SATURDAY

How, in God’s name, has it come to this?

Any answer can only be partial, but here’s a survey: by a bounteous universe (honor it by whatever name you choose), by a sun that makes things outgrow their bounds, by a nature that continues to slowly come undone, and, lastly, at the fragile margins, by the actions and inactions of women and men.1

Somewhere along the way, eons after it all began, clans of men, women, and children began to till the earth. Affixing themselves to the land and to the calendar by which their crops were sown and reaped, these men and women gradually developed a set of activities, some immediately germane to material flourishing and some seemingly extraneous to it. Here we might take special interest in the “less useful” activities: Our forebears cut symbols into rock, they fashioned semblances out of pigment, they made music, and they danced. They played games. The children watched them do it, the parents showed them how, and the practices survived them all.2

Much later, in the same corner of the world, in a trend spanning roughly a millennium and a half—and henceforth the historical record will substantiate our conjecture—a handful of influential visionaries were credited with gaining access to a realm of reality beyond reality, whereby they received, from an invisible being regarded as to some degree sovereign over all that they saw and didn’t see, a set of amendments to the laws by which they lived. Let us call the commemoration of these wondrous encounters and the enactment of their consequent prescriptions religion (though as a category presuming to isolate an elementary component of our species’ nature, religion will only emerge much later).3 On their merits, too, as well as via conquest, trade, and emigration, these cultural and religious forms spread, mutating with each and every transmission. Eventually, they even traversed the ocean. Toward the very end of our story, in a uniquely idealistic and opportunistic hour, a country was founded.

It is here, in the new American republic, that we stumble upon the curious innovation that will one day furnish our seven days their improbable setting. For it was in Ben Franklin’s Philadelphia that a group of middle-class Quakers and their fellow religious progressives, having grown disgusted and horrified with the going forms through which public depravity was censured, revolutionized punishment.4 On the strength of their mobilization, the age of the stockade, the whip, and the gallows was declared over. In the modern era, punishment was to be softened, transformed from a system that extracted recompense from the body into one intent on mending the soul. Henceforth, the debauched offender was to be removed from his corrupting environment and placed in a penitentiary, where, by means of a solitary encounter with the divine light dwelling within him, he would be reformed. At Philadelphia’s famed Eastern State Penitentiary, which opened in 1829, the aspiration of holy encounter was literalized architecturally with the placement of skylights—“eyes of God”—through which the sequestered prisoner might come to see himself as the Almighty saw him, slough off his sin, and repent.5

In theory, the penitentiary was to have been the quintessentially modern institution. And by means of surveillance and instruction, its product, the transformed man, henceforth to be known as the prisoner, was to be the archetypal bearer of what theorist Michel Foucault would a century and a half later call the “modern soul.” As iconically illustrated via Jeremy Bentham’s idealized prison, the panopticon, Foucault’s elegantly simple idea was this: if people are unsure whether or not they are being watched, they will assume responsibility for policing themselves.6 In this manner, as a properly disciplined modern subject, the prisoner was to have been rougher hewn, for sure, but in the end fashioned not all that differently than the factory worker, the soldier, the student, and the patient—a man endowed in body and mind with the requisite know-how to act (and only to act) in the productive manner befitting his peculiar social position.7

Things didn’t turn out as planned. The silence and solitude of Eastern State inspired madness more than rectitude.8 Before long, as incarceration became the norm, solitude itself was sacrificed to overcrowding. Reformist zeal proved fleeting. By the mid-nineteenth century, the penitentiary’s founding aspiration had been largely abandoned, leaving the institution branded with its name to hobble on without coherent philosophical justification, a machine without a ghost.9 In the public conceptualization of crime, the pendulum swung—much like it did again in the final decades of the twentieth century—from Quaker environmentalism to Calvinist fatalism. Moral turpitude came to be seen not as a collective product of rotten environments but as the intrinsic nature of rotten men, and, gradually, as driven by the shaping power of the ownership class and the spirit of American racism, the modern prison grew into the appropriate instrument for the infliction of just deserts.10

In the chapel, this epic history is also local history. For when Eastern State was mothballed in 1971, its prisoners were dispatched to Graterford. Back then Graterford’s population was only half of what it is today. But then came the wars on crime, then on drugs, and, eventually, on terror. Interests lobbied, people organized (and failed to organize), government officials did their things, and the system changed with the times. More and more prison time was handed out to more and more people, such that something like 2.3 million Americans will spend tonight in prison or in jail.11

THESIS 5

American religious history provides one way to account for the array of dispositions on display in the chapel. By linking imprisonment to reform, the religious beginnings of the penitentiary left their institutional traces, as did, more diffusely, the second and third Great Awakenings, when practices empowering individuals to draw their own theological conclusions proliferated, thereby presaging ever more innovation. Recent trends have been more directly determinative: the Great Migration north of African-Americans during the early decades of the twentieth century and the attendant urban improvisations that made Islam in its varied articulations part of the black religious vernacular; mid-century litigation undertaken by religious outsiders that stretched the narrow conception of what qualified as protected free exercise under the First Amendment; the prisoners’-rights movement of the 1960s, in which religious prisoners, predominantly members of the Nation of Islam, agitated for and won rights to possess religious literature and ritual implements and to assemble for prayer; the explosion by more than six hundred percent of the national prison population over the final three decades of the millennium; the pro-religion spirit of our political era that has brought new public and private support for religious programming on behalf of incarcerated men and women even as other educational and therapeutic opportunities have dissipated; and, at Graterford, the 1995 raid and subsequent chapel shake-up. By enabling some moves and circumscribing others, this unlikely sequence of historical contingencies—sometimes recalled, mostly forgotten, and always contested—lives on in the chapel’s practices.12

THESIS 6

For an account more attentive to religious experience, individual men may furnish a second starting point. At Graterford, one could make the case, religion truly starts where William James says it does: with “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude.”13 Having arrived in the prison undone, men must learn to survive confinement, one another, and themselves. Many did not have rich interior lives before, but now the thoughts come in a flood: anxiety in search of assurance, suffering in search of language, anger in search of a foe, chaos in search of order.14

Of course, these men were once children, too, and do not arrive in the prison as blank slates. They come equipped with religious proclivities born of their families and communities: in the past, there was a grandmother or mother who preached the Word at them, in vain; there was a voice inside their head that knew when they were doing wrong; like the majority of Americans, without thinking about it too much, they’ve always known that God is who He said He was.

Whether in solitary confinement or in the general population, days at Graterford are frightening, boring, and exhausting. One gets by the best he can. At night, the distractions fade away and the thoughts rush in. It is here where the prisoner is forced, in James’s language, to “stand in relation to whatever [he] consider[s] the divine”—which is how many religious men will soon conceptualize the echo of their thoughts. Here anxiety comes for assurance, suffering to make sense, and anger to be honed; here the self begins to erect an order, and here the terrible secrets that a man must keep to survive become the things that only me and God know about.

THESIS 7

From the prison’s vantage point, however, all this comes only later. First come the steel and concrete, then authority structures, regulations, and only then the prisoners’ religious ideas and practices. And what may we say of these practices? Foremost, as can be said of any social forms that have been around since longer than yesterday: they work. Just as mass incarceration works—not to rehabilitate and reintegrate prisoners (far from it!) but rather to reproduce itself, grow, crowd out alternatives, and become normal—so, too, for these men is religion made to work.

Living in prison is a crazy thing to make men do, but the overwhelming majority of convicts will give it a shot. Strangely and twistedly, men are conditioned by the building, the administration, by the staff, by their peers, and by themselves into making it through another day, another week, another year. The incarcerated men draw on all resources available, and toward this end, religion proves a trove. An illustration might help:

If the convict is alone, shared tribal marks suggest religious faith to be one way of finding his people. More likely, if one already has people from back in the street, then their differentiating symbols and postures are easy to assimilate into one’s style, one’s affect, and one’s language. By aping those who’ve already figured out how to do it, men begin to make their lives in here.

In this process, there is certainly room for religious meaning. From their pockets, the acculturators pull out penciled Bible verses or Qur’anic surahs, words that they say help them get by. But these bulbs will take a while to flower. More critical at this stage is finding one’s footing. Because early on danger is especially acute, one must pay close attention, and check his impulses. If one forgets to mind himself, then a prisoner or a guard will serve as an instructor and burn the memory into his body. But this is less common than it used to be. More likely, should one forget, the task of building self-awareness will be subcontracted to time, a bottomless stock of which is stored in the hole. After ninety days, the prisoner returns to the block one didactic scar richer. Following a brief spell of clairvoyance, anguish dissipates and boredom returns.

Primed for action by his fellow prisoners, by his cousin who once did time, and, principally—like the rest of us—by what he’s seen on television, the convict is pleasantly disappointed to discover that very little, in fact, happens here. Bored one night, with his cellie asleep, the TV out, but the light still on—it could be weeks or years into his sentence—he picks up his Bible. After flipping through its crisp pages, he finds the recommended verses. For the first time in ages, he reads. Now something is happening. The next night he picks up where he left off. Maybe it’s his need, maybe it’s his vague sense of readiness, maybe it’s the brute power of the printed word, but for whatever reason, he finds that when he reads these verses, he suddenly knows something in a way that he hasn’t known anything before.

Or perhaps the novice is illiterate. Religious traditions are transmitted orally most of the time, and here it is no different. Through a third party, he receives word to come down to the chapel on Sunday, that his cousin will be there to meet him. He goes. Jesus, it’s good to see him. They hug and reminisce and get dirty looks from the ushers. When it’s over, they agree to do it again. And another time. Before long, going to the chapel becomes a normal thing to do. It proves much more enjoyable here than when he was a kid. He enjoys listening to the gospel music, or even to the sermon. Even when he’s bored, there’s a feeling of camaraderie in being bored with others. And while two years back he wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told him, when Sunday comes around he’s as excited for chapel as he is for the Eagles. Well, almost.

One tough Wednesday, he gets bullied on the shop floor. He tells himself that if he can just hold it together until Sunday, everything will be okay.

