The One You Feed - Chris Hoke

Episode Date: April 22, 2015

This week we talk to Chris Hoke about finding spirituality within the darkness Chris Hoke is a jail chaplain and minister to Mexican gang and migrant worker communities in Washington’s Skagit Valley. His experiences are recounted in his new book, Wanted: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders, which Kirkus calls “a liberating, transformative chronicle of how spirituality can foster inspiration and hope while emboldening the downtrodden through their darkest days.” Through his work with the organization Tierra Nueva, Hoke co-founded a coffee-roasting business, Underground Coffee, which employs men coming out of prison and addiction, and connects them to agricultural partners in Honduras. Hoke’s work has been featured on NPR’s Snap Judgment and in Sojourners, Image Journal, Modern Farmer, and Christian Century. In This Interview Chris and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.Thinking of how we feed others as much as ourselves.The state of our current prison system.Practical Mysticism. For More details see our web pageSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

the injustices that we can just see on TMN and turn the channel, or just the inequities in society we've just grown numb to. What if you couldn't grow numb to it? It would break your heart. You would constantly be heartbroken. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together our mission on the Really No Really podcast

is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor what's in the museum of failure and does your dog truly truly love you? We have the answer. Go to really no really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason

bobblehead. The really no really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Chris Hoke, a jail chaplain and minister to Mexican gang and migrant worker communities in Washington state. His experiences are recounted in his new book, Wanted, a spiritual pursuit through jail, among outlaws, and across borders. Through his work with the organization Tierra Nueva, Chris co-founded a coffee roasting business, Underground Coffee, which employs men coming out of prison and addiction and connects them to agricultural partners in Honduras. Hoke's work has been featured on NPR's Snap Judgment and in print with Sojourners, Image Journal, Modern Farmer, and Christian Century.

Here's the interview. Hi, Chris. Welcome to the show. Hey, thanks. It's good to be here. Your book is called Wanted, A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail Among Outlaws and Across Borders, which is a wonderful title. So I'm happy that we were able to get you on the show to talk. That's an honor. I like the book a lot. One of the things that you say early on about the book was that it is a mix of true crime and spiritual adventure, which might describe the type of book that is most likely to get my attention of any kind that could be written. So I was definitely interested in reading it, and I think I read it in about, I don't know, within 24 hours, I think.

Awesome. don't know, within 24 hours, I think. And so I read a lot of books for what we do. And it's just, it's great to get one that is both educational, enlightening, inspiring, and just plain fun to read at the same time. That's a rare combination. So it was really nice job. Well, we're only less than two months from publication date. And so hearing that, it's just ecstatic for me to hear on my first book, so thank you. You're welcome. So we'll get deeper into the book in a minute, but we'll start off with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather and he says, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, since you invited me to come to the show a couple weeks ago, I looked at that parable and I realized I'd seen it before. I'd seen it in some Native American looking posters and different drug and alcohol recovery centers at the lobby, waiting for guys who were going to appointments.

And so I thought I knew it, but I never really thought about it for myself. But when knowing I'd be on the show and thinking about it, what came to mind is, what if we didn't read the parable about our own, within the individual, the good wolf and the bad wolf within me.

But what if it was the good wolf and the bad wolf in inmates and in those who are locked up in society and having a responsibility not just to ourselves individualistically, but to others, which do we feed in others in our policies, in our correctional system? Do we feed in others in our policies, in our correctional system? And so I've seen, as being a chaplain in Skagitoni Jail in Washington State here for the last 10 years, that these men have both inside them, and that when they're fed a daily diet of control and distrust and being deprived of more and more of their just basic human realities of comfort and respect and even touch. And that's something I write about in the book, a chapter called No Contact.

That came from a story I did with an NPR program a couple of years ago that I just read it out, which is just my story about how when I met with these gentlemen as a pastor, as a chaplain, a young pastor, I didn't really have a pastoral style, but I found myself meeting these one-on-one lawyer visitations with them. And when they were in a safe room and where I didn't have anything to preach at them, but I would just say, can we pray about that? And they'd often just take my hand willingly in that kind of touch, but I would just say, can we pray about that? And they'd often just take my hand, um, willingly, and that kind of touch. And they would just, oh, they would just exhale and throw their head down on the table and

just like rest. And then we would just pray silently. They'd just start to weep. And I was able to just bless them. It opened in me. It opened in them. Um, and same thing was happening in these, these groups we were having where men would be able to, we could go around and lay a hand on their shoulder

and pray for them and bless them and have been cursed their whole lives by society, by their family, by their enemies and bless these guys how much they were just weak and to the most honest, tender confession and begin caring for one another in their hearts several years ago

just the basic function of touch was taken away from us chaplains, and one-on-one visits could only happen through the glass. And I saw when they were not fed this kind of human basic of physical contact and of mercy, that it was so much easier for them to become hardened. And that's a message of saying when hearts don't have a much easier for them to become hard. And that's what I'm saying. When hearts don't have a place to break, they become hard. And so when we feed hurting men in our society, like I'm saying, distrust, control, deprivation, they become worse.

