Imprisonment, opportunity for salvation or fall

Prison creates unique conditions. The cell becomes a place of prayer and sustenance, a setting for asceticism, isolation, and the denial of worldly goods and pleasures. It offers an opportunity to live in poverty, purity, and chastity, and a chance to place one’s trust entirely in God’s care and will. Obedience requires a superior—often a confessor—whose guidance one follows, a gift from God manifest in the presence of priests. At the same time, one submits to the programme imposed by secular authorities, an act of divine pedagogy in which personal will is consciously subordinated to the divine will.

Is this not the life of a monk? Denying the world, taking up the cross, and accepting God’s will? By civil status, one may not be a monk, yet this condition can be harnessed for spiritual growth by embracing suffering for one’s own faults, like the thief on the cross or the captain at Jilava: “I sit here for my sins”—a monk in spirit, if not in society.

God, who loves us, saw our desire and our effort to serve Him, and placed us in circumstances that allowed us to offer Him a completely purified being—body and soul—as a sacrifice.

Those who lived in this way received extraordinary spiritual gifts. Those who failed to understand God’s intention were unsettled in spirit, troubled by confinement, hunger, and fear, or worried for the safety of their families. Some protested, at times exposing themselves to punishment or even death. Others, lacking spiritual anchoring, fell into despair, blaming God for their misfortune. In utter hopelessness, the condemned sometimes threw themselves beneath the executioner’s blade—and the executioner received them already dead in spirit.

(Virgil Maxim – Hymn for the Cross Carried)