Meanwhile, some of the dudes he saw in the chapel, he sees around on the block. They share a laugh. They start sitting together in the chow hall. These guys give praise to Jesus a lot, and that’s a bit odd, as is their talk of how they were saved on such and such a day. Other behaviors make more immediate sense. He becomes attentive to what he’s eating: I mean, this food will kill you if you don’t watch out! Once a week his new buddies walk the yard, and he joins them. Other than to work, his weekly trips to the chapel and the yard are the only times he gets off the block.

One Sunday during service, the sun is shining and the choir is singing, he is overcome by a strange sense of euphoria, a feeling that the worst has passed and that, in the end, everything is going to be all right. He tells the other guys about it over chow. That feeling, they tell him, is the Holy Spirit reaching out to save him. A few weeks later, maybe something happens again. As he’s been prepped to expect, he feels somehow like a new man: clean, absolved, and deeply grateful.

Or maybe nothing happens at all. Instead, ever so slowly, the Jesus-talk that once seemed so weird ceases to be so. The man begins to make the religious language his own and, as such, comes to understand his own experience through it. One of the things he understands intuitively is that he is no longer the same person he was when he first came to prison.

So religion at Graterford works: it works to replicate itself inside its residents’ bodies and minds; once there, it helps to pass the time, to give a man tools to survive this boring, scary, and sad place, both in isolation and together with his fellow men. It works to institute self-control, conditions discipline of conduct, of diet, and, especially, of thought. It gives the prisoner the framework to think through who he is, what he has done, what will happen when he dies, and how he might never go home. Or, just as likely, it provides objects for contemplation so that he doesn’t have to think about such dire things. If perhaps never to the stark degree achieved by the jail’s edifice and regimen, as a lived practice, a prisoner’s religion gives shape to his world.

In its perverse and roundabout way, then, religion at Graterford honors the penitentiary’s founding mission, producing men who regard themselves as transformed, and indeed, in a variety of ways, they are.

*   *   *

“Religion?” the squat Spanish volunteer howls.

“Yes,” I shout back over the slushy reverberations of conga, tambourines, maracas, and guiro. “Religion.”

Having goaded me into introductions, Rafael has proceeded to inform the volunteer of my disciplinary allegiance as a religious studies scholar, just as on Thursday he clued in Rita, the tiny Philadelphia county chaplain, to the fact of my cumbersome inheritance as a child of Israel. Rita is also back, and, once again, from her miniature beehive down to her patent leather shoes, she is a composition in luminous black. When it’s her turn at the lectern, Rita will tell how, yesterday, in her chapel, two guys badly beat up a third—this after a special service where fifteen people gave their hearts to God, which obviously the devil didn’t like.

But the morning will belong to the third volunteer, a pale, sunken-eyed Dominican named Mota, who will rail against religion and against the Jews.

“You people who think you came here this morning just to hang out, just to speak to a friend?” Mota will shout once he’s caught his stride. “You’re wrong! Because God has a different purpose for you. God brought you here to hear the Word. God has a big promise for us, and through Jesus Christ, He confirmed it. Moses asked, Who are you? God answered, saying, I am that I am. But Jesus said, Blessed are those who haven’t seen, but who believe!”

As he promised, Rafael is translating for me. Half-deaf from his years on the blocks, he has sat us in the front row, where he can read Mota’s lips.

“Religions are wrong!” Rafael bellows in English on top of Mota’s Spanish. “Religions submit men to their own willingness. But Jesus Christ sets you free. Jesus Christ says, I am the Truth, the Way, and the Life; and no one comes to heaven but through Me. Only through Jesus can you come to the Father. But everyone who embraces Jesus will be saved!” That is to say, codes of conduct, ritual observance, charity—in the final analysis, these are vanities. Faith in Christ is the thing.

“If you think that God has forgotten you, you’re wrong! It’s you that has departed from God! God does not depart from us. The devil tries to put your self-esteem down so that you think that you’re a nobody. He tries to tell you that you’re no good. He hopes that you will kill yourself. He wants you to break all the vehicles of salvation. That’s why we must believe God. I’ve got problems, too, even if I’m in the street. Maybe even my problems are bigger than yours! But I am with God, and God’s promises are unchanging and eternal. What God promised to Abraham, Moses, and to the Jewish people? He has promised the same to you!”

Mota reads from the twenty-first chapter of Matthew, in which, by parable, Jesus warns the Pharisees that the kingdom of God will be taken from them, and its fruits brought forth by another.15 Mota prays: “We should all overcome our stubbornness and open up our hearts to Jesus Christ.

“Jesus spoke to the people of Israel but they did not listen to Him. So they fell. To this day the people of Israel do not believe. They are still waiting for another messiah. But when He comes, they will see that He is their messiah. Those who believe, they will be edified. But those who do not believe … they will have a big problem. For religious people, Jesus will never come. That’s why we must seek the truth.

“Because He’s continued doing miracles, and because you and I live, He lives. Out of the midst of you I will rise up!”16

“Yes! Praise Jesus! Hallelujah!” the assembled men shout in Spanish and English.

From First Peter, Mota recites the admonition and promise that if a man is humble before God and vigilant in the face of the devil, God will take him from his afflictions and restore him.17

“A Jew said this!” Mota screams, and, factoring for the amplified reverb and Rafael’s hearing-impaired echoes, I’m fairly certain that he’s screaming at me.

“Jesus confirmed the Word with His sacrament. And Peter and Paul gave testimony to Christ of the glory. It is necessary that we study this Word, that we submit ourselves to the Word. There are a lot of religions, it’s true. But there is only one truth. And that’s the truth of Jesus Christ.”

Pounded in time, the lectern emits dull thuds. “The Jews continue to have problems. Do you want to know why? Because they have the Word but they don’t want to know it. They think He is a stumbling stone. As it promises in Luke 2:34, Jesus is for the falling and lifting of the people of Israel. All who believe are risen up! All those who do not, fall! We need to be ready for His return. The young people say, The world is mine. And the old man says, I’ve been waiting all my life but He still hasn’t come. But we’re going to see Him with our own eyes!

“Hallelujah! Jesus Christ separated himself from God the Father so you can sacrifice and be holy. We like to say that we can’t be holy, but that’s not true! All those who believe in Jesus Christ can be holy. God doesn’t see us for what we do. If He did, then we wouldn’t be here. He sees us through His Son, Jesus Christ. Don’t despair just because you have problems. You’re holy! He said it and I believe it. None of us in this world is just!

“Wow,” Rafael says, “I wish I could write like you!” It takes me a second to understand that these are Rafael’s own words, rather than Mota’s. I look up and he’s pointing at my scribbled transcript. Rafael suffers from dyslexia, he’s told me, but when he was a kid nobody told him, so he figured he was just stupid. At Graterford, he’s learned to read and write Spanish. English is next.

Rafael returns to channeling Mota: “Christ started working on your life ever since the day you came to Jesus. Abraham received God’s promise—Like the stars in the sky, like the sand in the sea will be your descendants. And he believed! The most beautiful thing about God is this: we don’t want to submit. Instead we want to manipulate the Word of God. But we can’t manipulate the Word of God. God says that to all the nations, in all the tongues, first to Jerusalem, and then to Greece, and then to Rome, and then to Philadelphia. So the Word of Jesus Christ is being fulfilled. Wherever they try to stop us, we break the locks and come in. He’s going to break down the walls, the jails, the chains. Because this is the Word of God, the Word that edifies and constructs.

“Jesus spoke in parables,” Mota says. “But what was hidden the Lord brought forth into the light. Sure, it was hidden, but who can hide the Word of God? It is religion that tries to hide the truth of God. But God has taken the truth and made it known so that people can know Him. The trunk of the tree is Israel—but it is we that are the spiritual descendants. We abide in the promises of God, not the promises of man. Jesus is our spiritual house.

“Like it says in John 8:36,” Mota roars. “Jesus said to those Jews who believe in Him: Know the truth and the truth will set you free. The truth of Christ will free you from all titles and all religions. They said: We are from Abraham, how can you say that we aren’t free? But Jesus Christ said to them: You can’t be free and still be tied with sin. So the Jews couldn’t be free. They prescribe laws that they can’t observe themselves! To ogle, to deceive a brother—these are sins before God! But the Son will make us free. This is not about deeds. It is about faith. Faith in what? Faith in Christ! Hallelujah!”

Mota’s frenzy crashes into the lagoon of the altar call. Softening his tone, “Does anyone need prayer?” Answered back with silence, gently he asks again, the prosecutor suddenly a counselor.

A solitary brown approaches the dais and stands at the base of the step, his head held down but his shoulders broad.

*   *   *

Am I Mota’s Jew? Or is Mota’s Jew merely a Pauline trope for the half-stepping wretch who lives—infuriatingly and piteously—in each of us? I’m tempted to approach Mota, to ask him what precisely Jewishness means to him, to interrogate him and, in all likelihood, be interrogated in turn. But I opt to let it go.

Instead I seek out Rafael, who’s wandered off, to thank him. I find him at the mouth of the aisle, standing beside the altar call’s sole responder and across the table from a young white CO.

“Whatever it is,” the CO passionately pleads with the altar-call-responder, “you’ve got to keep your hands off the situation. Whatever it is, you’ve just got to let God take care of it.” Turning to Rafael, the CO points at the brown. “Tell him I’m a Christian. And tell him that God just spoke to me right now, and told me I needed to talk to him.” He turns back to the brown and implores: “I don’t know your situation, but God just told me that you’ve got to keep your hands off it!”

Rafael translates the CO’s instruction into Spanish.

“Thank you,” the brown says back to the CO in heavily accented English, “’cause I’m going through something really hard right now.”

“See?” The CO turns to Rafael and me, his eyes sparkling. “I don’t even speak Spanish! God just spoke to me. Told me I had to come over here and tell this man to keep his hands off his situation. Because God is going to take care of it!”

*   *   *

Santana and Papa are chatting on the Catholic side and Philly soul oozes from the conference room.

Baraka is in the office with David and Vic. When queried, David fills me in on this morning’s activities, where upstairs they discussed the rise of vernacular Hebrew until David and the Rabbi got into a kerfuffle, something about the ideological agenda of Leon Uris’s Exodus.18

Baraka and David have been reminiscing about Watergate.