The bad wolf grows. What did you say? Greed, hatred, fear. But when we feed those in society where they will bat a guy of mercy and support and compassion and hearing the trauma and the deprivation they've already had in their life

and how to give them what we want for our own children, how many of these guys are so resilient and they become leaders, when they're becoming leaders in our organization called Tyrannical Washington State. And there's just so many treasures of society that are locked up in our jails and prisons. When we feed the goodwill inside them,

they're really, so many of them are creative, dynamic, compassionate leaders. That's a very interesting perspective, A, with the people know, the people that you work with that makes a ton of sense. And I think that's the first time anybody talked about, has used the parable in, you know, what are we feeding in the people around us? You know, what are we recognizing? What are we drawing out of them? What are we looking for in them? Yeah, I mean, just this conversation made me think of a book that had a great influence

on me many years ago when I was in my early 20s. It was Dostoevsky's novel, The Brothers Karamazov, and kind of a spiritual mentor, Father Zosima, this Orthodox, Russian Orthodox monk, kind of a holy man. He oftentimes says, all are guilty for all. And when he was faced with a murderer, he knelt down and asked the murderer's forgiveness, which logically seems insane. But the kind of orthodox spirituality is that we're so interconnected. And so we as a society did not see the good wolf in you. And so I, on behalf of society,

ask for your forgiveness. You've been so deprived that you've gotten to this despicable state in your life. It's beautiful stuff. It is. What I'd like to do is read a couple passages from the book that talk about, you know, I think that highlights some of the things that we're talking about here. And just for our listeners, you referred to it a little bit there, but basically the book is a story of you became a young chaplain in a jail up in northwest Washington, and the book is a story of your journey through that, as well as several of the men that you met and their stories, and how that all intertwines with your spiritual view. Would you say that's a reasonably short description that's somewhat accurate? Sure.

All right. So I'm going to read a paragraph here, and you're talking early on about how you were always the sort of person that enjoyed the evening. You sort of came alive more at night than you did during the day. Yeah, total night out. Yeah. B than you did during the day. Yeah, a total night owl. Yeah. Boredom disappeared with the sunset.

Now I wanted to step out the door and walk the warm suburban sidewalks and look at the desert stars. I wanted to read more books, then write some myself. In this hour, I suddenly knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I wanted to pray. I don't think this was a religious impulse. I had no sense for tradition or ritual, the bowing of heads or the folding of hands, no interest in robes or prayer books,

nor was I longing for something transcendent in the sense of looking outside or above our mildly troubled suburban existence. Rather, I sensed there was a sweeter world hidden under the thin skin of this one. I thought that was a beautiful way of describing the spiritual search. Yeah. As I mentioned earlier, with Dostoevsky's character, Father Zosima, who's an Orthodox Russian monk, I'm discovering now as I go into, as I study mysticism, I'm trying to find a language for this kind of spiritual experience that I've had with men in the Skagit County Jail for years. My study of mysticism has brought me into a closer study of Orthodox Christianity, Orthodox in the sense of kind of

like even pre-Roman Catholicism, like the first 300 years of Jesus' followers and how they understood, first 300 years of Jesus' followers and how they understood, interpreted Jesus' teachings that we have in the Gospels. And so much of it is this, I don't know, I call it practical mysticism. Like the Catholics kind of relegated the mystics. They're kind of the weirdos. They're on the outside. They had these experiences in monasteries, whereas the Orthodox never, they never kind of ghettoized the mystics. Everyone had this kind of very, they call it a noetic or intuitive kind of spiritual center to them,

this kind of radio inside of their minds and their hearts. And then it's getting more in touch with that within ourselves, not having an abstract kind of afterlife narrative, but something that's very here and now. And so I think I always intuited that, maybe the Orthodox most would say as a kid, despite my kind of evangelical upbringing about what prayer was. I think I always intuited that it wasn't just transcendent, but that the kingdom of God was here and hidden. And that when we were given eyes to see, we could touch into a hidden realm

that can transform how we live and act. Yeah. You also say at another place that, and I love this line, that creation begins not in a clean vacuum, but in the place of darkness and chaos. And I think that's so, it ties to what we talk about on the show a lot here, because we talk very often about how it is those very challenges we have that can make us great, not necessarily in spite of them, but because of them. Yeah. I mean, I've seen guys have spiritual awakenings in jail that I've never seen happen in myself or someone I know in a church or in religious colleges they go to. But in a place of total chaos.

