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Inspired by Antoine Saint-Exupery, author of Wind, Sand and Stars

The hiker ascending Costa Rica’s Rincón de la Vieja, an active volcano east of Golfo de Papagayo, climbs 5,000 feet and passes through several ecosystems. First, near the entrance to the park, the forest spills over the footpath in a restless green vandalism. You see the horde of tree and fern sucking at the rich, moist soil and stripping from the sunlight all its effulgence. In the gloom breathes an armored blue iguana, invisible until it moves, like a thousand turquoise stones organized suddenly under a primary volition. Farther up the hiker meets a cold mist, and trees cowering away from a firm down-slope wind. Every few hundred yards the ground rises more steeply. At each switchback, the vegetation grows up from the thin, stony soil more dwarfish and hardy. At last there mounts up into the white mist, scoured by the wind, a trackless pate of gray and broken rock.

This afternoon, with my husband of six days, I climb over and under downed trees. For several days, the park closed as high winds uprooted trees and felled thick limbs, but today is calm. There is something foreboding in the stillness of the green canopy, where so recently the violence of the wind brought the dumb trees to a pitched and groaning battle. We walk through a world muffled and tangled, a world secretive to strangers.

The secrets of these volcanic forests include pools of bubbling, breathing mud and, higher up, ancient craters scalloped from the heights in eruptions of fire and ash. In the vanishing views offered by the shifting mist, the water-filled craters appear from above as smooth and luminous as the faces of cut gems; the crater walls seems to drop into them as if in homage to beauty, and from their hot, acidic surfaces steam rises toward the cooler mist. When the volcano last erupted, it rained plumes of mineral-rich ash down upon its flanks. Now insects unknown to science hum and bore into the wind-felled trees. A delicate biology thrives improbably upon the marriage of wind, water, and fire, not unlike man holed up in his pockets of civilation.

In the middle of the forest a single ficus tree with two interlocking trunks has grown high into the canopy and deep into the earth. It gathers into its trunks all it can of sunlight, rain, and nutrients. It draws us to it to itself to marvel and gape. It is a kind of forest deity, the two-in-one god. Locals call it Los Gemelos, or The Twins.

Near The Twins we hear a large party of Costa Ricans descending the trail. They round a bend, and we see them. Their eyes are round and vanquished.

“Turn back!” they say to us, who would venture. “Turn back, because the trees are down, and the way is slick, so you cannot pass.”

Having come so far, however, my husband wants to continue. We gamble that we are tougher than those that the crater has turned back, a family party with an old man amongst them. So I follow my husband over the raspy girths of downed trees, through the damp softness of muddy earth, behind the opacity of emerald curtains.

Finally, after hiking for several hours toward the summit, we cross above the last of the big trees. We see where we have come. A bird rides the air currents down to the dry, golden plain of Guanacaste. A gulley, carpeted with green, passes away to the east.

 Above the trees grow only stunted shrubs with oar-shaped leaves. The earth is pink as a blood-soaked napkin, and fissured by a muddy watercourse which we traverse slowly, marking off the yards in roots for grasping. Slick ledges for toes. We make halting progress. Streaked with earth, I nearly cease to believe in the warm, humid, arboreal tent and sweet, loamy footpaths of this morning, effaced as they are by the chill, eager billows of descending cloud.

We rise up to the lip of the crater where nothing grows. It is a trackless, lunar ground, the unfriendly slope of a perfect cone. The wind has become a personal malevolence, and it hurls itself across the ground with a force I have never felt outside of a hurricane. Its noise rises like a pained cry and falls like stitches are being ripped from a garment. I halt and double over, afraid that if I stand up the wind will get a firm enough hold to toss me off its hip.  My husband leans into the slope above me, zigzagging between rocks. Every several paces he stretches a long-fingered hand to the loose ground, as if ascertaining the reality of the earth in a dreamscape. He turns to look for me. The mist passes before him. Obscures him. He calls something that the wind carries away, so that his voice sounds to my left instead of above me. I hesitate, then struggle up to where he waits for me. We brace ourselves together against a fresh lash of wind. His thick hair flattens over his brow with the gust, and I laugh.

