Francis Joseph Harrington

Following the rioting in Baltimore City, my wife, Marian, and I headed to the airport. The National Guard now patrolled in the city. We had committed ourselves to a trip to the southwest to visit friends we had not seen in years. We also planned to spend a few days in the solitude of a Benedictine monastery in the Chama River Gorge in New Mexico. I had misgivings about leaving our home with the situation in the city still tense. My concerns eased by the time we drove south on the interstate from Albuquerque, partly because the first three people we met picked up right away on our concerns about the rioting. The man at the car rental desk, the high school student at the fast food counter and the young teller in the bank were very much aware of the situation and expressed their warmest concerns for the people of Baltimore.

Marian and I spent our first days with our old friends. What a lift they were for our spirits; they were for us that reassuring reminder that it is the solid bonds of our relationships that hold our whole human thing together. Then we were on our way, off the grid, to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert.

Life is different there for the thirty-five monks and the guests who spend time with them. It is a life of work and prayer, of offering hospitality. We joined the monks throughout the day as they chanted the psalms and celebrated mass. There were no TVs to fill gaps, and days slowed to a different pace. An hour, a day would not slip by like a second or a minute. It felt as if we were living the fullness of the day that had been given us. I did not fret about the tasks awaiting me if I am ever to publish my book. I just needed to be sitting in the chapel before the altar as first light colored the rim of the cliffs above the monastery and peacefully descended into the valley.

The monks hailed from a multitude of countries and cultures. A newly-wed couple interrupted their canoe trip down the river to attend mass. A family with three young children from France visited as did a woman from Italy. There were times of community when the rule of silence was waived allowing monks and visitors to talk. Meals were taken in silence; there was an awareness of each other and of the food we were eating that is often lost around the kitchen table at home with our chatter about the laundry that’s still in the dryer, the phone ringing and the evening news anchor vying for our attention amidst the barrage of commercials. Our days at the monastery were just what we needed. Within the silence of the desert a voice as gentle as the breeze could be heard. Be still, and know that I am God (from Psalm 46.)

The final week of April 2015 brought back memories of the 1968 riots in Baltimore; then I had sat watching the violence on television from the safety of my family home in Toronto. I was back from my second year of studies in the seminary on my way to priesthood. Now 47 years later I sat with my wife in our suburban Baltimore home watching the escalation of a new wave of street violence. We were packing for a flight the following morning from the Baltimore airport for a week in the southwest. We slipped out to grab a quick supper in the nearby mall and sat down at a table in a nearly deserted restaurant. I could hear young waitresses talking together anxiously about the unfolding mayhem in the city; some of them lived there. We ordered our meal, but I stopped the young woman before she headed off to the kitchen. “Are you worried about the rioting in the city? I asked.

She spoke quickly. “The mall is closing. We’re getting text messages that say men with guns are driving out to the big malls. The manager said you’ll be our last customers; then we can go home.”

“Then make our order to go,” I said. She looked relieved.

We joined the people hurrying from the mall to their cars. “Look at their faces,” Marian said. “They’re so frightened; they’re looking all around for trouble.”

It was dark when we reached our house. We ate supper in front of the TV as cameras scanned the fires burning in parts of the city that had just begun their recovery from the ’68 riots. We both felt the sadness of the mindless destruction, and prayed quietly for those caught in the terror. Baltimore City was Marian’s home.

My thoughts drifted back to a week I spent years before at the seminary in Detroit that sat on the edge of the destruction left by the rioting there. We were confined to the building and a small patch of parking lot patrolled by armed security. By Sunday afternoon I could no longer stand the claustrophobia and slipped out into the empty streets. I walked through block after block of burnt out tenements and apartments until I reached something of the downtown. A drugstore on the corner was open so I went in just to make some human contact. The clerks and the merchandise stood on the other side of glass walls thick enough to withstand a barrage of bullets. I found little human contact there.

I took a bus back to the seminary, feeling something of an intruder among the black passengers. A well inebriated man boarded at the next stop, but lacked money for the fare. Riders took up a collection to pay for his ride. I gave the change in my pocket and had to admit I had never seen that happen in all my days of taking public transit back home in Toronto.

Marian and I left the next morning for the airport, looking out over the city from I-95. Down in the streets, parents were beginning to bring their children out of the houses with brooms and shovels and dustpans to begin the cleanup and the healing. I pray that the city that is now my home acts as quickly to address the deeper scars that are the legacy of violence and trauma.

My slow-motion memoir project had accelerated in the closing months of 2014. A Toronto editor had completed an exhaustive evaluation of my manuscript; he had gracefully led me to the conclusion that I needed to do a complete re-write. In spite of the distractions posed by the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays I finished the task by the end of December. I would go into the New Year ready to shift my focus from the actual writing to the publishing aspect of the undertaking. Then it happened; a new distraction announced its arrival, this time by means of a subpoena issued by the county circuit court. I was called to serve a four-month term on the Grand Jury that would take me from early January to the end of April.

Truth be told, I knew little about the Grand Jury process, but the subpoena came on the heels of decisions by other Grand Juries in the country not to indict police officers involved in the arrests of black men who died during the process, Ferguson, Missouri and New York city being cases at point. Previously, I had witnessed police brutality. Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union I spent five weeks in Moscow to arrange the adoption of our son. My host warned me before my daily walk to the orphanage that, if I found myself in danger, I should by no means involve the police. More than once, on arriving at the entrance to subway stations, I witnessed police arriving in vans and brutally beating men loitering nearby, no questions asked. I still remember the awful sensation of realizing I was in a place where I could not rely on the police in a time of need.

Privately, jurors voiced their concerns that we might face a case similar to the Ferguson or New York cases. It came close. Just outside county jurisdiction, members of the Baltimore City Police Department chased down and subdued a young black man who ran from them. The man suffered severe damage to his spine during the arrest and transport; he died a week later from his injuries. During our jury training we had attended a presentation on the use of deadly force at the police training facility that focused on gun use in confrontations. Guns were not used in this case, but it seemed very clear that some form of deadly force ended this man’s life. From my short but powerful experience of police misconduct in Moscow I understood the anger and despair the black community was experiencing. When you cannot rely on such a fundamental cornerstone as the police, you feel alone, vulnerable, always in danger. I was wrong when I treated my jury duty as a distraction from the work I needed to do. It was in fact the work I had to do if I was ever to feel a sense of identity with the people who call Baltimore home.