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Hospitality to the Imprisoned ˜ 191
The only resistance work over the next hour, as we drive to Jackson State
Prison, is to pray when the truckers, with Confederate flags glued to their grilles
and hearts, flip the middle finger at us or honk like demented beasts arising
from a turbulent sea. (“If you put and end to oppression, to every gesture of contempt,
. . . then the darkness around you will turn to the brightness of noon”
[Isa. 58:10].) Murphy reaches across my lap where the Word sits and shakes open
to Ezekiel 34 and pulls her dark glasses from the glove compartment. We are on
the way to visit several of our brothers on death row.
I
We want to do what Jesus does: reduce the distance. We want to incarnate
the Word into our lives and flesh. So, responding to the mandate to “visit the
prisoner,” we prepare to enter another world at the Georgia Diagnostic and
Classification Prison. Here death row is incorporated among some 1,500 diagnostic
prisoners waiting to adjust to the Georgia prison system and then travel
to one of our forty-one prisons. Here Death is resident and life is an alien. Many
prisoners and some staff struggle to choose life, to resist the awful oppression
and despair of violence, hatred, and the technological efficiency that defines the
inner life of a prison machine. Even if the beast does not devour the whole person,
all of us who enter are wounded and weakened. Yet we go, knowing that
God’s love, promise, and presence are relentless in the bowels of this institution,
whose mission statement is to bind and kill. Jesus proclaims: “Liberty to the captives!”
and he is executed. Between the bars and deep within a few prisoners’
eyes, tokens of resurrection are passed to us like the bread at Eucharist or breakfast
grits.
Murphy returns her dark glasses to the glove compartment. We leave our
Bibles in the car, for we are only allowed to take “state Bibles” into the visiting
area. We lock the car and head up the hill. Standing below a tall tower, we give
the guard our names and tell him our aim and purpose: to make a pastoral visit
to friends under the sentence of death. He informs us that count is not yet complete.
We stand and wait under the Georgia state flag, which whistles Dixie in
the wind. Twenty minutes tick away, and the count is complete. We enter and
walk toward the visiting area.
II
The visiting area is neither the prisoner’s world (the cell block is) nor the
visitor’s. Nevertheless, it is a most significant “meeting ground.”
We do “enter the world” of the prison staff, trustees, and prisoners being
visited. We who go into the prison “leave our world behind,” but we do not
enter the primary space of the prisoner’s prison life.
Yet much about this space tilts toward the world of the prisoner. We are