The Golden Ass

"Just as we never leave the presence of the Spirit in Luke's narrative, we never leave sight of the prison. It is always with us, always offering the antithesis to the good news. The prison always announces worldly power and reveals those intoxicated with the lust for violence, but not primarily from the site of the cell but from the place of the warden, the guards, and those benefitting financially and politically from the mechanisms of incarceration. The church cannot and must not ever seek to hide itself from the prison. Confrontation with it is fundamental to our ordination, our way of following Jesus." - Willie Jennings, on Acts 12 and Peter's imprisonment by Herod

The following is my reflecting on some revelations that came upon me in my conversation yesterday morning with my friend Michael Gonzalez, who is African American and has gotten involved in some prison abolotion work in his home city of Philadelphia. These reflections will be interwoven with quotes from Willie Jennings' commentary on the book of Acts. Through this interweaving, I am being taught that my relationship with prison and the "justice system," whatever my relationship with them, is inextricably interwoven with my discipleship.

To that point, I have never been able to face, name, and own what happens in my body WHEN I AM NEAR A PRISON, whether in person or through a screen. Whenever I am in the presence of one, I can now recognize that what my body experiences is FEAR. When seeing someone actually ENTER a prison, if identifying with a character on the "safe" side of all the fencing and other mechanisms of "security", I feel a safety that feels just as unnameably uneasy as safe.

Why was I not able to name this fear? Why is the feeling of safety so uneasy? Because trauma. Because we need angels to awken us to our full humanity.

John 20:
"19 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for FEAR of the Jew[ish authorities], Jesus came and stood among them and said, 'Peace be with you.' 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced..."

Jesus shares in our trauma, and we are called and invited to follow him - by, in, and through His Spirit - in overcoming it. The disciples WERE IN PRISON, and Jesus was CALLING THEM OUT of it and INTO FREEDOM.

Why was I not able to name this fear? Why is the feeling of safety so uneasy? Because we need angels to awken us to our full humanity.

"Nothing speaks of dehumanization more than the stripping away of familiar clothing, the exposing of the body to nakedness and shame, and the donning of garments that remind the prisoner of a suspended identity and a loss of story. But here the angel demands Peter dress himself for the journey and prepare himself for freedom. The angel tells Peter to put back on his clothing and take back his life...God frees and God prepares Peter for freedom. We must do the same with those who seek to liberate." - Willie Jennings, on Acts 12 and Peter's prison break

My takeaway: PETER'S PRISON BREAK IS NOT SEPARATE from Peter's original invitation and call to discipleship. Just as Peter needed Jesus to call him out of his shame and into life, to call him out of his distorted image of God, reality, and of himself on that lake, so Peter needed the same as he lay in prison, bound to shame, death, and alienation. So, speaking of Peter's original call, I've really missed the boat on this! Just as Peter did when he tried to fish by himself.

When I was first exposed enough to prison abolition to become interested in it, I thought it was a complete thing I tie or bind myself to, an accomplished or finished thing in the world with which I identify. This was partly a function of my inability to name both my fear and our call as disciples out of it. But we don't become an abolitionist. We work towards abolition. We are becoming abolitionists. Abolition isn't a branding, a commodity I possess. We don't choose it by ourselves.

Why was I not able to name this fear "in my body" whenever I came near a prison? Why was the feeling of safety so uneasy? Because I imagined myself detached from it.

"Of course, people do horrible things worthy of prison and tied to capital punishment.

But Christians are given a wider lens than media fictions of crime and punishment. We have an inheritance born of life inside the cell, and the intimate knowledge of power misused through the facile foolishness of equating crime and punishment with wickedness and righteousness. The state wants us to forget what we know and see only singular bodies, dangerous and detached, kept from us and our possessions only by the iron power of kings and rulers. But the church is formed in a pedagogy of prison that we must never forget, lest we forget ourselves and forsake our mission." - Willie Jennings on Acts 12 and Peter's Prison Break

My takeaway: FREEDOM FROM PRISON IS INEXTRICABLY BOUND TO AND INTERWOVEN WITH OUR DISCIPLESHIP. If I am a disciple of Jesus, I cannot possibly be detached from it. I cannot be kept safe from prison, nor from all the mechanisms and levers that keep some people in and others outside the bounds of "the system's" jurisdiction. I am either the guard, or I am Peter. But either way, I am INSIDE the story.

