I entered the world in Bangkok, Thailand, in 1966. My father, a West German diplomat, was stationed at the embassy there, and, since neither of my parents ever attended a Christian church, they introduced their newborn son to organized religion by taking him to the local temple to be chanted and prayed over by orange-robed monks.
It was not only a Buddhist bug that bit me in the Land of Smiles: Just one year later, Fr. Thomas Merton, the famous Cistercian monk, mystic, and author, died across town in a hotel room. I have no doubt that his departing soul gave mine a nudge in the right direction before racing home to its Source.
Shortly thereafter my father was transferred to the West German embassy in Cyprus, the site of Paul’s first overseas mission (Acts 13:4-12). Of course I did not realize then that the very same ground I walked on daily had been trod by the first Christian saints 2,000 years earlier; but who is to say that the shores of Paphos left no mark on my childish soul, just as my little feet left prints in its sand?
A few years later our family moved again, this time to the foreign ministry’s home office in Bonn, Germany, our native land. To catch my brother and me up on our heritage, my parents took us to every museum, tumble-down castle, and cathedral we passed, so I was exposed to dozens of Europe’s most beautiful churches. Even though we attended no services, I still recall vividly nearly three decades later the sense of awe and reverence those temples of soaring stone and light inspired in me. Our age seems to have lost the secret of raising the soul’s eye to God through sacred architecture, but across the centuries those medieval masons gave me my first glimpse of the visible Church, the sacramental principle.
On my eleventh birthday, my father was transferred to the West German consulate-general in Atlanta, Georgia, where I was introduced to American culture via a hotel television screen: Hogan’s Heroes, professional wrestling (Rick the Nature-Boy Flair versus Chief Wahoo McDaniel) and the Rev. Ernest Angeley telling me, “Put your hand up against that television screen and say ‘Ba-a-a-a-a-a-aby Jesus.’”
Somehow I managed to resist poor Rev. Angeley’s attempts to evangelize me. Nor was I persuaded by the soft-spoken young minister at the ruinously expensive Episcopalian high school to which my parents sent me. Wednesdays there were “chapel day,” which meant we had to wear ties and sit still for 50 minutes—perhaps the most effective means of paganizing children known to man. Certainly it worked on me, and when I began reading Buddhist books in my mid-teens, I had a positive alternative to the weekly snoozefest on chapel day.
In those years I was spiritually hampered by God-given abilities that made it too easy to earn excellent grades, write award-winning articles for our high-school newspaper, play guitar in two rock bands, participate in the drama program, and outshine my contemporaries in half a dozen other areas. If I was this good all on my own, I thought, who needed religion? And how could anyone but the simpleminded believe that a Palestinian revolutionary walked on water and returned from the dead two millennia ago?
On the other hand, I thought Buddhism met my high standards. Here I found sophisticated and plausible answers to philosophical questions like the problem of evil, without being asked to believe in childish miracle stories. Moreover, the Buddha had promised that nirvana, the release from samsaric existence, lay within our own power if we applied ourselves. Most intriguingly, my otherwise invincible intellect actually failed to crack Zen koans or meditative riddles, so there really had to be something to all this Buddhism stuff, right?
Upon my graduation from high school, one of this country’s top ten universities awarded me an academic scholarship that paid not only for my tuition but also rent, food, and spending money. The Buddhist boy genius had come into his own. Less than two years later, on April 30, 1986, I was arrested for double murder and entered the belly of the beast: the court and prison system.
I will not bore you here with the details of my trial, appeals, and incarceration; in any case, my legal difficulties had no immediate effect on my religious views. I continued to consider myself a Buddhist, though I had no contact with other believers and restricted the practice of my faith to a steady diet of books and occasional attempts at meditation.
It was not until the fall of 1994 that I reached my great turning point: a conversion to Christianity (though not Catholicism) that was prompted by certain Catholics and NASA. That summer Catholics protesting the movie The Last Temptation of Christ made the news, with predictable results in my case at least: Since I could not go to a cinema, I quickly ordered the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. In its pages I made an amazing discovery: a (fictional) Jesus I not only liked but empathized with and even admired. This was not the sappy wimp I remembered from chapel day but a complex human being who suffered and doubted and struggled with his destiny, much as I suffered and doubted and struggled with mine. Could the religion founded on his life and death hold some meaning for me after all?
I began to read the New Testament consciously and voluntarily for the first time in my life and, after an indecisive encounter with the synoptics, fell in love with the Gospel of John. One verse in particular touched the very center of my being and quite nearly brought me to tears: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Like some supernaturally bright light, that sentence illumined a terrible night in my own life, changing its meaning though not the sad facts.
