COLUMN LEFT : An Act of Contrition for the Sin of War : As America celebrates, the protest continues, through prayer and fasting in jail.

“Hey, Homes, you still in here?” The voice of my fellow prisoner bounces off the steel walls of this jailhouse recreation room in reverberating echoes. “I thought they were gonna let all you protesters go home now that the war is over.”

“No, man, it looks like I’m kind of a prisoner of war now.”

Even the guards here at the Federal Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles were a little surprised that I hadn’t been released. But that became unlikely once I was indicted as a felon for my part in a Feb. 15 protest in which we peace activists dumped 40 gallons of oil and two pints of human blood on the Federal Building steps.

“Was it worth it, Homes?”

Who can say what convictions are worth? We are known as men and women of conviction only if we are willing to pay the price of that conviction. It is easy enough to protest a war. Far more difficult a task is to place our entire existence in the path of war. But to speak the truth while none are listening, to continue protesting a war that is substantially over, to stay in jail when your presence is so obviously ineffective, is to appear foolish bordering upon the pathological.

Three of us declined bail; it seems that our task is to remain in jail, praying and fasting, even as America cheers and celebrates. Our task as people of conviction is, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, “to save the soul of America.”

Though we are in the midst of the Lenten season, this archaic notion of doing penance no doubt seems offensive, even masochistic, to contemporary sensibilities.

But the original prophetic intent of repentance was always addressed to the corporate transgressions of the community; injustice, repression, the violence of war were the traditional targets of the prophet. The authentic purpose of penance is to give substance to the otherwise ephemeral reality of evil in our midst; to take onto our own flesh the insubstantial spirit of malevolence that otherwise remains unconscious and thus deadly.

When the national spirit of euphoria subsides, what will remain is the conviction that the great cost of this conflict in terms of death and destruction to the enemy was not commensurate with the paltry price that we have paid for victory.

Bloodshed tempers righteousness and restrains even the hand of the mighty with the mournful memory of sacrifice. Like sex without love, victory without significant sacrifice is irresistibly seductive. Unrestrained power, like unrestrained lust, destroys moral character.

While conferring a sense of omnipotence, the cool, rational instruments of technical sophistication annihilate our sense of moral responsibility by abstracting power and disconnecting it from its locus within the human person. Just as the assembly-line worker feels no responsibility for the fruits of his labor, in the same manner does the B-52 pilot feel disassociated from the deadly effects of his labor.

Despite the illusions that have been established, of victory without sacrifice, of war without suffering, of battle without death, we know that actions have consequences. While our nation rejoices that so few of our countrymen and -women were lost, we remember the real price of America’s cheap victory: 100,000 or 200,000 or more Iraqi lives. These we mourn.

The popular theology of America’s “new world order” is perhaps best expressed in the hit song “At a Distance,” which proclaims: “From a distance God is watching . . . from a distance, we are all one family.” While this sentimental image is comforting to those whose world view is seen through the lens of high-tech obfuscation and moral disjunction, a more authentic theology is one that recognizes God not at a distance, but rather incarnate in the very flesh of humanity.

It is this task, this penitential task of putting flesh upon the disembodied spirits of unseen suffering, that keeps us here. It is the desire to confront the elusive reality of war with its unacceptable truth that causes us to remain in this prison.

So we continue to fast, and each evening we gather in an obscure corner of this jail under a makeshift shrine of the Sacred Heart, to pray the Rosary with a group of Latin Americans who cannot even speak English. They, too, are POWs for the most part, foot soldiers and underlings captured in the not so triumphant “War on Drugs.” They do not pray for world peace or economic justice. They pray for a lenient prosecutor, a fair judge, a compassionate jury, a brief sentence, reunion with family and friends. We join our prayers with theirs in the deepest hope and profoundest conviction that such commingling of concerns may indeed “redeem the soul of America.”