We are here on the edge of the cold, white abyss beyond the trees and all wise admonitions. All this whiteness! The cloud has erased everything, and there are no longer in the world any signs of life, of green, or warmth. There is only me and the man I said vows to at a church six days ago, who is still nearly a stranger. And there is our mysterious covenant to conquer this whiteness, and not to be plucked from it. How naked and doomed and brave now seems the pact between us, set down in a world that will never in truth offer us more clarity and hospitality than this cold and truncated circle! From whence will we draw the strength to arise from our isolation day after day and go to succor each other? The vows he and I have repeated seem but fragile links forged in a tender hour: a wind could tear them up, a fire burn them. Now we have climbed up above our heedlessness.

Yet we are together now. Somehow because of that sole fact I am not afraid. Together we dare the fierce wind and the white cloud and the universe to sunder us if they can. We may thrive improbably against all the violence. This absurdity and this unquenchable comfort are in my laughter hunched over on the rough, sliding stones. I read in the curve of my husband’s answering smile a similar exhilaration, a secret to bear down between us through the forest and among the habitations of men. 

Helping Hounds

His eyes concealed behind dark sunglasses, Chris Goehner walks into a restaurant in Washington, D.C., shadowed by his service dog, Pelé. When Chris sits, the large, sunny-coated retriever curls up on top of his feet. The restaurant employees notice Pelé and assume that Chris cannot see—until they spy him typing text messages on his cell phone.

Chris is not blind. He returned from military service in Iraq with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a serious anxiety disorder triggered by traumatic events. Pelé, trained by a special group of inmates in New York, helps Chris cope with the otherwise crippling effects of his condition.

Invisible Battle Scars

Chris comes from a small, closely knit community in Washington State’s Wenatchee Valley. Eighteen days after his high school graduation, he enlisted in the Navy. Though his grandmother offered to pay for college, “I felt like I could do something better,” says Chris. “I could do something more.”

He received training as a medic and served two tours of duty. On the second tour, Chris worked at a base 30 miles southwest of the Iraqi capital. At all hours of the day and night, wounded soldiers arrived by truck, helicopter, or tank. “If you’ve seen the TV show M.A.S.H.,” remembers Chris, “it was pretty much like that.”

In 2005 a suicide bomber destroyed a bus near the base. A young boy wandered into the field hospital with a severe shrapnel wound.

“Boy walked in,” shudders Chris. “Not crying. Not screaming. Not blood everywhere. He moved his hand. Moved his bandage. And you could see right into his abdomen . . . You remember that stuff.”

Now, when Chris sees his young nephew, the image of the wounded Iraqi child comes rushing back.

Chris left Iraq in March 2006. Though he had left danger behind, normal events unsettled him. Fireworks caused a panic. Loud noises irritated him. Many nights, he lay awake for hours. When he did drift into sleep, he would wake from a nightmare covered in sweat. When suicidal thoughts plagued his mind, he decided to seek professional help. He was diagnosed with PTSD.

A psychologist prescribed medication to treat Chris’s anxiety and insomnia, but the young veteran still suffered. Though bright and articulate, he struggled in school, as though he had forgotten how to learn. He tried to find simple work in a hospital emergency room, but even with all his experience, no one would hire him.

Chris’s relationships suffered, too. Acquaintances judged him for serving in a controversial war. Old friends misunderstood him. His marriage, too, became a casualty. Nervous in public and distrustful of strangers, Chris turned inward.

Finding Help

A turning point came when Chris learned about Puppies Behind Bars (PBB), founded by New York resident Gloria Gilbert Stoga in 1997. Under this innovative program, now active in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, inmates volunteer to raise and train puppies. With careful instruction from inmates and PBB’s staff instructors, the canines grow up to become guide dogs for the blind, bomb-sniffing dogs for law enforcement, and life-changing companions for veterans like Chris.

