Sermon by Rev. Brian Covell
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
December 4, 2005
Call to Worship:
Why
else was this temple of the human need for reverence built, if not to welcome
all humanity: the seeker, as well as the tourist? Whoever you are: model
citizen, or outcast; wherever you are: at peace or at unrest, may all of us find
here this morning the comfort of kindred spirits—and may we not be
comfortable until we have answered the call of those left in despair.
First Reading:
from an article on UU
prison ministry in the May/June edition of the UU World magazine.
"The
Restorative Justice Team at Unity Church – Unitarian of St. Paul, Minnesota,
mentors inmates and ex-offenders, supports those about to leave prison, and
teaches classes in prison that encourage spiritual reflection.
One team member is the Rev.
Ann Romanczuk who, having been ordained at Unity Church, now works as a
full-time prison chaplain. Chaplains, Romanczuk explains, encounter a wide
diversity of beliefs.
In the Minnesota
Correctional Facility for Women in Shakopee, for instance, there are members not
only of various Christian denominations, but also followers of Native American
faiths, Muslims, and Wiccans.
Chaplains with a strong
sense of their own religions, she says, almost have to put their faith aside to
be able to do their work. UUs, on the other hand, ‘are ideally suited to be
chaplains because diversity of belief is at the very heart, the very center of
our tradition.’
She finds that traditional
Christianity, at times, can be helpful to prisoners by providing firm guidelines
for women who often have led wildly chaotic lives, while UUism can seem too
abstract. ‘I have sat with women who have killed their children, along with
women who just forged a few checks.’
Because Romanczuk does not
try to impose firm rules or creeds, she says, prisoners ‘see me as being open to
them no matter what their beliefs and convictions.’ Above all, she adds, ‘I can
be present to them, listen to them, and let them know through the human
encounter with me that they are loved."
Second Reading:
a poem by Robin Merrill entitled “Out
Here.”
I know why he
killed himself.
You know, the old man
who spent thirty years
trying to break out of prison
and his last two
aching to get back in.
I know him, how he missed
that cold comfort of gray.
I too, have seen colors be scary.
I know why he carved his name
in the headboard at the boarding house
before he swallowed the stolen pills.
For thirty years they barked his name.
He hasn't heard it since. After living
the same day over and over,
regimen and routine,
now he wakes without schedule.
There are no friends here.
There is no family.
He left all of that behind.
Though he didn't know it then,
prison gave him purpose.
It's lonely out here.
Sermon:
Before I start,
let me offer my thanks to your congregation for the privilege of speaking here.
Those of you who came expecting to hear the Reverend Taylor this morning, let me
tell you that this is his idea. He believes that our congregations should know
each other better, particularly due to our proximity. I came because Third
Church in Austin believes it’s important to do missionary work in Oak Park!
I respect Alan, and I
deeply appreciate our growing relationship. He wants Third Church, where he’s
preaching this morning, to thrive; I wish the same for Unity. There is much we
can learn and do in being open to each other—and in a time of need, Alan has
already done so for us.
Speaking of that “time
of need,” let me go back to a day this summer. Since we’re so close, Unity and
Third, you might want to know this story of openness, betrayal, and
reconciliation.
The perfect, Chamber of
Commerce kind of summer day in Boston contrasted richly with the grim brick
buildings making up the prison where one of my parishioners now lives. It’s a
forbidding and hard-to-find place, since there’s no sign at the entrance.
The Commonwealth of
Massachusetts apparently believes signage is a frivolous and thus unwise
expense. Apparently, the state doesn’t want to make it easier for family
and friends to bring succor to those who are supposedly hateful to “the good
order” of society.
That welcome, or lack
thereof, is the first indication that those who enter the prison will be treated
with institutional stiffness.
Accoutrements of dress,
like jewelry and shoes, are removed as you pass through a metal detector, and
you are escorted briskly to the visiting room without comment in a single file
as though it is you who are incarcerated.
And judging from what I
heard that evening on the walk to the visiting room, the families who visit
their bothers, fathers, and boyfriends, absolutely share the feeling of
imprisonment with their loved ones.
This was the tone of my
visit to Walpole Prison, which was broken by a familiar wave and impish grin as
soon as I entered the reception area.
It was as if “J.J.
Jameson,” whose real name is actually Norman A. Porter, Jr., was saying, without
mouthing a word, “Can you believe that we’re meeting like this?”
Some, if not all of you,
remember the headlines in the papers in the days and weeks after Mr. Porter was
forcibly apprehended outside my office on March 22 this year. Later that week,
on Good Friday—the day Jesus was betrayed by a kiss--Alan Taylor and other
ministers helped our congregation deal with our pain and confusion.
One of his friends that
week, speaking for all of us when we learned about his past, said, “I knew J.J.,
and I never met Norman A. Porter, Jr.”
Now, when I introduce
myself both in and out of Chicago, I often get this response: “Oh, the ‘Killer
Poet’--so that was your church?” with a trace of amusement, or sympathy,
or both.
