The faith of my father, Jimmy Lai He prays for his Communist captors

From the beginnings of their faith, Christians have viewed tribulation as, paradoxically, a boon — a source of purification and strength. “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account,” Jesus taught on the Mount of Beatitudes (Mt 5:11). Saint Paul similarly promised that “in everything God works for good” (Rm 8:28). 

It is these assurances that come to my mind — and that of my father, the Catholic publisher and businessman Jimmy Lai — as the Chinese state ramps up its persecution of him for the “crime” of insisting on democracy and rule of law in Hong Kong.

When my father came to Hong Kong, then a British colony, as a boy, he discovered his life’s great loves: God, family, and freedom. The freedoms he found were curtailed after the handover from British to Chinese rule in 1997. At first, it was gradual; he saw decreasing ad sales for his media properties, and subtle changes in the expressions on people’s faces. He was arrested one month after Beijing enacted the National Security Law on July 1, 2020, and in December 2020 was charged with violations of that law. 

On the morning of Feb. 9, my father was sentenced to 20 years in prison. At the age of 78 and in failing health, my father does not have 20 years; he doesn’t even have 10. Yet news outlets reported that he smiled and made a sign of gratitude to the crowd before leaving. 

Many people wondered why or even how he could smile. But even in my heartbreak, I didn’t.

On Dad’s first day in prison, he told me he was in God’s good hands. He has repeated this multiple times throughout his imprisonment to his daughter, who is not good at very much other than worrying. Recently, when I left Hong Kong, five years into his imprisonment, I wrote to him expressing doubts about myself and about him. He chided me asking me why I doubted when God is so good. 

He wrote: “So, my dear daughter, though I understand your frustration, why did you doubt? Trust that God leads you in his ineffable way. The way is darkness for us, but [also] the best possible way for us, because He loves us more than we love ourselves.” 

The conditions in which my father is being kept have gone from bad to worse, and his health has deteriorated dramatically. He has developed worrying heart issues, visible signs of a compromised immune system (tooth rot and nail rot), and a litany of new conditions have appeared while previous ones have worsened. Yet his trust in divine providence grows only stronger. Echoing Saint Thomas More’s letter to his daughter, he has told me, “If we seek heaven on earth, we cut ourselves off forever from true happiness.” In one letter I received from him, he called the dire prison conditions in which he is kept a “holy sanctuary”, a retreat where solitude allows him to better feel God’s abundant grace and its ongoing impact on his life from even before he knew Christ. 

And while seeing his body breaking down cuts at me, he has used much of his time comforting me, telling me that suffering has cured him of his previous ignorance, acting as a “renewed baptism”. It has had the effect of bringing him closer to Jesus this life and next. And, in imagery I now often evoke, I’m reminded that although Christ suffers most, he teaches his disciples to pretend they are hiding at the foot of the crucifixion, which represents profound voluntary suffering. My father said he was grateful for the suffering that got him closer to God’s presence, saying “God’s action confounds but always turns out to be marvelous for us.”

In prison, my father wakes up in the middle of the night every night to pray. Before the crack of dawn, he wakes up to read the Gospel by leaning against his cell door to catch light from the corridor. I worry for his back and his waist but am comforted by the joy it gives him. He has said that doing so is like “touching the cloak of Christ” and that it ensures that “life is full, peaceful, and meaningful”. 

While he has always been a voracious reader, his book diet now consists almost exclusively of theology — ranging from Pope Benedict XVI to Saint John Henry Newman, and from Bishop Robert Barron to Hans urs Von Balthasar. He also studies drawing books to aid him in improving in his drawings; his two topics are the crucifixion and the Virgin Mary. I remember when he, ever the perfectionist, once spent eight hours on a drawing of the Virgin, only to be unsatisfied. 

He also spent a few days drawing the crucifixion for his friends who did not yet know Christ, because he wanted to ensure the God-Man’s act of love was sufficiently reflected in the drawing. I remember when he asked me to bring him photos of the Pieta to prison, and he started drawing it only to realize it would take some time to practise. Shortly afterward, the prison authorities banned him from sending those drawings out. 

The aspect of my father I most want to try to emulate is his almost unlimited capacity for love of God, for his family and friends, and not least, for those who wrong him. When he was mistreated in prison, I grew angry. Instead, my father told me to pray for the guard. He told me to pray that he, too, might feel the grace of God. 

One time, I said that I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to pray for people who contributed to my father’s suffering. He gently scolded me then. He reminded me that love comes from God and his grace is what gives us the capacity to love. He taught me the same growing up, but seeing him live it in these circumstances has been quite different. 

Nearly two millennia after the Christ event, the Italian mystic Padre Pio declared: “Blessed is the crisis that made you grow, the fall that made you gaze up to Heaven, the problem that made you look for God!” For my father, Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong’s descent into a dark night of oppression has been a source of light.

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