Free JJ09 - Blood Moon by Michael Lister Page A

and mild-mannered young man with closely cropped brown hair and sad, sagging brown eyes.
    “Says working here has changed me.”
    It probably had. It was a difficult job in an inhumane environment, a daily assault on civility and humanity. Incidences of alcohol and drug abuse, depression, anxiety, and domestic violence all increased among correctional officers.
    “Has it?” I asked.
    He seemed to think about it for a moment, then frowned, shrugged, and nodded. “Yeah, guess it has.”
    “It’s a dark, difficult place,” I said.
    “But . . . our vows were for better or worse.”
    “How much worse is it?” I asked.
    He didn’t respond right away.
    My mind kept wanting to wander back to Anna, to the plan and preparations, and I had to keep bringing it back to this moment, to helping this man, to being present––something I was finding challenging in the midst of everything else I was doing these days.
    “It’s not bad all the time,” he said. “But . . . I do have a shorter fuse these days. I don’t know, it’s like I’m always on edge. Sometimes I just lose it. Definitely drink too much. Not sure what all I do to her when I . . . when I’m drinking.”
    “Have you hit her?”
    “No. Nothing like that. I wouldn’t blame her for leavin’ if I ever did anything like that. And I won’t.”
    We talked for a long time after that, but the more he talked the more futile it all felt. It wasn’t that he couldn’t make the monumental, fundamental changes needed to save his marriage. It was that, like most of us, he wouldn’t make them. He wanted things to change, but there are no things. There is only us. We change us––our thoughts, words, and deeds––or we change nothing.
    Later in the afternoon, I supervised an inmate AA group––something I always found difficult to do.
    The meeting was held in one corner of the chow hall. Open and airy and full of hard concrete and metal surfaces, the coffee- and cigarette-laced breath of the words spoken by the inmates ricocheted around the room and were gone, lost like everything else they had ever had.
    I felt awkward when placed in the position of being present in a meeting I was facilitating but not participating in.
    It felt dishonest not to tell the inmates attending that I too was a friend of Bill W’s, and that the program that works if you work it had worked for me, was working for me. But there were inmates who exploited any personal information they could obtain about officers and staff, and I couldn’t run the risk of being compromised in a way that prevented me from effectively serving my parish. Still, it made me feel like a liar.
    Fortunately, it wasn’t something that happened all that often. I only supervised the group when Lee Friedman, the volunteer sponsor, was unable to do it.
    Today’s meeting was designated as a step meeting, so over bad coffee in light blue plastic cups, the incarcerated men in various stages of recovery discussed how to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of themselves.
    As they did, I thought about how brilliant and elegant the twelve steps were.
    Of the few things I would even consider to possibly be truly inspired, these simple, proven, life-changing steps were certainly among them.
    This thought led inevitably to others, and before long I was constructing a list of the writings I considered to be canonical––poetry and narrative I considered to contain the breath of God.
    But before I ever completed my list of sacred texts, the meeting came to a close, ending with all of us standing in a circle saying aloud, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. One day at a time. Keep coming back. It works if you work it.”
    When I reached Anna’s car at the end of the day, Jake was waiting for me.
    It was nearly an hour after the admin shift had ended, the parking lot largely empty, my coworkers long gone. We