Photography by James Brosher
John Cord never imagined he would be spending his retirement in jail.
Then he became a deacon at a Catholic parish in the small town of Seymour, Indiana, and his life changed.
Cord had pictured himself doing the things that he thought deacons do — assisting the priest at Mass by preparing the altar or leading prayers, and maybe traveling the knobs and hollows, as the rolling hills of rural southern Indiana are known, to visit people who couldn’t make it to church. He thought he might focus on disaster response, helping victims of tornadoes and floods. As an engineer handy with construction, he had been doing that already for years.
Soon a fellow deacon, Mike East, suggested another kind of community service: visiting people in jail. “I thought, that’s not me,” Cord recalls.
Still, he agreed to accompany East to the county jail one evening, albeit nervously. He had never been in a jail before.
“It’s kind of frightening,” he says, remembering that first visit. There’s the screaming, he says, and “guards are everywhere.” East agrees: “The first time you go in there and you hear the doors slam behind you, it’s kind of unnerving.”
Cord gave a homily that night to a few dozen men. It was his first time preaching to anyone, ever. And where he least expected it, he found an engaged and interested audience. “They were like sponges, wanting to hear from people,” he says.
The next time he went, more men gathered. And then more again.
Most weren’t Catholic, “but they wanted to share their stories, to learn about the word of God,” he says, even the “tough-looking guys, tattooed from head to toe.” He learned about the problems that had led people to the wrong side of the law, and then the wrong side of a jail cell. Poverty, drug addiction, homelessness, mental illness.
He hadn’t expected people to talk so openly with him. “They’d tell you their whole life story,” he says. “They’d ask you to pray for them.”
Soon, he was helping local activists provide food and supplies to homeless people — which he learned was a surprisingly large population in Seymour, yet all but invisible: Think families sleeping in cars because someone lost a job. So Cord helped launch a homeless shelter, a first in the county and one of the few in southern Indiana.
Last year, he became coordinator of the corrections ministry for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis. He shared his experience with proponents of legislation that would send mentally ill offenders to health facilities instead of jail, a bill the governor ultimately signed into law.
Cord, who is 68 years old, tall and thin with gray-flecked hair, has a serious disposition yet sees the humor in the turn his life has taken. A father of three, he ran an industrial paint business for decades. In retirement, he and his wife, Gwen, thought maybe they’d buy a house in Florida. Cord was looking forward to improving his golf game.
But he also remembers words of wisdom from his father decades ago, when Cord was just starting his own adult life. “He said, ‘Have a plan for retirement.’”
As a young man, “I didn’t know what that meant,” Cord says.
Now he does.
Today he sees his friends retiring left and right, “and they have no clue what they’re gonna do with their time. You can’t just sit at home, the two of you, and be bored together. You have to have something.”
But the deacon-goes-to-jail thing? That wasn’t the plan. In fact, at first Cord didn’t even think he was deacon material. He didn’t think he was holy enough. “The deacons, these are holy guys,” he says. “I thought, I’m too rough around the edges.”
But then, what is “holy” anyway?
For Cord, finding his own definition has not only answered the what-to-do-with-yourself-in-retirement question, but it has also given him a chance to learn surprising things about the place where he’s lived most of his life — and about himself.
On a late-autumn evening at a sprawling women’s prison overlooking the Ohio River, John and Gwen Cord pass through security with a priest, Father Jeremy King, from the Saint Meinrad Archabbey, a Benedictine monastery, and a volunteer from a nearby parish. A prison guard escorts the group through a maze of corridors to a brick-walled auditorium, where women are gathering.
Wearing gray sweats and rubber sandals, 10 women sit in chairs arranged into a semicircle. King presents a passage from Matthew 25, the Parable of the Ten Virgins: A group of bridesmaids await a groom, but only five bring enough oil to light their lamps through the night; the rest are unprepared and get left behind. King considers what it means. “God gives us the tools we need,” he says, “but we have to use them wisely.”
The group discusses the concept of wisdom. King asks the women to describe the qualities they believe make women wise.
“They’re nurturing,” says one.
“They’re compassionate,” says another.
“They listen,” says a third.