“Nixon was simply the best president ever,” Baraka says without looking up from a letter he’s redrafting. “There was a man wholly unafraid to use the power of the post.”

Still somewhat mystified myself, I ask David what he makes of Baraka’s professed Republicanism.

David looks at me with his wild eyes. “He’s black and he’s Republican. I figure it’s got to be mental illness.” Still without looking up, Baraka smiles.

The Rabbi passes through. “Did you know Baraka’s a Republican?” I ask. The Rabbi’s mouth drops open. Even in a place like this, some revelations retain the power to shock.

“Look,” I chide Baraka, “now you’ve upset the Rabbi.”

Baraka and David find common ground in Pennsylvania’s Senator Arlen Specter. He was the DA on Baraka’s case, I learn from Baraka, and the author of the single-bullet theory in the Warren Commission Report, I learn from David. As a railroader and whitewasher both, Specter, they agree, is a scoundrel of the first order.

Father Gorski pokes in an exuberant nose. In his hands, he holds copies of Pope Benedict’s encyclical on love, the first of the pontiff’s new papacy, which Gorski plans to distribute. I ask if his anticipated pay-raise came through. He laughs like I’ve made a joke.

Baraka explains that he’s only down for a minute, and that he’s got an afternoon appointment with the Flyers game on TV. Early on, when he was still feeling me out and our exchanges hovered around politics and sports, Baraka described his youthful career as a cleats-up tackling soccer defender. Only later in life did he get turned on to hockey.

Soon it’s just Vic and me.

“So what’s going on in the world of religion?” the resident atheist asks.

“A little of this…” I say.

“You know,” Vic says, “religion is the perfect example of how twisted we are as a species. All you need to do to see how sick, self-loathing, and paranoid we can be is look at religion.”

I laugh with the pleasure of unanticipated recognition and deliver a short spiel on the nineteenth-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach and his touchstone inversion of the principle that man is made in God’s image. According to Feuerbach, precisely the opposite is the case. It’s God who’s made in our image, not vice versa. As an imagined ideal, God is the projection of human capacities. However, in the process of building up God, according to Feuerbach, we sell ourselves short. In relegating our strength, love, and justice onto God, we debase the human—disowning the virtues that are rightfully ours and asserting in their stead a vitiated nature of rot and sin.

“No, that part religion gets right,” Vic laughs. “We are a bunch of dirty rotten sinners. So is he your guy, this Feuerbach?”

I detail for Vic the special place that Feuerbach occupies for the study of religion. How if you take Karl Marx’s word for it, Feuerbach was the beginning and end of the criticism of religion, which for Marx provided the template for all social criticism. Just as Feuerbach read theology anthropologically, so too would Marx encourage us to scrutinize economics, philosophy, and law. As presently constituted (whenever our present might happen to be), the ideas of God, the Good, the Law, and the Market—indeed, all our abstractions—are reflections through the fun-house mirror of our uneven social relations, and serve the interests of the owners over the laborers. If, according to Christian theology, man is a dirty rotten sinner, that’s only because his dirty rotten social relations make it appear so.19 Should we ever overcome social and economic injustice, the scales would fall from the eyes of the religious, and the pernicious nonsense of religion would be cast off.

“And for you?” Vic asks.

Well, I venture, you might say that Feuerbach’s materialism represents my point of departure. Coming out of this tradition, I see religion less as a study of gods in heaven than of people here on earth. However, while Feuerbach and Marx are key way stations on the road to the anthropological study of religion, I don’t see them as suitable stopping points. While with Marx I see ideas as wholly enmeshed in the social world—and not merely reflective of our material world but, rather, decisively implicated in how this world is constituted and reconstituted—religion as mass delusion doesn’t strike me as a particularly interesting story to tell.20

“True but boring, huh?” Vic interjects.

More like true but hardly exceptional, and, more perniciously, badly conducive to reinforcing the blind spots for comfortably godless men like Vic and myself. In lieu of real political and economic power, the poor man, it is said, has his religion.21 In its materialist metaphysics, its normative liberalism, and in its haughty universalism, the poor man of religion is a quintessential Enlightenment defamation. Hemmed in by modernity or capital, estranged, relegated to nonage, or enrapt by illusion, the poor man (and, perhaps more commonly, the poor woman) is nothing less than the religious subject as configured in the secularist imagination.22 For those operating within this conceptual framework, the poor man of religion applies wherever one finds people who for whatever mindless, brave, or sad reason avow an untenable and injurious faith in the caring nature of the cosmos. As encapsulated in Charles’s reduction of Daffy Ball’s fervent faith at EFM—Oh massah! I’s is just so privileged to be a slave!—the poor man of religion is the pitiful soul who, by means of religion, comes to embrace the inhuman conditions of his or her enslavement.23

The poor man of religion does get something important right. Namely, that in adopting the descriptions of the world available to us, people affirm the existing social order. Contrary to what some of its more fetishistic critics might allege, however, religion is hardly unique in its propensity for fallacy or in its support of systemic injustice. If it is delusional to believe in something too much, which is to say in a manner partially oblivious to its sources and social consequences, then we are all of us delusional—those of us who structure our lives around a given scholarly conversation, musical subculture, sports franchise, or political party no less than those of us who profess a particular religious conviction. Ergo my principal reluctance to pity too much the purported poor man of religion: by mistakenly regarding the general conditions of ideology and practice as somehow specific to religion, the invocation of the poor man scapegoats religion so as to let the rest of us off the hook.24

The framing poses other dangers as well. Though not as directly conducive to the use of brutalizing force as is his bad man counterpart, the poor man of religion may also turn deadly. Consider, for example, the specter of the burka’ed woman, who in the run-up to the Bush wars became a quandary for which benevolent military intervention was the necessary solution.25 Indeed, far from being the bad man of religion’s opposite, the poor man is, in fact, its ready complement. After all, without a brainwashed flock on hand to execute his will, the false prophet is no more dangerous than the neighborhood crackpot.

As I argue to Vic, for purposes of rendering religion as a scholar, the poor man framing would be especially toxic. By presuming to know religion’s essence and function at the outset, the pathologizing move succeeds in capturing little of what religion is and does for those who practice it. Dismiss the beatific Daffy Ball as a deranged poor man and one misses all the things that, through his faith, Daffy is enabled to do. I note how humbling it was to find people in this place who manage to direct their psychic energies not toward anger and resentment, but toward gratitude. It is a focus that inspires Daffy to serve his fellow men in a variety of ways, the social utility of which—as his hospice patients would be the first to attest—are readily intelligible beyond Daffy’s Christ-centered framework.

In making this case, one may certainly err in the opposite direction. As regrettable as it would be both analytically and politically to deny the poor man the entitlement to his convictions, it would also be wrong to fully concede him his claim to freedom. While Daffy’s claim on freedom is true in its own fashion—and true in a way that as a fellow struggler I would be a fool to reject out of hand—in a country that incarcerates so many, it would be cynical and defeatist for the non-incarcerated among us to endorse a version of freedom that erases the distinction between a life spent behind bars and a life not spent behind bars.26 To raise the poor man up from the dust and dunghill and declare him by virtue of his religious faith free is to validate his place and to relinquish the prophetic disgust that the system we have collectively wrought is rightfully due.27

Cast in the role of the holy unvanquished, Daffy Ball becomes a sacrifice offered for the pleasure and enrichment of those unincarcerated religious believers who might draw strength from the spectacle of his enduring faith; or, alternatively, a sacrifice made on behalf of seculars like me, who via the same saintly spectacle are, in their bad faith, somehow redeemed from their lingering obligation to practice religion at all. But if we remain on the wire between pity and glorification, we may unsentimentally observe that through his relationship with Christ, Daffy Ball, in his small way, works wonders.

It’s funny, I say to Vic, how differently the same set of data may be processed. Take the premise that life is short. With that recognition, one may curse the world for not being some other way. Buried in that discontent, however, is the affirmation of the extraordinary and precious thing that life is. It seems to me, I say, that especially in this place, it’s by means of a committed engagement with a religious discipline that folks overcome the disempowering trap of resentment and embrace instead an orientation of wonder and thankfulness. In this way, faith is decidedly its own reward, regardless of where we might or might not go when we die.

Vic shakes his head. “You know,” he says, “I never understood all the angst that people have about death. Death is simply part of life. There’s no point in fearing it or hating it. I mean, you don’t hate eating or taking a shit, do you? So why hate dying? But on the other side of the coin, don’t be in such a rush to die. There’s always pleasure to be squeezed out of life.” He waves an arm. “Even in a shithole like this.”

“It must be truly miserable to live here,” I say.

“No,” he assures me. “This place isn’t misery. This place is a joke. It’s a comedy they’re staging in here, pure and simple. Now, Camp Hill”—the DOC flagship—“now there’s an institution that’s run by the book. Up there they’ll send you to the hole for having two guys in a cell.” Vic chuckles, noting how cruel and unusual it is to send black guys from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh into the center of the state. “You know what they say about Pennsylvania,” he says. “It’s Philly in the east and Pittsburgh in the west and Alabama in between. It’s rough up there. At least down here you got a lot of COs who are more or less from the same population as the prison population. Up there? It’s all white people on one side of the bars and all black people on the other.”

I ask Vic to remind me where he’s from.

“Lebanon,” he says. “That’s midstate.”

“What’s that like?”

He mouths a couple of measures of “Dueling Banjos.”28 I get it. Even though it’s Klan country up there, Vic says, he always related well to black people.

The door swings open and the fat dwarf from St. Dismas’s Communion asks, “Do you have any toilet tissue?” We shake our heads no, and the door closes.

*   *   *

The vestibule sound track has taken a strong turn toward the liturgical. For those for whom religion is something housed in stained glass and stone, the trebly organ and two-part harmonies of Peter’s Catholic trio might well sound like the week’s first religious music. Which, on his more truculent days, is how Father Gorski sees it.

In recent chaplains’ meetings, Gorski has complained of the racket that sometimes rages in the conference room. Not discernibly practice or rehearsal, sometimes, according to Gorski, it’s just “a bunch of guys holding a jam session.” By Gorski’s traditionalist ritual aesthetics, there’s nothing holy about a jam session. As a liberal and a jazz musician, however, Reverend Baumgartner has a much more expansive conception of the sonically sacred. At least so long as Baumgartner’s the FCPD, it’s his sensibility that will hold sway; and on those Saturday evenings when Al sits in with True Vine, the music bumps, and Gorski once again decides he’s had enough, he and Al will continue to skirmish.

