The Mercy of God Is Everlasting

The History of Salvation is quite awesome to read. Whenever God intends to deliver his people, he stirs up the hearts of the prophets to pray for them.

For example, the prophet Micah prays that God’s Anointed would take care of his people, as the great Shepherd of the sheep, and to go before them, while they are here in this world as in a wood, in this world but not of it. The prayer is answered in the person of the Good Shepherd who seeks out and finds the lost and prepares a banquet for the wayward who returns. The prophet’s prayer and God’s response was powerfully enacted when Pope Francis visited a prison in Mexico, at the end of his pilgrimage to that country.

Standing before men and women who had been incarcerated because of crimes they had committed, Pope Francis spoke of God’s pardoning mercy. “There is no place beyond the reach of His mercy, no space or person it cannot touch” (Pope Francis). Sin and wrong doing have brought us into spiritual bondage, but God’s mercy extends pardon and forgiveness to us. When the One Who did not know sin became sin, God broke the power of sin and made all of us who are willing to receive the gift of grace heirs of the Kingdom. When God nailed sin to the Cross, He made the sin-sick world as white as wool and the sin-darkened world as bright as the sun.

The Good Shepherd has sought out the lost and placed them on His shoulders, making their burden his own. In His own body, He took our punishment so that through His wounds we would be healed and made whole again. The Mercy of God is everlasting to all His people. He Who is Mercy has extended to each of us unlooked for grace and unimaginable pardon. By so doing, the Prince of Peace has broken the cycle of violence and sin. No matter how low our sin has brought us, the Father has never ceased calling us Son/Daughter. When God works on the heart of a sinner, He convinces the individual of His infinite love and calls him back to His loving embrace.

I will close with a few comments of Pope Francis concerning the commemorative gift he left at the prison. "You encounter much fragility. Therefore I would like to offer you this fragile image, Crystal is fragile, it breaks easily. Christ on the Cross represents the greatest fragility of humanity; however it is this fragility that saves us, that helps us, that enables us to keep going and opens the doors of hope. It is my wish that each one of you, with the blessing of the Virgin and contemplating the fragility of Christ Who died to save us, sowing seeds of hope and resurrection".

--Father Jerome Machar, OSCO

Rosary in Prison

Rosary Made by Prisoners in the Confraternity of Penitents Alessandro Ministry. $1.59 Available from CFP Holy Angels Gift Shop on this link.

Peace my dear little sparrow friends!  I have a wonderful tale to tell you today but you will have to use your imagination to visualize my story.

Recently the Holy Spirit fell on the Catholic prisoners here at the Federal Medical Center in a most delightful way.  As I've shared with you in the past this is a federal prison for prisoners in need of medical attention.  Factually a lot of the men who come here are without hope of life to last.  In some ways it is a dark somber atmosphere for most prisoners to live through for most men die alone and with no-one to care for them.


I find myself trying to keep the "light of Christ" burning in my life but honestly it gets to be a bit of a trial for me and others as we try to cope.  However, a little time ago another prisoner came to my hospital room and asked me an unusual request.  The man knew I was a Franciscan and that, among other things, I have a deep love and devotion to Our Lady.  (My room is adorned with a very large picture of Our Lady of the Rosary.)  So he asked me would I lead a Rosary group of sick Catholic prisoners in  the recitation of a daily Rosary.

Now before one thinks elated thoughts you have to remember that praying the Rosary in a group outside the Chapel is frowned upon and usually stopped by the authorities.  I went to a Protestant Chaplain and told him of my problem.  The Chaplain told me to go ahead and if caught "just ask for forgiveness." 








So I figured one or two men would show up.  You can imagine my surprise when six (6) men showed up!  I want you to use your imagination--try to visualize these six men.  All of them are hardened criminals and they are the most motley looking bunch of desperados imaginable.  All of the men are well over 200 pounds and two of them are over 300 pounds and with their array of tattoos and body scars present a look reminiscent of "Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch."  I mean the average citizen would cross the street if one of these men came walking their way!  But, of yes, but, if you heard them reciting the Rosary with vigor and concentration and closed your eyes you would assume you were hearing friars or monks praying. 

I know that these men cause the Father and Holy Spirit to shine in God's glory and  the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary have joy and heart felt love for these men.  Not only that but you should see the looks of consternation and confusion on the other non-participating prisoners faces! 

The Rosary refers to a "rose garden" and the many Aves are symbolic of roses being offered to Our Lady in the form of a "crown" or "chaplet" that is placed spiritually on Our Lady's head with the completion of each Rosary.  So my dear little sparrows she receives six crowns a day from her prisoner sons and that is most beautiful gift from their hearts.

                                      pax et bonum
                                      bro. sparrow (Robert Hall, CFP Affiliate)

Insights into the Incarnation from Desert Prison Ministry

Hermit Newsletter #10   An occasional publication of Desert Prison Ministry

The Hermit cat, Luthien by name, awakes from slumber in the window of the hermitage.

