USA

Letter from Prison

What is freedom? This is the question that animated the GS winter vacation in America. Joshua, an inmate in a North Carolina prison, virtually participated in the vacation by writing a long letter that moved the students and caused them to raise questions

EDITED BY GS-USA

A week before going on the GS 2003 Winter Vacation, the GS kids in Brooklyn, NY, read two letters, one of which is published in Traces. They were both written by a man, Joshua Stancil, who is currently in Morrison Correctional Facility in North Carolina. The second letter was written after a meeting he had with two people from the Movement, who went to visit him. We were struck by these letters, and so decided to write him a letter with some of our questions concerning Freedom (the theme of our vacation) in hopes that his response would come to us before we left. It reached us in time, and helped us more than can be said in words. This is the publication of that very letter and our own responses. We hope you, reading the following pages, can glimpse at least some of the beauty we experienced on our vacation.

February 10, 2003
Hi everybody,
I apologize for the delay in responding: Your letter was sent Priority Mail last Thursday, which means it arrived here last Saturday; unfortunately, Morrison Correctional has no mail service on Saturdays, so I didn’t receive the letter until today. I hope this reaches you in time for your vacation.
First of all, let me say how touched I am that you’ve written, and that you would ask for my thoughts on anything, particularly on a topic of such importance, our relationship with Christ and with each other. I’m especially moved by your letter because I know deep down that I have far more to learn from you than you have from me. I thank you for your letter, and I hope my answers to your questions make some kind of sense.
1. You ask how my life is different now. I think it comes down to the whole notion of the Presence, the Presence of Christ: not some far-off unattainable Deity hiding in shadows, remaining distant, aloof–but rather a God who, fantastic as it may sound, has an active interest in me and all of His creation. I’m a convert to Catholicism, and until recently my experience of our faith has been more or less solitary: I converted alone, attended Mass alone, had no Catholic family members or friends, my girlfriend was Jewish–my spiritual journey has, for the most part, been a solo flight. I learned about the faith from books, which is fine, I guess–I’m grateful to have been given the grace to know of Jesus at all, even through books–but it produced in me a tendency to look at Catholicism, at faith, at God Himself, as merely a cerebral exercise. I reduced Jesus to a set of doctrines, a rigorous and strict moral code (a moral code, by the way, I consistently flaunted). Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not downplaying the importance of doctrines and morals, not at all. Rather, my whole approach to the faith, by making it a dry, academic exercise I could engage in privately, almost reclusively, robbed those doctrines and morals of any real hold or effect on my life. My encounter with CL, which is ongoing, is showing me a manner and a method of living those doctrines and morals, not merely knowing and reciting them. Before encountering CL and the charism of Father Giussani, I never gave much thought to Presence, that this Presence could touch me and mold me and rebuild me, and that I could do all of that because It–rather, I should say “He”–loved me and loves me still, now, in spite of my repeated failings and frequent ingratitude. God was for me a concept, not a Presence. He was Somewhere Else, a benevolent but distant figure I’d perhaps get to meet some day after my body had assumed room temperature. I never thought of Him as a Presence that can be experienced–that wants to be experienced–here and now, in this life, at this very moment. It certainly never occurred to me that this Presence could be experienced through other people, even through the most unlikely of people. In my world there was me and only me: no room for anyone else, not even a Presence. Now, much to my delight, I find my world greatly expanded and I find myself open to it all.
The other big change is the cultivation of hope. Since my early teens, I’ve struggled with depression, with a sense of hopelessness. Although the severest bouts were only periodic, I can see now that a vague nihilism was continuously affecting my worldview. Prison, needless to say, only exacerbated the problem. Prison makes you sour on humanity. You eventually, without even realizing it has taken place, lose any and all sense of the goodness of humanity. You come to see humans as irredeemable, beyond reform or help of any kind. My encounter with CL has most definitely changed that aspect of my thinking. I now find myself generally hopeful about things–a complete 180° from the “old me.” Sure, I still get frustrated at times, but the frustration doesn’t overwhelm me as it once did, doesn’t cause me to pinwheel off into a deep blue funk. I’ve encountered a Presence which stabilizes me, sustains me, and gives me hope.