Talk turns to Thanksgiving, which is just a few days away, and the priest asks what everyone is thankful for. Again, the women jump in with their thoughts.
“My family.”
“God and his forgiveness.”
Later, after a few minutes of quiet reflection, the women joke that the facility has never been so amazingly silent. A cat wanders through the auditorium (it’s part of a pet foster-care program) and disappears behind a curtain as the evening winds down. One woman says how grateful she is that the visitors have come for the evening. Cord says, “We’re here because we love you.”
The deacon makes a point of saying those words every time he visits a facility, he tells me on the drive home. As we pass by rural towns and farmhouses, their lights dotting the night, he explains why. It started with a young man he spent four days with at a jail in Plainfield, Indiana, through a program run by Kairos, an interdenominational organization that brings volunteers into prisons. “It’s basically a short course in Christianity,” he says of the program. “There’s good food, music, a lot of talking about God and the Bible, forgiveness of sins.”
When he met the young man, he recalls, “He came in, in his orange jumpsuit, and wouldn’t look at me. For the first two days, he wouldn’t look me in the eye. The third day, when we started talking about the forgiveness of sins, that’s when he started to open up and tell his story about what got him to where he was.”
The young man, speaking in a low voice, head down, told Cord his mother had been a prostitute, drug dealer and addict. He himself had been arrested for dealing drugs.
“He was an 11-year-old boy when his mom committed suicide in front of him,” Cord says. “He had an 8-year-old little sister, and the only thing he knew to do was the thing he’d watched his mom do — sell drugs.
“For the first two years, he and his sister literally lived in dumpsters. They were scared. Their mom had said to stay away from Child Protective Services, so they hid. They did what Mom told them to do. They lived in the crooks and crannies of the world.
“He’d never had fresh fruit in his life, never had anything other than canned food or stuff out of a trash bin.”
After the young man told his story, the deacon tried to comfort him by reaching out and touching his hand. But the young man flinched and turned his back, unaccustomed to being touched. “I told him, ‘Hey brother, we love you.’”
The message got through. On the fourth and final day, each of the men had the opportunity to stand up with a microphone and talk about what they had learned. The young man had something to say. “I had my hand on his shoulder — he didn’t want to do it without me there — and he was shaking like a leaf. He held the microphone close, right up to his lips, and said, ‘There’s only one thing I wanna say: I’ve never had anybody tell me “I love you” before.’ Everybody in the room was bawling their eyes out.”
For Cord, it became a defining moment. “Because of him, I try to get that point across almost every time I go into a prison — that we’re here because we love you, not because we’re terrific, or we’re better than you, or we’re gonna fix you. We’re here because you’re our brother and sister, and we want the best for you.”
Cord would say a prayer and give communion before heading down the winding country road to visit another out-of-the-way place.
The first time I met the deacon, he was visiting my father, John Pesta ’65, at my parents’ home. Dad was declining in health and had been hunkering down with my mother during the pandemic — staying safe but giving up the human contact we all need. As an author, newspaper publisher and journalist dating back to his Notre Dame days, when he was editor of The Juggler, Dad missed being able to go out and talk to people about their lives, keeping a careful watch for dialogue and characters he could repurpose for his novels and short stories. He also missed going to church and chatting with friends afterward over coffee and doughnuts. And so, Cord brought church to him.
The deacon would sit in the living room and talk with my parents about family and favorite cars — he and my father both had tiny, two-seater Miata convertibles — about cats, writing and art: Cord’s daughter and my mother, Maureen O’Hara Pesta, who graduated from Saint Mary’s College in 1964, are both artists.
Then Cord would say a prayer and give communion before heading down the winding country road to visit another out-of-the-way place. For a couple years, I saw him every time I visited my parents. I could tell Dad enjoyed his calm presence.
Cord was there on my father’s last day. It was an early September afternoon, and the deacon came and sat with us as we looked out at the trees and birds in the backyard. That night, we said goodbye to Dad.
I’m glad the deacon was there that day. I know Dad felt surrounded by love.