I mean, imagine being locked up. Not only does your life have enough chaos and darkness to get you there, but once you're there, everything's falling apart. You're in the midst of your nightmare. And that's where a relationship with yourself and God can begin. It just seems so right that that's the first two paragraphs of the Bible. And so that's in the book. I'm saying that's how this...

I came up here to the Northwest to learn with this guy, Bob Ekblad, who was writing a book called Reading the Bible with the Damned. Because I wanted to read the Bible, but I didn't trust any of the churches or seminaries I was around. But I came up here to be with this dude, and the jail became a seminary. And how he read even the first page of the Bible is like, that sounds right. Yeah, you described some of those early readings when you were first in the jail and with Bob and when you started going back yourself. And I'll read another part here, which is when we leaned over these ancient stories from opposite sides of the table, we saw ourselves and our lives reflected back. Men born blind, guys who'd lied and screwed over their brothers like Jacob, self-pitying prophets like Elijah, on the run from governments

they'd assaulted, hiding and suicidal in the deserts. Violent persecutors like Saul having mystical encounters with the risen Christ out on the roads. These flawed characters always came up against a presence, a voice, sometimes an angel, a vision, and received the unexpected. New sight with mud and spit in their eyes. A felt presence that wrestled with him till dawn. A fresh cake in Yeah. You want me to expand on that? You can. Is it interesting for you to hear your own stuff read back to you yeah yeah i mean just just with a different audience in mind like i don't know who's outside

my window out there in the podcast darkness right now listening to this but uh just the awareness that strangers could be hearing that instead of me just kind of tweaking out the glowing screen of my word processor yeah for me to just hear those words now, yeah, it reminds me of what I was trying to get at in the first place, which is there's no system in the Bible. There's no such thing as systematic theology. I mean, it's maybe a helpful category, but there's always this just raw, elusive, mysterious spiritual presence at work doing scandalously beautiful things and meeting nobodies in the wreck of their lives. And then later on, they go to tell about it.

And then later on, the people in the temples and people with robes and people with degrees are the ones that try to make a system out of it. But the Bible is just this series of report after report. And I would say flawed report after flawed report of like forensic reports of, I don't know what the fuck happened, but I was blind and now I see. I was trying to kill myself in the desert and shake my fist to the heavens and mercy opened up my heart.

I found myself fed and refreshed and now I can't stop telling people about it. And that's, so these are just reports after reports that something is loose and alive out there, and that's what I'm trying to pursue. In our email exchanges, I express that I'm not Christian, but I love the spiritual search that you describe so much in the book, and you talk about the early monks, you know, often known as the Desert Fathers, that would go out and they monks, you know, often known as the desert fathers that would go out and they were, you know, they were searching for God. And one of the things it says that they cherished tears as a sign of God's presence, that they would pray for the gift of

tears so that through sorrowing, you may tame that which is savage in your soul. And I think that's such a, I know for myself that often those moments of that opening that seems to accompany tears, if it's not like the tears that I get when Chris kicks me in the stomach, but the kind of tears that come when you just see something so beautiful or powerful is an opening. Yeah, yeah, it's an active opening. It's a sudden opening, like laughter or crying at beauty. Like Paul, the Apostle Paul says something in the beginning of Romans when he's just kind of, for chapter one, he's kind of chewing out all these religious people.

They're all, you know, judging each other. And he writes this letter and he says, stop judging each other. You guys are hypocrites. You guys are knuckleheads too. You're all knuckleheads. Don't you realize that it's the kindness of God that leads us to repentance? And I think I would want to throw so many other words in kindness. Like I would want to say,

don't you realize that it's seeing the beauty of the transformed heart that leads us to repentance? I mean, I used to argue with people back home about criminal justice policy. I guess I still argue about it, about capital punishment and it it just hardened the debate. But when I just stopped arguing about it and pouring my life into the jail and some of these guys I love, many of the guys who are in the book, especially my good friend and now co-worker named Neeners.

Some people love Neeners. I just went back to Southern California last week, not only to go to Homeboy Industries, but 45 minutes east in the kind of upland in Southern California where I grew up and my friend meeting him and this guy with tattoos

on his face and neck and his arms and they've heard, oh yeah, this kind of Chris is working with this gangbanger guy who's changing

up in Washington, but they see him and just sort of delight in how fun and how cool this guy is. So many people, like there's a breaking of heart

in so many of my friends. I could just see it. Seeing the beauty of a transformed life leads us to repentance. And I think that's the repentance God's calling for. It's not like, okay, I suck.