Pelé, who was born in 2008 and named after the Brazilian soccer legend, was raised by inmates at Mid-Orange Correctional Facility, a medium-security men’s prison in New York. Pelé lived with inmates 24 hours a day. In addition to normal obedience training, Pelé learned specific commands that would help him serve a veteran. He learned to “block,” or stand close to his handler and keep strangers at a distance, and he learned to “pop a corner,” or go ahead of his handler to check for danger.

Pelé and Chris finally met in November 2009, when Chris traveled to New York to receive a service dog from PBB. Before Chris could take Pelé home with him, though, he also had to go to prison and meet the inmates who raised Pelé. Never having been to prison before, Chris was nervous. To prepare himself, he watched every prison show on television, and his tension mounted. He expected to find scary cliques of tattooed, muscle-bound toughs in the prison yard.

Instead, he found a clean, well-kept facility with inmates who were “nice and respectful.” Some had also served in the military.

The inmates who had raised Pelé sat down with Chris to help him understand his dog’s personality. And they shared some of their own struggles, chief among them the difficulty of reintegrating into a society that judged their past and ignored their contributions, like raising Pelé.

Although Chris realizes the obvious differences between serving time in prison and serving in the military, he empathized with their struggle to reintegrate. Wow, he thought when he heard the inmates’ stories, that’s kind of like getting out of the military!

A New Life

Pelé has made an enormous difference in Chris’s life. Chris no long suffers from nightmares, because Pelé jumps onto the bed and licks his face. Chris finds it easier to control his temper, because Pelé tugs on his sleeve when he raises his voice. Chris has stopped taking five of his psychiatric medications, and he has the confidence to venture into public. Together, Chris and Pelé have been to the White House, Las Vegas, and the inside of the Hoover Dam. Pelé even provides an easy conversation-starter when Chris meets strangers, and he is learning how to trust people again.

He also wants to help others like himself. Recently Chris worked for a senator on the Veterans Affairs Committee, helping to write a Senate resolution clarifying the rights of PTSD-affected veterans with service dogs under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Chris and other veterans are not the only ones to benefit from Puppies Behind Bars. Gloria Gilbert Stoga, the organization’s founder, says that inmates who participate also reap rewards.

“They learn compassion,” she explains, “and also increased self-esteem. They learn that they can undertake something difficult and succeed.”

From the Archives: 2008

C.S. Lewis has written that raw kindness does not care so much whether its object becomes good or bad, but only that it does not suffer. God sees wickedness, and not pain, as the ultimate misfortune, and so he is willing for us to suffer in order to make us good. Sadly, pleasure and prosperity rarely make a man or woman better than before, unless the soul has already advanced far on the heavenward road.

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Visitors

In early spring a foolish robin built her nest in the side of our apartment building, right along the stairwell. I could have reached out and touched her with my hand. As I came around the corner, I always stopped to look at her, and she watched me warily with her round black eyes.

After a few weeks came her three eggs, blue and reflective as turquoise stones. During the raging storms of summer evenings, she spread her brown pinion feathers over the sides of her nest, that the eggs might not know a drop of moisture.

My husband and I looked in on her every day. We regarded her as a friend, a fellow sojourner surviving in our corner of Fairfax. We rejoiced and cooed when out of the eggs broke three robin chickens with pink, translucent skin.

But a couple days later I found the nest empty. No chicks. No robin. No trace of shell or feather. They have never returned. I suspect the grey housecat that lives on the first floor. Jim thinks the mother “carried them to a new nest,” which he says either to comfort me or to comfort himself. I cannot believe it.

We still glance reflexively into the nest when we come down the stairs, though nothing changes.

