5th Sunday of Lent- C
April 6, 2025 5pm
Our Lady of Grace Parish, Parkton
Inmate Firefighters
Three months ago, a friend of mine texted me that her daughter and son-in-law with their two small children lost their home in the wildfires near Los Angelos – a devastating loss for this young family.
We’ve all seen the heartbreaking pictures of the communities in California destroyed by wildfires. And maybe we’ve also been inspired by the courage and commitment of those firefighters.
There’s one part of the story we may not be aware of, and I was not aware of until very recently. Of the 14,000 men and women fighting the California fires, almost one thousand of them are prison inmates.
They’ve become a critical part of the workforce in this very dangerous profession. One of these inmate-firefighters – named Eddie Herrera – has told his story.
One Inmate Firefighter
Eddie Herrera was a firefighter during the last two years of his 18-year prison sentence.
Herrera served as a municipal firefighter outside of Sacramento, responding to residential fires, CPR emergencies and rescue calls. He says that this work changed his life.
Herrera says that his transformation began with his first CPR emergency in 2019. The patient was a veteran police officer.
The police officer didn’t survive but Eddie recalls that the experience “made me realize that firefighting was something that I wanted to do and could do. When the police officer’s wife came to pick up her husband’s body, and we loaded him into the back of the van, I remember my captain directing us to put an American flag over his body and to take off our helmets and salute him.
“I remember the brothers of the police officer shaking my hand and saying thank you. I had never experienced something like that.
“I felt a sense of pride, because I knew that I was not being defined by my circumstances. That I could help and make a change.
“Because, being incarcerated, it’s this sense of feeling like you’re nothing. You’re basically lost!
“But in those moments serving as a firefighter, I didn’t feel any of that. I felt like I was human again.”
Eddie Herrera has completed his prison sentence and is now a professional firefighter. He has been working in southern California where the recent wildfires happened.
Eddie says that the most important quality he’s learned is empathy — empathy both for his incarcerated coworkers and for the people whose homes he works to save. He says this.
“I know what it’s like to feel helpless . . . I [now] feel empathy and a sense of wanting to help people who are living through this.
“We’re all equal in the sense that we’re humans. And we all make mistakes, and we all have the capacity to change.”
Some Observations
That’s one of those really good stories, and now I want to conclude with just a few observations.
Eddie Herrera and the incarcerated firefighters had been defined by their crimes. It is much like the woman in today’s Gospel who was defined by her sin.
But to respond to the words of Jesus today, we are to drop our stones of condemnation. Notice that Jesus does not ignore the sin and he tells the woman not to sin anymore.
But equally or maybe more important, he doesn’t condemn her. Instead, he heals and restores her.
He tells her to look to the future with pure intentions and be freed of the past and the labels associated with that. And by the way, this is what our Catholic Sacrament of Reconciliation is about or should be about.
It is about empathy and healing, restoring to life and dignity, focusing more on the future and not the past. The story of Eddie Herrera and today’s gospel tell us that this is possible with Jesus and through our following his way.