I'm going to change my ways. But it's when you see something that's so much more beautiful than the cage you've been trapped in. Right. And I think it's easy to see the poetry in such dramatic transformations as the ones that you're talking about. And I think they're beautiful and they're inspiring. And I think that they can be a way for us to see that in ourselves, even if the circumstances aren't quite so dramatic,

that ability to change and to open and to be somebody who's very, very different than the person we've been. I think we put ourselves into a limited range of the ability for me to change. Like, well, I'm kind of this person, and maybe I've got a couple degrees of latitude one way or the other. But you see some of these things that you're describing and you realize like that's a story we're probably telling ourselves. Yeah. I mean, to, to, to, to something you said just a couple minutes or maybe just the beginning of that, um, of it, it's easier to see kind of a larger shift or contrast or narrative

arc of transformation. And some of these guys in the jail, who have lives of extreme pain, neglect, violence, than in our own lives. I think that's completely true. I say it in one of the chapters how, for me, I feel like the jail is like a warped existential mirror, like a funhouse mirror at the carnival that it's it's such a political cartoon it's an exaggeration of what's going in my own heart and life um and so when i can see a life change in a big way like a magnifying glass i can tune into the more subtle experiences of change and mercy in my own life that maybe didn't have such extreme darks um but I can see that shift in myself.

And so I've wondered sometimes if part of my work with men in the jail is doing my own work of repentance and receiving love vicariously through these gentlemen. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really.

Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The chapter is titled Hearts Like Radios. I guess I'll just do some more reading. And the reason I'm reading so much of it is that it's just, I think that the writing is so beautiful. And I feel like

the conversation is going to miss a lot of that if I don't just read some of it. So I'm doing more of that than normal for listeners who are wondering, but that's just because I think it's, it's the best way to get to some of this stuff. Well, I'll just, I'll just go into it. For some time, I've imagined all of us having a fragile nerve inside of us, like a spiritual antenna deep within our core. Some people, I've thought, simply have an abnormally large antenna inside. Poets, prophets, psychopaths, your slightly crazy aunt who's drawn to the paranormal, who some days is more compassionate than anyone you know, and other days is aggressive and convinced everyone, including the government, is conspiring against her.

In my work both behind jail bars and the years I continued with homeless youth on the streets of downtown Seattle, I've met a number of young people with schizophrenia. I've wondered when talking with them about some of the abuse and trauma they've survived, whether the internal antenna nerves of some people are damaged. Maybe they could be exposed, jutting out like a bone from a broken arm, picking up way too much of the otherwise faint spiritual frequencies coursing through the world, from beyond as well as the person across the room. I've wondered whether some of these people slam heroin or meth

or any street medicine they can find as a way of jamming cotton into their spiritual ears. It's not a real theory, just how I've pictured that part inside of us all. I thought that was a very interesting description of a, you know, schizophrenia, but mental illness in general, and just a way of thinking about people who are more attuned to the sensitivity. And you go on to talk about how if you look at people, you know, certainly some of the biblical figures that are looked up to the prophets, they, from the outside, and certainly if you put them in today's world, they would look crazy.

Absolutely. We'd lock them up. Right. We'd lock them up quick, quick. Yeah, I mean, I think that's where the jail, along with Bob's very, very Protestant bent to really stick close to Scripture and hold Scripture tightly, which I was not inclined to do after growing up in church, but the jail gave me a new place to get even closer to scripture. Like, wait, let's kind of like throw off the kind of pastel, um, kind of a Sunday school version. We think we know scripture. Let's really look at that stuff and let's read it

with some people that, um, can read it for what it is. It didn't have that church upbringing, maybe. And seeing that this, these characters in Bible Lord equally is raw, if not more off the hook than my reading partners in their jail scrubs. And so, yeah, seeing how raw the prophets are and how they get beat and locked up and thrown in a hole, especially Jeremiah, my friend Nieners, who features largely in the final chapter called Fire in a Hole, about his time in solitary confinement and somewhat mystical experiences in solitary confinement, he started really identifying with Jeremiah, this guy who was just weeping and weeping and weeping and was miserable.

And the words that he had were silent. He was thrown in a pit. You know, solitary confinement's called the hole. And these are extreme experiences. And so as I tell in the chapter, at the same time that I was coming across some of these folks in jail, but some of these really lovable types that I'd accompany, one of them would even crawl through my bedroom window some nights and just broke his way into my life over and over

in a totally nonviolent and loving way. But this guy was so tormented. Like, he was hearing stuff all the time. I was forced to really not just write off, like, oh, well, dude hears voices. That's crazy. But really kind of be curious about the content of what he was hearing.