Down for the sparsely attended Seventh-Day Adventist service, Oscar the musician enters the vestibule from the chapel, a Daily News word-find in hand, and asks Father Gorski to lend him some Wite-Out.

“No,” Gorski curtly responds, “can’t give it to you. It’s contraband.” Oscar slumps back into the chapel, his puzzle uncorrected.

I ask the Father if he was kidding.

“Not in the least,” he says. “Wite-Out can be used to alter clothes.” Because browns’ uniforms are frequently adorned in white with nicknames and slogans, it hadn’t crossed my mind that doing so might be against the rules.

*   *   *

A motley crowd has gathered in Classroom A to pray the rosary with the Legion of Mary. Among them is Michael. Twenty years old, if that, Michael has a soft, round face and a big rear end, which he advances in a duck-footed waddle. Of all the chapel regulars, Michael is the one who inspires in me the most sadness. Developmentally delayed, Michael comes across as painfully free of guile. Only once have we spoken: “Gotta go to school,” he said, seemingly to no one. We were in the main corridor. “Very important to go to school,” he repeated. I told him that I agreed.

While childlike faith is often extolled here, Michael is well beyond the pale. Not that his unnerving simplicity is, at Graterford, in any way unique. Beneath the hospital, the Special Needs Unit is full of such men. I’ve seen them: squeezed there amid the wild and irrepressible, the shit-throwers and the self-harmers, are men who present not too differently than Michael, men wide-eyed and disconnected, who whether by chemistry innate or administered, seem largely unaware of where they are.

Perhaps it’s the weekend quiet—the bare corridors, darkened shop floors and vacant side yards—but on Saturdays, the prison’s social function as dumping ground for the unwanted is difficult to ignore. Add to that the refusal of Catholic ritual to brush death under the rug, and, even when I’m not depleted, like today, Saturdays tend to be more contemplative than is comfortable.

Lap, who has hollow cheeks, stringy long hair, and might himself pass for Jesus were it not for the three wooden crosses around his neck, has been reading aloud from a medieval hagiography of Saint Thomas Aquinas. In the far corner of the tiny room, a cart draped with a white tablecloth supports two burning candles, two vases of red plastic roses, and two statues—a matronly blue-and-white Mary, and the birdlike figure that is the lay Marian order’s insignia. Scattered on the end-to-end tables are tangles of plastic rosaries; a cascade of rosary pamphlets, some crisp and glossy, some sticky; a teetered stack of handouts; and a beat-up White Pages with “CLAW” scribbled in indelible marker across its bottom.

When Lap finishes, the Legion’s ancient, bony-beaked volunteer reminds the men of the five glorious mysteries: the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the ascension of Jesus up to heaven, the descent of the Holy Spirit to the Disciples, the assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven, and her subsequent coronation as Queen of Heaven and Earth. Until the Lenten season begins and they turn to the sorrowful mysteries, it is these five beautiful and unfathomable events, when the rigid boundary between heaven and earth was temporarily breached, that will remain the focus of their prayers.

Unlike most of the chapel’s religious languages, which are designed to feel accessible at first encounter, the universe of concepts revealed through the rosary remains for me inaccessible and strange. Form is easier to fathom. Moving clockwise, the men take turns reciting the five glorious mysteries and the biblical passages on which they are founded. After recounting a mystery, the reader leads the group in responsive recitations of one “Our Father,” ten “Hail Marys,” and one “Glory Be”—which Lap counts with upheld fingers. The cycle finishes with the singing of “Ave Maria.”

Sometimes smoothly, sometimes joltingly, the mysteries circle the room.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for our sinners, now and at the hour of our death, Amen.”

As the chorus issues forth its dissonant affirmation, Lap holds his rosary aloft and toward the altar, his eyes shut. Soon it’s Michael’s turn.

After reciting the opening words intelligibly, toward the middle of the mystery, Michael’s delivery deteriorates into a muddled mumble. By his fourth or fifth repetition, he’s turned the reading into a joke, slowing it down, raising and dropping his pitch in a sarcastic singsong cadence, unpersuasively suggesting that he could read it better if only he cared to.

As the rotation leaves him behind, Michael leaves. In watching him go, I can’t avoid thinking something Baumgartner said of a similarly piteous Saturday regular who got shipped last spring: “He simply never had a chance.” Not all are so sentimental. According to Bird, Michael is a convicted rapist, and knows full well that what he did was wrong. Same as he knows that it’s wrong when he slips away to have sex with a guy.

While prison ethnographers generally turned a blind eye to prisoners’ religion until the 1970s, when the Nation of Islam’s spectacular militancy made religion impossible to disregard, a notable exception was a purported correlation between chapel attendance and sexual deviance. At Donald Clemmer’s Depression–era Illinois penitentiary, for example, it was “the opinion of numerous inmates that those who attend because of a religious drive are usually the intellectually dull, the emotional, the provincial, and the aged. Criminologically, these same observers report that sex offenders, murderers, and embezzlers are in attendance at the service in a much greater proportion than their share of the total population.”29 If at Graterford, embezzlement and murder carry no special stigma, the sex criminal remains a pariah, and the chapel a place where even the most despised can go without fear of being turned away.

Lap, whose mother is deaf and who signs along with the mass from the dais, recites a mystery with a deaf man. With Lap’s accompaniment, the man, who has thick plastic glasses, a palsied left arm, and a large wooden cross around his neck, jarringly exclaims the mystery, spit flying from his mouth. Again with Lap’s help, a deaf five-foot-tall Vietnamese man-child makes an indecipherable go of it. When next it’s Lap’s own turn, he and the man-child repeat it the same way.

*   *   *

Vic the heathen and Peter the Catholic have known each other for decades, dating back to the early eighties at Camp Hill, although back then—I won’t discover until later—Vic was the Catholic one.

No one in the chapel is more serious about his religion than Peter. Born to unaffiliated Protestant parents, at twelve Peter started attending church on his own. Already a seeker in his youth, after receiving life for murder, Peter began his studies in earnest. At Frackville, in the mountains, he started studying Greek and Hebrew. The latter he continues with the Rabbi to this day—carving, in seven years of Tuesday evenings, a sizable path through the canon of late biblical and early rabbinic literature. After exploring the gamut of available practices (among them, Buddhist meditation), Peter was baptized a Catholic. Of the many traditions he studied, Peter determined, Catholicism afforded him the best techniques for accessing what he characterizes as “both the numinous and the mystical facets of religious experience.” Through the Catholic tradition Peter has come to know God both as separated and transcendent—what, after German theologian Rudolph Otto, Peter dubs the “wholly other”—and as radically present.30

Though an indefatigable student of the text, for Peter the project of knowing God is something altogether different. “Trying to understand God through language,” Peter explained, “is like trying to taste grapefruit with your eyes.” For Peter, knowing God is an urgent undertaking. “With love,” Peter said, “God allows you to become something more than what you were.” But concerted spiritual discipline can only get you to God’s doorstep. Admission requires grace. “You can’t expect it,” Peter said. “If you expect it, it’s lost its giftness.” Peter sees the need for God as universal, but he understands the special function religion provides in his daily life as a prisoner. “In prison,” he said, “those who try to be hard inevitably break. Religion allows one the give to be strong.”

While Vic schmoozes with the shaggy white CO on duty—playing a listing game of COs who ended up on the other side of the bars—Peter inquires if I’ve yet read the proposal that he gave me back in December. I confess that I haven’t, and ask Peter to jog my memory. It’s a protocol, he reminds me, for a restorative-justice program based on the model of Franciscan penance. His intention is to run the program in conjunction with the Secular Franciscan Order that with Father Gorski’s assistance he’s in the process of bringing to Graterford. His driving motivation, he explains, is to do anything in his power that might give his victim’s family a chance to heal.

Taking a hard line utterly discordant with Peter’s tone, I ask Peter if in his hunger for absolution, he might unintentionally be trespassing on his victim’s family’s right to be left alone. That is, what if what they want from him is nothing other than distance? Peter is momentarily quiet, making me fear that I’ve come on too strong. Seeking to fill the silence, I make a borderline snide aside about victims—a demographic whose pain, as I see it, is too often cynically mobilized for the purposes of ever harsher punishment. Chiding me gently, Peter draws a distinction. It’s the public-advocacy victims’-rights groups he can’t stand. “They don’t care about victims at all,” he says. “They just use them, and perpetuate their hurt for political end.”31 For the victims of crime and their families, however, he has nothing but respect and compassion. I don’t at all disagree, and feel properly chastened for my indiscretion.

“Shift change!” Vic barks. Through the glass window of the chapel complex door, a couple of whitecaps are nearing the corridor’s end. Vic proposes we move into the office, which we do.

Peter continues. Given the debt accrued through his crime, he just wants to help out his victim’s family any little way he can. Even the littlest thing, like sending a birthday card on their daughter’s birthday. With modestly greater care than before, I wonder aloud if that isn’t something of a fairy tale.

Not at all, Vic says, tuning in. At his trial, members of his victim’s family made a plea on his behalf, and now and again they send him a ten-dollar money order. Moreover, he does send them cards on the holidays, which, to the best of his knowledge, they appreciate.

