i so hope this will be like this too.

I’m changing jobs at the end of the year – i’ll still be with the UCA, still working from the same office, just changing titles and some tasks. i’ll no longer be part of the culture and context unit [for which i feel a deep sadness], though I’ll continue working on basement spaces and spirituality, and i’ll be taking on some broader responsibilities. The title intimidates me, just a little: Associate Executive Director of the Commission for Mission. It’s an unexpected move, and certainly not one i sought. But i’m here, i’ve said yes, and i’m grateful.

I’ll be in the prison again tonight and on Sunday. I’ll put up the services early in the new year. And hopefully next year there’ll be time to collate all the resources for prisons into some kind of printed collection…

Until then, this is a prayer for the start of the space on christmas day:

We light the Christ candle:
our act of faith
that love is born into the world today,
lighting the darkness of our story
with its justice, hope and peace…

The story tells us that this is all it takes for love to be born:

you listen to the voice of improbable angels

you dare to believe you might have a part to play in their story

you say yes to the idea of the impossible

you give up the future you thought was inevitable

you defy the protocols and social mores of the day when they get in the way
of what you know is true

you dare to say to those who would deny your value and your role
that you just might have what’s needed, in this moment

you search for your allies and trust them with your dream

you devour the moments of joy when they come

you demand truth from yourself and those around you

you give up the things you are comfortable with

you travel long journeys in inhospitable conditions

you stand up to be counted

you take whatever shelter you can get

you aren’t afraid of darkness or dirt

you do whatever it takes, even if you’re lonely, scared, a laughing stock, intimidated, overwhelmed, lost, uncomfortable

you accept gifts of wisdom from strangers

you honour those who put their gifts of love, however small, alongside yours

you risk everything, even your life, to give it breath

that’s all it takes for love to be born.

On Christmas day each year I go into one of Victoria’s prisons to spend some time with some of the men in there. The unit I go into houses some of the more vulnerable men in the prison – most have acquired brain injuries or intellectual disabilities. After my first visit a few years ago, I recall thinking it was the most godforsaken environment I’d been in, and Christmas day only makes it more so. The day is as lonely and desolate as you can imagine, and then some.

Their regular chaplain and I offer those inside some meditation and the chance to light some candles. Last year the men requested that we sing carols. Musical accompaniment isn’t possible in this part of the prison, and I doubt that any of us were used to singing in a group, but we handed out the lyrics to some carols and tried our best. The words were of use only to those who could read, but those who didn’t sang the first verse of Away in a Manger three times over, and hummed along to Silent Night, joining in the occasional familiar line when they recognised it. ‘Sleep in heavenly peace’, we sang, discordant and tuneless. I swear it sounded like angels.

‘It’s good of you to go in there’, the woman in the café told me this morning, as she made my coffee and we talked about our Christmas day plans. Without thinking I responded, ‘It’s good for me to go in there’. It’s not that going in makes me appreciate the friends and family who surround me for Christmas  - that would come uncomfortably close to pity or charity; it’s not that I discover the ‘real’ meaning of Christmas in there, because there are many real meanings to Christmas. It’s that in the prison, like no other place, I recognise my own fear and darkness sitting alongside that of the men, and I find it transformed. It seems that in honouring another’s humanity in the most godforsaken places, I’m given the chance to discover my own.

And at Christmas, if the stories of the Christian faith are anything to go by, finding our humanity becomes the most divine task. I love the stories of faith, if only as beautiful mythology, where we are invited to believe in the possibility of love that pulls us into our human-ness – not away from it – and then transforms it into something beautiful. That’s the miracle of Christmas in the prison: it gives the gift of human-ness. It says that the most divine act is to live with the degradation and shame of being somewhere and someone who is abhorrent to all that is glamorous and beautiful. And it’s only when we live with that, in the midst of desolation and desperation, that something of glory is given the chance to be born.

We confess that there are times
we find living with hope
is simply too hard,

when it seems easier to focus on miracles of virgin births, shining stars
and wise men from the east
than it is to have faith that love might come
into even our broken and shamed lives

we think of those places where love is beyond our hope:
in our broken relationships
in the people we have hurt
in the systems that damage and oppress us

we name them silently,
in an act of desperate faith
that this will be enough
to make the space love needs
to be born again.

anyway… this is what i’ve written:

Despite all our attempts to believe otherwise,
death reminds us
that we are human
that this is our one life
fragile
amazing
unique
flawed.