When at the same time our ministry was in a season where we were getting into more contemplative prayer and even some of the charismatics were like, about the content of what he was hearing when at the same time our ministry was in a season where we were getting into more contemplative prayer and even some of the charismatics who were like you can hear god speak today just quiet yourself down focus on god get a pen out trust kind of intuitively i don't think they use that word i think the orthodox would say you know trust your kind of intuitive spiritual antenna ask a question and write down what comes to mind. It won't sound, often say in the jail, often times won't sound like, Purse, this is the Lord.

It'll just kind of flow through like a thought, but better than your normal thoughts. Write it down because it's so easy to write off. Just it's so quickly to write off schizophrenics that you get to write off God speaking to us. It just sounds fleeting and crazy. Write it down. And while I was trying to tune in and really silence my mind and tune in and pick up on this possibility of the faint message of God's heart whispering through my mind, and then 10 minutes later, I have to go upstairs and take care of this guy suffering from schizophrenia and swinging a golf club through the room uh i could calm him down not by telling him those voices aren't real you know cussing

out through the windows you're like all right she's got this big antenna um let's just use it let's just dial into a different frequency all right let's just let's just pray right now which seems i guess practical kind of like de-escalation doesn't seem the right thing to do, but it seemed kind of more honoring to him, right? Okay. You are hearing shit. Let's just turn to a different dial, bro. And tuning in to God and the things that he heard were immediate and they were beautiful. I'm like, Oh my gosh, this guy is hearing everything that everyone downstairs in the listening prayer

class is trying so hard to hear. I don't hear God's voice. The guy's hearing it, and he's also hearing voices saying, like, piece of shit, fuck you, you fucking faggot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're going to beep this out, right? We don't necessarily have to, but we can if you want. Oh, no, no, I don't care. No, we don't care.

I'm not soiling your show here at all. Our show has been plenty soiled by this point. Not by you, but by 60 episodes of me talking. So, no, you're fine. Carry on. Okay, so these guys just hearing these voices, just mean, just shit-talking voices in their head, but they hear it. And so that just forced me to kind of

think that the world of mental health and hallucination and the world of spiritual listening, maybe we're not so different and there might be some obvious differences. So I have a lot of people that have family members that really suffer with mental illness and say, can sometimes take issue with what I'm saying. Uh, if they feel I'm just romanticizing mental illness. Um, but I think they really hear me out and hear the stories of the people I work with. Like,

no, I have no illusion about the absolute insanity and meaninglessness and torment and psychic turmoil people can go through. And yet some of them may be part of their mental illness is um they're really picking up on stuff and then through the chapter i try to explore like well what's the implications of that for the western modern mind are there really spiritual currencies out there and they're not just projections of their own wounded consciousness bouncing around in their head but maybe they're picking up on stuff that, you know, the next generations of physics in 60 years will finally tune into.

Right. You talk about how if there are those frequencies that maybe these folks, as you described earlier, it's like the antenna is damaged. It's overly sensitive. So it's picking up all the good and bad. And you do describe with some of the folks that when you ask them more about the voices, there is another voice there that is kinder, more loving, generous voice. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they've been tuned into that channel many times in their life, but they had more people telling them they were fucking nuts than they had people saying, oh, that's God. He adores you. Stay on that channel. pronouncements, but as humans with a severe sensitivity to evil. To the prophets, he writes, even a minor injustice assumes cosmic proportions. And the prophet's ear is attuned to a cry

imperceptible to others. They are so sensitive to what we overlook or have ceased to feel, they appear insane. Heschel says that the prophet is primarily burdened with the pathos of God, an infinite vulnerability. I should read that every morning. Not my own writing, but Heschel. Yeah, it was neat to be thinking about this stuff that we've just been talking about and to go back to anyone listening to the show, I buy that book, Abraham, Joshua, Heschel, the prophets.

It's amazing. And that's from his first chapter where he just defines like what what is the prophet and he kind of tears down these kind of western ideas and he's trying to get back to kind of the weirdness of the hebrew imagination he's tearing down all these western greek philosophies of you know people that kind of hear these divine pronouncements like they're just microphones and it's just like no no no the prophet is someone like he's now my language whose antenna is so swollen and is so large they're

picking up on everything their heart the heart of their radio is so big and so sensitive it's as big and sensitive as God and the injustices that we can see on TMN and turn the channel or just the inequities in society we've just grown up to. What if you couldn't grow up to it?

It would break your heart. You would constantly be heartbroken, and you would constantly be in love. Your eyes would never be dry. That this is the heart of God, and the prophets are the ones burdened with a heart that big. Yeah. That's a beautiful way of thinking about it.

And so, Heshala, he's so cool. He kind of goes to the root of a lot of our Western suppositions, and he says, like, the kind of the Stoic philosophical tradition that we're still in, he says, is that, you know, wisdom or godliness is like this impassibility being removed. or godliness is like this impassibility being removed. I don't know enough about Buddhism to comment on that, but I do sense there's a certain detachment. There's a loving detachment, but I also know in all of us, we don't want to suffer.

