Prison

At church inside the women’s prison last Sunday, Pastor Samm raised her hands after communion and said, receive this blessing. Immediately a roar of feedback from the mics and monitors behind her angrily filled the room.

A gal rushed to the stage and shut off the extra mic.

Geez. Worst blessing ever, someone said loud enough to be heard above the dimming feedback.

Everyone, including Samm, laughed. Then, raising her hands again she said “OK, well…receive THIS blessing….” and went on as scheduled:

May we who have been fed at Wisdom’s table, take her welcome out to where doors are locked and tables are bolted to the floor. May The Spirit drive us to break our bread on the altar of the world.

The thing that I think would surprise people the most about church services inside the women’s prison isn’t the possibility of a lock down, or the congregation’s predilection for facial tattoos, or even the fact that at any point the service may or may not be interrupted by two residents being busted for having sex in the gym bathroom.

I think what would surprise folks the most is the joy.

The joy is unbelievable. But so is the suffering. I am starting to believe these two things are related.

There’s just no way to successfully hide hardship in a place like a women’s prison. The accumulated effects of generational trauma, addiction, neglect, poverty and undereducation are written indelibly on everyone who lines up for communion in their shapeless green pants and aggressively yellow T-shirts.

Basements

Unlike many of us on the outside, the suffering these women have both caused and endured is not so easily hidden. Maybe this is why I feel so comfortable at New Beginnings; because like in AA, most folks don’t end up there because everything has gone really well for them. There is a conspicuousness to the difficulties of life in both prison and in AA, which I find very relaxing; because you just know what you’re dealing with. And I think maybe this “no way to hide how shitty life is” dynamic in prison allows for something else as well, and that is (perhaps counterintuitively): joy. A bursting out loud, celebration of life. More than I have experienced in most churches, if I’m honest.

I just wonder if perhaps there is a relationship between a community’s ability to hold suffering with honesty and its ability to also experience joy with abandon.

See, often what I hear in most churches … in the prayers or the preaching … is, I guess, true. It’s just (in my estimation) seldom honest. But what I hear shared in AA meetings is entirely brutal and compelling in its verisimilitude AND almost always accompanied at some point by raucous laughter. As I have said many times before, I have experienced people speaking honestly about their lives and connecting to God and to one another more frequently in church basements than in church sanctuaries.

Hearts

Facing, holding, and speaking honestly of our own suffering and the suffering of others can feel brutal. Like pieces of ourselves are being scooped out. True. But what is also true is the way that it excavates something in us that joy can then fill that much deeper. It doesn’t justify the suffering, it just follows it.

All I know is, every time someone has sat with me as I wept, that eventually … eventually we usually end up laughing. I love those bleary-eyed laughing fits, even if I will do anything to avoid the breaking down in tears part that precedes them.

But the thing is, there is no protecting ourselves from suffering in this life. Not really. What was can hold at bay is joy. Through formality. And legalism. And pride. And fear.

And the older I get, the less interest I have in any of that.

So receive this blessing:

As you wander through your bafflingly painful and breathtakingly beautiful life, may you find the most honest words possible to speak of it all. May you find people who will not say stupid shit to you when the bottom has fallen out. And may they not try and fix you, but simply allow their own tears to join yours, soaking the holy ground of your broken heart until that same heart is filled again with the joy that comes from a perfectly timed fart joke.

Amen?

Amen.

Alleluia.

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