Today we’re going to have some words
and some silence
it’s not religious, it’s just a place for all of us to remember those who have died here,
to remember that they – like every person here – matters.

There’ll also be some silence and an opportunity to light a candle
or to pray to remember those we love outside of this place who have died, or who we’re separated from today.

Let’s begin by being silent for a moment.

Today we remember those who have been part of this unit
who have died while here.

Whether we loved them, or couldn’t stand them
even if we did not know them
we remember that we were here together
that we share so much in common:

not just this place
and what it’s like to live here
but what it is to be human:
to fear
to know hope
to love
to have dreams
to imagine a better life
to feel desperate
and desolate,
lonely and happy

And if these men wondered
like so many of us do
if they would be remembered
or if anybody would care that they had gone
today we do.

We remember them.

If we knew them, we remember how they pissed us off
and made us laugh
we remember the things that were unique about them

And in the act of remembering
we let go of the things we wish they hadn’t done or said
and the things we wish we hadn’t done or said to them

[silence]

Today many people celebrate Christmas
and in here that means something very different to the rest of the world
but Christmas isn’t always about joy and being with the people you love
it’s about peace being born in the most unlikely, impossible places.

so today
as we wish our lives and the world were different
let yourself be open to the possibility of peace
even here
and even now.

We have candles here.
if you’d like, you can come and light one

and when you’re ready, feel free to leave.

we gather with the longing
to be made whole again
if just for this time, here
and now

we gather with a prayer,
however vague and tenuous,
that in spite of the absence
of virgins and angels,
wise men
and shepherds,
we might still be a witness
to the birth of all love.

we gather
as ready as we’ll ever be
for this story of faith to unfold.

I read the stories for advent 4 in the hopes of getting some inspiration. I didn’t like them, so I went to the christmas eve stories. I couldn’t escape it though: the line that seemed written in bold, in everything i read, was ‘Do not be afraid’. Anything but that, i thought, but i think i’m going to have to go there…

Do not be afraid
the angels said
over and over.

I wonder what they would know
about fear
and what right they have to preach against it.

Do not be afraid.

[I think these are the same angels who say
'buck up!' to the depressive
or 'it will all turn out ok' to the heartbroken.
I stifle the urge to slap them.]

I picture the men I would say the words to
broken beyond repair
silent and babbling
grasping for life
lost
dangerous
endangered
frightened for every good and necessary reason.

I chew my pen
searching for the way into the impossible
feeling stifled by the irony
that i am not the one who should be doing this,
i was just the one who said yes.

Do not be afraid of being chosen,
I write,
or loved

or of being the one who could be the gift of love.

i squeeze the story again
into palatable squares of white bread
to be consumed by the ravenously hungry.

it will have to do.

The italics below are created from the conversation with the men. The other words are lifted from Isaiah 35.

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom;
Life will be lived as it’s meant to be lived
everyone will be valued
everyone will know they are loved.

We shall see the glory of the Lord,
the majesty of our God.

Strengthen the weak hands
and make firm the feeble heart,
‘Be strong and do not fear!
Here is your God.
Know you have what it takes
to live through this.
Know you can find the will to get over it’.

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened
The sick will be well
The elderly will be loved
The children will be safe
The prisoner will be remembered.

For waters break forth in the wilderness
and streams in the desert;
The justice system becomes just
Governments stop being corrupt
People in Somalia and Africa have food to eat
Those who have nowhere to go find somewhere to live.

A highway shall be there,
and it shall be called the Holy Way;
and on this highway
everyone will be welcome
even those who we hate
and those who hate us.
We will be welcome too.

Together, we shall obtain joy and gladness
and sorry and sighing shall flee away.

I don’t mean that in a sanctimonious, martyrish way. I’m not that selfless.

Last night I went into the Marlborough Unit at Port Phillip Prison with Ross, the chaplain. We spent a couple of hours with some of the men, deciding what we’d do over the next few weeks. We’re going to work through some advent readings, doing meditation stuff, and bringing in images for the readings, gradually building up the table with a picture of our waiting. This is a group of men who like silence, and they like talking, so we’ll use their words from the next few weeks to craft christmas day.

At least that’s the plan. It won’t work like that.