Then this summer there came a mint-green luna moth with a fuzzy, white body and antennae like tiny ferns. Dramatic plumes curled from its back wings. Day after day it stayed motionless by the lintel of our door. Once I made him to crawl up on my finger and brought him into the apartment. I called him Simon, spoke to him, and tried to feed him sugar water, as I used to do with monarch butterflies. I put his feet in the water, since moths and butterflies have their taste receptors in their toes, if they can be said to have toes. But I found out later that it did no good. Luna moths live for only a week, their sole purpose to mate before death.

I took him out into the stand of trees in our complex, hoping that there he might have better luck.

He to Whom We Call

We use it all the time. We whisper it. We curse it. We sing it. It’s part of our basest slang and our most sacred expressions. But where does the English word “god” actually come from?

The other languages I am familiar with all have a Latin base. The word for “god” in Latin languages comes, originally, from “zeus”. It survives in English in terms like deism or theology.

I’ll cover the Latin roots in a follow-up post, but the roots of “god” are not Latin, but rather an ancient Germanic language. Many of English’s most basic words come from this source: man, woman, child, hunger, thirst, sun, death, birth, and water all have nothing to do with parlance of Rome. The word we use for the One we worship is no exception.

So let’s take a look at where we get the word for “god”.

Before “god”, says the linguists who study Proto-Germanic (the theoretical, reconstructed root of all modern Germanic languages), we had the word “ghutan,” which was used in the sense of “supreme being.” But that word had an even older root (ghut), which in turn had an even older root: “gheu”. And “gheu” once upon a time meant “to call, to invoke.”

So when our ancestors spoke of god, they meant not merely a spiritual being, but one on whom they called. One with whom they could interact. A relational Person. God was “the one to whom we call.”

I like this—very much.

Because regardless of our personal theologies, we all do this. In the foxholes of our daily lives, we invoke the help of a Being we may say we don’t believe in. How many atheists have been forlorn to hear themselves cry out, “God, please!” in the moment of their personal distress?

It’s as is we cannot help ourselves. Because at some level beneath reason and will, we poke our fingers through our measurable, material surroundings in search of the spiritual we instinctively know to underlie it.

Scientific studies sometimes bump up against this phenomenon. http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/04/04/neurotheology/

One of the scientists quoted in the above article explains at length how the human experience of “god” is an evolutionary adaptation, an almost universal response to the pressures of sentient, rational existence.

But what if it’s the other way around? What if we call upon God because He designed us to call, and because He loves it when we do?

Chasing Tony (From Jubilee, July 2010)

“Can you get a gun?” asked Tony, then 16.
He and two friends had run out of drug money. To get it, they robbed seven convenience stores with a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun. “We just wanted play money,” remembers Tony.
At the seventh store, the cashier reached for the phone. The boy wielding the shotgun fired, and the clerk went down, a red stain blooming on his flank.
How had it come to this?
When small, Tony was raised by his Catholic grandparents in Chicago, and at the church of a believing aunt, he remembers reciting John 3:16 before the congregation.
But when he turned eight, his father, who lived in Dallas, brought Tony to live there. Tony resented the change—and his father’s battle with alcohol. He started failing school and fighting.
“Every week,” remembers Tony, “I had to bring a note home explaining my bad behavior. . . But it didn’t seem to deter me.”
Tony stole to fund his spiraling drug addiction, and he ran away to avoid the consequences. Whenever he ran, his father patrolled the streets all night in search of him. Tony failed to recognize his father’s love at the time, but now he recognizes that “my father never gave up on me.”
After he was arrested for the convenience store robberies, Tony was released to his father’s custody pending trial. Before long he ran again, hiding from both his father and the police.
On February 1, 1989, Tony was apprehended fleeing from a stolen vehicle. He was certified to stand trial as an adult and sentenced to 25 years.