It’s emotional, Cord tells me, getting to know families on visits like these. It’s an aspect of his role he hadn’t really thought about when studying to become a deacon. While he knew deacons often visit people in the community, he hadn’t foreseen the deep relationships that could develop. “No one said there are some emotional things that go along with this — you’re gonna get to know these people really well, and they’re gonna become your friends and family.”
Cord was in his late 50s and active on his parish council at St. Bartholomew Catholic Church in Columbus, Indiana, when at the suggestion of church leaders he began attending discernment classes, the name given to the courses where one learns about becoming a deacon. Gwen went with him to the classes, which is a requirement, he says, because the idea is that “you’re in this together — it’s a life-changing thing.”
Neither expected much to come from it. “I didn’t think I had time to do something like this,” he says. “I thought we’d go to one meeting and never go back.”
They attended the full nine months of classes. He learned that becoming a deacon would require four more years of academic and spiritual studies, known as formation.
The role of deacon has roots in the early history of the Church, when deacons held a special place in the Christian community, preaching and spreading the Gospel. Today, they are ordained Catholic ministers assigned to a specific parish and given a wide range of responsibilities — preaching homilies, leading prayers, baptizing, witnessing marriages and conducting funeral services, to name just a few.
They aren’t priests, obviously. For one thing, married men can become deacons. But, if their wife dies, they can’t remarry without special permission, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. They receive Holy Orders, the sacrament most commonly associated with ordination to the priesthood, but are ordained to the ministry of service, not that of the priesthood. Deacons cannot hear confessions or consecrate the bread and wine at Mass — only priests can do that.
Women may not become deacons, and Cord would like to see that change. “I will very loudly say that yes, women should be in the diaconate,” he says. “From our clergy voice, we are missing a huge perspective that men can’t give.”
Cord had doubts about himself and that confounding question of holiness — whether he had what it takes to be a deacon, whatever that intangible thing might be.
While deacons have long played a significant role in the church, they are “even more critical” now amid the decline in priests, says Father Dan Staublin of St. Ambrose parish in Seymour, where Cord would eventually end up serving.
But at the time Cord finished the discernment classes, he didn’t think he would move forward. “I thought, I can serve my church in other ways,” he says.
Gwen had concerns as well. For one, she worried that if her husband became a deacon, he would be busy on Christmas and Easter when the couple visited with their children, who lived across the country at the time. “My biggest fear was that we wouldn’t get to be with our family,” she says.
Cord also had doubts about himself and that confounding question of holiness — whether he had what it takes to be a deacon, whatever that intangible thing might be.
Mike East, who served as director of deacons for the archdiocese for 12 years, says that in his experience, it’s typical for men becoming deacons to feel they’re not holy enough. “I think there are very few deacons that felt like they were worthy to be ordained,” he says. “We’re all just trying to get to the same place, and the way we get to it is by helping each other.”
Weighing whether to continue on the path to the diaconate, Cord was questioning how he, an imperfect person, could be worthy of telling others about the ways of God. So what does “holiness” mean, really?
“The word ‘holy’ is probably used by most of us in different ways,” says John Cavadini, a professor of theology and director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame. “Strictly speaking, and in a Biblical sense, ‘holy’ means ‘set apart for God or by God.’”
But nobody’s perfect. “None of us can claim holiness, and the most holy are those who would never think of making such a claim, perhaps,” Cavadini says. What people can do, he adds, is place their confidence and trust in God and grow to be more faithful and charitable, achieving a more “ordinary holiness.”
Cord turned a corner when a deacon at his parish in Columbus urged him to keep going. When he got accepted into the program, he and Gwen discussed ways they could compromise and build in family time, and she said she would support him. “The church very much emphasizes that it’s a couple’s decision,” she says. They decided together to go for it.
The next four years of studies were “challenging,” Cord says. “Here I am, 40 years removed from college and having not done any really hard studying and writing and those kinds of things in that period of time.” He also knew he would need to move to a new church, as his parish in Columbus had enough deacons. “That was tough,” he says. “It’s where we raised our kids, and that was home to us.”