And so it's in the opposite direction. It's like the cross, it's running headlong at suffering, where so many of our philosophies are about avoiding suffering and being serene and at peace. But yet there's this opposite direction of the Hebrew imagination of love means embracing the suffering. To love is to suffer. And to avoid suffering is to slowly be less of a loving person. Yeah. Buddhism is interesting because that is certainly one interpretation of it, in person. Yeah. Buddhism is interesting because that is certainly one interpretation of it is that it is a, you know, if you are detached, if you have no preference in anything, then you suffer

less. And then there's another, you know, group of people in Buddhism that talk about finding that soft spot underneath everything, finding that sort of words you use, that infinite tenderness, that learning to be okay with the essential insecurity that comes with life, like embracing it and not trying to pretend it's not there. So I wrestle with those questions too. I align a lot with Buddhist thought, and that is one of those questions that I sort of wrestle with a lot, which is around that, well, is detachment really the ideal state? Is that what, is that what spirituality is? And I think that's a,

I don't think that that's what's really being taught, but I think sometimes it's hard for us to hear, or it's not being presented well in a way of what's really there. Yeah, you're probably right. But that is a, you know, I do, I do think that question of suffering and, you're probably right. concern, which is like the broad world, everything you sort of concerned about, and then a circle of influence, which is what you can actually act upon or do something with or be involved with. And that he said that if you spend all your time in your circle of concern, that circle of influence actually starts to shrink. Whereas if you spend your time in that circle of influence and you keep working at it, then that grows. And that makes a lot of very intuitive sense to me. Then I also go, but is that sticking your head in the sand? And I think the challenge is like you describe the work you do in the jails and the, I mean, there's stories in your book that

are just heartbreaking and the prison system. And we could flip around and find 10 other major areas of the world, poverty or sex trafficking, that are equally painful and heartbreaking. And what's the right response to that in a way that allows us to be useful and compassionate, but not completely just overwhelmed by grief? That's a great question. I mean, just the way you're framing it. I like that. What did you say? Stephen Covey? Yeah, Stephen Covey. He wrote, the guy who wrote Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

Oh my gosh, yeah, I missed that one. I've heard of that title. I should have read that. I like that because I think that helps explain something I touch on really quickly in the chapter that tells kind of how I came up here to the Northwest and to do what I do in a jail. But in college, I went to UC Berkeley. And, man, talk about a circle of concern, like just every class and walking through Sproul Plaza and hearing about injustices happening everywhere in the world.

And so many of my peers just getting like Rhodes scholarships and summer internships, and they're all in the world. And it's so many of my peers just getting like road scholarships and summer internships and they're all changing the world. I mean, you're aware of too many problems in the world. So huge circle of concern. And I had zero circle of influence. It was just me and I was dying of loneliness and uselessness in a world. And that's when I was most suicidal.

It was just me, and I was dying of loneliness and uselessness in the world, and that's when I was most suicidal. And so I needed to come up to this tiny jail in a tiny, you know, leaving the Bay Area into a little Skagit Valley, Washington, I'd never heard of, into this small confined room. It was a confined jail, and then within this confined jail in this tiny cell the size of a closet at one table with one person, and then to start to see the power of mercy and of prayer and of being together truthfully with someone. And that started to, I started to come alive in that space. And I'm just rethinking through the story with the categories you just gave me. And I think now my 10 years later as we grow our coffee roasting business, Underground Coffee, and where we're fundraising stands for guys like Meeners and others, guys who have left that life to become kind of fellow outreach workers with me and our staff grows, my circle of consciousness is growing. We're growing Homeboy Industries and speaking in Nashville staff grows my my circle of consciousness is growing and we're going to humble industries

and speaking in nashville and in north carolina a couple weeks it's growing now because um like you're saying the circle of influence finally took a route somewhere and something i really care about it's connected to my heart right and it's been yeah and your circle you know that your circle of influence has definitely grown i mean i'm I'm, I'm reading your book and, and, you know, talking to lots of people about it. And I think there's, you know, there's a lot of I just, I always find that concept fascinating, and to try and figure out what is the appropriate response to suffering, because it is everywhere. And there's a there's a degree of compassion that I feel like we have, but it can become crippling, and despair is a, as you talked about early on for you, it was a pretty overwhelming thing. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

