he said. “The other guys in the bunks around me all want to borrow mine.”

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae:  If you have been a subscriber to These Stone Walls, we have done our best to transfer your email address for notification of posts at Beyond These Stone Walls. If by chance we missed you, or if you wish to subscribe anew, please subscribe at the end of the post.

Also from Father G:  If you would like to send a note or card of encouragement to Pornchai, it may help to sustain him through this trial.  The address is:

Pornchai Moontri

A039064244

LaSalle Detention Facility 

P.O. Box 560

Trout, Louisiana 71371

And if you would like to help him as he begins life anew you may do so at:

Pornchai Moontri

c/o Beyond These Stone Walls

P.O. Box 205

Wilmington, MA 01887-0205

We also invite you to like and follow Beyond These Stone Walls Facebook. You would assist us greatly by sharing this post on your social media.

Please share this post!

You may also like these related links from Beyond These Stone Walls: 

Prison Journal: A Midsummer Night’s Mid-Life Crisis

As major transitions loom for our friends behind These Stone Walls, Social Psychologist Erik Erikson was the catalyst for a midsummer night’s mysterious dream.

In eleven years of writing from prison for These Stone Walls, this has always been the most difficult time of year to produce a post. Labor Day is looming in the United States, and in 2020 it is on the latest date possible. It’s a time of staff vacations in prison so pretty much every department is understaffed. This year, Labor Day conspires with a pandemic for limited access to everything.

All outside vendors, visitors, volunteers, program facilitators, and medical providers are currently barred from entry. Visitors have been barred for months. What was once a three-hour visiting period twice per week with family or friends was reduced last year to ninety minutes. In the time of Covid-19 it is now reduced to a single monthly 45-minute no-contact visit from behind glass with masks, and it has to be arranged three weeks in advance.

And as you know by now, my friend Pornchai Moontri and I have the added stress of knowing that major change is coming but we know neither the day nor the hour. Each day I face the possibility that I could return from work to an empty cell and no chance to wish him well and give him my blessing. Such is the nature of prison.

We do have a plan for when Pornchai finally arrives in Thailand after an ordeal in ICE detention. I hope you have read our recent posts, Pornchai’s “Hope and Prayers for My Friend Left Behind,” and my bombshell post, “Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri.” These have been the most visited posts of the year during our most difficult days of the year. Now, more than ever, our faith in Divine Mercy is getting a workout.

All of this has conspired to create a perfect storm lending itself to anxiety and, for me, a mid-life crisis. It is not my first, nor will it likely be my last. When I told a friend that I think I am now having one, he sent me this story about a midlife crisis. It is not a true story - at least, I hope it isn’t true - but it made me laugh and I needed a good laugh right now. Maybe you do, too:

• “Approaching her sixtieth birthday, Mildred lapsed into a depression that sent her to a therapist. He diagnosed her downward spiral as a possible midlife crisis, and assured her that it is a very common phenomenon. The therapist suggested that Mildred take up something new and challenging, perhaps something adventurous.

• “‘Well, I’ve always wanted to try horseback riding,’ said Mildred. Affirmed as a great choice by the therapist, she stopped at the library and checked out a couple of books on horseback riding. When she felt she had a grasp of the rudimentary details, Mildred ventured out on a Saturday morning for her first ride.

• “Approaching the horse with some trepidation, Mildred placed her left foot into the stirrup, grabbed the crop atop the saddle just as the books suggested, and found mounting the horse to be surprisingly easy. Then the horse began an enjoyably slow but steady pace. As it worked up to a more pronounced gallop, however, Mildred found herself growing anxious.

• “The horse picked up a little more speed, but Mildred’s anxiety grew along with it. Fearing that she was slipping from the saddle, she began to panic. Clutching the horse in her panic as it gained speed, Mildred began to scream for help as she struggled to hold on for dear life. Then, just as Mildred began to tumble completely from the saddle, Walter the Wal-Mart Greeter rushed over, and unplugged the horse.”

