From Prison to Priesthood, By Terry Messman

[An excerpt from an article printed in this month's "Street Spirit - Justice News and Homeless Blues in the Bay Area" - A publication of the American Friends Service Committee; homeless individuals may obtain up to 10 copies at a time for free, and then sell them for $1.00 apiece. Interested folks may contact me at 831-295-3917 or email me to arrange for pickup.

There is also an extensive interview with Rev. James Tramel posted to the site at http://www.thestreetspirit.org/June2006/interview.htm ]

When Fyodor Dostoevsky served four years in a Siberian prison for taking part in a radical political movement, he wrote a book entitled The House of the Dead. That ominous phrase summons up all our fears of prison. Prison is dedicated to purposely dehumanizing inmates and banishing them from the land of the living. Too often, human beings are turned into the walking dead.

Yet Father James Tramel was imprisoned for 20 years, five times the length of Dostoevsky's sentence, and he somehow found an inner current of hope and faith that transformed his prison cell into a place of new life. This renewal occurred in the most oppressive surroundings imaginable, as if a small flower had defied the unyielding concrete to blossom in a prison cell.

In ministering to prisoners who were dying the loneliest deaths imaginable behind the prison walls of the House of the Dead, Father Tramel found friendship, a new reason to live, and a hope that could not be buried, not even behind the fortress walls of some of the nation's toughest prisons -- San Quentin, Folsom, Solano State Prison, and Vacaville.

Dostoevsky vividly described his prison time: "I consider those four years as a time during which I was buried alive and shut up in a coffin... It was an indescribable, unending agony, because each hour, each minute weighed upon my soul like a stone."

By contrast, Father Tramel said in an interview with Street Spirit shortly after his release, "By God's grace, there's not a shred of bitterness in me about all that time. I'm very happy with who I am today, and there is not a single person in my life who I would give up to have any of that prison time back."

Instead of missing out on life, Tramel made friends he cared about and loved, and he comforted his fellow prisoners when they were dying in the prison hospice. He was ordained as an Episcopal priest by Bishop William Swing in Solano prison -- they made Eucharist with bread from a croissant and Welch's grape juice from prison vending machines. He was engaged to Rev. Stephanie Green, a fellow seminarian who visited him in prison.

A lot of lives never darkened by the shadows of prison bars are not that rich, that fulfilled, that human.

Father Tramel is a man of many firsts -- the first man ever to be ordained as an Episcopal priest while in prison; and the first prison inmate ever admitted into an Episcopal seminary, the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley.

He was also the youngest prisoner in San Quentin when he was locked up in the notorious California prison in 1986 when he was only 17. He spent his entire adult life in San Quentin, Folsom, Vacaville and Solano prisons until his release on March 12, 2006, after serving more than 20 years for second-degree murder.

[continued at http://www.thestreetspirit.org/June2006/prison.htm ]