That evening in Walpole
Prison was the only time in my life I actually did not know whether to laugh
(which I did when I looked J.J. in the eye) or cry (which I did on the way back
to my brother’s house in Concord, the home of Thoreau and Emerson, two of J.J.’s
favorite writers).
In the ten seconds it
took me to walk to our glass cubicle, I felt the cumulative effect of the events
of the previous four months—the concerns of our church, the near constant
inquiries from the press, hours of talk with his lawyers.
Our talk that summer
night was vintage J.J., and in that way, prison hasn’t changed him. He was
entertaining, if not always credible; likely the only person I’ve ever met who
could laugh, swear, eat and bend the truth in almost the same breath. It was
how they used to make Chicago aldermen!
Now that we know that
much of his time as a young adult was spent in jails, we should think it
reasonable that prison life has formed him. He was there for his role in two
murders he participated in when he was a very young man, one of which involved
the murder of a jail guard during an attempted escape in 1960.
Once captured and
convicted, he became a model prisoner, got high school and college degrees,
learned a trade, put his body on the line to prevent inmate-to-inmate violence.
But, despite all that, and his faith in the system to reward his transformation,
he was denied parole in the early 1980s.
And so one day, “simply
fed up” with what he thought was a lack of regard for his good deeds in prison,
he simply walked out of a minimum-security-work-release center near Boston, used
money he stashed in jail, caught a bus, and landed in Chicago—a city he was
attracted to based on his reading the novels on Nelson Algren.
He lived here in the
city as a fugitive for almost 20 years. He worked on political campaigns, and
as a handyman. He was a community activist, and often gave what he could out of
his own meager resources to others who were hurting.
He was a fixture on the
city’s poetry scene, giving readings at slams and at a bar called the “College
of Complexes.” He showed one Sunday, literally with rags on his feet, to Third
Church, and in time he joined the church.
How much was he a part
of our congregation? He became well known for his poetry and loud political
opinions. I bet there are more than a few pious souls here this morning who are
saying inwardly, “Sounds like Third Church to me!” After a time of some turmoil
at the church, he was elected as board chair, and even resided in a building we
owned.
On that day in July, he
filled in some of the blanks of his earlier life for me. He was raised in a
strict, conservative Christian home, from which he rebelled as a kid. He told
me what he took for college courses in prison, and how he learned to become a
barber. He was happy that so many people from Chicago were writing him. We
giggled about life at TUC—more so than he had in months, he said, and I can
believe that. He was also somber in knowing his stay in jail will not be a
short one.
We learned this fall
that his sentence is from eight to ten years, with the possibility of parole in
five. That could be a death sentence for a man in bad health. Norman Porter has
done hard time inside and outside of prison.
The last thing he asked
me that day was how the Red Sox were doing; the last thing I asked him
was what I could do for him from now on.
“Bringing a vision for a
life left in despair.” How could I, or any of us, even his lawyers after his
day in court, do this now for J.J.? “Instilling a vision for a life in despair”
was the mission, distilled to one sentence, of the hospital chaplaincy I saw at
Lutheran General.
The same can be said
about the prison ministers I’ve met, with one difference. So much of hospital
ministry is about the loss of health; so much of jail ministry is about the loss
of freedom, for people whose lives are otherwise in front of them.
The church has been
connected to jail since the day Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate. Both Jews
and Christians value, if not celebrate, the effect of hard time in their
theologies.
The literature of
captivity in the west starts with Exodus, moves through the Prophetic books,
runs from medieval rabbis and the Holocaust writings of Primo Levi and others.
In his “Letter to the
Ephesians,” St. Paul calls himself a “prisoner of Christ.”
And another prisoner of
Christ gave us the last best piece of Christian literature ever written. Martin
Luther King, Jr., said from a Birmingham jail, “I see the church as the body of
Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social
neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.” Make no mistake—Norman A.
Porter is a nonconformist, and an activist against social neglect—and that is
what attracted him to us. And I have to believe he came, like Robin Merrill
said, because it is lonely out here, in a hard world outside of jail.
We took him in, not
because we are special and anointed, but merely because we did what churches are
supposed to do: to be a respecter of persons, to give everyone regardless of
their jobs or bank account a chance to experience the good, the beautiful, and
the true.
J.J. could run from his
past, shadowy and dangerous in Massachusetts. But a lot of people in Austin
can’t.
Here in Illinois, the
idea behind the governor’s “Operation Spotlight” plan was to double the state’s
parole officers, so they could better track and support parolees—to help them
stay out of prison. Parole officers today in Chicago are supposed to find jobs
and drug treatment services for parolees.
The good news is that
some of them are actually doing just that, as the Chicago Reporter
magazine said in June.
But the bad news
is that while we have more parole officers, more parolees are going back to jail
for mere technical violations, like testing positive for drugs. Some 28% of
those admitted to jail last year were parole violators. Recidivism remains a
major problem all over the country.
This year almost 40,000
people will be released from Illinois jails. 20,000 will come back to
Chicago. In fact, our Austin neighborhood has the second highest
concentration of ex-cons of anywhere in the state.