Erik Erikson on the Origins of Our Midlife Crises

I have known and counseled many people in the midst of a midlife crisis. I’ve had more than one of them myself. It’s a time when values and beliefs are questioned and sometimes even abandoned. The concept is not at all new in psychology or literature. In a few past posts on These Stone Walls, I have written that Dante Alighieri began the Inferno, Part One of his famous 14th Century literary masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, with what may very well be world literature’s first description of a midlife crisis:

• “When I had journeyed half of our life’s way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray. Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was, that savage forest, dense and difficult, which even in recall renews my fear. So bitter — death is hardly more severe! I cannot clearly say how I had entered that wood; I was so full of sleep just at the point where I abandoned the true path. But to recall what good I found there, I must also tell you the other things I saw.”

I was once an avid student of psychology before studying theology. Dante put a spiritual spin on the “shadowed forest” of his midlife abandonment of ‘the true path.” That is fitting, for a midlife crisis is as much a spiritual phenomenon as a psychological one. Its evidence is just as Dante described it seven centuries ago.

Since Sigmund Freud became the Father of Psychoanalytic Theory in the early Twentieth Century, the various efforts to understand what makes us tick are fascinating. I once wrote a controversial TSW post about the secrets we keep even from ourselves entitled, “Be Wary of Crusaders! The Devil Sigmund Freud Knew Only Too Well.”

But I have since abandoned a good deal of psychoanalytic theory and practice as bunk. To be clear, the practice of it is often bunk but the science behind it is sometimes still helpful. There is one psychoanalytic pioneer, however, whose work has withstood the test of time and contrasts well with human experience.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Austrian-born Harvard social psychologist Erik Erikson developed his Stages of Psychosocial Development which today remains a standard for understanding how we develop psychologically. Much of his work became pivotal for comprehension of one particular stage of growth: adolescence, the most stressful time in the life of every parent. Erikson defined the central crisis of adolescence as one of identity verses role confusion.

Though he never used it, the term “Identity Crisis” has its origin in his work. For parents, an adolescent identity crisis results in experimentation, sometimes recklessly so, and a questioning of the parental status quo and value system. It is the time in which many parents are stressed to the limit.

The identity crisis is but one of Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial development. The other stages and their respective life crises are, in a nutshell: infancy (basic trust vs. mistrust), early childhood (autonomy vs. shame and doubt), preschool years (initiative vs. guilt), middle childhood (industry vs. inferiority), adolescence and its crisis of identity, young adulthood (intimacy vs. isolation), middle adulthood (generativity vs. stagnation), and late adulthood (integrity vs. despair).

My Midsummer Night’s Anxious Dream

For this post, my focus is on the backdrop of every midlife crisis. Erikson never actually used the term, but it clearly has its origin in his stages of development. It comes in between the last two of the eight stages, between middle and late adulthood when the human psyche naturally begins a nostalgic, and sometimes excruciating examination of the past and a measurement of one’s place in it. Our minds are very complex, as is this subject, so let me stick my neck out a little with a personal example.

Early in the morning of August 17, 2020, I was awakened at about 3:00 AM by a troubling dream that seemed to play out in epic performance. It needs a little background. I began religious life as a member of the Capuchin Order, one of the main branches of the Franciscans. It was while a member of the order that I began formal studies in psychology working toward both undergraduate and graduate degrees

My mentor in this was Father Benedict Groeschel who years later would part from the Capuchins along with the late, Father Andrew Apostoli to become founders of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. Like them, I, too, left the Order on very good terms, but in a very different direction: to study for diocesan priesthood. I wrote about how that experience, from almost day one, became a crisis in its own right in “Priesthood, the Signs of the Times & the Sins of the Times.”

I don’t have to tell you where that change in my path ultimately led me. Now, at age 67, I look back over the decades and find myself spontaneously doing exactly what Erik Erikson predicted. My mind wanders often into a sort of inventory of my life and my place in it. All these years later, I find myself questioning my decision to leave my religious community, wondering to this day whether I did the right thing.

It’s interesting that I still, after forty years, refer to the Order is “my community.” The inner struggles that we have are often expressed in dreams, and in dreams my conflict is evident. The early morning dream of August 17 this year was no exception. It was both then and now. Dreams often have temporal confusion.