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And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I do have a question. that even while doing this work, you enter into despair because you've got, certainly there are, there are success stories and there are people who make dramatic transformations in their life. And yet there's a lot of people that that is not what happens for a variety of reasons, whether that be the prison system they're in, the gang life that they were in that won't leave them alone, demons from before that they can't quite shake. How do you, you talk about wrestling with it in the book a couple of times. Where are you at with that right now? I'm still learning how to love. I mean, that's the same problem that I have

with the men I'm working with is they loved at one point and then they got hurt. They got rejected. They got betrayed maybe by their girlfriend, by their family, by their best friend, by their homie who ratted them out or they got assaulted in prison or their kids said, you know, screw you. I don't want you anymore. And so we protect ourselves because that hurts so bad. So we forget how to love. It's the same for me. I would have thought as I am a pastor now for 10 years that I would just be growing in love. But I find it's harder and harder for me. I've loved and loved,

and so many people have not been able to reciprocate. And it's sad enough if they die in prison, if they get shot down by federal marshals when they can't bear their own pain and they get just so addicted to a chemical cozy blanket and shove heroin in their veins and don't wake up. That's bad enough, but maybe this is selfish, but what hurts worse is someone that I've really seen, I've gone fly fishing with and I've, and I've done their budgeting with, and I've bounced their kids around and laughed with and called them my friend. And when, um, when they don't call me back and when I don't know what I did wrong, or if I can analyze their own shame or why they're hiding from me, but when I've lost a friend and it's turned away from me, it makes me very careful in wanting to call someone else my friend again

and wanting to share life with them. It makes me want to go find more white-bearded, hipster, craft beer-loving dudes with knee glasses in Bellingham like me who won't break my heart like some of the guys that I've shared these years with. It's really hard. Yeah, that is a difficult path. I mean, I've, you know, I talk often in the show, I'm in recovery, and unfortunately, you know, I've got a lot of friends who have made it and a fair number of people who didn't. And that is hard. And I don't know that what you're dealing with is exactly the same, but in recovery we have the concept of it being a disease, the alcoholism or the drug addiction, and that that just tends to become more powerful than...

That that just tends to become more powerful than – I guess it gives it a way to not take it – to try not to take it as personal because it's not that that person doesn't love or care. It's just that they're overwhelmed by something that they simply can't deal with. But it doesn't change the fact that it still, uh, you know, breaks your heart. When we got to the end of the book, um, you know, at the end of the book, you are this guy Neeners that is, you know, he's throughout the book in a lot of different places. He's close to finally getting out. And I finished the book and I was like, Oh no, did he? I mean, like, it was like a cliffhanger. I was like, I'm hoping to God this guy got out after all the other heartbreak you've described. And so I was very happy to hear that he had and things were going well. it is where does the work of art where does the book end um and honestly i was writing that that chapter still you know finishing the book it was still four or five months off for his release date and we'd been we'd had two or three release dates and then last minute something happened

he'd lose a year good time right um and who who knows if within this year of losing good time if he'll survive and after one main. The other main characters in the book his name's Richard are little jokes. He literally rotted to death in a first world prison here in Washington State at age 26. Preventable flesh-eating disease.

And a lot of guys get stabbed to death or taken off main line or shot down by snipers. They don't make the news so we don't know how often this happens. And so I had a hope that he was going to get out, but I realized I needed to leave the book with that question mark, even if I could kind of like type in a final paragraph to the publisher after Nieders got out and everything's been going well,

I think it was better for readers to sit with that emotion with me. Although it's not meters. What about, you know, inmate X, millions of them out there, like, are they going to make it out? And do we care? Yep. It was really powerful. And I've, I've actually had a very specific experience with a very good friend of mine who was in jail and, you know, it was just the same thing.

It was like, he was about to be out and then he would, you know, something would happen and, and, uh, you know, he wouldn't get out. And then ultimately he sealed his own fate by, um, you know, he was on his way back from work release and he decided to get off the bus on the way back to jail and, and, and smoke crack for a couple of days, which is, you know, clearly insanity any way you describe it. But so I w I really any way you describe it. So I really resonated with it personally also. But I'm glad he's doing well. Oh yeah, it's my buddy. I mean, if you go on my website

it's really easy to see pictures of beaners and hear about what we're doing now on my Facebook. So we were just down in Southern California and that homeboy in the street and one of my childhood friends was just like, what are you guys doing tomorrow? Uh, what are we going to wrap up? And I'm like, I'm going to take you guys to

Disneyland. So to just go back to where I was as a kid, you know, the happiest place on earth, right? And like how he bought us like those classic Mickey ears with our names embroidered on the back and it's, it's, it's really turning into a happy ending. And yet we get home and there's five problems waiting

for us. Right. He would have every reason to just want to be like, I'm done. You know, I'm out. I've got to just handle with just the pain of family life and stressors and debt. And so it's a constant roller coaster.

