Readers and writers blog

Troy Chapman is a slender fellow in his early 40s with an engaging smile, a graying beard and a long list of accomplishments as an author, artist, songwriter, music minister, ethics lecturer, literacy volunteer, community college librarian, even a Jaycee chapter organizer.

What’s important to us is his writing — specifically, his weblog, Sacred Matters, the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

Well, some people might also mention that he is a convicted murderer serving a 60- to 90-year term in the Michigan state prison system. That’s not an incidental fact, of course, but significant to us not for its legal or social aspects but because of its apparent influence in his development as a writer.

Beneath that development is a personal belief system that seems to have borrowed the best from Christianity, Eastern philosophy and native American pantheism. And he seems to find the best ways of expressing these beliefs, as in a June 16 entry about suffering:

Suffering (is) a fundamental point of connection. Every human being who’s ever walked the earth, all the way back to the misty beginnings of our species, has suffered. When we suffer today, there’s a point of connection with all our ancestors. Sometimes when I’m suffering, I ponder this truth and draw strength from all those who have come before me.

Just so you don’t think he’s some latter-day Chuck Colson trying to use religion as a revolving door out of prison, we also should mention that Chapman has now served 22 years with, under his current sentence, at least 38 years more before he will be eligible for parole.

The case in brief: Chapman, imprisoned earlier for a crime committed at age 16, in November 1984 walked away from a halfway house — the authorities called it an escape — and eight days later stabbed and killed another young man in a drunken bar fight. Chapman was convicted of second-degree murder by a jury that also weighed a lesser charge of manslaughter, but he got what seemed a first-degree murder sentence from a judge who saw “no hope” the 21-year-old could be rehabilitated.

I’ve spent the past two decades trying to find my way back to the person I was before the killing — not to the insanity, hopelessness, addiction, and sickness of that time in my life but to the innocence that lay behind all that . . . I had to allow myself to feel the full horror of what I’d done. I had to (look) at the human body that lay on the barroom floor in front of me that night.

I made myself imagine that he was my brother . . . that he was my son . . . (finally) that it was me who died . . . This brought me closer to the truth of my crime than the facts ever could. (December 2003)

On love, written in January 2006:

Instead of ‘good/evil,’ we should see the world in terms of ‘love/not-love’ . . . When terrorists recruit people to kill other people, they convince them that this is a ‘good’ thing. Racists, Nazis, and fundamentalists of every stripe use the same tactic. But imagine them trying to convince people that murdering other human beings is an act of love. It doesn’t work nearly as well.

Chapman’s weblog entries are posted by a group called Friends of Troy Chapman from his current and earlier writing, and they run a separate weblog about their efforts to get his sentence reviewed and shortened.

It’s hard for us to comment on this because all we see on the two websites is their side of the story. Still, 60 to 90 years is a long sentence for any crime.

But reading Sacred Matters convinces us of a few things that a very good editor at Yes! magazine wrote beneath Chapman’s byline on an article for the quarterly’s winter 2002 edition:

Sometimes the people with the most to teach us about love are not behind pulpits. They’re behind bars. In prison, one man learns that love is possible in the worst of places, and that even when there is no way out, there is a way up.

– Sid Leavitt