When I was first exposed to prison abolition, I thought it was idealistic. This was partly a function of my detachment, and of my forgetting of our mission. But prison abolition isn't a detached ideal. It's a work from inside.

"Great tragedy ends this story beginning with the fate of the guards. To be a guard is to be bound to violence and death. It is work, but it is not good work. Anybody who claims its goodness is lying to themselves. The best thing that might be claimed is its necessity in a system that wants us all to confess its necessity....These guards were there to maintain the captivity of other human beings, and once Peter escaped, the obvious question pressed on the guards was one of allegiance: Are you working for the opposition?...Could it be that the church must now seek the deliverance of not just the prisoner but also the guards?" - Willie Jennings, on Acts 12 and Peter's prison break, and on the death of the guards

When I was first exposed to prison abolition, I thought it was an alternative justice system. I was thinking of it that way in my abstracted Whiteness that thinks everything together - figuratively, "from above." I was reading the story of Acts 12 as a prison guard, as as master who is in charge of detached surveillance of our world to maintain its safety and beauty. But abolition isn't a work a guard gives himself to. And abolition isn't a system. Abolition is a fragment work of entrusting myself to a God who invites me into nonviolence and embodies the crumbling of the system. It's not a system, because I don't know the outcome. It's not a system, because, with it, I touch my creatureliness.

"We are all ripe to be made prison guards whether we work in prison or not, because we are slowly being desensitized to prison horrors, slowly being baptized in capitalist logic as the natural order of things, and slowly being brainwashed into believing that Christianity goes hand in glove with the pseudo-morality of our judicial and penal systems. Every increase of the guard population is an increase in the power of death, every new hire who draws a paycheck from prison work draws more death into society, and every church that sits silently at this expansion denies the power of deliverance given them by our risen savior." - Willie Jennings, on Acts 12

MY TAKEAWAY: OK FREEDOM FROM (the nakedness, shame, and alienation of) PRISON IS INEXTRICABLY BOUND TO THE WORK OF OUR DISCIPLESHIP.

When I was first exposed enough to prison abolition to become interested in it, I was hesitant. When there were gunshots in my parking lot, and when my downstairs Latino neighbor was abusing his significant other (and they both later ended up in jail later for grand larceny), I called the police. Now I'm seeing that I did that as an act of convenience for me. Abolition is a commitment to sacrificial love. Now I'm seeing that as an act of hopelessness. I had no imagination for any other way to relate to my neighbor. But abolition is a commitment to the crumbling of the system that lynched God, an embodiment of hope.

It's true that I did call the police partly because those neighbors showed me who they are and what they want. They do not care about other people. But hope is hope in restoration. And what is love that doesn't hope? What is love that doesn't center the other? These questions are inextricably bound to my discipleship.

These questions are bound up in my discipleship for all the reasons I've already said. If the scriptures are our script for the world, then I'm either the guard or Peter. This is difficult to see and touch, because prison is a system that traumatizes. And, trauma dissociates. Jesus shares our trauma and invites us to overcome it with him. He even demands it. In the grace of his presence with us, he reaches out and extends to us the overcoming of his fear and the facing and naming of my vain sense of safety and security that does not love. He calls to me for my awakening from the sleep of my discipleship in Gethsemane when our humanity - which is stripped from us by the carceral system that crumbles in Jesus' hands - is at stake. And, in His very person through the powerful work of the Spirit, he shares with us a re-membering of the body from which we dissociatively detatch in allegiance to our American idols of false justice that shames, alienates, and kills. These questions of care, hope, and restoration in relation to my neighbors are interwoven with my discipleship in all of these ways.

But, the FIRST reason these questions are firstly about my discipleship is becuase my calling the police on that couple and when there were gun shots in my parking lot was my functioning as though our police, "justice," and prison system are my true gods. I was inhabiting a world governed by those systems, and I was responding to events in my life as though those systems have authoirty over me, as though I have given my allegiance to them. If, however, that system destroys hope and drains life, if what it does is bring shame, alienation, and death - if it lynched God - then my living according to my fear and my convenience is my idolatry. It's a lie. The system that is crumbling between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday is built on, depends on, and in fact is MEANT to perpetuate precisely the fear, self-centereddness, and hopelessness by which I function when I can't even begin to imagine prison aboltion. If Jesus is king, then obedience means freedom.