When Lightning Strikes
By then, whatever faith Tony possessed had dwindled to a faint memory of brimstone and catechisms.
“I was 16 going on 17,” he says, “and I wasn’t going to be nobody’s fool.”
Prison only honed his criminality; after 10 years of incarceration, he lasted four months on his first parole. Tony returned to a hole that no light penetrated—until lightning struck.
Tony’s pregnant Aunt Tina was hit by a lightning bolt. Though she survived, doctors recommended terminating her pregnancy. Tony’s Aunt Margie offered God her life if He spared Tina’s child. When Tina delivered a healthy boy, Margie surrendered her life to Christ.
Margie and her husband, Mark, began to visit Tony. He scoffed at their mention of a caring God, but their own compassion bewildered him.
“Don’t worry about me,” he assured them. “This is my world.”
They wept for the nephew who could imagine no life but prison, but eventually, their perseverance bore fruit.
“God started giving me a soft heart,” says Tony.
He began to pray before parole hearings. When denied, he would give up on God again. But God never gave up on him.
In 2006 Tony reviewed his note card with scripted statements to impress the interviewer at yet another parole hearing. But something made him throw it away; for the first time, he approached God without conditions.
“I’m tired of the games,” he confessed. “If I serve the rest of my term, that’s fine. I want to know the power that’s behind the people who come into prison to visit me. Just help me.”
Tony was shocked when he was offered parole and his choice of reentry programs: nine months of drug rehab or 18 months in the InnerChange Freedom Initiative® (IFI), a reentry program developed by Prison Fellowship and based on the life and teachings of Jesus.
Though tempted by the shorter program, Tony remembered his request of God. Here was his chance to meet the Power behind his aunt. He asked to be sent to IFI.

“God Never Turns His Back.”
“He was just a different person,” marvels Margie, remembering the first time she visited Tony in IFI. On the four-hour drive back home, Margie and Mark wept tears of gratitude.
Tony grew to know God in IFI’s structured, values-centered environment. He also learned to release the pain of his childhood and to understand the consequences of his own choices. And when his business plan won at an IFI business fair, “it amazed me, and it gave me a new viewpoint of my capabilities.”
After his release Tony continued IFI’s post-prison phase. After a difficult job hunt, he finally found employment with Artifex Technology and was promoted to project manager. “I would trust him with anything,” says Artifex owner Jacob Cervantes.
Tony also married Annie Cervantes, a relative of Jacob, and became an instant father to her 11-year-old, Nathan, soon followed by baby Giovanni.
Giovanni’s birth left an awestruck Tony determined to make it on the outside. “Two nights ago,” says the dad, “I was holding Giovanni and the thought crossed my mind if there was a way I could earn some fast money. But he was just looking at me . . . and I realized that my son will look to me as the example.” For his own example, Tony can look to his father, about to celebrate eight years of sobriety. They talk daily.
Tony “understands what life is now,” says his father. Someday Tony wants to use his life to help other ex-prisoners, but for now he serves and loves his family. Despite some transitional struggles, Annie says he’s doing “excellent.”
Day by day, he looks to God for strength because, no matter how far Tony ran in the past, “God never turns His back.”

Raising Up Fathers (from www.prisonfellowship.org)

Raising Up Fathers from the Inside Out


View This IssueOn Father’s Day in America, the tangy smoke of barbecue will float over countless backyards. Young daughters and sons will present their fathers with hugs, homemade cards, and breakfast in bed. But for over one million children of incarcerated men, one thing will be missing: Dad.



The hundreds of thousands of fathers behind bars have an irreplaceable role in the lives of their children, and they need training and practical tools to become better parents. Prison Fellowship has partnered with the National Fatherhood Initiative® (NFI) to develop InsideOut DadTM Christian, a curriculum based on solid biblical principles to help men become the fathers that God created them to be.



And it’s available for your use!





Life Like a Locomotive
Rev. E. Gregory Austen, Jr., director of corrections programming for NFI and primary author of InsideOut Dad Christian, compares the situation of many incarcerated fathers to the biblical character of Samson. “Samson spent most of his life as a man who was unaware—going through life like a locomotive and not fulfilling God’s purposes for him. He couldn’t see clearly until he was in prison and blinded.”