And, sadly, the research
shows that many of them will end up behind bars again. For when they’re
released, skilled in almost nothing else except being a better criminal, they
come back to where they came from—the scene of former crimes.
Having programs like the
Sheridan Correctional facility downstate, where offenders learn skills for
decent, legal jobs, get counseling for their addictions, and are held
accountable for their actions, is good. But it’s not enough.
So far, about 13 percent
of parolees released from Sheridan have gone back to prison, compared with 25
percent of inmates from other state jails. But less than half the men from
Sheridan get the jobs the state
prepares them for!
It costs the state 28
thousand dollars a year to keep an inmate at Sheridan. And most people in
Illinois prisons will never get to Sheridan. It costs much less in tuition and
fees for you to send your kids to Eastern, Southern, or Northern Illinois. Why,
in the name of the God some of us worship, do we spend so much to keep
black men in jail, and so little on their childhood in primary schools?
It’s hard for me to have any
faith in systems educational and penal that seem to have next to no faith in our
minority communities.
Remember the poem? J.J.
appreciated the ex-cons he knew in Austin, and they him, because he had lived
their lives, in a sense. He fed them and gave them money. Some of these guys
know their Bible better than I do. One such man, who comes to church Sunday
mornings just for the coffee, and did not know of J.J.’s life in prison, said to
me last week: “He was Saul who became Paul on Mayfield Avenue. He was
your prison minister, out here.”“Bringing a vision for a life left in despair.”
Depending on your view of humanity, of ministry, and of Unitarianism, you might
be surprised that there are more liberal religions who feel as though they have
an authentic calling for ministry in jails.
In the 19th
Century, the Universalist Charles Spear wrote The Prisoner's Friend, a
journal for turning prisons away from punishment and toward rehabilitation. Did
you know that the Church of the Larger Fellowship, our “church at home anywhere
in the world,” supports more than 100 incarcerated UU’s?
The number of men and
women in American jails is well over 2 million. It’s long been shown that a
majority of these men and women came to jail poor, and will of course leave jail
that way. In contrast, Unitarians have more personal wealth than individuals in
most other denominations. What’s more, the religious culture in US prisons is
strongly imbued by evangelical Christianity. One might ask how successful,
privileged, non-Christian UU’s—that’s you and me--relate to convicts?
J.J. gave us, still
gives us, a chance to do this, but the need remains to build faith, a liberal
faith in the prisoners open to us.
The Reverend Emily
Brault is a chaplain at a prison in Oregon. When she preaches, she likes to use
the Carolyn McDade hymn we sang this morning: “Come sing a song with me, that I
might know your mind.”
She says, “We need to
balance our emphasis on social justice, important as that is, with knowing
people—not changing them or fixing them—for…then our vision of the world is made
bigger. In my experience, that’s how change takes place.”
“Bringing a vision for a
life left in despair.” This summer the New York Times ran an article
about chaplains at Bellevue Hospital, the one with psychiatric and prison
wards. It had a story about a middle-aged rabbi trying to minister to a young
Muslim from West Africa anxious over tests that might explain the pains in his
chest. ‘’Do you want a psalm or a prayer?’’ said the rabbi, his book in hand.
“Both,’’ said the Muslim. Apparently, it was the first time the rabbi had
prayed with a Muslim, and the Muslim’s first with a Jew. And so the patient
said, after the meeting, “Anyone who is praying for me is wishing me well.”
I’d like to think that
when the Muslim and Jew prayed together, their view of the other changed.
So--how did J.J. answer
my question, “What could I do for him?” He said, simply, “Stop by when you’re
in town.” Maybe my visit didn’t do much more for him than breaking up the
monotony of jail, but my gut tells me otherwise.
Nobody approves of what
put him in jail—and some of us weren’t crazy about his choices in Chicago. He
could be a pain in the fanny of Biblical proportions, which someone said was
hard to do in a church that doesn’t know the Bible much.
He’s lost friends at
Third Church, and that’s putting it mildly. But that’s the reality. It is
also a reality that he performed acts of kindness for some of us, and stood
for the causes we hold dear, like racial and economic justice. I believe he
feels he was better at Third Church than in any other part of his life—and for
that reason, he thinks fondly of us. So, if I remind him of TUC, I’ll visit
him, just as I would visit anyone else from our congregation who finds
themselves in jail.
“Bringing a vision for a
life in despair” to people, in any condition you find them. There’s a word for
it, and prison chaplains know it better than most. I’m still learning how to do
this, and J.J. gave me a lesson in it. It’s called ministry, and all of us can
do it.
Closing Words:
The French mystic
Simone Weil once said, “Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each
other by knocking on the wall. The wall [that separates them] is also their
means of communication. It is the same with God and us. Every separation is a
link.” Let our congregations, separated by about a dozen city blocks, be open
to each other, to the model citizen, to the outcast.
© Copyright 2005 Rev.
Brian Covell, All Rights Reserved.
