Rev. Gus Graap, O. Carm. from Chariot of Fire

I worked with our Lay Carmelites for four years and afterwards I was approached by our Provincial who asked if I might be interested in part time prison ministry. We received a call from a local deacon in the Middletown area who needed to find a priest to work with him and with a second deacon in another prison in order to be hired on as a Catholic chaplain. I said I'd give it a try, and told the deacon that I would commit myself for one year. That was fourteen years ago. (And, interestingly, both of the prisons where I work used to be boys reformatories and were served by Carmelites back in the 50's and 60's.)

Prison ministry is a lot of different things, but perhaps I can sum up what makes this ministry so special by way of two stories. The first is about Mark Graham who entered the prison sys-tem at 17 years of age on a 20-to-life bid. He was a little guy "' about 5'2" and 125 pounds with a smile that reached from Middletown to his home in Manhattan. He told me of this incident that happened in prison: It was Superbowl Sunday and there were notices throughout the prison that the game should take precedence over any other TV programs. (About 40 guys share a TV in each unit.) Mark walked into the TV room about 5 minutes before the game ready to settle in for some fun. However, there was Rock music on the screen and the TV was dominated by a big, young, bully-type of guy. But when 4:00 came around Mark stood right up and changed the channel to the game and sat down. The big guy stood up and switched back to the music. So Mark went to the bulletin board, pulled off the notice about the game and read it to all the guys. He turned the TV back to the game and sat back down. The big guy got up again and switched it right back to the music. Then Mark, by his own account, got up, went to his "cube" and put his sneakers on - his fighting sneakers. He had a perfect record in j ail for about 18 years and would probably get himself pretty banged up, but he didn't care. He walked back into the room and was poised to attack when a friend from our Sunday Mass group grabbed his arm and said, "Hey, man, what are you doing?" Mark said, "That's when I woke up - thank God!" (He smiled.) He continued, "I went back to my cube, took off my sneakers, and I fasted from TV for three weeks because of what it almost did to me." Mark was released from prison after his first appearance at the parole board (a minor miracle) and is now working for an agency in New York City that helps people just getting out of prison.

Charlie Murray (not his real name) is another story. He did a ten year bid for killing a man in a bar when he was stone drunk. The victim was gay and had approached him. He was so enraged that he beat the guy over the head with a beer bottle and sent him to the hospital where he died. He barely remembered what had happened when the police came to pick him up the next morning. When Charlie was released he returned to the lower East Side of Manhattan and picked up the pieces of his life - especially his wife and two boys. One day about a year later I ran into Charlie as I was coming home from helping out at Bellevue Hospital. He asked me if I'd like to have dinner with him and his family sometime when I was in the City. I said I'd love to and we set up a date. It was a wonderful occasion and I got to meet his third son who was about six months old at the time. After dinner his wife and kids went their own way while Charlie and I sat down to talk. He said that he had a story that he wanted to share with me and hopefully with the guys still in prison. He said that he had just moved into this new apartment building and things were going great. Then one night somebody new moved into the apartment next to his. The man worked until midnight and when he came home he switched on a sound system that could be heard from 296. St. to the World Trade Center. Charlie's whole family woke up and the baby started to cry. His wife begged him to tell the guy to turn the thing down but Charlie said he'd talk to him the next day. He did so, but the same thing happened the following night, so he had to get up in the middle of the night and pound on the man's door to tell him to turn the thing down. Things were quiet for a few weeks, but then it happened again. Charlie was so enraged that he pounded on the guy's door again until he answered it at which point Charlie barged into the guy's apartment, grabbed the guy by the collar and pinned him against the wall. He told him about his time in prison and about the last guy he had killed. He swore that if he ever blasted his system again he "would be history." It never happened again! At the end of the story Charlie said to me, "Here's what I want you to tell the guys, Fr. Gus: if I was drunk that night I would have killed another person and gone back to prison. Thank God for what I learned in prison, and for AA. "

People learn, and part of our role as chaplains is to help them and support them in the learning process through prayer, Scripture and personal conversation. Being there also helps me to follow one of the goals of the Carmelite Order throughout the world, namely to have "a fundamental option for the poor." And prisoners are definitely poor.

I hate it when people come to talk to us chaplains as a group and begin by saying" I really admire what you people are doing." What are we doing? We're just working with people, and the two deacons and I know that under different circumstances anyone of us could be "wearing green" rather than black clerical attire.

Yes, prison ministry is a lot of different things. For me the most important part is celebrating Mass with the guys and hearing their confessions. The rest is talking with them, loving them, sharing their joys and heartbreaks, their hopes and failures. And it's wonderful to hear from them when they're "back on the street" that something you said or did while they were "behind bars" had such an impact on their lives. It has also been great to have other Carmelites work with me from time to time like Brother Jim who joined me on Sundays for almost 10 years as well as a few of our novices. It's a joy and a privilege to do prison ministry, and I can say without reservation that some of the men are the greatest guys in the world.

Just a week ago I visited with one of the prisoners and his parents in the visiting room just about 3 days after he had been “hit by the board” for another two years. I expected him to be really upset, but he was smiling and his folks were relaxed. He had already done 20 years so they figured they could hold on longer. Besides, he had some hope for an appeal this time around. But he said to me, “Don’t worry about me, Fr. Gus, I’ll be fine. I have a loving and supportive family, some good friends in here, and I have my religious family. Who could want anything more?” and then the flowing week I talked to another guy who was old enough to have no more family “out there”. But he was happy to have religious family in prison. So, both of the men used the term “family” to refer to the people that they meet with weekly to study the Bible and to pray – especially at Mass. We often refer to ourselves as “a parish with the prison fences”.