From the God of Punishment to the God of Love

Phil Darghty, known to many as Frenchy, spent 32 years in the California state prison system. 16 of them were at Folsom, where he was one of the founding members of what is surely the longest running Centering Prayer group inside a locked facility (it’s met continuously – except during COVID – since the mid 1990s). Some of you already know Phil from various events or from the videos he has recorded with Contemplative Outreach, where he puts it simply: "Centering Prayer was my salvation." We recently had the chance to sit down with him again, which also prompted us  to revisit two conversations he recorded a few years ago, with COPOST. 

"Nothing jumped off"

It started, as Frenchy tells it, with an order. 

In the mid 1990s, a friend on his tier, who had been reading Thomas Keating's Open Mind, Open Heart decided to start a group, and told Frenchy he would be joining it. Frenchy wasn't keen. He grew up in a strict, church-every-Sunday home, and the God he knew then, in his words, "was the god of punishment," and the day he left home at 18 was the last day he stepped inside a church. A prison chapel was the last place he wanted to be.

He went anyway. About 75 men showed up, men who ran nearly every group on the yard, and they sat down together in a circle and closed their eyes.

"The fact that people sit in a circle with their eyes closed, being the people that they were, totally blew me away. I'm sitting on the back wall waiting for something to jump off, and nothing jumped off."

He kept coming back, and so did many of the others. Before long the group had around 400 men on its roster, rotating in up to 50 at a time each week. For the next ten years, Frenchy says, he doesn't think he missed a meeting other than lockdowns.

"Other people had to tell me"

Frenchy is candid about who he was when he arrived. "I came into the prison system as a very violent individual. I will never claim not to have deserved to go to prison." The change, when it came, was something he noticed last. "I didn't notice any real changes within myself, but other people around me started noticing I wasn't flying off the handle like I normally would."

Part of that change was in how he understood God. "It's not a different God," he told us. "It's just a different understanding of God." Over time, “the God of punishment” gave way to "the God of love, the God that I know now." 

Forgiving himself took longer. "The hardest thing for me to do is forgive myself. I knew better... So now I've forgiven myself."

Years later, after he was home, Frenchy and his sister were working out how to care for their father in hospice when she stopped him in the lobby.

"She looked at me and said, ‘Who are you? ... My brother would never do what you're doing. My brother would never say what you're saying.’ "

They're close today. And the relationship with his parents grew too, slowly, through fixing things around the house and simply showing up. "I was holding his hand when he died," Phil says of his father. "I did the same with my mom... You tell me where I came from to do that. I can't explain it."

Coming home

Frenchy paroled with nowhere to go. For a while he stayed at a mission, which meant spending two or three nights outside before he could return. "Those nights were long. And I found that my sit times kind of increased during those times... Those sits became my way of letting go and my way of relaxing."

Mike Kelley, the Folsom group's original sponsor, became his ride to get his paperwork and IDs in order in those first months. And it was Mike who, a few years later, invited him into something new: "Hey, there’s a group starting. Do you want to join?" That group became Outside the Walls.

"Commonality"

Today Frenchy remains an active participant in Outside the Walls (OTW), in addition to having been among the group’s founding members.  He is a regular in both the Sunday evening online community where people who learned Centering Prayer inside keep practicing together after release and the Wednesday “OTW and Friends” Centering Prayer group, which casts a wider net, welcoming all who desire to practice the prayer with those affected by incarceration. Each group meets weekly over Zoom to sit, read something together, and talk. "You can't believe the depth of our discussions," he says. What makes it different from other groups? "Commonality. We’ve all been in the same place, so we understand where we're coming from."

He also finds words to explain, from the perspective of his own experience, what happens when people sit together: "There seems to be an energy that's developed when you're centering and when you're with a group..." he says. "When centering, the energy that we create is greater than the energy that each of us put into it."

He still sits every day, first thing in the morning, and then makes a point of greeting people with a good morning. When he missed a morning recently, someone came looking for him just to say she'd missed him. "These are the type of things," he says, "part of the new Phil."

One of his memories from the years inside involve Thomas Keating himself, who visited the Folsom group more than once. The first time, at the end of the meeting, Frenchy asked him for a hug. "He gave me a healthy hug right in front of the warden, chief deputy warden, lieutenants and captains and everything else." Contact with visitors wasn't allowed, and Frenchy spent that night in the hole. "But I got to go to the hole over Thomas Keating," he says. "So that was pretty good."

Asked if there was anything else he wanted to share, Frenchy keeps it simple. "The biggest thing is, it works. If you take the time to do it, you'll find new answers – or, a new way of looking at things. That’s what happened to me. I found new ways of looking at things and my outlook totally changed, without my really being aware of it."  Or, as he put it in the video he recorded with us: "I went from an animal that deserved to go to prison to somebody I can respect today. I'm pleased with who I am today."