Wanted: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders

by Chris Hoke

Overview

Interweaving his own story with moving vignettes and gritty experiences in hidden places, a jail chaplain and minister to Mexican gang and migrant worker communities chronicles his spiritual journey to the margins of society and reveals a subversive God who’s on the loose beyond the walls of the church, pursuing those who are unwanted by the world.

Wanted follows a restless young man from the sunny suburbs of his youth to the darker side of society in the rainy Northwest, where he finds the direct spiritual experience he’s been seeking while volunteering as a “night shift” chaplain at a men’s correctional facility. The jail becomes his portal to a mysterious world on the margins of society, where a growing network of Mexican gang members soon dub him their “pastor.” As he comes to terms with this uncomfortable title—and embraces the role of a shepherd of black sheep—his adventures truly begin.

Hoke shares comic, heartbreaking and sublime tales of sacred moments in unlikely situations: singing with an attempted-suicide in the jail’s isolation cell, dodging immigration and airport security with migrant farm workers, and fly-fishing with tattooed gangsters. Set against the misty Washington landscape, this unconventional congregation at times mirrors the Skagit Valley’s fleeting migratory swans and unseen salmon. But Hoke takes us with him into riskier terrain as he gains and loses friends to the prison system, and even faces his own despair—as well as belovedness—on the back of a motorcycle racing through Guatemalan slums.

In these stories of “mystical portraiture,” like the old WANTED posters of outlaws, Hoke bears witness to an elusive Presence that is still alive and defiant of official custody. Such portraits offer a new vision of the forgotten souls who have been cast into society’s dumpsters, helping us see beneath even the hardest criminal a fragile desire to be wanted.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062321367
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	02/03/2015
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 2.30(d)

About the Author

Chris Hoke is a jail chaplain and pastor to gangs and violent offenders in Washington's Skagit Valley. Through his work with the organization Tierra Nueva he cofounded a coffee-roasting business, Underground Coffee, which employs men coming out of prison and addiction, and connects them to agricultural partners in Honduras. Hoke received his B.A. from U.C. Berkeley and his M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from Seattle Pacific University. Hoke's work has been featured on NPR and in The Sun, Sojourners, and Christian Century.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Wanted I 5

Night Shifts 13

Wanted II 47

Birds of the Air 53

No Contact 75

Wanted III 87

In Search of Sacred Space 91

The Angle of Descent 103

Wanted IV 127

Fly Fishing with the Dammed 133

Wanted V 153

Fuck the World 165

Hearts Like Radios 191

Stranger on the Edge of Town 229

Wanted VI 251

Calimero 255

Wanted VII 273

Saint Christopher on a Kawasaki 279

Donacio's Table 301

Fire in the Hole 317

Wanted VIII 349

Epilogue 357

Appendix: Tierra Nueva 359

Acknowledgments 361

Editorial Reviews

12/08/2014
Just as Wanted posters alert the public to outlaws, Hoke’s written sketches of prisoners with whom he has worked alert readers to the presence of God in those “slipping through the shadows.” Lost in his early twenties, he imagined committing suicide until he met Bob Eckblad, a “radical theologian” who established Tierra Neuva ministry for jailed gang members in Washington state. There’s rich material here: characters with tragic, compelling stories, including the narrator himself. He connects to these men by comparing them to Jesus and his followers, finding beneath their reticence red-hot spiritual hearts. This book should be great, but its narrative jumps are confusing. The story starts slowly, hampered by abrupt changes from character to character and time to time. Although this process introduces several players who will be followed through the book, the result is frustrating. One of the middle chapters, “Fly Fishing with the Damned,” contains full story arc in itself, and it’s a relief. From there, the book gathers momentum. It’s worth the effort. Agent: Wendy Sherman, Wendy Sherman Associates. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Taut, tart, furious, merciful, tender, blunt, searingly piercingly unforgettably honest...and sometimes so funny I sprained an eyeball laughing. I never read a book so tender with its ears and so honest with its tongue. You’ll never ever forget it. Really and truly.

Brian Doyle

One of the most inspired answers I’ve found to the WWJD? query is beautifully and forcefully displayed in Chris Hoke’s ‘Wanted’....Wondrous.

Spirituality & Health

Wanted is inspiring and eye opening, at turns heartwrenching and funny. It is stunningly written, thought provoking, and will touch readers in the darkest depths of their souls.

Pop Culture Nerd

This book is imbued with dignity, prayer, and an understanding that relationships require forgiveness, on both sides. Wanted is a beautiful reflection on what the life of faith looks like in action.

Sojourners

Every so often our spirits are lifted even higher by compassionate, courageous, and creative souls who give all they’ve got to prisoners in work modeled after the servant ministry of Jesus. Wanted describes such a ministry, and we highly recommend it to you.

