Recently I heard about a man who’d gone free.
Really free, I mean—through the escape route people have always longed to find, but have been misdirected from by a lot of bad info.
The free guy is Nick Yarris of Pennsylvania, who spent 23 years on death row in solitary confinement. He’d been convicted, at age 20, of a rape and murder he didn’t commit, before DNA evidence proved him innocent.
Yarris was naturally enraged and bitter during his first years in the prison, where he was ridiculed, mistreated and tortured, he said.
But one prison officer had mercy on him, bringing him piles of classic books and urging him to read. “It changed everything,” Yarris said in a recent BBC interview. “I stopped being bitter.”
Yarris’s reflections comprise a new documentary, “Fear of 13.” In discussing it, he reveals the philosophy that freed him before he was freed — and releases him even today of any sourness, grudge or persecution mentality.
Though he won a legal settlement, “there’s no compensation laws for what was done to me,” he told the BBC. “I live with 11 unhealed broken bones, two collapsed disks in my neck; my face has been shattered; I have a missing piece in my left eye; and I’m in serious physical agony every day of my life. But!—” he exclaims.
“I am not going to be a victim of what was done to me. If someone can get help from my life, then so much less has been done to me. I realize I have to be there for other people.”
And he is. Despite chronic pain, Yarris now lives a life aimed at sharing with everyone the love and freedom he found within.
Gate of mercy
The story struck me at this dawn of a new year because it’s the year of “Jubilee,” according to Pope Francis. He announced it last month by opening the “holy door”—a usually-locked, symbolic gateway of mercy, at St. Peter’s Basilica.
The Jubilee is based on an old Hebrew law that deemed every 49th year (7 x 7) a super-charged sabbatical to free the spirit and heart. It was to be a year for setting free the indentured or captive, forgiving old debts, relieving the pangs of the poor, having compassion for the animals and remembering the land was God’s.
Whether the Jubilee was ever quite practiced isn’t clear. How many human egos, after all, want to give up what was paid for painfully, or lose what is due, forget a foul deed or really wipe a slate clean?
But the pope announced it anyhow, at a time on the planet when, admittedly, compassion could sure be handy.
“We have to put mercy before judgment,” Francis said, and “abandon all fear and dread.”
These aren’t just Christian or Jewish ideals. They pass right through the walls between all the world’s wisdom traditions.
Even the character we call “the Good Samaritan,” cited by Pope Francis to embody the Jubilee spirit, was not “the good Christian” often assumed by Sunday-school mythos.
He was not even Jewish like Jesus. He was, of course, a Samaritan.
Samaritans were generally shunned by the religiously correct of Jesus’ culture, who considered them pagan, errant and disapproved of by God.
But Jesus makes a Samaritan his parable’s hero — the one guy in the story unbound by mental divisions, fears or self-preservation. Delivered of such jailers, he was free to run and help a pure stranger.
Captives
That brings up the other aspect of Jubilee: freedom.
This abstract word now ornaments so many political speeches and think-tank websites, it’s hard to see past it to find any foothold on the ground.
But if you wade through all the flotsam to locate a solid plan, “freedom” appears to mean dissolving any laws that protect the low — like our common life, lands, waters, air, soil, wildlife and people. That way, forces who fund these positions will be “free” to use the world as needed.
Plato considered this “might-makes-right” plan the most primeval form of government. He figured it freed nobody. Even the top dogs in such a state, he said, would be captive to their own whimsy.
It’s an old truism that pervades all the world’s wisdom traditions: “You can’t get out the top.”
Nick Yarris got out the bottom. “I realized nobody else was gonna get me out of there,” he said.
So he freed himself through the inner gate-of-mercy called the heart. “I learned that the only thing we have between us is love.”
Thus this wronged man — while hated, imprisoned and isolated — became a benevolent citizen of the whole world.
Liza Field’s column runs monthly in Extra.
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