It does happen, Peter insists. He relates an anecdote from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A woman whose son and husband were killed under apartheid had the opportunity to confront their killer. But instead of responding with vengeance, she converted her loss into love: “You took away the people that I love,” she reportedly told the man, “so let me love you.”32

When he later returns for mass, Peter will show me two letters he received in response to his proposal—one from a Villanova grad student who is eager to help, the other from a victims’-rights group that is predictably aloof. He will hand me, as well, a second copy, blued at the edges from carbon paper, of his “A Path of Penance: A Reflection upon Living St. Francis’ Exhortation to Penance.”33

In the eight-page, single-spaced proposal, Peter humbly articulates his intention—as a Christian, as a Catholic, and as a Secular Franciscan—to pursue a path of personal penance. This pursuit begins conceptually with a critique of the existing order of punishment. According to Peter, our retributive system injures, hardens, and isolates. It rapes. Acting coercively from without, it can do nothing to change hearts, to instill love or contrition, or to inspire actions of atonement. As such, it does nothing to address the offender’s broken relationships with his God or his neighbor, or to address the harms inflicted through his criminal acts.34

Penance means responding to Christ’s call to an abundant life and freedom. Setting off on this journey of faith requires that one renounce the things of the world. To those skeptics who might dismiss as trifling the renunciation of the world by a prisoner who, seemingly, has already lost everything, Peter insists that reluctant renunciation is hardly enough. One must, rather, issue his renunciation affirmatively—a maneuver that the prisoner’s history of loss and everyday precariousness makes all the more difficult. But one has no choice but to begin where one is, which in Peter’s case is in the condition of guilt. While his guilt, as Peter sees it, is defined not by his crime but by his common heritage as a son of Adam, he acknowledges the special responsibility he bears as someone who through grave sin has injured his neighbors. Reconciliation with Jesus Christ entails that he, in Paul’s language to the Ephesians, “put away the old self … and put on the new self,”35 so as to go forward, seeking “what is noble in the sight of all.”36

Coupling penance for past wrongs with an ethics going forward, Peter describes this requisite death and rebirth as a conscientization. Conscientization is the ongoing critical self-examination that lies at the core of personal and spiritual growth. This process does not take place in isolation. Rather, full fidelity to a faith through which, as Paul says to the Romans, one is not conquered by evil, but conquers evil with good, necessarily requires fierce engagement with one’s circumstances.37 In the case of the prisoner, penance requires that one refuse the habits of dehumanization, vengeance, and wrath to which our criminal justice system has acclimated him. Because this system expediently sacrifices the true needs of victims and offenders for short-term political ends, at the heart of this transformation, penance requires that one transcend as well the dehumanizing binary of victimizer and victimized.

As to the nuts and bolts, Peter vows and advocates four practical measures, two more or less discrete and immediate, and two comprehensive and ongoing. They are, first, an expression of regret; second, a full confession; third, making amends as far as possible; and, lastly, working toward creating positive relations in the place of the division, hurt, and harm wrought by his crime. By adopting these measures and by calling upon others to do the same, Peter hopes to impart healing on a world ravaged by sin.38

It is difficult to capture by means of synopsis alone the erudition on display in Peter’s proposal, and its exquisite balance of qualities often in tension: commitment and humility, diagnostic precision and idealistic courage. Plainly, it is a considered stab at making good. What grabs me most about the document is Peter’s refusal, in spite of the change he is desperate to effect, to delude himself about the difficulties of the task at hand. Channeling Paul, Peter exhorts himself and the reader not to “conform to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.”39 As Peter repeatedly stresses, however, an “age” is a pervasive and resilient entity. No quick fix will abolish this age of “criminality, victimization, and even victimhood.” Transformation, both individual and collective, and the freedom that such transformation will enable, are not present conditions but horizons to strive for. The journey ahead is as impossible as it is necessary.

Much in the way, then, that Baraka, as would-be bad man, resists the pull of facile virtue unto putative “goodness,” so does Peter—whose impassioned faith might qualify him a poor man—refuse the ready elixir of declaring himself already liberated. Freedom, for Peter, is not to be had via instantaneous grace or merely by affirming it so. Freedom will require the grinding, self-critical commitment to the life of love that is Jesus’ mandate for women and men on earth. As subjects of this fallen age, we are all of us spiritually impoverished and psychically yoked. If his criminal guilt and the material fact of his incarceration make Peter an exceptional case, in his dire need for comprehensive overhaul, he epitomizes as well the fallenness that is the human condition. Freedom—the freedom to which we are all obligated to strive—will arrive eventually. But in the meantime, as a freshly fallen Adam learned and a weathered Candide affirmed, there’s work to be done.40

By some kink of fortune, minutes after I receive Peter’s reissued proposal, Vic will hand me four essays of varied lengths, which document, in sum, a history of his gathering frustration with (and presage his eventual break from) Inside-Out, the prisoner/outside college student dialogue group. While Vic’s papers lack the acute sobriety of Peter’s program, that is not their game. At once more confrontational and more playful, Vic’s efforts are no less learned or critically engaged. Peppered with scattershot citations of Seneca, Eminem, Carol Gilligan, Karl Popper, Martin Luther King, Nietzsche, Joseph Heller, Pink Floyd, and Michel Foucault, among others, the papers represent a challenge to the program’s director, an exhortation to his fellow course participants (the prisoner “insiders,” especially), and a demonstration (to himself, principally) of his own sovereignty. In style, the pieces modulate back and forth between bald polemic and a more probing mode of immanent critique that judges the program against its own ideals. At the papers’ core lies the following argument: If, by fostering dialogue and collaboration between insiders and outsiders Inside-Out is hoping to follow the lead of educators John Dewey and Paulo Freire and use education to overcome oppression, then, as Vic sees it, the program is falling miserably short of its goals.41

Vic’s grievances are concrete: the diminishing number of outsiders, the shadowy procedure by which insiders are tapped for inclusion, the mechanisms by which insider authors are not credited individually, the overwillingness of the director to speak on prisoners’ behalf, and the overly regimented course structure that leaves little time for spontaneous exchange—all of which reduces the insiders to little more than animals in a petting zoo. This litany of irritations betrays a coherent picture, one that Vic renders using the tools of critical theory. To wit, while Inside-Out may talk about combating prisoners’ isolation, disempowerment, and infantilization, in the process of becoming an organization, these animating goals have been sacrificed for the putative “greater good” of preserving the organization itself. Rather than informing the group’s actual practices, then, these ideals have become little more than an ideology, one used to crush dissent and prop up the extant regime of power. Having drunk the program’s Kool-Aid, Vic’s fellow insiders have become principals in their own subjugation, whereby—much like the docile schoolboy, the prostrate parishioner, and the flag-waving citizen—they sacrifice the possibility of true individual and social freedom for the sycophantic acquiescence to local authority. In the end, far from troubling the structures of power through which prisoners are dominated, the program merely serves to reinforce them.

While I will be floored by the simultaneous receipt of Peter’s and Vic’s papers, I will be unsure of what precisely to make of their juxtaposition. For the longest time I will presume that the insight embedded in this shard of serendipity is to be found in the contrast between the two men’s texts: the contrast between religion and secularism, between proposal and critique, and, ultimately, in extrapolating from text to character, that between Peter’s enabling optimism and Vic’s self-defeating resignation. But after repeated readings, I will come to read these texts not for what they suggest about their authors’ inner lives, but for what they reveal about their capacities for action. Arguably influenced as much by Baraka’s take on honor as by Kierkegaard’s take on Abraham, and in a way that perhaps renders religion a red herring, I will come to see in Peter’s and Vic’s texts not the contrast between contentment and frustration, but parallel evidence of two men struggling with the tools they have come by to reshape, in ways small and big, the world as they find it.42 In each case, the odds are as long as the power is unequally distributed. But against a world set in its crummy ways, each man pushes incrementally on toward its remediation. In Vic’s case, righteous struggle will soon yield to bitterness. The condition is a fragile one, and courage will require renewal. But at least for the moments captured by Vic’s and Peter’s prose, two selves stoked toward transformation catch fire and threaten to engulf others.

Albeit far too late, in this dual characterization of Peter’s proposal and Vic’s papers I can’t help but believe I hold the kernel for an affirmative response to Brian’s badgering inquiry from last night as to whether or not there are at Graterford men of faith.

*   *   *

Before the office empties, Gorski fetches me to accompany him, as he occasionally does, on his rounds of the Restricted Housing Units.

Both of us coatless in the unseasonably warm sun, we pass the defunct garden, where, before the raid, as Baraka tells it, a guy could forget he was even in prison. To our right is L Block, where Sayyid is. Behind the barbed wire, prisoners out from the hole for their daily hour of air pace and idle in the sideways stack of ten-by-fifty-foot chain-link cages, one man to a cage. Just shy of the prison’s eastern wall, we hang a left and pass through the barbed wire that cordons off J Block and the rear sally port.

The J Block tiers, which house a mixture of men in the hole and some of the commonwealth’s 225-plus death row prisoners, are stubby old things. Each one consists of eight cells flanked by doubled hallways that leave eight feet of clearance between these special prisoners and the free people who come to see them. Using the inner hallway, we tour Gorski’s regulars: a flabby but frail seventy-something with a death sentence, a cloudy right eye, and a table littered with orange silos of meds; Shepherd, one of four brothers serving life or on death row, whom the grinding industrial fan renders all but inaudible; a tenderized African-American man whose crossbars are stuffed with sci-fi paperbacks; a second black guy who blurs with the first; a deeply decent-seeming Latino death row prisoner roughly my age whose photographs of his kid disappear now and again behind an armada’s worth of flapping laundry; and Andy, who once he’s done his 120 days for having lost it at a CO, will rejoin Gorski’s monthly session where he’ll make clear to kids from nearby St. Gabe’s reformatory school that prison is simply no place for them. Andy, who’s white and whose brother just won a Rhodes scholarship, teases me about my dissertation’s lack of a thesis, wonders whether what I’ve seen at Graterford has made me more willing to forgive, and lauds proposed legislation that would make lifers over fifty who’ve served twenty-five years parole-eligible.43 Only when our exchange is almost over do I notice that half-obscured by laundry and gloom, huddling against the bars by my feet, there is an elf of a boy, his torso covered in Celtic tattoos and shirtless in the hotbox heat.

When Gorski has bestowed upon each of his regulars the Eucharist, a prayer, or just a few minutes of company, we leave J Block for the rapidly dwindling sunlight. Gorski emphasizes the importance, for the death row guys especially, of “a ministry of presence.” How critical it is for them just to have somebody drop in now and again to say hi. “It doesn’t even have to be particularly religious,” he says. “Just to show them that they’re remembered.”