In the dream, I was in my Capuchin habit at Mass with my community, but I was also a prisoner having just been released on a sort of leave from prison. I was the age that I am right now, but everyone else in the dream was as they were back then. Except for my friend, Pornchai, who was with me at the Mass. In the dream, I was stricken by how out of place we were. Pornchai and I were deeply wounded by life while all the others present had been sheltered - just as I would want them to have been — from the sort of trials we have endured.In the dream, before the Mass ended, I had to leave. I removed my habit and left it there in the chapel. Others gathered at the door as Pornchai and I walked away. He asked me, “Where are we going?” I answered mysteriously, “We’re going to where this path leads.” It was then that I woke up, troubled, anxious and depressed. Only later in the day did I realize that the date was August 17, the day that I first professed vows in the Order forty-five years ago.

As I look back with some nostalgia, I realize that those years were among the happiest of my life. Then something happened that suddenly altered them. It is a story that I have never before told, but I know that someday I will tell it. It adds no light, but only more mystery, to the path I ended up upon.

That path led down a long and winding road to where I am right now, approaching 26 years in prison for crimes that never took place. This is not the sort of “community” I had in mind when I first discerned a vocation to religious life all those decades ago. It is also not lost on me that this condemnation and imprisonment began in 1994 on September 23, the feast day of the most famous of the Capuchin saints, Padre Pio, who would later insinuate himself behind These Stone Walls with us.

He Knows What He Is About

Over the last decade at These Stone Walls, we have told a story very much like the one Dante Aligheri told seven centuries ago in The Divine Comedy. It may have been divine, but it did not always feel much like a comedy. Like Dante, having strayed from the path I was on - though not by choice - I entered the dark wood of prison and brought the readers of These Stone Walls with me. Across this decade, we told a tale of all that I had found there, both the good and the bad. In the end, it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the two.

My friend, Pornchai Moontri is an example. On the surface of life he was seen as just another bad actor who made terrible choices that led him on a path to prison. My recent post, “Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri” pulled back the veil to reveal his life as a victim of horrific crime long before he was driven into one of his own.

Thanks to readers, that post found its way into several internet sites dedicated to addressing human trafficking. Pornchai’s story was told prolifically at These Stone Walls, but it remained hidden in plain sight until one of you shared it in just the right place. Whoever you were, you acted as a bond of connection between persons, a very important concept that I will return to below. In my midlife crisis dream, Pornchai asked me, “Where are we going?” I told him, “We’re going to where this path leads.” It seemed to me to be a strange response until I pondered it. Our path - the paths of all of us in life - lead along the threads of connection placed there by God through us - through the bad as well as through the good.

These Stone Walls became Pornchai’s religious community, the community of faith that formed him. His leaving, and leaving me behind, is painful, but at least one TSW reader has equated him to Timothy, the companion of Saint Paul. In that sense he is not leaving. He is being sent.

Where do I go from here? I have not even pondered that yet. My priority at the moment is to do what I can to spare my friend from the one-size-fits-all nightmare of ICE detention. Thanks to some of you sharing my posts in the right places, there is now a glimmer of hope for that. Just a glimmer, so please pray for that intention. I hope that in a month or two, These Stone Walls will have a voice from Catholic Thailand.

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From the voice of Saint John Henry Newman: “Some Definite Service.”

“God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.

“Somehow, I am necessary for His purposes... I have a part in this great work. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connections between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling.

“Therefore I will trust him, whatever, wherever I am. I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him. If I am in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end which is quite beyond us.

“He does nothing in vain. He may prolong my life, He may shorten it, He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends, he may throw me among strangers, He may make me feel desolate, hide my future from me - Still, He knows what He is about.”

— St. John Henry Cardinal Newman - March 7, 1848

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NOTE FROM FATHER GORDON MACRAE: Mine is not the only “Prison Journal” in circulation these days. I have just pre-ordered my copy of the soon-published Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell from Ignatius Press which promises to be a spiritual classic. You may also like these lesser classics from These Stone Walls:

• Priesthood, the Signs of the Times and the Sins of the Times

• Pornchai Moontri: Hope and Prayers for My Friend Left Behind

• Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri

• Priesthood in the Real Presence and the Present Absence