Yesterday’s weather felt like it came straight from Darwin. There’d been a pretty ferocious storm in the afternoon followed by bright sunshine, so by the time we arrived the air was still and hot; the humidity was frightful. The unit felt like a sauna. We arrived as the men were finishing dinner [or throwing it out]. It looked disgusting. We sat at the dining table for an hour or so, listening to the rambling conversations of lonely men, who can barely remember the sentence they’ve just spoken. These are the most pathetic people in our community – people who struggle to comprehend basic cause and effect, who think they are forgotten by the world and therefore that nothing they do will have any consequence. We think making them live in subhuman conditions will reform them. The truth is more likely to be that it will confirm this is all they were born for.

One man, no names, brought up last weekend’s state election. He checked who I’d voted for first, and then mentioned that Ted Baillieu was visiting the prison next April. He’d heard that Baillieu wanted to make things harder for people in prison. You could tell that just the idea of it being harder was beyond his capacity to imagine.

I said, more wishful than knowing, ‘there are a lot of people outside who would oppose that on your behalf’. I hope i’m right.

There was silence, and then the thing next on his mind came up.

‘The thing is, getting over Christmas’.

To which there is no possible response.

There were two big areas of conversation with the members of one rural community yesterday: the first was on what difference faith can make in the prison. Chaplains are not allowed to proselytise – the potential for manipulation is too high. Prisoners are surrounded by psychologist and self-improvement programs. What is it that those representing faith can do? And, as importantly, what is the promise that faith can make and then deliver?

‘These Christians,’ said Alex, on my second visit into the prison, ‘They promise the world and then they give you an atlas’.

As I drove home from the meeting last night, I caught the end of a radio interview. I have no idea what the program was [i was waiting for the news about leadership spills!], or who was being interviewed, but the I heard him say that the primary question for his faith was not ‘what do you believe in?’, but ‘in what do you invest your life?’. He said he could no longer invest his life in ideas about God, but that didn’t mean he’d lost faith. His primary investment now was in justice and love; they were the things worth living for, even if they came to no end. That was the other big area of conversation yesterday – how much working in the prison changes your life. It becomes your investment.

I’ve learnt that someone has the potential to be a good chaplain when they talk about how they will change in the process, and how they don’t think they have what it takes to do this well. It seems that those who think they are cut out for it find it hard to recognise the holy ground they’re walking on…

The cliche about prison life is that I am actually integrated into it, ruined by it, when my accommodation to it is so overwhelming that I can no longer stand or even imagine freedom, life outside prison, so that my release brings about a total psychic breakdown, or at least gives rise to a longing for the lost safety of prison life. The actual dialectic of prison life, however, is somewhat more refined. Prison in effect destroys me, attains a total hold over me, precisely when I do not fully consent to the fact that I am in prison but maintain a kind of inner distance towards it, stick to the illusion that ‘real life is elsewhere’ and indulge all the time in daydreaming about life outside, about nice things that are waiting for me after my release or escape. I thereby get caught in the vicious cycle of fantasy, so that when, eventually, I am released, the grotesque discord between fantasy and reality breaks me down. The only true solution is therefore fully to accept the rules of prison life and then, within the universe governed by these rules, to work out a way to beat them. In short, inner distance and daydreaming about Life Elsewhere in effect enchain me to prison, whereas full acceptance of the fact that I am really there, bound by prison rules, opens up a space for true hope.

Slavo Zizek, The Fragile Absolute

*It’s times like this where i love being part of a denomination. I know many people are saying that the religious institutions have passed their time, and are no longer places for innovation and experiment, but i’d be devastated if denominations were to end. So much of what we do in the prison and broader community is possible only because we are a denomination. The major decision making and policy implementing bodies within our community are constructed in a way that relies on communication with institutions – I’m not prepared to let our institution go until that reality changes. Denominations are trusted with this because we have a history that lasts beyond any one person or generation; we have the depth of resources and breadth of wisdom that means we are worth listening to. We have proven that we carry through on promises and can [to a large part] be trusted with people’s vulnerabilities.

That doesn’t mean to say that I think everyone has to be part of a denomination, that i don’t think there are some fundamentally sick things about institutions, or that i don’t want denominations to change – but i get disheartened by those who refuse to acknowledge what it is that would be lost if the institution were to fold, and who define institutions by rigidity and lack of imagination. Of course, if you think the stuff of the church is simply local then none of that matters. But if you think the church has a broader role to play within the community and world, then we need to stay faithful to those collections of people and communities that together have a chance of making that happen.