2. You ask how I can be free in prison. Principally, by remaining cognizant of the fact that there is an Other who will provide for me, provide for my family, and who will, in His own time and according to His own designs, work all things for the salvation of His Church, His pilgrim people.
3. As for comments made by my fellow inmates since this encounter with CL, they’ve been numerous and, on occasion, sort of funny. For instance, when I returned from my visit with Elisabetta and Tobias, I had no idea I was grinning like an idiot. I couldn’t stop smiling. One of the guys in my dorm came up to me and said, “Dude, you’re beaming”–a pause here, then he asked, “Are you on drugs?” I’ve had some guys ask me how I can stay so calm, how I can seem so at peace about things. (Prison is a very loud, chaotic environment, and prisoners themselves tend to be rather loud and chaotic too. If one is quiet like I am, if one seems undisturbed by the usual goings-on, it draws attention.) A few inmates have expressed a desire to read Giussani’s works and some issues of Traces, so of course I’ve made them available (Elisabetta sent me a humongous shipment of books and magazines, so it’s more correct to say that she has made them available.) It’s tough to reach guys in here. There’s a lot of hostility toward Christianity, albeit a Christianity peculiar to Protestants in America’s South. Unfortunately, that “brand” of Christianity–fundamentalism–is all they’ve known and they mistakenly think it’s all there is. What they’re rejecting isn’t Christianity, then, but rather an oddball, stripped-down version of it. It’s hard to convince them of this and to present to them an authentic Christianity.
4. I’ve said that Elisabetta and Tobias (and by extension the whole CL community) showed me the way, not a way, because the charism of Father Giussani strikes me as the only authentic approach to Christianity, to the Event. I’m not saying that one must be a member of the Movement to be considered fully and authentically Catholic; what I’m saying is, one who is fully and authentically Catholic will have become so by incorporating, even unwittingly, the approach of the Movement. When I look at the great saints of history, those born long before the advent of the Movement–say for instance St Francis of Assisi and St Maximilian Kolbe–I see people whose “method,” if you will, is that of Giussani’s, of the Movement. The spirituality of the Movement is truly Catholic, which is to say, “universal.” It can be traced back to the first Christian communities and has been the primary means of evangelizing the world throughout the centuries. Even you as high school students, by meeting and studying and traveling together like you do, as a community, bear witness to the Event and make it present today. You are heirs of the first Christian community.
5. How can I have hope even in my current situation? I think my answer to number 2 applies equally well to this question. Hope is not always easy to come by in here; there is occasionally a great deal of effort involved, but the effort is usually to “get me out of the way.” All too often I put myself front and center when instead I should step aside and allow God’s grace to work.
I have to remind myself too that death is not the end. My parents will likely be gone by the time my sentence is completed. This is, as you might imagine, an extremely bitter pill for me to swallow. But death is not the end. Jesus, the Bible tells us, is the God of the living, not the dead. Resurrection: Christ’s resurrection (and, hopefully, my own)–therein lies my hope.
6. The Divine Comedy is important to me for a couple of reasons. One, by any objective standard, it’s one of the great works of world literature. You don’t have to be Catholic to appreciate its quality. Two, its beauty points to an Other, to God. Only humans can appreciate beauty, only humans can hunger for it. How can evolution alone explain people gathering to watch a sunset? How can DNA alone explain the need we humans have for paintings and sculptures and poems and plays and novels? The fact that we so obviously desire beauty is, to me, an indication of the reality of God.
7. My daily routine? Let’s see. Breakfast is at 6:15am. I come back, brush my teeth, and get ready for work. (I work as a teacher’s assistant.) I head off to the school building at 7: 15am and work until 11:00am, at which time we break for lunch. Back to the dorm I go (we live in army-style barracks or dorms, around 36 bunks per dorm) and I wait for the mail to be handed out. Then I’m off to supper. Exciting, no?
I hope my answers to your questions made at least a little sense. I could have gone on writing for pages but 1) it’s almost time for us to go to bed, and 2) there’s no reason to bore you kids on your vacation. And speaking of your vacation, I hope its fruitful and a time of great happiness. I’ll be praying for you.
Best wishes always,
Joshua Stancil

