8th letter

Dear

Thank God for your letter. Earlier I felt so edgy here; it’s embarrassing. I’m sorry to let these walls make me shaky; at least I might learn from them to stand firm.

This cell resounds with so many voices that I envy concrete for remaining unmoved, but then I hold a letter like yours, grateful to consist mainly of water. Mineral, pure, am not. At least in reading such words as yours, my vulnerability seems a blessing. The walls can do nothing with what they receive, not that an architect has not positioned them to uphold…what sound they make, echo, while we humans absorb and transmute.

I read a message in your letter that went all through me. A whale calls from the deep, a dolphin just beneath the surface, yet your soul sent signal at every depth. Not every pitch can I hear, yet the message has not lost its audibility in my ears. Is it my confinement that helps me to hear the signals with comprehension? A wall I could be, deaf to what you say, but I respond, imperfect and heartfelt, a soul in communion.

Please keep transmitting such truth that, one day, the total meaning may at last be hard. The cell here has its voices and you join them, bless them, a word that does more than echo hollowly. Yours is held, enshrined, redeeming us in our captivity for God’s true end.

7th letter

Dear

If I misunderstand your letter today, I trust that my answer will pique a second-coming of your question. The matter of witness does not too much difference make. Nor the difference it make render little sway, in matter. Still, ground for a rebuttal has of authority been revealed.

These lines of answer derive from the swell of the grounds themselves, that unfortunately fester like a malignant cancer issued forth, I fear, from the very inclimate terrain on whose threshold my passage appeared, violate. However immune these grounds presented themselves, my witness was but a laughable prick, yet as my conviction and sentence proved, the puss burst forth.

The alleged criminality of my action only evinces the great need for healing, for it is so slight a penetration is made; by my act, how deep the wound was lanced. Consider revising your question if no impression has been made. I offer you my love and above all things would cherish another moment of equanimity, the very gift of writing you.

Blessed by the letter you wrote, I am aligned with the rightness of that desire which impelled your outreach to me. May every word increase in the faith from which all inspiration springs. With love,

6th letter

Dear

Your letter brings me comfort. Until it pierced my anxiety, I had enjoyed a frightened mind, pacing my cell in consternation, burrowing into myself with the dull spoon of second-guessing.

It was your letter, which I read on the toilet, that came (with great relief:) to extol glad tidings. I flushed the trouble that vexed me and reconsidered all that was before so worrisome.

Your letter reproved that phantom attachment of mine which I share with our enemies, namely, the conceit of a consumptive artist. If among this nation the spirit of envy had not so persuaded us, then I believe your testimony correct. You address the greed our nation pretends to conceal with majestic good neighborliness, and I agree that the symbol the SOA stands for is like the peacock—that vainglorious pursuit of geopolitical dominance. For a nation state to have pernicious citizens is for a body to have endemic weakness, a parasite, yet only the interior constipation can alert the body to consume more balanced meals. Likewise, the conscience inflicts compunction and the nonviolent reject cooperation.

Peaceable dominions arise from the agents who make manifest their conscience. You recall in me no greater purpose than this.

5th letter

Dear

Your letter came when I felt wrung out; the delivery of mail shifted my consciousness from its dip into self-pity into the potent self-awareness of my relationship with you and in other ways reaffirmed the greater order at work in the world.

For weeks I anticipated the opportunity of a setting in which the possible of God’s Kin_dom could be that much easier to pronounce.

I find that here my fellows meet our Maker in the mundane. The rare time comes when a dispiriting mood takes us all at once—but it happens, and the evil grips us like a vice. The horrifying pressure exerted upon us then seems not only man made but demented and diabolical. Then we know hell by the fingertips, out touch desensitized, our imagination a palate of starch, overboiled. Hunger even for mush would suggest our souls animate, but this slackens until we only faintly notice an ache in our bones. At times the walls seem to flux under the heaviness; they lean in as if to smother us but even that, it seems, could be a kindness. No, not all of it goes away when mail is announced, but then the magic of the wizard of oz was nothing preternatural either.

A word from you suffices though to assure that my humanity itself was fashioned in the image and likeness of God. With thanks,

4th letter

Dear

Thank you for your conviction and dedication. The words you write state clearly the task before us: to mince words no longer and in ones action bring glad tidings to the world. The Kin_dom comes!

You wrote a testimony that touches me deeply. I trust the Holy Spirit shines through you to offer these words as seeds of contemplation. I have asked myself similar questions about our call to become Christians and in your writing I find my answer.

You speak of the most essential thing: not courage, per se, but he thinking heart. The core strength of this movement to vigil at Ft. Benning, in my opinion, has this same characteristic. We act to preserve our integrity as human beings in relation, a people endowed with inalienable communal responsibilities, among these solidarity, self-abnegation and the pursuit of planetary eco-consciousness.

The testimony shared in your letter elicits in me a greater desire to participate in the Great task set to us by God: to be Christ’s hands and feet, yes and ears.

I am made more human by you.

3rd letter

Dear

Thank you for writing in support of my cause.

I accept the consequence of my sentence to serve time incarcerated because I respect laws and institutions. My conscience impelled me to act in a symbolic witness of solidarity to demonstrate the call of Christ for our time. With the inevitability of the charge and the sentence, no amount of dissuasion out of concern (for my well being in prison) could deter me from giving voice to the voiceless.

Today you bear the witness. In your letter your words reveal to me the faith that heals. I am grateful for any encouragement since I know it comes from the Holy Spirit. You seem to me a prophet, seeing me and calling out the truth of my deepest conviction. What I read emboldens me to hold fast in truth to my brothers and sisters, the dead and the living, who manifest the beloved community. I find healing in your words for they strengthen my resolve in the faith that truth shall overcome.

Thank you, dear prophet, for calling forth from me all that love requires.

2nd letter

Dear

What a letter! In you all my hopes and dreams thrive; what a miracle to hear them coming true. That is, you write in such clean sweeping boldness that every pinch of dusty discrepancy, every self-impeding fatalism, is swept up and cleared. My soul knows itself in the love-ordered world from which you write. Thank God for you and the desire that impels your epistolary effort. Know that the soulforce that enlivens us both has now enabled me to transcend my surroundings and restore with God my human dignity.

Praise be to God. I never doubted that someone like you could exist out there today. Your work has the ineffable, the indescribably quality of Christ-like compassion. From this ongoing work of yours, even the moments of meditation with which you wrote reveal the habitus so pulsating, so interiorized in you. When my captors tempt me with despair I can laugh with more dramatic irony than ever. We know what this life has in store for us. All we need has in our heart already been stocked; the beloved like you need only display it.

In His way,