HOW do you think your prison experiences will help you to become a better pastor, Mr. Ho?”
The question, like all the others, was delivered in flat, uninterested tones. The man across the interview table was thin, bald, and tall. He had not, so far during the 20-minute interview, exhibited a trace of warmth. He had merely spoken with scrupulous politeness. An ambitious man. An ambitious man who worked for the church. Nicky Ho instinctively distrusted such a man.
In ordinary circumstances, Ho would reply that Jesus spoke to sinners. He would talk of Christ mingling with prostitutes and thieves. It was these Jesus was trying to reach out to. He wanted to speak to the lost, the misguided, the unfortunate and the reckless. He wanted to show them change and redemption was still possible. Ho knew all that, because a change had happened inside him. Even if he could not attain what he wanted, he was a different man to how he was before. The change was permanent. There was no going back.
But to the man across the table, Nicky Ho was murderous scum. He would always be murderous scum. He would always be a half-Chinese, half-black low-life who had killed a storekeeper during a bungled robbery at the age of 17. And that was exactly what he had been. There was no getting away from that.
Ho let his gaze rest on the scored grooves of the wooden table in front of him while the action replay went on in his mind. The scene he knew well. There had been time enough to ponder it. A stupid little kid, trying to be big, who fired off a couple of shots when the storeowner looked like he wouldn’t co-operate. And before he knew it, Nicky Ho had killed a man. There could have been few killings as senseless and unnecessary as this one. Nothing justified it. If he hadn’t been so young, he would have ended on death row. Instead, here he was, 15 years later, still serving time.
His gaze flicked up at the man before him. Was it because his eyes were such a light shade of blue that they looked so cold? The churchman’s face was unmoving. He didn’t even appear to blink much. He had a rigidity in his stare that Ho recognised. He had seen it in the faces of hundreds of imprisoned men. They were people with capacity to hate.
There had been one sentence Ho was determined from the outset not to say, but abruptly, he realised he had changed his mind. He decided to come straight to the point.
“You’ll be thinking I’ve only applied for this because it will look good for the parole.”
The churchman’s face did not change. “But you didn’t?”
“No.” But Ho was quelled. The skepticism in the older man’s voice was only just beginning to impact on him. The steady look in the pale blue eyes reinforced it. Ho shouldn’t have mentioned this after all. He had just talked like a man who was only thinking of himself.
Look,” he was trying again. “I did a terrible thing. I killed a man. It was the stupidest thing, and I don’t know how his family found it in their hearts to forgive me. But they showed me the way to God. I owe them everything. Even if I spent the rest of my life doing time, I will always owe them so much. They showed me change was possible.”
The clergyman’s face did not move. Why was it Nicky Ho’s tongue seemed wedged by nervousness? What was so terrible about telling this cold, shuttered-face individual what had really happened to him? Why didn’t he explain how a lawless kid like Ho had found God?
“You deprived my children of a good, kind, loving and generous father,” the storekeeper’s widow wrote. “I shall pray for you.”
I shall pray for you.
When he first saw the words, it hit him like an insult. Later, when he thought she might be serious, he couldn’t believe it. He laughed about it. Crazy, twisted woman.
And then he laughed less. Crazy woman, senseless with grief.
In years to come, he was to realise she was the only one who had ever made sense. The thought of her generosity still had the power to make him weep sometimes.
Nicky Ho was a short, skinny, under-sized runt. That went a long way toward explaining why he packed a gun. It was some of the reason why he was trying to prove himself to others when he first thought about doing the robbery.
Prison life did not come easy to short, skinny under-sized runts like Nicky Ho. In the first few years, life behind bars was every bit as brutalizing an experience as the most vengeful of people could have hoped it would be.
Until the day something changed. After one particular beating, he remembered the worst insult he had ever received in his life. He was bloody, battered, and hurting, but he looked his tormentor in the face and said, “I shall pray for you.”
Ho saw right away the words disturbed his tormentor just as much as they had once disturbed him.
That was the day he began to realise faith was a shield.