Then came a moment when everything fell into place. One Sunday, he was working on an industrial paint system at the Cummins engine plant in Seymour, about a half-hour drive from home, when he decided to pop into Mass at the nearby parish, St. Ambrose. “I’d never been there,” he says. “I got there 20 minutes early and was sitting quietly. Nobody was there yet, and all of a sudden I got this feeling: Welcome home, this is your new parish. I went home and I told Gwen, ‘I think I know where we’re gonna get moved to.’ And you know, the next Friday at class, they said, ‘We’ve got your assignment.’ I said, ‘I already know.’ They said, ‘How did you know? We haven’t told anybody!’ I said, ‘The Holy Spirit told me.’”
Indeed, Cord got assigned to St. Ambrose, and was ordained in June 2017. “It’s emotional; it’s kind of like a marriage,” he says. “You’re making these vows. You’re committing your life. You’re setting your course.”
Cord’s unexpected journey into the jails of southern Indiana helped him see his community in a new light. He describes one eye-opening early experience, meeting three women sitting together in the local jail — a mother, daughter and granddaughter. Generational poverty and drug addiction had led each one in and out of jail for years. “It seemed normal to them to be in jail,” he says. The youngest of the three had just become a mother herself.
He began reading about the problems of addiction and mental health in America. “Those are the two monsters in the room when it comes to homelessness and incarceration,” he says. He expanded his ministry to address these social problems, working to feed the homeless in Seymour, then putting together a team to figure out how to open a shelter and speaking to the city council to make it happen. The shelter opened in 2021 and now helps residents find jobs and permanent housing.
That same year, a tragedy occurred in the rural county jail that Cord had come to know so well. A young mother, Ta’Neasha Chappell, died after getting sick and begging for help all night long. “It just lit me on fire,” Cord says. Then, a month later, a man with a history of mental illness and drug use, Joshua McLemore, died after spending 20 days at the same jail, where he was held in solitary confinement, naked and mostly not eating or sleeping. It’s what led Cord to speak with proponents of the legislation to help the mentally ill.
Last fall, Cord spoke on a panel organized by the Indiana Public Defender Council about a 2018 jail death in a nearby county that involved a man who had overdosed. Jailers had strapped him to a restraint chair and repeatedly shot him with a Taser. The panel focused on accountability, Cord says, as well as on what can be done to prevent these kinds of tragedies.
“One of the things that drives me nuts is the fact that once a person is incarcerated, they go into a downward spiral,” he says. “We basically are incarcerating all these subclasses of people — [the] mentally ill, [the] addicted, people of color who are struggling with poverty — and we’re making it worse for them. From a Catholic-social-teaching point of view, you say, that’s not right, these are our brothers and sisters. As a society, instead of spending billions of dollars locking those people up, we need to wind that backwards and fix the underlying causes.”
To that end, he has become interested in what is known as restorative justice, an alternative to the traditional criminal-justice approach centered on jail time as punishment. For example, restorative justice might involve a plea deal in which the guilty person agrees to make reparations to the people he or she harmed, apologize in person and participate in counseling. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a number of states have been using various restorative-justice measures for decades, typically targeting young people who have committed minor or nonviolent offenses.
Not everyone agrees with Cord’s ideas. A column he wrote about the possible benefits of restorative justice for The Criterion, the archdiocesan newspaper, drew a mixed response. “Half positive and half questioning or negative,” he says.
Restorative justice is “not perfect,” he adds, noting that he still has “many unanswered questions.” Still, in it he sees potential to help individuals — and his community.
Cord spends 20 to 30 hours a week doing deacon things, he tells me. Much of that time is spent on country roads, stopping in to see housebound folks like my father, people unable to get to church or visit old friends. So, he becomes a friend. After my father died last September, the Cords drove more than an hour so the deacon could offer a prayer at the memorial service. Deep in an emerald-green forest in southern Indiana, standing in a historic shelter house among a lifetime’s worth of Dad’s friends and relatives, Cord spoke words that were simple and powerful — you might even say holy. “I want to stay close to you,” he said to my mother. “Please let us do that.”
Abigail Pesta is an award-winning journalist and author of The Girls: An All-American Town, a Predatory Doctor, and the Untold Story of the Gymnasts Who Brought Him Down, and co-author of How Dare the Sun Rise: Memoirs of a War Child.