Spirituality & Practice

Wandering, surprising....as Hoke tells story after story, he surprises the reader with his emotional honesty and his unswerving commitment to peeling back layers of the narrative.

Books & Culture

Dark and yet hope-filled....Raw and real, this is a book you don’t want to miss if you’re serious about being a Christian.

The Dubious Disciple

Wanted: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders, made skeptical me cry, sit upright, and see my reality anew... it grabs readers by the neck and forces them to see their own soul in the real world, the actual world that exists.

Alissa Wilkinson

Wanted... is a beacon of faith and hope, but it’s also a compelling commentary on the U.S penal system and the callous disregard for the bodies and souls crushed by it

Shelf Awareness

... it positively gleams with God’s presence as it goes to one of the darkest corners of modern American society: jail.

Stina Kielsmeier-Cook

Wanted: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders (HarperOne, 2015) is intense from the very first page. Chris Hoke has taken the reluctant prophet theme so prominent in Scripture (Jonah, Moses, Jeremiah, etc.), crossed it with true crime, and written the results down.

WORLD News Group

As a former jail chaplain myself, I have yet to find a book that is so well written, so honest, and so non-naïve-and yet compassionate-about the kind of world we live in! You will live in your own world with greater courage if you read this book.

Fr. Richard Rohr

God has a remarkable ability to show up anywhere. Blessed are those, like Chris Hoke, who have eyes to see, and who tell the stories so that we may come to believe. WANTED is beautiful writing and powerful testimony to God’s living presence in forgotten places.

Sara Miles

A powerful and moving account of what it means to actually engage a hurting world.

Bill McKibben

Chris Hoke is what I would call a Christ-follower. He follows the path that Jesus walked, eyes open, hands ready to help, heart ready to break. The result is life-changing-for him, for those he serves, and for us if we have ears to hear.

Scott Cairns

When Chris first told a story on my show, Snap Judgment, it was so beautiful I wept. But I kept asking for more. This book proves what we believe at Snap—stories can lure you into places you’ve never imagined, and maybe even change your life.

Glynn Washington

Wanted sings the gospel song that’s echoed through the centuries, from Paul and Silas’ jail cell to Fannie Lou Hamer’s. I haven’t read a book since Tattoos on the Heart that made me cry and shout “Amen!” as much as this one.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

I’m not Christian but Chris has proven that all people—even the most troubled—are worth our intrusions, even as passersby, as migrants, as souls among souls. Thank you for this moving story. More people should have such courage, such character.

Luis J. Rodriguez

Hoke meets the lonely young men of his valley who are in so many ways unwanted—and he advocates for them, loves them, calls them brother. Beautiful, unsettling, sometimes laugh out loud funny....For all their darkness, these stories have given me hope like nothing else I’ve read in recent memory.

Fred Bahnson

Hoke eloquently articulates the erasure of margins and the birth of a new inclusion-where the demonizing ceases and the disposable are no longer tossed aside. It is a book which refines one’s own heart to meet the brokenness of the other and discovery your own.

Greg Boyle

The psalmist says that God hides himself in the dark. That’s exactly where Chris goes looking for him. This search among the most maligned of us is bound to become a spiritual classic.

Dennis Covington

2014-11-11
A jail chaplain's memoir of a life spent ministering to the prison populations of northwestern Washington. Hoke relates his spirited tenure as prison pastor to incarcerated felons through the stories of those he has helped most. A restless, downtrodden youth growing up in Northern California, the author found the vocational "faith community" he'd been seeking after volunteering to co-minister to prisoners in a Skagit Valley, Washington, detention facility. Supporting himself with farm work, Hoke discovered his real passion behind the prison walls, where violent killers and desperate gangsters stared him down. Many of them actively participated in his Bible study class, and they eventually came to dub him their "pastor," though he would remain unordained. Embracing the ecclesiastical journey through the bowels of a men's penitentiary as his true calling, Hoke shares frank commentary and a collection of sobering anecdotes of the often mentally taxing time "learning to pray in a cathedral of tattoos and temporary release orders." Whether selflessly fostering relationships between a solitary confinement inmate and his daughters, bonding with a former East LA Chicano gang member, counseling a schizophrenic, homicidal young man, or fly-fishing in Guatemala with ex-gang members-turned-volunteer chaplains, Hoke's generous, unflagging spirit for these often hopeless inmates is an inspiring demonstration of the author's dedication to his ecclesiastical calling. Some of the author's behaviors, however, seem questionable, as when he illegally forged TSA initials on two immigrants' boarding passes to get them on a flight. His later work with Christian ministry Tierra Nueva has served as a continuation of his mission to establish a long-lasting connection between the devotional and the criminally incarcerated. A liberating, transformative chronicle of how spirituality can foster inspiration and hope while emboldening the downtrodden through their darkest days.

Kirkus Reviews