Easter is a time of resurrection, of coming out of the tomb into the sunshine of new life.

Lyle Wildes broke out of the tomb of negative thinking while serving time in federal prison on drug charges. He found new life helping others.

“Lyle is a living example of resurrection,” said the Rev. Kathy Nelson, pastor of Peace United Church of Christ in Duluth.

For the past six weeks, a group of Peace Church members have gone through a Lenten study with Wildes, who taught them about a course he led in prison that changed his life — Positive Attitude Development.

Nelson, who worked with Wildes to present the Lenten study, said he inspires others to come out of their own tombs of negativity. The idea for the Lenten study with Wildes fit because his experiences show the movement from death to life that occurs at Easter, she said.

Wildes, 63, is a merry-looking man with a friendly smile, amused eyes and a fluffy gray beard. He likes to say he spent 20 years growing up, 20 years messing up, 20 years locked up and now he’s free to help others wake up.

Wildes was released from a Duluth halfway house on Dec. 10, 2007, after serving nearly 20 years of a 22-year sentence for conspiring to purchase cocaine with intent to distribute. He served seven of those years at the Duluth Federal Prison Camp.

The people he knew before he went to prison are dead, he said. Everyone who meets him now knows him as the new, resurrected Lyle Wildes, he said.

LOSING HIS DREAMS

Wildes ran a successful trucking business in Wisconsin from 1970 to the mid-1980s. He also dabbled in drugs on the side — both using and manufacturing cocaine. He got into the drug trade because it was fast money, he said.

When he looks back at those days, he sees how he was on “automatic, destructive pilot,” he said.

Wildes spent two years in a Wisconsin state prison for manufacturing cocaine in the mid-1980s. When he got out, he had plans to build a recreational development in the Wisconsin Dells and was engaged to be married. But he continued his involvement in drugs and in 1989 was convicted on drug charges and was sent to prison. “I lost all my dreams,” he said.

At first, Wildes was angry and stressed out about being in prison. He recalls one time when his pulse was racing and the table he was sitting at seemed to shake. He was in a Michigan prison and thought there was an earthquake. A fellow inmate grabbed him as he started to fall out of his chair and told him he’d better do something or he wouldn’t make it out of prison alive.

“When I lived in prison, I observed how the prison environment affected me. Prison manages most of your life,” Wildes said. He realized that his thoughts were his own and the prison couldn’t control them.

While people who are going through a tough time often are urged to take life one day at a time, even one day was too overwhelming for him, he said. Instead, he focused on getting through seven seconds at a time, which he calls his seven-second rule. “I did most of my time seven seconds at a time,” he said.

In 1990, Wildes was asked to be co-facilitator for a Positive Attitude Development course that another inmate, Dan L. Bayes, had developed. Some men who took the class told Wildes that he helped them change and develop a positive attitude.

“Men were listening to me,” Wildes said. “I knew I was on holy ground. It gave them a chance to resurrect their lives.”

CHANGING HIS BRAIN

Over the years that he taught the class to about 2,500 inmates, his own life underwent a transformation. While in prison, he read 50 pages a day, which amounted to about 1,000 books over 20 years. Many of the books were about positive thinking.

“I realized our brain is a changeable organ,” he said.

When someone is in prison, they are immersed in negative thoughts, he said. It’s like a rock at the prison gate on which a drop of water — a negative thought — falls every second, he said. “At the end of 20 years, some people are transformed into animals,” he said.

If you can change those negative thoughts — if you can remodel your brain into thinking positively — it takes away the anger, he said.

“I came to see life as a journey, not a battle,” Wildes said.

Nelson said that people often are in prison to their thoughts and need to re-format how they think. “Often, we live like we’re in a prison,” she said.

Nelson does a weekly Bible study with women in the St. Louis County Jail. She has told them about Wildes’ seven-second rule and has encouraged them to try it — to try to stay positive for seven seconds at a time and to know God loves them for those seven seconds, she said.

Wildes said he doesn’t like to put a label on faith. He said he trusts in the universe and he trusts in the things Jesus taught, such as nonviolence and loving your neighbor as yourself.

“If you don’t trust God, you are rudderless on a sea of emptiness,” he said.

Wildes has found a community of support at Peace Church.

FINDING CONNECTIONS

While Wildes was serving time in the Duluth prison camp, he became friends with longtime peace activist Brooks Anderson of Duluth. Anderson was serving a three-month prison term in 2000 for trespassing at a Georgia military installation during a protest against the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas. Protesters alleged the school trained Latin American terrorists.

Anderson described Wildes as “the most incredibly upbeat person I think I’ve ever known.”

Anderson said prison is an embittering experience. “It makes it all the more incredible that [Wildes] is such a totally positive person, considering he spent 19 years in an environment that is designed to degrade and embitter,” he said.

After Anderson left prison, he obtained permission to visit Wildes and became Wildes’ first outside visitor in 12 years. Almost every time Anderson visited Wildes, another inmate would interrupt them to introduce Wildes to a visiting relative.

“They would say, ‘This is the man I told you about — the guy who saved my life,’ ” Anderson said. “Through their contacts with Lyle, he helped them survive their prison experience. Hundreds of people feel he helped them enormously.”

When it came time for Wildes to be released, Anderson helped him make connections in Duluth.

Wildes lives with John and Lyn Clark Pegg of Duluth, works as an office administrator at Men As Peacemakers, co-facilitates groups with the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project, and teaches Positive Attitude Development in the Community Offender Re-entry Program run by SOAR Career Solutions and Men As Peacemakers.

A lot of people who come out of prison feel bad about themselves, so they go back to doing bad things, Wildes said. By helping them change their attitudes, he hopes to help them change their thinking and behavior.

Anderson has faith that Wildes will make a difference.

“He always has that sense about him that there’s a lot to be hopeful about,” Anderson said. “Lyle lets people know they can make a difference.”

Wildes said he has an inner sense that he’s doing the right thing, and through that belief he has found bliss.

“I have slowed down and I feel what my duty is,” he said and flashed a confident smile. “I want to change the world. That is my goal.”

LINDA HANSON covers family issues and religion. She can be reached at (218) 723-5335 or by e-mail at lhanson@duluthnews.com. She blogs at www.areavoices.com/squeezed.

Copyright © 2009 PAD Group All rights reserved