We can Learn a lot from Prisoners

When I was at Rikers Island working one on one writing plays with inmates, I learned a lot from them (probably more than they learned from me honestly).  In the midst of the Corona virus nightmare I find myself thinking a lot about these guys, mainly because to the average white American the concept of being locked away from the world is totally foreign. To these guys, it’s their everyday reality. We complain when our favorite coffee shop is closed. They don’t have access to Starbucks.  Our reaction to being cooped up not only shows our propensity for not being able to sit still but it also reveals our privilege.

I previously posted on the need for wisdom in this time of crisis. I talked about taking a long look at ourselves and seeing which category we fall into and using this time well. I wanted to follow that post up with the some practical advice on how to use our time well from another angle.  Who are better experts on confinement than some of the 52,399 prisoners currently serving time or held in detention awaiting trial in New York State?

1. Make use of your time

The prisoners I see thriving in Rikers are the ones who make use of their time locked away from the outside world.  The ones I meet are actively researching and working on their own cases. They often have a strict physical regimen for themselves. They often have jobs at the jail where they make money. They often participate in social service programs. They participate in my programming. They envision their future and take time to create in order to get there.

2. How you make use of your time can sometimes feel arbitrary

Waking up on time every day and brushing your teeth can sometimes seem silly when no one is coming to see you.  But these men I’ve worked with do it because they know it’s important in the long run. They work on their cases. They have to be nice to people they don’t want to be nice to (i.e. turn the other cheek when an officer or inmate provokes them). Their goal is getting out and often the tasks put in front of them feel totally arbitrary to their overall purpose or even how they feel in the moment. But they do it anyway.

3. How you make use of your time should also bring you joy

The people I met thriving inside also lived from a place of purpose. The creative ones that I worked with made sure they created and it brought them joy. I once had someone in my group who told me what we were doing was stupid and he didn’t want to do it. I told him he didn’t have to.  He interestingly stayed there because he wanted everyone to know what he thought. I wondered afterwards if he actually did enjoy the work we were doing on some level because he stayed. 

The ones that didn’t want to create who I interacted with spent time reading. They were interested in religion and the way other people thought.  They chose to engage with different views because it connected them to the world.  They recognized they wanted their minds to be active and it brought them joy.

4. How you make use of your time should be affecting others for the good

I watched one creative group being used for good and for evil in this way.  This was the group that actively wanted to create but only if one of the guys they didn’t like wasn’t present. When he was present, they used their creativity to bully him.

I found people who were deeply hurting in jail thriving because they were taking the time to really think about how their choices were affecting other people. These were the people who reached out and created camaraderie in groups. These were the people who called other people out on poor treatment of others. These people I noticed were very open and vulnerable about their own failures and willing to own up to everything. They had come to terms with themselves and now wanted to advocate for others.

Now I know we are not isolated by choice and we don't know how long it will last, yet we can choose how we want to respond to it.  I see that the way the inmates at Rikers use their time is wise and we can benefit from their wisdom.  Whether you are working or not working or handling the messiness of juggling other humans living around you, accept the seemingly simple and arbitrary tasks of the day. Make the ordinary magical by bringing yourself joy in new ways.  Explore your creativity. Perhaps paint, draw, write. Make sure you are stewarding joy.  Finally, do what these inmates taught me: reach out and connect to other people who need your empathy.  Find away to help others. I am truly grateful to my friends being held in detention for showing me how to walk this path with so much dignity and grace.

This Calls for Wisdom

Most of us are familiar with the 7 stages grief that ultimately ends in acceptance and hope. I’ll summarize them in 2 stages: the “shit” stage and the “what now?” stage. The shit stage for many of our existence involves or is related to the shutdown of the world because of the Coronavirus. This leaves us with this new normal of restricted access to people and a lot of time on our hands.  If you haven’t gotten past the shit stage of the Coronavirus, perhaps you’re not ready for the following post.

Some of us don’t like being benched and some of us like being benched a little too much.  Those of us who don’t like being benched are doers. We like to help and feel helpless when we are not being put to use. Sometimes people in this category are told about the practical importance of rest but often minimize our own need for it until we are so burnt out we can’t handle ourselves.

Those of us who like being benched too much I suspect are of the personality type of intuitive or creative (and obviously aren’t concerned about practical things like job security either). We find the most joy in our inner worlds: imagining, creating, and even relating to some Divine source. Our inner thought lives provide the needed entertainment. Books, music, or movies can supplement them. But we really enjoy just listening to ourselves sometimes.

Let me just say I already feel like this is an oversimplification and a rudimentary categorization but it is purposeful.  I suspect that humans in general go back and forth between the two a lot.  This is purely based on my own experience, of course.  When I’m working and take a vacation I have a really hard time relaxing at first and want to do a million things though I know I’m going to need and love the relaxation more than the doing in the long run.

My point is that sometimes we are aware and sometimes we are not aware but there is a way in which we can miss out on our purpose if we fall too much to one side.  One reason I believe this to be true is that I have noticed in general I do not like to do things, like good and important things, because I am afraid of failure.  When the option of not having to try is presented to me, I am instantly relieved. No one to fail, nothing to fail at? Perfect.

For myself, I am really enjoying my time of solitude. I can literally spend all day reading my Bible and communing with God through song. I leave my window open and listen to the birds. I am writing to you now and wrote to you in the previous blog about resting like me. I also have admittedly been fasting social media and to me looking at the news is a chore. One more thing to worry about? No, thanks, I’ll take my comfy bed and cup of chai and conversations with my creator instead.