Pennsylvania has a long tradition of such meager but lifesaving ministry. In 1835, a Prussian visitor to Eastern State Penitentiary quoted one anonymous prisoner who noted that his “greatest joy was the visit of a cricket or a butterfly because it seemed like company.” The visitor, a Doctor Julius, observed: “The Bible also became a document of interest to the prisoner, because his possession of it was a favor during his good behavior. The infrequent visit of the moral instructor, or of some visitor from the outside world, might be lengthened or made more frequent if the prisoner would try to learn to read from the Bible as a textbook. Moreover, any visit from an officer came to have an intense meaning to the prisoner. Such visits alone connected him with the world of living beings.”44

“You know,” Gorski says. “The administration instructs staff to alter their routines so prisoners can’t anticipate your movements, but in the case of the death row guys, I do my best to have precisely the same routine every week. They depend on it so much.” I realize as he says it how many of our J Block exchanges concluded with the caged man half stating, half pleading, “See you next week?”

I couldn’t help but notice how fiercely present the ordinarily acerbic and uncoddling Gorski was with the guys on J Block, and I tell him so. Gorski acknowledges how much he likes it, ministering to the guys on the RHU. Indeed, from the tempo of his speech and the glimmer in his eye, Gorski seems elated—elated in a way seemingly common to chapel volunteers following their services, elated much in a way that I myself frequently feel when released into the parking lot after an intense day. What a crazy thing we’ve built in the penitentiary, I think to myself. How truly bizarre that this awful place should afford such profound pleasure to those who feel called to enter into it and partake in its overflowing meaningfulness.

With L Block on our left, I ask Gorski if he’s planning on going to see Sayyid.

“I’d rather not,” he says.

I’m disappointed but remain silent.

“It has nothing to do with Sayyid,” he says. “It’s just that they’ve already started feeding the guys, so they have things to throw now.”

Gorski is harassed in the RHU much less now than when the Church’s sexual abuse scandal was raging.45 Back then, on visits to J and L, he was sure to get called “baby raper” and worse. The charcoal-hued Keita, who’s greeted with shouts of “Ooga booga” and “Shaku Zulu” is, nowadays, more of a target.

*   *   *

Andy, Gorski says over dinner in the dimming staff dining hall, is not generally one to make trouble. He grew up in a $400,000 home and he went to high school with the son of Gorski’s friend. With Andy, Gorski says, it was really driven home for the first time: how these people are from the same world that he’s from. And though, as I know, he is quite conservative, he honestly believes that Andy is innocent of the crime for which he was convicted.

Gorski scans my face for surprise. The proclamation is indeed out of character. Gorski is acutely allergic to liberal sentimentalists who cast prisoners as helpless and lodge all blame on the system and its operators. “Yeah, he can be an angel for an hour, sure,” Gorski wants to say to such idiots, “but you don’t see him raping somebody back on the block.” More than once, with joyous incredulity Gorski has told me about the time he took Reverend Carvel, the aging St. Dismas volunteer, back to L Block, and how, when Carvel couldn’t hear the prisoner through the small, square, eye-level window, the foolish priest got down on his knees and spoke through the knee-high slot where the food tray goes, practically begging for a face full of feces.

Gorski is not alone. The volunteers can drive Baumgartner nuts, too: the sanctimonious supporters of convicted cop-killer cum political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal; the white volunteers who play black; and the egomaniacs who treat saving souls like notches on a bedpost.46 Baumgartner told the story of one such preacher. At the close of his service, he pled and pled for someone to answer the call. Eventually one guy approached the altar—a demonstrably mentally ill new-sider who came up more or less every week. The volunteer left wholly delighted with himself, beaming at his morning’s work. When he returned to the jail six months later, he asked Baumgartner: “And how is that young man?” Baumgartner didn’t have the heart to tell him that he’d hanged himself in his cell.

Gorski tells me Andy’s story. In college, Andy got mixed up with drugs and one night a girl ended up dead. The DA put the pinch on a local drug dealer who was somehow involved. In exchange for a deal, the dealer ratted out Andy who, though innocent, had no alibi for the hours in question.

While I have no judgment about this account on its merits, I suggest to Gorski the possibility that his empathy might say more about his own positioning than about the facts of the case. The key variable, I say, might be the $400,000 home that locates Andy within the recognizable domain of Gorski’s own world.

Father Gorski disagrees. There’s something particular about Andy that makes Gorski doubt he did the crime for which he was sentenced.

For scholarly and civic reasons both, I’m not particularly interested in the facts of men’s crimes. In light of how we think about prisoners, I concede that the preoccupation with such facts seems merely “common sense”—and it is. But tethering the substance of each man’s character to his crime is no less bluntly unreasoned than if, as one with a fondness for psychoanalysis, I made a point of probing each man about his relationship to his mother. Yes, each man at Graterford has a mother from whose womb he sprung, just as each man has a crime for which he was convicted. Neither, however, is necessarily my business, nor necessarily determinative of his character. From a political standpoint, moreover, undue attention to individual criminal acts obscures the root causes that bring men here for life. Take Teddy, Sayyid, and Kazi. Inasmuch as these three men grew up on the same block, the crimes for which they were convicted were plainly symptomatic of other precipitating factors.47 As for an ethics of engagement, am I truly obligated to probe a man about the worst thing he’s ever done? Would anyone think to impose such a brutal hermeneutic on me or Father Gorski?

If I’ve been more than happy to avoid the specifics of crime, the men of the chapel have proven unwilling to follow suit. As I tell Gorski now, of those prisoners I get to know beyond “how you feeling?” sooner or later, the majority make a point of telling me about their cases. Of these, roughly half—like Baraka and Teddy—want me to know that they didn’t do it, and half—like Peter and Lenny—want me to know that they did, and that they take full responsibility for what they have done. As far as claims to innocence go, I’m effortlessly agnostic as to the relationship between these declarations and the blurred facts on the bygone ground. When men like Baraka, Teddy, and, in this case, Andy, claim innocence, I presume that they truly believe themselves to be so. However, whether they were factually innocent of the crime for which they were convicted or whether, after years of denial and magical thinking, they’ve somehow managed to convince themselves they were, I’m in no position to judge.48 Just as there are, no doubt, men in Graterford for crimes for which they have zero culpability, I figure that there’s a lot a man can avoid knowing when his last shot at freedom depends on it. In either case, as far as my own civic entanglement is concerned, whatever evil these men might have done is secondary to what we have collectively decided to do to them—which in the case of a man like Baraka, for example, is to imprison him for longer than I’ve been alive.49

As I reassert to Gorski, should we factor out Andy’s race and class—elements which, I say, make Andy an easier object for his empathy and mine—I have no reason to presume Andy as more viable a candidate for innocence than, say, Teddy.

But in Teddy’s case, Gorski pushes back, there is a long history of crime, a long track record with which to make sense of his arson-murder.

But that, I counter, is the flip side of the $400,000 home thing. Most people who grow up in $400,000 homes don’t have lengthy rap sheets. Whereas a former drug addict from the ghetto …

Shifting from the fact of Teddy’s guilt to its psychic consequences, Gorski pinpoints the absence in Evangelical Protestantism of anything like the sacrament of reconciliation. Without reconciliation—that is to say, the Catholic rite of confession—a guy like Teddy will never have peace. He’ll always have to carry around the burden of the lie.

I detail for Gorski the Protestant guys’ frequent invocation of the distinction between the virtue that Paul counsels to the Philippians of finding contentment wherever one happens to be, versus the vice of acceptance, which to them is tantamount to soul suicide. Seems to me, I say, that a good number of the Evangelicals here—the lifers especially—display an astounding capacity for achieving this frangible equanimity.

Gorski doesn’t buy it. In his perspective, the simplistic formula of Christ’s instant and unconditional forgiveness is thin and wholly unsustainable. Meaning: in placing his faith in the insufficiently exacting God of Evangelical Protestantism, a bad man like Teddy deceives only himself, and only fleetingly at that. Roman Catholicism, by contrast, is the one tradition that institutionally ritualizes forgiveness. It’s the guys who experience that, Gorski argues—especially the lifers—who are most at peace because they’ve been given the tools to assimilate what they’ve done and a ritual process for ongoing absolution.

“It’s just good psychology,” Gorski says. As far as Teddy goes, he’ll never be at peace because he’s never asked for forgiveness. “Faith alone can be a dangerous crutch. Some truly live it, but for others…” He trails off.

Talk turns to the Legion of Mary and the ragtag bunch that congregates there. “I-tards,” Father Gorski says, alluding to a horrible quip I recently made about the developmentally disabled men who live on upper I Block. He laughs and reminisces about how back when Al was running the choir, it was full of “I-tards.” We share a guilty chuckle. Knowing that Al and Father Gorski have had their run-ins, I come to Al’s defense, saying that I found his outreach to upper I Block guys quite admirable, perhaps even “Christian.”

Bypassing my sentimentalist bait, Gorski sticks to the absurdist, launching into an impression of his parishioner, the frantically insane Anthony Lukes. In a rough approximation of Lukes’s inimitable oratorical style, Gorski delivers a breathy diatribe about the “political, economic, social, critical forces” that are shaping the present historic moment, and the “political, economic, social, and critical aspects” of the situation at hand. It is, in fact, true that Lukes speaks like the skipping recording of a sociology graduate student. Sticking with Lukes, Gorski says that while under his regime only baptized Catholics can receive Communion, his predecessor, Father Rzonka, gave Communion to anyone who asked. When he came on, Gorski took Lukes, who is black, to be one of these newly unsanctioned holdovers. But Lukes gave him his mom’s phone number. “Turns out she’s more Catholic than I am!” Gorski quips. “Go figure.”

On the topic of his mentally challenged parishioners, I ask Gorski about the disturbingly childlike Michael. Shaking his head, Gorski says he has to watch Michael carefully because he has sex issues, and that if Michael leaves for the bathroom and is followed out by another guy, odds are they’re having sex in there. I tell Gorski I’ve heard this same thing from Bird. Gorski agrees with Bird that guys like Michael know full well what they’re doing and need to be held responsible for their actions.

We head for the chapel. Soaking in the tranquillity of the deserted corridor, Gorski muses rhapsodically on the moment following Saturday night mass when he first leaves the prison. He loves that moment, he says. That regardless of season, at that hour the parking lot feels so quiet and serene. I say I know exactly what he means.

