When Going to Prison Feels Risky

I like to be prepared for things. I like to know I'll be good at them before I try. When I was little my sport was soccer (well, first it was tee ball, but I'm not sure that's a sport in itself). I remember doing drills in my front yard over and over with Dad, making sure I'd be able to stop that ball when it came at me from the feet of another team. The games mattered so much. The technique mattered so much. But it was the practice that mattered the most.

When I learned Russian I didn't speak much until I knew complete sentences. At the end of my first 3 month trip, Slavik said, "How did you go from knowing 3 words to saying everything? I've never seen anything like it." I like to know I'll be good at things before I try.

It doesn't mean I don't love a good challenge. A marathon in the driving rain, 50k of Appalachian terrain, getting a Masters degree, living in Russia…I thrive on challenges, but these are my challenges. I know I can run. I know that pain, that ecstasy. It's the unknowable, unpreparable things that leave me shaking.

This fall I was roped into teaching a class at Lee Arrendale State Prison for Women. Ok, I volunteered, but not because I was looking for a challenge. I volunteered because somewhere along the line someone said "you'd be good at that" and "you can teach whatever you want" and to my ears that sounded a lot like "you can trap 24 students in a room and make them talk about your favorite subject every week." Oh, ok, sure.

So I did. I filled a syllabus with my favorite things about Christian biomedical ethics, things like reproductive technology and healthcare access. I wrote lectures about the sacredness of human life, sacramental ethics, community ethics, justice and beneficence and care for the vulnerable. I didn't know how to be a teacher. I still don't know. But I wrote some things on the chalkboard and asked some really tough questions and listened to stories about abortion and we worked our way through the stuff.

So it was about bioethics. It was about birth and death and illness and health. But it was primarily about suffering - suffering and injustice - because that's just the filter my students use in their lives.

We talked about every issue in terms of "who does this hurt?" and "who doesn't get enough?" They were experts at finding the vulnerable people in a story, possibilities of exploitation I would never catch on my own. "Catholics don't want us to have birth control, but if I have an abusive husband, 'natural family planning' won't work for me," they'd say. "What about then?"

Or "what about the girl who's kicked out of her home for being pregnant? If she gets an abortion, is that really autonomy?"

I got really proud when they would read Principles of Biomedical Ethics for fun, which is freaking philosophical ethics so that's incredible, or when they'd casually say the words "a sacramental perspective…" I was really proud of a lot of things they said, but I was also over my head approximately 87% of the time.

The first day of class I was overwhelmed with the place. There's just so much khaki, so much gray, so much nothingness on the off-white walls. "State Prisoner" stamped on their backs. They're loud. They swarm into the theology hall in one large cloud, like bees.

It's cold in there. I can't even go the bathroom without an officer. And it's absolute chaos in the most orderly way possible.

The unspoken social dynamics, the stories tattooed on their arms; their complete dependence for everything, their complete lack of control over their lives. The thing is that I don't know their past. And to me, in that classroom, for those hours, their past means absolutely nothing. Who they are today is all I need to know. And it often struck me as something really beautiful that their identity in that room was not "prisoner" or "felon" or whatever else they are labeled in this world, just "theologian." Student. Ethics student.

There were so many weeks when grading 24 more position papers and writing a lecture were daunting. There were so many weeks when getting up before dawn  and spending 10 hours in a badly-lit theology hall with inmates seemed crazy. But during the hour-long commute up I-85 every Friday, as I went through security and had my backpack x-rayed, I thought about how there were 24 women in that prison who could not come to me, and so I was going to them. That's as clear a picture of the gospel as I've ever seen.

I was not prepared for this thing, for its chaos and unpredictability. I was not prepared for the work of being a teacher and a friend to inmates. Nothing could've prepared me for their stories and for the hard questions raised by their presence. But I'm learning that if I'm going to follow Jesus, there are going to be some chaotic interruptions in my plans, and if I'm not ok with that I should've turned around and walked out a long time ago. You don't really get a practice round in gospel-living.

My story at its bare bones is that I was in a place where I could not go to God, and God came to me. I wish I could say I was good at recreating that in my life, at bringing the Kingdom to earth by living that way, but I'm not. I'm too worried about being good at things before I do them. I guess that's why I consider this semester such a success even though it was far from a perfect class: I risked it. I went to them when they couldn't come to me, even on the weeks when I felt unqualified. To me that was risky, and it mirrored something good. Chaos, white walls, barbed wire, and all.