To be a Christian in my circle, this would win me a badge of honor.  We proudly talk about how its better to be a Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus listening to him than to be a Martha running around doing lots of arbitrary things. We say fear is evil and therefore we shut out the world and gaze upon the eyes of our loving Jesus. (Again, this is an oversimplified version of a Christian worldview.)

The writer of the Psalms in the Bible, David, I think was like me. He could spend hours on the grass just lying around and playing music and enjoying the sweetness of God.  Preachers even talk about this as being the reason he walked so closely with God and led a nation to worship God day and night.

Yet how could he be a king later if all he knew how to do was lie around and play songs?  I think that’s why God gave him the task of being a shepherd.  He was training him.  He needed wisdom to govern and he could only acquire that wisdom through tasks that seemed (probably to him) totally arbitrary to what he felt like doing.

I think like David our ultimate purpose is dominion. Perhaps we not are called to be a king or even work in government. Yet if we are creative we are not just supposed to be musicians. We are not just supposed to be actors. Our primary calling as humans can be found in Genesis 1:28 “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”  We are not unlike David after all.

This calls for wisdom. How are we to do this if we are just lying around in our fantasyland?  Solomon is the Biblical character who asked God for wisdom and God granted it to him.  He wrote these words: “For the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them” (Proverbs 1:32).  In times of crisis the call is to be wise and act.

“Show me your faith apart from your works and I will show you my faith by my works…For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead” (James 2:18b, 26).  Let’s use our time wisely by discerning what it is that we need to be doing in this hour and do it.

Coronavirus Isolation, Boyfriend, and God

My window is cracked open to let the outside world in as I start my second week of self-quarantine, as I am sick during the corona virus pandemic.  I hear church bells ping and birds chirping and the soft patter of rain. It’s a welcome reprieve from the inside noises I am used to experiencing since my landlord painted my room and I couldn’t get my window open. Thankfully it is now open and the world around me calms and quiets me into my thoughts.

I’m aware that words on a paper, though not physical, are memorials of a time. I want to look back and remember this forced time of solitude, termed “shelter in place” by the government, and how it brought out so many new dimensions of our inner lives that we weren’t even aware of. I knew going into this New Yorkers at least would be overwhelmed that they can’t do anything and therefore the quiet would force them to recognize the climate of their inner being. I am no exception.

I am nearly 7 months into a relationship and it’s been nearly a year since we met.  We are both busy New Yorkers. He works a full time job and I have many social, artistic, and religious volunteer commitments aside from my part time job.  The normalcy of our relationship up to this point was not seeing each other all week and then sharing extremely passionate weekends before going back to our daily lives.

Last Monday I started to not feel well.  He had taken off work and I was hoping to spend the day with him, instead I spent it in bed alone. This marked the beginning of a shift in the routines of our relationship that would continue as it continued on a grander level throughout the world. Nothing was normal anymore.

He wasn’t working. I wasn’t working. But we weren’t in physical contact.  We were at our separate apartments talking throughout the day everyday over text, phone call, and Facetime video chat. It seemed so strange to me to be totally physically cut off from him while at the same time having complete access to hearing his voice and knowing what he was doing every second.

I grew restless and frustrated and wanted the comfort of being physically held by him. Saturday night he called me and things weren’t dandy. I was suddenly so insecure. The conversation was disjointed. He was doing a million things. I felt like I wanted to be the center of attention but at the same time had completely run out of things to say. This new way of communicating was bringing up so many new insecurities I didn’t know I had. I was suddenly at a loss for how to communicate that.

Alone in my room that night after he had dropped off to sleep I cried and wrote in my journal wondering what was wrong with me.  I started painting this picture in my mind of who I am to my boyfriend, how I think he sees me.  In my mind I was crazy, emotional, dramatic, too young, and far too virginal.

Well, I may have gotten dramatic right based on how this evening alone went and I practically did go crazy berating myself for not being the kind of person he would want to be with.  But when I told him how I felt essentially asking “who am I to you?” I was met with so much love, so much tenderness. He likes me. He actually likes me.

This new normal in our relationship got me thinking about how God relates to us.  I realize his grace in this whole situation, using it to actually draw my boyfriend and I closer together. God actually told me as I dropped off to sleep that night, “This is my mercy for you. You are learning emotional intimacy without physical intimacy.”

First, this longing for physical closeness that I feel is like the longing we have for union with God and his longing for us. Remember, God used to walk with Adam in the cool of the day.  Now God is in Heaven and we are on earth separated by this tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Christ’s death has given us access to God, but no one has seen his face. Our way of relating to him is internal and emotional.  Our ultimate longing will be fulfilled when we are married to him in Heaven.  What will it look like to be chilling with God in the Heavenly places, having dominion over the earth?  We can only imagine.  God longs for total union and that should be our longing as well.

Secondly, this separation is going to bring up insecurities in our hearts.  We are not doing anything. We tend to put our identities in what we do for the world.  In situations of crisis, especially disease and death, we are forced to recognize how not in control we actually are.  For humans, this can be terrifying. We go down dark rabbit holes in our minds. In these moments of crisis we can either reject God or run towards him. We can assume, as I did with my boyfriend, “he doesn’t care about me.” Or we can ask, “Who am I to you? Who are you to me?”

I have felt since before we were all physically isolated that God would use this for his good. He is drawing us to himself. He wants to meet us on a deep, individual, emotional level. He wants us to learn to develop emotional intimacy with him.