Gorski asks what my friends think about what I do. I tell him about the so-called “Capote effect,” where, by spilling over with arresting details of prison life, I rudely relegate everyone else’s dinner table conversation to an afterthought. (The effect is named after a scene in the recent biopic when, after spinning some stunning yarn about the Clutter murders, Capote breaks the resulting silence by sarcastically inquiring, “And what have you been doing?”)50

Gorski concedes that he, too, is always the hit of the cocktail party.

*   *   *

Baumgartner’s phone is ringing off the hook. In all likelihood someone is dead, but nobody is finding out about it until Monday.

Kazi arrives and sits down unassumingly at Sayyid’s desk. More convivial solo than when around others, he asks how my project is going. I tell him about the week I’ve spent and how I’m beginning to suspect that it might furnish the structure not just for a chapter but for the book as a whole. He asks me when I’m out of here for good.

Perhaps due to this week’s heightened intensity, I’m beginning to sense the guys’ awareness that I’m not long here. It feels to me like anticipated abandonment, but that might be a projection of my own discomfort, my first stirrings of fear about what will happen when these men of flesh and blood are flattened out by distance and craft into something more closely resembling characters. What will happen when they lose the power to hail me in return? In what I write, will I do them justice? Or will time and distance facilitate betrayal? When I bring these worries to Lenny, he’ll backhandedly reassure me that, as prisoners, they simply assume people like me will screw them over; but they’re open to being pleasantly surprised in the event that I don’t.

I still have lots of folks to talk to, I stress. Kazi nods, saying that there are some really low-profile guys, guys who rarely speak but whom I should definitely track down. I ask for names. He singles out Qasim, Yunus, and a couple of other Sajdah elders, all of whom I’ve heard of, I say, but none of whom I’ve talked to yet. I ask Kaz why he’s down this evening. He explains that he’s here to work on his postconviction writ, whose filing date is fast approaching.

While I resist the impulse now, next week I’ll ask Kazi about how he figures Sayyid is faring in the hole. “You gotta adjust,” the notoriously institutionalized Kazi will say. “In prison you really got to adjust.”

For now, though, we each write in silence.

*   *   *

Al lights up and says he would’ve come down earlier if he knew I was here. I pepper him with questions about last night’s Bible study. It takes place in the kitchen in the back of B Block, usually with four other guys. It was blessed, he says. And was he teaching or preaching? Some of each, he says, but a lot of preaching, which he doesn’t like because it makes him too emotional. I ask him what he was preaching about. Al’s face tightens in search of the right word. Moments pass. Gratitude? I ask, more probably because it’s on my mind than any other reason. Yeah, he says, making me wish I’d outlasted his silence.

When Al asks me how I’m feeling, I confess my incipient separation anxiety.

“When are you gonna disappear?” he asks.

“One more month as it’s been, and then back when necessary.”

“Like a couple of times a month?”

“Something like that,” I say, though I doubt it’ll be that frequent. Silence. “It’s going to be pretty boring without me, huh?”

“Your presence will be missed,” Al says. He can’t believe it’s been almost a year already.

As will shortly become clear, I’m not the only one for whom the emptying of the hourglass sparks concern. If by last summer Al and Teddy first jokingly put a bounty on my soul, with my departure now looming, Al will begin to make his play for real. As he’ll tell me next week, he’s been worrying about me, worried about what’s going to happen to me during the tribulation—the tumultuous period described in Revelation after the faithful are raptured but before Christ’s return. For while he knows that Enoch and Elijah will eventually advocate on the Jews’ behalf, he’ll just want to make sure “I wasn’t going to be going through all that.” Because I know him and Teddy, he’ll stress, the Word has been made available to me, so I’m going to be held to that higher standard. He’ll press me: What exactly is my plan for what’s going to happen to me after I die, when I’m forced to stand before God’s judgment?51

I will concede that as far as personal salvation goes, I really don’t have much of a strategy. As best I can tell, I’ll divulge, before we’re born and after we die, we’re like water in the ocean—wholly undifferentiated. For the brief, thrilling, and sometimes lonely time that we’re here, we’re like water in the toilet bowl—discretely contained, and, as such, seemingly disconnected from all the other water that is. Then, at the end of our days: flush. And back to the oceanic oneness we return.

At one time that might well have been true, Al will reply as if what I’m saying isn’t too far out—but everything changed when the spirit was breathed into Adam. And while there was a time in his life when he knew he was doing wrong, God came to him and saved him. And because God already did that for an animal like him, he’s certain that eternal life is to follow. “The spirit dwells with me forever,” Al will say, “and I have salvation because Christ Jesus died on the cross. Jesus Christ took my place for me.”

For me, I’ll try to explain, the most pressing order of business is less what’s going to happen when I die than how I’m to live in the meantime. Digging back into my day school training, I’ll detail the rabbinic distinction between mitzvoth bein adam l’makom and mitzvoth bein adam l’havero—commandments regulating the relationship between man and God versus those regulating man’s relationship with his fellow man. For me, I’ll say, one’s relationship with God is essentially a private matter. What concerns me more is how I might live up to my obligations to my fellow woman and man.

Because Al’s own sense of duty—the one that drives him to do everything in his power to save my soul—is inextricable from his relationship to God, he’ll struggle to understand who exactly my relationship is with. I’ll explain that while for him, as I understand it, one voice inside his head—the one he calls God—speaks louder and clearer than all others, my mind houses only a jumbled chorus, whose voices I take to be aspects of myself. But who is my relationship with? he’ll again probe. Rather than with God above, I’ll say, with whom my exchanges historically proved to be frustratingly monological, for me, relationship inheres in the social, in moments such as the present one when we are moved by the ideas and feelings of one another.

After thirty more minutes of conduits and cul-de-sacs, we’ll return to the problem of salvation. “If Jesus Christ isn’t who He says He is,” Al will confidently declare, “then let God do whatever He wants to me.” Meaning, all he can do is live and die with his conviction, and if that conviction proves to be wrong, well, then he’s willing to face the consequences. Excitedly, I’ll tell Al that in my more confident moments, this is precisely how my godless ethical convictions feel to me. Maybe I’m wrong in discounting personal salvation, I say, but I’m doing the very best I can with the information I have, and if one day I’m forced to stand before God and defend the choices I’ve made, I’m willing to make my case.

What will have begun in rancor will give way to an extraordinary moment of translation. I will be engulfed in a sense of fellowship, forged through hard-won mutual recognition—a sense that perhaps our two worldviews aren’t so irreconcilable after all. Seemingly, something similar will happen for Al. As he’ll say to me the following day, he figures that if we just took the time to talk it all out, we’d discover that when it comes down to it, we don’t really disagree about anything.

*   *   *

Vic arrives and parks himself at Sayyid’s desk, which Kazi has vacated. Al asks him how long he thinks I’ve been around. “Dunno, six months?” Vic hazards. “A year,” Al corrects him.

“So when are you out of here?” Vic asks. I tell him what I told Al.

“I don’t get it,” he says, “why can’t you stick around?”

“Because I have no function here,” I say.

“You and seventy-five percent of our staff!” Vic declares.

I laugh, but Vic is adamant that my purposelessness around here is a wholly generic condition.

“Do you drink?” Al asks.

Having been browbeaten before for my admittedly intemperate, fornicating lifestyle, I hesitate to give an answer. “Yeah,” I tentatively say, “a bit.”

“Then you could do Baumgartner’s job. Baumgartner drinks.” I can’t tell whether this is empathy or censure.

I tell them about how I’m working on landing a Villanova class for next winter, so that’ll guarantee me an ongoing presence (though not necessarily with men like Al). And then there’s the pending mid-state job opportunity. If that works out, I say, then I can pretty much stay on forever. Furthermore, should that come through, I could figure out ways to bring in students. In such an event, I ask, what sorts of things might they want to do with a bunch of college students?

“Sex show,” Vic says, to Al’s delight.

“No, really,” I say.

“I’m serious!” Vic pleads.

“Come on.”

“Well, let’s see,” Vic tries again. “Some kind of religion thing…” He fades out in search of some kind of religion thing.

“It doesn’t have to be a religion thing per se,” I say. “Just something educational that might involve them and you. Can you think of anything between religion and a sex show?”

“Nude show?” Vic tries, and again Al loses it.

*   *   *

From atop the CO’s desk, Kazi gazes into the corridor past the first trickle of men arriving for mass. In the conference room, Ezra, one of the stately old heads who pomades his hair and carries a comb in his breast pocket, is rehearsing True Vine. In Baumgartner’s assessment, Ezra is the chapel’s most talented musician. Although according to the same source, during performances, Ezra likes to mess with the tempo to throw the other guys off.

Next door, in the Catholic office, Jack, dressed tonight as an altar boy, is holding forth in culture-warrior mode for some of the usual suspects. Emboldened by my arrival, Jack rails on about the liberals.

“How can you be so mad at the liberals,” I ask, “when the conservatives have control of the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary branches?”

“Well,” Jack says, “Philly’s still run by Democrats and they screw that up plenty. Tax and spend, tax and spend.” Jeff, a second Catholic regular, is slight in frame, and he too is one of Gorski’s altar boys. He also objects. Even with Alito, Jeff says, the Supreme Court still has only three true conservatives.

“If the conservatives are pro-life,” an incessant yeller yells, “then why don’t they support health insurance covering fertility treatments!”

“Because they’re not natural,” Jeff explains, favoring the restriction.

The office grows increasingly cramped as the gathering horde—fifteen men, all white—cluster for confession.

In the back of the chapel, I find Gorski’s clerk, Mike Callahan, whom I take as a fellow refugee from his coworker’s vitriol. “Why do you think Jack’s so pissed off at liberals?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Mike says, “it’s Ridge he ought to be mad at.” In a well-worn lament, Mike rues the political climate that brought on the raid. He invokes Mudman Simon and Reginald McFadden, perpetrators of two high-profile, media-electrifying crimes, which the new Ridge administration exploited so as to lengthen and harden punishment. While I’m quite familiar with Mudman the biker, who, out on parole from Graterford, shot and killed a New Jersey state trooper, I ask Mike to remind me of the details of the McFadden case. Mike recounts how upon his release from Graterford, McFadden went up to New York and killed a whole bunch of white people. He expresses sympathy for McFadden, who was only sixteen when he was sentenced to prison for a black-on-white murder, and then snitched his way to a commutation. “He didn’t know any better,” Mike says. “You know? What do you expect from someone who was raised here from the time he was a kid? He learns to deal.”52

Santana sidles over to join us. When the beleaguered choir director discovers that we’re talking about the raid, he snarls his disgust and gestures goodbye with both hands.