What completed my conversion was the publication in a national magazine of those first, magnificent photographs from NASA’s Hubble space telescope. While looking at the swirl of the galaxies around their mysterious, glowing centers, I had a kind of epiphany: Both the physical force of gravity, which set those stars circling, and the human emotion of love were forms of attraction. Come to think of it, electrons could be said to love the nuclei they orbit, just as sunflowers love the sun they follow across the sky—yet further cases of attraction.
Could this be what the New Testament meant when it claimed that “God is love” and that it is in this universal attractive force that we “live and move and have our being” (1 John 4:16, Acts 17:28)? Did the Psalmist see what I saw when he wrote that “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalms 19:1)?
My tentative yes to these questions led me to contact the Rev. Beverly R. Cosby, one of whose parishioners visited me regularly at that time. Bev was the brother of the Rev. Gordon Cosby, founder of Washington, D.C.’s Church of the Savior, made famous by the books of Elizabeth O’Connor’s. What attracted me to Bev was his radical commitment to the inner and the outer way, which seemed to adhere closest to the model Christ gave us: Full members of his congregation had to not only spend an hour each day in silent prayer but also had to dedicate large amounts of time and money to serve society’s outcasts.
That combination of the spiritual and the practical produced their town’s first interracial swimming pool and summer camp in the 1960s, low-cost housing for dozens of poor families, homeless and battered women’s shelters, an AIDS hospice, and literally a dozen further ministries—all accomplished with only a handful of people. Their leading texts, apart from the Bible, were Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, Henri Nouwen’s works (he was a personal friend of Bev’s), and Fr. Thomas Keating’s books on centering prayer.
With these texts I began my education as a Christian, and for the next six years I read voraciously—everything from Josephus to Rudolf Bultmann. However, because I was housed in a special unit within the prison for former members of law enforcement and high profile cases, I had no access to church services throughout this time. My only means of practicing my new faith were twice-daily Bible readings and verbal prayer and monthly tithing of my prison wages to the Feed the Children organization.
Yet the Holy Spirit guided me in my studies. I quickly discovered, for instance, that I could not swallow the extensive marginal notes in virtually all the Protestant Bibles I bought or was given; inevitably, they insisted that Genesis be taken literally or that Peter wrote personally the second epistle attributed to him, or something equally implausible.
Then, in 1997 or thereabouts, I finally acquired a Catholic NAB Bible—and rejoiced. Here at last were marginal notes that a thinking person could accept and learn from each time he opened the Bible. Why was “my” side—Bev’s side, the Protestant side—unable to produce something like this?
Meanwhile, I was gobbling up those enormous fat commentaries so beloved of evangelicals, though the ones I chose were probably more academic and “liberal” than most. Every one failed to measure up to the very first 15-pound commentary I had bought, the one I simply could not bear to part with: the New Jerome’s. It went deeper into the text and, unlike the Protestant’s, provided ancient and medieval exegetical views.
These in particular came as a monumental surprise to me. Up to that point I had never encountered the thoughts of Jerome and Augustine and Aquinas and thus did not realize that they had developed a Catholic philosophical edifice that was more sophisticated and satisfying as the Buddhists I had admired from my teens. And to think, the only reason I had bought the New Jerome’s was because it had been on sale.
Many of the theologians I read were Protestant Europeans, but while they satisfied my taste for the hyper- (and arguably pseudo-) intellectual, they presented me with a new problem: Christ vanished! By the time the Tubingen school was finished with the New Testament, it was barely willing to admit that the man Jesus actually existed, much less that he might be the Son of God. After all, there was no independent historical verification of his life aside from the famous reference to a certain Chrestos in Tacitus.
But if Jesus had really been no more than a peasant preacher whose body was stolen from the tomb, why did the apostles willingly go to their own deaths for him in the decades that followed? Why would an intelligent, educated, anti-Christian man like Saul of Taursus fall so thoroughly for a religious con game run by eleven leaderless rubes?
But if Bultmann and the Protestant academics had argued themselves into a philosophical dead end, who could offer me a reasonable, intellectually respectable explanation of who Jesus really was?
It turned out that Fr. Oscar Lukefahr and his two lovely little catechetical books, The Privilege of Being Catholic and We Believe . . ., could. They introduced me to the sacramental principle—of which the first instance or manifestation was the incarnation itself—and to the scriptural basis for each of the seven Catholic sacraments. Even if I took my Protestant sola scriptura as a starting point, I had to admit that Catholics were in fact more “fundamentalist,” truer to the text, than the most conservative evangelical. Especially the Real Presence became to my mind indisputable—”Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life”—whereas crackers and grape juice avail nothing (John 6:54).