Likewise, says Rev. Austen, men who have made serious mistakes and entered prison have an opportunity to see themselves clearly for the first time, especially in their parental roles. InsideOut Dad Christian is designed to illuminate for men their God-given purpose as fathers and equip them to begin to live it out.





Speaking to the Man
InsideOut Dad Christian “speaks to the man—not at him,” says Raeanne Hance, executive director of Prison Fellowship Florida. Through 12 core sessions, 26 optional sessions, and a reentry module, the curriculum addresses issues central to men, such as: exploring faith, handling and expressing emotions, improving communication, maintaining mental and physical health, and managing stress.



Check It Out for Yourself!
Click here for sample lessons of InsideOut Dad Christian.

Holistically grounded, men will be better able to tackle the fatherhood portion of the curriculum, which helps men to write letters to their children, understand their children’s developmental needs, and reestablish relationships with caregivers.



Each volunteer-led core session comes with optional sessions that expand on important themes. Participants study the curriculum, journal their thoughts, and discuss their findings in breakout sessions. The curriculum also suggests creative ways to interact with their children from afar, such as: “Paper Hugs from Daddy,” chess by mail, and recordings of storybooks. Woven throughout with Scripture, InsideOut Dad Christian is edited for a sixth-grade reading level.



“Volunteers . . . love the curriculum. They love the principles that are being taught,” says Raeanne. She has made InsideOut Dad Christian an integral part of reentry programming at four facilities in Florida and hopes to add a fifth in the near future. She also plans to train inmates to become peer facilitators and lead the program on their own.



The inmates’ “attitudes have changed,” adds Shawn O’Neill, who directs reentry for Prison Fellowship Florida. They have “that eagerness to take that rightful, God-ordained place as father of the family.”





From Sorrow to Hope
When participants were confronted with the importance of godly fatherhood, “their reaction was remorse,” says Bill Anderson, executive director of Prison Fellowship Arizona/Oklahoma, who oversaw promising pilots of the curriculum. But soon participants moved from sorrow to hope as the curriculum offered them practical ways to reach out to their children—and wait patiently for trust to grow back in broken relationships.



Shawn tells the story of one inmate who had a broken relationship with his daughter. Though he had written to her several times before, no answer came. He wrote to her again to share some of the insights he had gained from InsideOut Dad Christian. Soon, she re-opened correspondence with him. By the end of the program, says Shawn, they were “well on their way to reconciliation.”



Robby, an inmate and the father of three boys, wrote to Rev. Austen to say, “I just want to be the father they need in their lives. I truly am blessed to be apart [sic] of a program . . . and I really do appreciate the guidance. It’s only by the grace of God! I plan to apply what I have learned over the last 12 weeks to the best of my ability.”



Not only does fatherhood training help men become better fathers from the inside, but it also helps ex-prisoners stay out. Behind a saving relationship with Christ, claims Rev. Austen, nothing can motivate a man more than the desire to be there for his children. “When they believe that they have an irreplaceable role in the lives of their children,” he says, “it gives them a reason to care.”



Returning mature, well-equipped fathers to their families also helps to break the cycle of intergenerational incarceration. With children of prisoners at significant risk of entering jail, effective fatherhood training can help mitigate some of the worst consequences of separation and betrayed trust.





Implementing the Program
Although it is sometimes inappropriate, and illegal, for inmates to seek contact with children or their caregivers, Austen emphasizes that in the vast majority of cases, reconciliation can reap a harvest of renewed hope for prisoners and their families. Even when caregivers return prisoners’ letters to their children unopened, prisoners are encouraged to save the letters so that one day they might prove to their children that they cared.



InsideOut Dad Christian is published by the National Fatherhood Initiative. You can view samples online. If you would like to bring the curriculum into the prison where you minister, please contact your local Prison Fellowship representative in the field, or call the PF National Program Support Center at 1-800-251-7411.