🔵 By Timothy Brunner. Photo by lauragrafie.
I lay in my prison bunk often, as I do now, from midnight until two or three in the morning and I think. Sometimes I write, other times I pray or meditate. Sometimes, though, I just think. I live with a weight of regret that Atlas couldn’t shrug. I account an immense wealth of experience that fills me with a horrible realization. These experiences rewind upon a life of selfish choices that lacked morals, abounded in victimization, were bereft of humanity, and courted utter damnation.
My life looks very different to me now. I observe from a perspective not unlike that of Dismas: Crucified for my crimes, I have found penitence. In a penitentiary. Looking down from the pedestal I have earned o see a dark path walked in tiny steps. Thousands; myriads; a plentitude of pedestrian plodding leading to the maturation of devastation that I have caused.
Perhaps I can only properly view my life from the cross of my sins. My cross, at this moment, seems to be this prison bunk in the middle of the night. The Catholic Church teaches, traditionally, that we each choose our own crosses. I do so choose mine. I have chosen mine. To fail to acknowledge the causal link between those two points would be to deny my own responsibility and neglect the lesson. It would be refusing to learn.
A past life of thievery led Dismas to hang an die on the cross. From the perspective of a culminated past, he was able to see what he wanted his future to be. In that crux of past and future, he was able to sieze his present and, in one huge step, shift the course he had been set upon. An entire life traveled to a specific destination, yet changed in one gifted step.
Such a present is my desire.
The most important words I can ever say is that I will do better. Not that I will try. Not that I am sorry. Not any statement that lacks a specific, quantifiable result. To say I will do better in a particular situation comes with a commitment to a new course of action. On such a course, doing better brings my focus from my selfish desire and orients it on ym shaping of the world around me. I do not say I will be better, but that I will do better. Action changes the outside world, not just my interior life.
Being better is a natural result of doing better. However, it is in the doing, in the actual work of action, that is born a new personality. Dismas was born anew in the midst of his own death because he acted on his faith. He didn’t try to be what he wished he was; he did what he knew he should.
That is repentance. An act of faith, not an expression. So, as I repent here and now, I offer an act of faith. I will do better and so become better. Maybe this one step at the end of my road will change my destination. After all, there was another man crucified that that, and he continued his journey, unchanged.