But we're, I think that might be the next book we write is about our relationship called thicker than blood. About rediscovering that there's, there's know, the phrase, you know, blood is thicker than water. Yeah. But I've witnessed there is something thicker than blood. Yeah, I think there is. I actually think there is. We're near the end of time.

So just a couple, one of the really fun parts of the book was describing how you got connected with David James Duncan, who wrote one of my favorite books ever, The Brothers K. Oh, yeah. That book just blows me away. But he's very into fly fishing, and so you guys got connected, and you started taking these guys. You know, it was one of the things that you did a lot with them was fly fishing. And there's just, there's, there's a, there's a happiness that leaks through your writing about those moments where you're, you know, where those guys are and you are out there doing that. So, um, any, anything you want to add to that? That was just a fun part of the story. I wish I did a more.

I mean, it's probably the problem of most fathers in America. They love fishing, but it's so easy to get wrapped up in your work and not take the time to pick the kids fishing. Not that I'm these guys' father, but it feels similar. I just got to do it. Almost every guy I've taken just loves it. I keep thinking they should be like,

man, this is stupid, but they love it. I've bumped into a new generation of gang members on the streets now that haven't even been in jail at all, just ditching school and breaking out windows and graffiti up a school property. And so I'm meeting, I met a gang leader and he's got like 80 of these youngsters that follow him. I'm like,

ah, you guys want to get out of here? Yeah. We always wanted to go camping. Like, well, I don't have a sleeping bag, but let's go,

let's go get into this archery. Cause I, you know, I got into it because I put punger games in school. and so we go into this forest with all these like hay bales with uh burlap sacks hanging over them and this stencil of like a deer or a bear and we start pulling back these arrows and they're flying and sticking into the hay bales and these guys just love it i thought man i wish i could do this full time, just go straight from the jail to fishing with guys and doing archery with them.

And so I got to do it more, but it's nice to just taste nature. I mean, that's like the one chapter in the book, the fly fishing chapter, where I'm trying to paint a bigger picture of redemption. It's not just about inside our hearts or fixing our legal cases, but there's also a reconciliation creation

that really rounds out our wholeness. So finding ways to get out there. And one of the things that your group has done is you've created an organization called Underground Coffee. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, well, I was inspired by homeboy industries in Los Angeles several years ago when I was getting unwittingly into gang ministry. And I thought, well, who else is doing this so I can learn from them? And one of the gang members in jail said one of his favorite books was a book called G-Dog and the Homeboys.

And so I was reading G-Dog and the Homeboys one summer when sleeping in a migrant camp cabin when I was also reaching out to migrant farm workers. And G-Dog and the Homeboys down at Homeboy Industries, what they'd done is started to create jobs that hired exclusively like guys with felons and with tattoos and were unhirable. Down at Homeboy Industries, they have silk screening and a bakery and a cafe. And so I thought, what could be our industry? And right around then, Bob, our founder here at Tearing A Wave Up in northwest Washington, said, hey, our base community down in Honduras where we started years ago, they're growing some pretty high-grade coffee now. And our friend Zach had been coming around who had like 17 years as an intravenous needle drug addict.

We started scheming and thinking of, wait, what if we bought the coffee from Honduras and our industry will be coffee roasters? And Zach has experienced that in the past. And so using that, honoring that as a transferable skill. And so we started roasting coffee and we came up with the name Underground Coffee. And now we have a brand. We have a website. Our coffee is purchased right now almost exclusively at churches, giving these guys a job in roasting and packaging and speaking in these churches. But now our neighbors at another coffee roasting company in our valley, in Hidalgo Bay, coffee roasters,

other coffee roasting company in our valley, Dalgo Bay Coffee Roasters. They've kind of taken us under their wing, and soon our coffee will be on the shelves of some of their distribution channels and grocery stores throughout Seattle. And if listeners want to check it out, we have a website, undergroundcoffeeproject.com. And it's a really simple website.

We've been thrown together. But you can get a subscription and two freshly roasted bags with our story will be in your mailbox and you can, through your coffee or your morning brew, be connected to Underground Change. There's your pitch. Yep. And so you can buy either the subscription or you could just buy a single bag of coffee there also, right? Oh yeah, you can buy a single bag.

Things like that are great. It's a great story and a great product so I'll definitely have links to Tierra Nueva the underground coffee all that on the show notes well thank you so much Chris for taking the time to join I really enjoyed this conversation I could probably

read parts of your book out loud for the next two hours but I'll spare everyone but I highly recommend checking out the book. It's a great read, and thanks for all the great work you're doing. Eric, this has been a pleasure. This is my favorite interview I've done thus far. Thanks so much, and I look forward to listening to more of your shows. All right. Thanks, Chris. Take care. We'll talk again soon. Peace, Eric. All right. Bye. Bye.