February 21, 2003
Dear Joshua,
Thank you so much for your letter! We are home from our vacation just 2 days and we wanted to write to you and tell you about our vacation, and also to thank you for your friendship with us.
The first thing we did when we arrived on Friday night was read your letter, which set a tone of such hope and joy for us. After that first night, we had an assembly about freedom– the theme of which was “Live Free or Die.” We played games; we had a meeting where one of our friends presented some poems by Wordsworth that had really struck her, and then we judged, according to our charism, those poems and Romanticism as a movement in art and literature. We found a correspondence between ourselves, the awe that we feel in front of nature, and the awe of the Romantics. Nevertheless, we understand that for them, nature was in some senses the end point, not the sign of a Presence that calls us out of ourselves to be with It. We also had a meeting about the possible war in Iraq and we saw, with the help of a friend who is a journalist, how important it is to know whom we can trust, especially in front of such a dramatic and important event such as the war. We heard how our pope, John Paul II, calls us to continue to hold out hope for, and thus pray, for peace. On Sunday, we took a hike along the Appalachian Trail– it was really cold!!!- but the view of Pennsylvania from the top of the ridge was breathtaking. That night, we had our School of Community and we discussed a sentence from the eighth chapter of At the Origin of the Christian Claim: “This is man’s choice: either he conceives of himself as free from the whole universe and dependent only on God, or free from God and therefore the slave of every circumstance.” Your letter was particularly helpful to us during this meeting. On Sunday evening, we had a final night of games, songs, and skits where–we hate to tell you–even your letter was made fun of, a little. On Monday morning, we had a final assembly where we spoke about our experience of freedom during our vacation and what struck us as new in our experience of this charism during those days. Again, your letter was so often sited as a source of hope by so many of us. We cannot thank you, or Christ, enough. After our final assembly, a snowstorm hit Pennsylvania and, to everyone’s great surprise, we got stuck for one more day. We wouldn’t be surprised if even you heard our screams of joy. We watched the movie Braveheart and judged the image of freedom presented by that film and the actions of its main character, William Wallace– played by Mel Gibson– according to the reality of freedom we experienced because of Christ’s Presence in our lives during those days. That night, we spoke about our newsletter, one that we will send to you every time it’s published, the GS News. You can read it for yourself and let us know what you think. On Tuesday morning, we had Mass together (we had Mass everyday) and afterward, took numerous pictures of all of us in front of the fireplace–we will send you a copy!
Below, we include a number of things many of us wanted to tell you personally.
n Joshua, we have had the same encounter and this encounter renders you free even in prison due to your awareness and openness; and I pray that I can have that same openness.
Giachi (Brooklyn, NY)
n God is much bigger than we can conceive.
Doni (Brooklyn, NY)
n Joshua, for me it was very important to hear you tell us that Catholicism is the way. The fact that none of your family or friends are/were Catholic and that you recognize this way as the way is a great testimony to me.
Eddie (Staten Island, NY)
n The fact that you so clearly possess the grace of this charism–you who met it such a short while ago–gives me hope because I see that I just have to be open to receive that same gift in its fullness. Freedom doesn’t depend on our circumstances but really is dependence on God, because even there, in prison, I can see how your dependence on God makes you free.
Matt (Brooklyn, NY)
n Your letter’s beauty that first night opened me immediately to thirst for Christ’s Presence, His love for me, on this vacation. Thank you again. In fact, I can say that you are a close friend of mine, like the people of my own community. Indeed, you are now and forever a part of our community and I’m grateful to Christ for your friendship.
Maura Kate (Brooklyn, NY)
n At the last meeting we talked about how we can say “yes” or “no” to Christ’s Presence. You have perhaps many reasons for which you could choose to say “no,” but instead you say “yes” and your “yes” makes me want to say “yes,” too.
Vanessa (Brooklyn, NY)
n The unity and the experience of everything we’ve met and how it coincided with everything you’ve met is a true affirmation of Christ and the Movement.
Debbie (Staten Island, NY)
n The fact that you wrote us a seven-page letter it showed me that we are already friends.
Katie (Staten Island, NY)
n If you, following this Presence in prison, can be so free, it helps me to want to say “yes” to this Presence always.
Marti (Brooklyn, NY)
n I understand now, from your letter, Joshua, that we can be friends even if we’ve never seen each other because we have the same experience.
Elisa (Brooklyn, NY)
n Your letter helped me to go deeper into a truer understanding of freedom.
Thom (Brooklyn, NY)
n When I think about freedom, I usually think about doing whatever I want. Instead, I understand that it’s not always like this because you’re in jail, but I know that you are really free, so freedom is something more than doing whatever you want.
Pio (Brooklyn, NY)
n Thanks to your letter, it was more clear to me that all men face the same situation. Before, I couldn’t really see that because, being able to do whatever I want, I have a distorted idea of freedom; but in a place like yours, it’s more clear that we need something outside of our circumstances.
PQ (Brooklyn, NY)
n I didn’t realize this beautiful thing I had before which I was ignoring. Your letter made me want to have His Presence more in my life.
Melissa (Brooklyn, NY)
n The freedom you experience even in prison shows me it is possible to see the Presence of Jesus in every situation.
Sarah (St Cloud, MN)
n I feel sometimes that I don’t have any freedom, but in your letter you sounded so free.
Bridget (St Cloud, MN)
n I can now see more clearly the true meaning of freedom. This is partly through your wonderful letter. Freedom is much more than just being able to do what you want when you want. It is something that can only truly be achieved through the Mystery.
Jonathan Fromm
(Holdingford, MN)
n I would just like to tell you how amazing it is to me that even in prison you can be so free. Sometimes in school I feel like I am in jail, but after hearing this letter, I feel as though I take my freedom for granted.
Kaleigh (Attleboro, MA)
n Josh, with so few reminders of your encounter with the Movement, how is it that you are able to continue to live your experience given the circumstances that you are in?Do you believe that prayer alone can sustain you?
Krista (East Windsor, NJ)
n My brother-in-law left today for jail and it was hurting me so badly inside, I couldn’t take it. He is like a father to me. He didn’t even do anything wrong–he was only in the wrong places at the wrong times. Your letter helped me… Seriously, you’re behind bars, and you have more freedom in your life than I do. Christ, no matter what, will always love my brother-in-law, you, and me. I thank you for being open to this because it made me more open to this…
Sincerely,
Catherine (Staten Island, NY)
We hope you understand how important you are to us now. We’ll try to keep in touch and–who knows?–maybe we can come and see you sometime. We love you very much, and promise to pray for you and those dear to you.
In communion with you, through the sweet presence of Jesus, we remain forever yours: [here all of us from NY and some Washington kids signed]