“Had enough of this topic?” I ask.

“Look,” he says, “if guys want to live with that for the rest of their lives, then that’s fine, but I live for today.”

Perhaps, I say in Mike’s defense, part of living for today is teaching newcomers like me how today came to be like it is and not some other way.

That’s fine, Santana says, he just doesn’t want any part of it.

It’s a fair position. There is, admittedly, an indulgent quality to the unflagging ruminations about the raid. Here especially, it must feel good to tell stories in which, for instance, other people are the guilty ones.

*   *   *

If Saturday is a theme on human sadness played in a minor key, it is during mass that the score reaches its crescendo. No doubt some of it is mine, but whether in the summer’s long light or the blackest winter night, Catholic mass invariably brings home the horribleness of this place and the loneliness that must haunt the men who pass their days here.

In the distance, two small white statues, one of Mary and the other of Joseph, sit atop the altar, while on the chapel’s flanks, fourteen wooden boxes have been unshuttered to reveal, in carved relief, the stations of the cross. Two-thirds of the 130 men assembled are browns and the remainder are blues, though of the browns a sizable share have dressed up for the occasion in white T-shirts. A scattering of small caucuses, some sober, some frolicsome, fill the chapel with a beehive buzz. As generally comes with a crowd here, there are some fearsome characters, too. Not too far from where I’m standing in the back, in the last pew before the final six that have been sectioned off with yellow police tape, the customary cluster of shiny white heads and inked bodies pulse with effortless aggression. From the back of one bulldog head, a pair of tattooed eyes—seductively lashed and meth-head wide—stare back at me.

Without forewarning, Father Gorski enters the chapel along with four green-robed altar boys. Between them, the men carry a bowl, a chalice, and a large gold cross. As the procession hustles toward the altar, the din of chatter rises and deadens. At stage left, Peter’s trio sits at the ready, while at the foot of stage right, Lap faces the pews, poised to translate. When the procession hits the stage, the music starts.

In spite of my expectations, mass, when it arrives, proves itself to be—disappointingly, and mercifully—a dead letter. Hymns are sung, their exultant lyrics seemingly belied by the trio’s plaintive, reedy sound. A prayer for the sick is offered. Two Bible readings are recited, the first from the Old Testament, by Father Gorski, and the second, from the New, by tonight’s guest, Peter’s invitee, a lay Franciscan sister. Both passages are didactic in kind, with the former cautioning against false prophets, and the latter a reflection on the unmarried man’s anxiety about and devotion to the Lord. From where I stand along the back wall, in the worn-down, somewhat disassociated state in which I find myself, the Bible readings might as well be in Greek.

My incontinent attention is claimed by a CO who approaches Jack at the aisle’s mouth and hands him a note. Pulling plastic tiles from the green box that sits on the back pew, Jack spells out a two-letter, four-numeral DOC number on a hand-held placard, which he hands to a black guy in white who parades it down the leftward aisle until it catches the designated eye. His number recognized, the seated man springs up and hustles out to receive his visitor.

Dutifully, I transcribe the homily, which Gorski delivers like he’s got a plane to catch. “In tonight’s Gospel reading,” he says, “we read the verse from which priestly celibacy is derived. While marriage is a holy sacrament, the Church Fathers decided it would be a good thing for a priest to be freed from the obligations and demands of family so he may dedicate himself entirely to God.” Gorski notes the Church Fathers’ wisdom in this regard. Though a decidedly different path from that of having a family, being a priest is, Gorski argues, an exceedingly rewarding vocation.

“Many of you are caught in the middle, too,” Gorski says. “Even though many of you are married, you are living celibate lives. This is a challenge, I know. How can you do this in a way that will give you strength? The only way is to sacrifice yourself in prayer, to offer yourself up in prayer for your friends and family outside. Bishop Fulton Sheen”—the former American archbishop and radio and television broadcaster—“thought that the question Jesus would ask at the pearly gates to each arrival is: ‘Where are your children?’53 Even those of you who don’t have biological children still have the obligation to bring forth spiritual children. And those of you who do have children—you need to do what you can so that they will lead righteous paths and enter heaven.”

The Apostles’ Creed is recited. The Lord is asked to reach out to the politicians and victims of violence and war so that people will hear Jesus’ Word. He is asked to provide safe schools, and to look after those who serve the poor.

The band sings another song, this one in two-part harmony, with Peter singing tenor and Jeff the altar boy in falsetto. “We hold a treasure,” goes its refrain. For a moment, the music’s unanticipated ethereal beauty blows away the fog and restores in me the feeling of permeability we sometimes call presence.

But that mood also passes quickly.

Father Gorski chants the liturgy of the Communion cycle. Twice—when the wine has been turned to Christ’s blood and when the host has become Christ’s body—a bell is sounded.

The Lord’s Prayer is recited, and amens aver it.

“Peace be unto you,” Father Gorski declares, and the men respond. Turning to greet one another, they trade embraces and words of peace. When all those within reach have been blessed, some turn and wave peace symbols across the chapel, halting their outstretched Vs where eye contact is made.

Jack finds me where I am. “In all seriousness,” he says, “peace be unto you and your family.” I echo back his words, and we embrace.

“Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, grant us peace.”

Gorski invites the practicing Roman Catholics to come up and receive Communion, and welcomes members of other Christian communities of faith to come up for a special blessing. A queue forms down the central aisle, granting cover for conversations to recommence. As the body and blood of Christ are dispensed, the line grows shorter, and a second wave rises up for its turn. Among them is the mentally disabled Michael, who joins the line straight from the vestibule. As the ranks of the reseated grow, the din of chatter crests into a sharp shhhhhh.

Following announcements, the recessional begins. “Lead me, Lord, lead me in Thy righteousness,” Peter sings.

I’m relieved mass is over, relieved not only to be set free of my sense of disconnect, but freed, too, from the potential catharsis immanent to it—an unbidden undoing for which I currently lack the stamina.

*   *   *

For what feels like the thousandth time, I’m approached by a blue. What am I doing? he wants to know. Am I getting paid for it? How much am I getting paid? In six months he’ll be maxing out. It’ll be the second time. In the interim, he’s doing what he can to get off E and onto one of the brown blocks—“the blues still think that they’re on the streets over there!” This blue is a Muslim, and he’s been wondering about me since he saw me at Jum’ah. Does he go to a masjid on the street? I ask. Yeah, he says, Masjid Warith al-Deen. He was in Graterford back in ’89, he tells me. Things have changed a ton since then.

*   *   *

In a frenzy of blinks and twitches, Anthony Lukes kicks off the third installment of Peter’s fledgling group of Secular Franciscans with an opening prayer.54

When Lukes finishes, the ebullient volunteer welcomes the fifteen or so men assembled. In addition to a mountain of literature, the sister distributes handcrafted strings of crown rosary. She encourages each man to take one but warns she’s been counseled that if they wear them around, they’ll be confiscated.

A rapping behind me calls my eyes to the small window in the door leading from Classroom A to the chapel. I turn to find Gorski’s face, which is quickly replaced by a beckoning hand.

Aside from Santana, who is tidying the altar, the chapel is empty.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“It’s quite unfortunate,” Gorski says. “You just missed something special for your book.”

“What’s that?”

“Well,” he says, “Michael was helping collect books when four COs showed up in formation, and led him away by the arm.”

I ask Gorski what that means.

“He must have reported that something happened,” Gorski says matter-of-factly, or perhaps euphemistically, but which in either case means rape.

I don’t say anything.

Gorski spoke to one of the COs, who told him that Michael had reported an incident from earlier this afternoon.

“What’ll happen now?” I ask.

“He’ll be taken away,” Gorski says, “and matters will be investigated. Whatever they find, he’s most likely headed to the hole for a while.”

Having nothing to say, I flimsily shake my head and return to my seat in classroom A, where in lieu of thinking and feeling, I lower my head and record another round of clockwise-moving recitations of men’s derelict loyalty to a loving God, and of their earnest efforts, at this late hour, to finally do right by Him.

*   *   *

As I enter a vestibule still banging and humming with Ezra’s jam, Anthony Lukes creeps over to me, tilts his bug-eyed face too closely into mine, and whispers, “I know you’re writing a masterpiece, a masterpiece.” As an advance review, it’s more heartening than the biting feedback he gave me last month, when, with equally inappropriate proximity, he said, “I heard you on NPR. You were doing an exposé on us animals.” (I had not, in fact, been on NPR.) With one hand pressed on my shoulder, Anthony pulls Father Gorski in with the other: “He’s writing a masterpiece, Father. A masterpiece, I tell you!”

Egged on by a madman, I find myself entertaining, as I gather my things from Baumgartner’s office, the grandiose thought that I might, indeed, be in the midst of producing something special. Inflated with this promise, I head for the front gate. Behind me, Ezra’s groove reverberates, then echoes, and finally goes silent.

Only miles down the road, my euphoria darkens and I tear up from excitement, empathy, and exhaustion. In ways I couldn’t possibly yet conceive, the interval contained in these pages will reverberate for me for a very long time. In and beyond the writing of this book, this week will acquire—both as an object of compulsive repetition, and as a spur for my most spiritually nourishing and ethically ambitious actions—an unmistakable family resemblance to those transformative events in proclaimed fidelity to which so many in the chapel live their lives.55

But it will be years before I’m capable of this conceptualization.

What I understand already, however, as I will earnestly but self-consciously confess to my friend and colleague Maggie at the other end of the drive, over an uncommonly potent Belgian beer in our neighborhood bar, is that my fieldwork will shortly be finished and that the conditions of my life will change. And I pray, or something roughly equivalent, for the strength of character to prove myself deserving of the trust these men have invested in me.