Next I succumbed to the philosophical force of fundamental Catholic doctrines like the necessity of works as fruits of faith—Bev Cosby’s “inner and outer way” in a different guise. And finally, Fr. Lukefahr made me see the logical consistency of Catholic social teaching, which condemned both abortion and execution as facets of the “culture of death” denounced by John Paul II. (Protestants by contrast either want to abort fetuses and save murderers or save fetuses and execute murderers, depending on their political persuasion.) Still, since I continued to have no access to any religious services whatsoever, I felt no pressure to make a commitment to the Catholic Church.
I continued my theological reading and twice-daily verbal prayers until, in the winter of 1999, I came to an end. An end to what, I hardly know how to explain. All I can say is that the inner resources that had sustained me for 14 years of incarceration failed me. Perhaps it was nothing more than the cumulative weight of my miseries: having my arm broken twice by other inmates, spending three years under threat of execution, being nearly raped by another prisoner, hearing of my mother’s death through alcoholism, and much else besides.
Or perhaps God had finally brought me to a place where I had to let go of my self. Slowly I learned a new way of relating to God and the world that uses no words and no g.asping with the mind but relies on a fragile inner silence through which the Spirit enters me and I enter it. This journey has been tough at times but it quickly began to transform my life.
Shortly after a prison guard shot me as a bystander in a prison disturbance, the department of corrections allowed me to transfer to a medium-security prison where, for the first time, I had access to religious services. Since the Baptists came three times a week and the Catholic priest only once every other month, I went through a hymn-singing, hand-clapping phase that I enjoyed greatly but which eventually showed me the need for liturgical worship led by a minister with valid orders.
Our Baptist “minister of music” was an elderly black inmate who did the best Sam Cooke impersonation I have ever heard; but over time I noticed that it was only the hearts of our congregation that he moved so profoundly, not our minds or our souls. Was “being in the spirit” really supposed to be just an emotional response to well-performed gospel music?
Fr. Leo’s exceedingly rare but quietly beautiful Masses seemed to answer that question in the negative. He too was “in the spirit” during his services—a very calm, gently glowing, subtly powerful spirit that seemed much more of a kind with the Spirit I encountered three times a day during my prayer. His God, like Elijah’s on Mount Horeb, showed himself in a “gentle whisper” (1 Kings 19:12).
Another thing struck me powerfully in Fr. Leo’s physical presence, since he was the first Catholic priest I had met in person: He represented a direct, unbroken, physical line all the way back to Jesus himself. The Son of God had breathed his Spirit on eleven men who had laid hands in turn on other men, who—through hundreds of intermediaries—had laid hands on Fr. Leo.
To me, this was a stunning realization. Fr. Leo’s priesthood was indeed a sacrament, a visible sign of God’s grace and one empowered to confer that grace by Christ himself. As much as I loved Bev Cosby and remained convinced of his personal holiness, even he was merely a man who might or might not be “in the spirit” during his church services but certainly could not claim to be properly instituted.
In January of 2001, roughly six months after I arrived at the medium-security facility where I met the holy rollers and Fr. Leo, the U.S. Supreme Court denied my attorney’s final appeal petition without granting a hearing. This came as a complete shock to me because I knew I was no more guilty of double murder than Joseph had been guilty of raping Potiphar’s wife. Over the previous 15 years I had held despair at bay with the firm belief that “the greatest legal system on earth” would eventually give me justice, clear my name, and return me to Germany. That hope, that crutch, was suddenly gone.
My response to this living death sentence (life without realistic hope of being granted parole) was, I believe, a gift of grace from God: I began to write a book. Entitled The Way of the Prisoner, it is based on the premise that all of us are imprisoned in one way or another, whether by cancer or an emotional trauma or prison. The truth is that some of us will never leave our prisons. Sometimes our crosses really do end in death. But sometimes our prisons can become instruments of grace. Christ knew this well; it was only on the cross that he could show us what divine, self-giving, self-emptying love looked like in practice.
I received the final shove I needed to convert to Catholicism during a Mass I attended in July of 2001. Fr. Leo had not allowed Protestants like me to receive Communion, but when he was disabled by an automobile accident, Bishop Sullivan sent us a retired priest who took note of the exemptions provided by canon law. Outside, a summer storm lit up the sky with lightning and battered the windows with raindrops the size of marbles; inside, the drama was even greater for me as I received the body and blood of our Lord for the first time.
I had been convinced intellectually of the Real Presence for years, but now I experienced it as a profound spiritual and physical reality, at the very depth of my soul. That Mass changed my life. Afterwards, I went outside long enough for the rain to hide the tears I could no longer hold back; then I returned inside to blubber out my thanks to the priest, who probably thought I was crazy.