From Prison to Crystal Cathedral, by Way of Some Cookies

He was seated in the Crystal Cathedral balcony and for a moment last Sunday--possibly for one of the few moments in his life--a semblance of heavenly light shined on Leonard Cantley.

To picture how incongruous it was for the Rev. Robert H. Schuller to introduce Cantley to the congregation during the 11 a.m. service, you have to know a little about Cantley.

For starters, he’s a step or two short of being a career criminal. At 43, he’s spent more than 13 years in prison, but never for anything more serious than burglary or car theft. He openly admits that drug abuse has led him from one dark corner to another. He takes pains to recite his prison history for me, but, frankly, it gets pretty confusing as the trail winds from California to Florida to Georgia to Nevada and back to California. And how, by his count, he’s been shot five times and been stabbed 17.

Ancient history, he says.

As we sit in the Ontario motel room where he lives, we’re talking about the present. Specifically, about chocolate chip cookies and how they led him to the Crystal Cathedral last week.

For 20 years at Christmas, the church has sent cookies to inmates at various California prisons. A church spokesman says about 15,000 dozen will be sent this holiday season.

Way, way back--Cantley says the early 1980s--he got his first box while imprisoned at Chino. Over the years, he’s sorry to say, he had partaken many times of the church’s generosity and eaten a lot of its holiday cookies.

Cantley appreciated them--a reflection, he says, of a firm belief in God, even if he didn’t always follow the straight and narrow. Many Sunday mornings in prison, he says, he’d watch Schuller’s “Hour of Power” service on TV.

How did the elegant glass structure of the Crystal Cathedral look, compared with his walled-off stone world? “It seemed like a whole other world, other than the one I had,” he says. “It looked like outer space. Something I could never see or touch.”

In 1996, Cantley was out of prison. Prison records show he hasn’t been back since. A few months ago, Cantley learned from an Orange County doctor he’d befriended that the doctor regularly attended Crystal Cathedral. Cantley, who doesn’t have a car, cajoled the doctor to pick him up in Ontario and take him to Sunday services in Garden Grove.

That weekly commitment has spilled into the holiday season. A few weeks ago, Cantley approached church officials and made a pledge.

“I told them I was going to bake cookies and replace every cookie I ate when I was in prison,” he says. He estimates he’s made about 3,000 so far. No, he doesn’t have the exact number of cookies he ate as an inmate, but says that isn’t the point.

Baking cookies is a way to say thank you and, perhaps, stake a claim to some redemption.

“The only thing I ever got in prison was from Robert Schuller’s church,” he says. “I was sitting in a bucket of bleep and somebody throws me a pearl. I felt like I owed the church that much.”

Crystal Cathedral spokesman John Charles says, “It’s just part of the ministry of this church and of Dr. Schuller that every individual has worth. In God’s eyes, all are created equal and all deserve good things to happen.”

The sentiment isn’t lost on Cantley. “They have nothing to gain by what they done,” he says. “They can get nothing out of what they’re doing other than doing it for simple human compassion.”

Last week, Cantley helped church volunteers pack up the cookies. He told one of the volunteers that he was “glad to be on this side of the cookies.”

He chuckles and says he isn’t sure she knew what he meant.

Then came Schuller’s acknowledgment last Sunday from the pulpit.

Just like that, people were applauding Leonard Cantley.

I asked him how it felt to take a bow from the balcony and be awash in the light of one of America’s most famous churches.

“Kind of funny,” he says. “And strange. But I felt good, I felt proud. I knew that all those guys in prison, a lot of them would be watching. My face is well-known. When they hear I baked their cookies . . . “

He begins to laugh. “If they could picture a million guys in the world who’d be making cookies, I’d be the last guy who’d be making them.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.