I was in prison and you came to me

 

 

Fr Seán Coyle

 

Article by Fr Seán Coyle - LINK HERE

 

I was in prison and you came to me.

 

I spent Holy Week and Easter Week of 1970 in a parish in a small town in eastern Kentucky. I was on a three-year programme of studies near New York City after my ordination in Ireland in December 1967. There were only a handful of Catholics, maybe 15 or so, now 15 families according to the parish website, among the population of around 1,600, now 2,500, in this predominantly Protestant area where there were still the remnants of hostility towards Catholics. That has probably disappeared by now. 

One of the Catholics was the local drunk and I heard after Easter that he was in the town’s lock-up. Al Capone he wasn’t, and was no danger to the community, only to himself. Being a stranger and a Catholic priest I felt a little apprehensive as I went to visit him. But I was totally disarmed by the warm welcome the policeman on duty gave me. He thanked me for coming and brought the prisoner and myself to the kitchen and told us to make ourselves at home. Then he left.

The prisoner and I had a long chat over coffee and he was grateful for my visit. I don’t remember what we talked about and had no further contact with him, as I drove back to New York that Easter Friday.

For me the grace of the visit to the lock-up was the warm humanity of the policeman expressed in his kindness towards the prisoner and me. I presume that the latter’s stay was a short one, probably not his first or his last.

Over the years I’ve come to see clearly that very many of the gospel stories involve Jesus encountering one or two individuals, often in the presence of others, and changing their lives. St Matthew’s passage on the Final Judgement (Mt 25:31-46) shows us that our eternal salvation depends on how we respond to others in such personal encounters: I was in prison and you came to me . . . When did we see you in prison? . . . And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’

The alternative Communion Antiphon in the Mass of the 16^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, which occurred when I was preparing this, puts my visit to the prisoner in Kentucky in an eternal context: Behold, I stand at the door and knock, says the Lord. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door to me, I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me (Revelations 3:20).

On that morning in Easter Week 1970 Jesus the Risen Lord had coffee with the town drunk and me in the kitchen of a lock-up in a small town in eastern Kentucky.