Hermit:  Awake from your musing?

Luthien:  Yawwwnnnnn.  That’s mew-sing in my language, old guy.

Hermit:  Well what are we on this time?  IT’s been a long time since your last newsletter.

Luthien:  Mews-letter.  I am in a state of wonder and I am mew-sing on the ultimate state of wonder.

Hermit:  Which is?

Luthien:  The state of wonder we enter into during Advent and which culminates in Christ-Mass.

Hermit:  Okay, you have my attention.  First, tell me what this “wonder” is you mention. And why do you say “Christ-Mass”?

Luthien:  I said, a “state of wonder.”  Something more than just “wondering,” like just  being puzzled.  And I say “Christ-mass” because that’s what Christmas is originally—the Mass we celebrate for Christ’s birth.

Hermit:  Is wonder like beholding something? 

Luthien:  That’s a start.  It’s beholding something with total awe.  Like being awe-struck.  You’re being ordinary and thinking or just watching the world and something grabs you right down to your whiskers.  Opens your eyes and your mind and maybe even your mouth, like you sometimes get when I surprise you with my wisdom.

Hermit:  I thought we were talking about advent and Christmas, or Christ-Mass.  Not cats.

Luthien:  First of all, what is Advent?  Catholics and some other Christians observe the season of Advent, the four weeks before Christmas.  Advent comes from the Latin for “to come.”  Something is coming—He is coming, the Savior of the World, the Son of God, the Creator of the Universe—in a human baby.  And before you make another crack, old guy, we cats know a thing or two about this wondrous event, the most astounding event there is.

Hermit:  Cats?  Knowing something about Christmas?

Luthien:  It was in a stable right?  St. Luke says He was born in a manger—that’s a food trough for animals in a stable.  And where there’s a stable, there are rats and mice.  Get It?  That means my ancestors were present—beholding the event.  We have been handing all this down ever since.  Why do you think we have the habit of mewsing and meditating the way we do?

Hermit:  I am dumbstruck.

Luthien:  Good, so maybe you can graduate to awe-struck.  Don’t you remember? Start first with the Magnificat—note that, manifi-cat—when Mother Mary bursts into a song of wonder when she visits her kinswoman Elizabeth after the Angel Gabriel has announced that the Savior will be born from her Womb   (see Luke, I, 46-55).  She is filled with wonder at an ultimate: that the Highest can become the lowest.  So that even cats can behold this mystery according to their own wits—and we do have some!

Hermit:  Okay, okay, you’ve made your point, but I would appreciate it if you could do it without a claw in my arm.

Luthien:  Granted.  Didn’t you participate in that wonder when you were a boy, sitting around the wooden stable and manger with your Mom and singing “Silent Night, Holy Night,” under the Christmas tree?  Wasn’t that wonder-ful?

Hermit:  Yes it was, and it is one of my most cherished memories of childhood.  It was something beyond any understanding.  In German it’s not “silent night,” but “Stille Nacht.”  Stille means still, and that is what gets me at Christmas, the stillness—yes, the angels sing “Glory to God in the highest” but we can only experience the “peace on earth” if we can be quiet, be still, give up the restlessness of our hearts and enter into stillness. Again, simple shepherds could hear, the highest could be wondered at by the lowest, for shepherds were very low in the scale, rough men of the hills.

Luthien:  Yes, I read (and yes, I have been sneaking in the books again) that the desert father, Evagrios the Solitary, said that we must cultivate stillness, because only in true stillness can we escape our material attachments and hear the Divine Word.  “Welcome to exile,” he says, because only in the same kind of exile Mary and Joseph were experiencing in the low, wretched stable in a hick town in Israel could one begin to behold the mystery of God’s birth as a human baby. 

Hermit:  Yes, Luthien, I am seeing a little cat, curled up in some straw, and looking at the manger in a still, frosty night in a stable where the most important even in history is taking place—God born as little child. I heard a Benedictine priest once at a retreat say that of all the mysteries of Christ, this is the biggest one, and the hardest one to grasp—the Incarnation.

Luthien:  At the risk of sounding like a human theologian, I would mewse that we simply can’t grasp it—we can only behold it in wonder.  When you were a boy, weren’t you closer to it than you have been for all the books you have read?

Hermit:  I think you are on to something there,  furry one. 

Luthien:  So, any reader I have out there in prison land who reads my newsletter, do not lament the fact that you are not in the middle of all the hoopla and materialistic madness of the “holiday season,” just be glad that in Christ-Mass, the highest becomes lowest in the most profound way possible, the Word becomes Flesh and dwells among us, and that in stillness and simplicity we, like Mother Mary, can ponder this Mystery in constant wonder!

Hermit:  Amen, Alleluia!

Ken Craven

Christ of the Desert Hermitage

Desert Prison Ministry

661 S. Edgewood Drive

Sparta, TN 38583-1105