It was dusk, a dusk that with our winter-bound movement was imminent. Under a fading horizon, I found myself driving toward a Massachusetts correctional facility. By the time I pulled off marked roads and onto gravel ones, the sun was fully down. It was dark, but not ordinarily so. It was a thick dark, a dark that was like a weighted blanket thrown over this particular parcel of the world. I stepped out of my car and felt its suffocating weight. As I walked on, I noticed that a lone, hazy light shone in the near distance. Taking this for the entrance I set out for it.
After moving from one holding area to the next, one set of slamming steel doors to the next, I was led into an empty visitation area lit by panels of buzzing overhead white lights. A guard pointed me to a small private room with a door left ajar. “Your client is in there,” she said. I walked in.
No matter the degree to which I prepare for a prison visit, nothing ever prepares me to really see the human being beyond the briefs, medical records, memos, and investigative reports. No matter how well-argued, client-narrative-centered, nor humanely dignifying. I was viscerally taken by my client’s precarity. He suffers from multiple life-threatening medical conditions. His outward vulnerabilities disclose his interior fragility. Every day, he carries the dark weight of several decades of wrongful incarceration. Since his conviction and imprisonment, he has maintained his innocence.
Across our evening together, we shared stories about ourselves, friends, and families. Like a kind of lurching gravitational pull, though, we could not escape the question: “Why me?” he asked. That is, “Why was it that I was wrongfully arrested, convicted, and incarcerated?” Each time we were pulled into the orbit of his question, he choked up, quivered, and tears rolled down his face. “Luke, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to do this in front of you.” At a loss for any real consolation, all I could find to hold on was: “You do not need to apologize. How could you not feel this way? What has happened is so indescribably cruel.” I then followed his lead and drew three long, deep breaths. He then guided us back to a place of tenuous conversational stability. Despite the specter of pain that haunts his life, he remains steadfast. He believes in himself, his legal team, and his redemption. His is a hope against hope.
A line from Gregory Boyle, S.J., resonates: “The day will never come when I have more courage or I am more noble or closer to God than they [former gang members] are.” Even though I traveled to visit with this individual to accompany, I was the receiver not giver of real presence, real grace. I was not guiding; I was being guided. My client was embodying what real vulnerability, interior strength, and empowered hope actually look like.
On this 500th anniversary of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s conversion, what lingers over my heart is Ignatius’s own experiences of incarceration. In Alcalá, Spain, Ignatius was discussing questions of faith in public and was arrested, thrown into jail, and held in custody for eighteen days without knowing the charges against him. In Salamanca, Ignatius was questioned about his preaching and subsequently placed in the city’s jail where he was kept chained to a post in the middle of the building. During his own moment in human history, Ignatius knew what it was to stand with his back against the wall. With his own back against the wall in 1st century Jerusalem, Jesus, too, knew the pain and terror of wrongful incarceration. And yet, in Jesus’s resurrection and Ignatius’s redemption, followed by his inspired ministry to the world, we not only find the long, dark shadow of wrongful imprisonment but also a hope against hope. How we remember Jesus and St. Ignatius matters. When we see them as not only in relationship but also in radical solidarity with the condemned of our own day, we might practice what Hebrews 13:3 instructs: Remember those who are in prison, as though you were there in prison with them, those who are being tortured as though you yourselves were being tortured. In remembering, walking with, and getting proximate to the wrongfully convicted, we see that with their backs against the wall they found a way forward, a hope-against-hope-way forward that we are called to follow.
[1] George M. Anderson, S.J., With Christ in Prison: Jesuits in Jail from St. Ignatius to the Present, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 5-6.2
[2] Anderson, With Christ in Prison, 5-6.
[3] Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, (Boston: Beacon Press,1976), 1