Notes from My Cell, April 6

I wonder what I’ll be like when I get out of here. A month without real church, a month of deep muscle aches and no relief, a month of obeying orders. I do try to dignify certain moments, such as looking the guards and male prisoners in the eye when I am receiving a meal or giving the tray back, and saying thank you, rather than complaining about what we’re served.
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I wear my pencil down too quickly when writing and have ordered more, since I can’t get up to sharpen them in the dayroom at night. It can also be frustrating only being able to switch between lockdown (cell) and dayroom (group) only every four hours during the day.
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Life happens here so early. I’m up around 5, which is unheard of; we’re done with breakfast @ 6:30 and dayroom and floors are cleaned and showers and then we wait around an hour or two before cell inspection. Lunch at 11 & dinner @ 4, you could almost go to bed by 6pm. The days feel very long this way.
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I am afraid to be cut off even this long. I could email from Iran & reach everyone, even check my bank account and bills. Hopefully, all will be settled just fine. I know I won’t be forgotten, it’s just anxiety. The next letter, the loss of a visit due to the schedule, and the inability to get stamps for this first week are all taking on too much importance.
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I’ve been told prison is easier than here by some of the women who’ve been to both. Prison actually offers more freedom, they said, and the chance to go outside, the chance to work. Also they said the food is better, and you get more, and there’s coffee. I do miss coffee. We get a cup of lukewarm instant in the morning. They said commissary is also better – you can get more useful things. One lady has been to most of the prisons around for DUI. She has three kids, grown, and is the nicest “mom” you can imagine. So sweet, I feel sad for her.
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I had really not anticipated the degree of physical pain and discomfort. After four days only of cold, small steel bench or cold, steel bed with a thin mattress, not much eases the muscle and joint pain. Not even yoga, not even walking. I probably wake up to muscle cramps as often as to night checks. I hope I adapt soon. I’ll get a few Tylenol through commissary and hope it might help, too. Otherwise, I just try to keep moving.

On Civil Disobedience and Jail

So, part of that Middler Review process asks what I think I need in order to prepare for the ministry before I am graduated and ordained.

I responded that I think I need to spend some time in jail.

I do, actually, think that this would be a very important part of my spiritual formation. For many reasons: I have issues with guilt, shame, 'good,' 'bad' and punishment. These are issues I had resolved as a peacenik in a war zone, protesting structures of oppression and namely, that time I got thrown out of Coalition Headquarters by the U.S. army guards, but redeveloped in sadly serious ways once I got to seminary. Obedience and submission for the sake of success and approval by people in authority is an ethic I need to get worked out of my system.

I also know that the most powerful, stick-with-me spiritual narratives are 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail,' by MLK Jr., and 'Letters and Papers from Prison,' by Bonhoeffer, and 'Every Land Has Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison,' by Kathy Kelly.

I also know that my colleagues and mentors in the peace movement have all spent significant amounts of time in prison, and that I have seen my future calling to be one including probably 2-3 years accumulated time in prison.

I also think that now is a good time for me to give a few months to prison witness. It means that I am not indispensable, which would be something I would feel more pressure about if I were out in the parish, or even in a Ph.D. program--paths that are to be explored all too soon. And as I stand accused gently by my deans as 'overfunctioning,' (being workaholic), stepping out of the busyness may be a very good spiritual discipline for me. Though, Dow (my advisor) says, I probably would devise ways of being just as busy once I got to jail!

I kind of think I shouldn't be allowed to be ordained without this prison time. [Actually, I would tend to say that no one should be allowed to graduate a seminary today without an arrest record and a well-worn passport. But I digress].

So, these are some of my very many reasons for pursuing civil disobedience and jail. I responded with these, and then my advisor asked, 'But what do you want to go to jail *for*? On whose behalf? For what cause?' I had forgotten to begin at the beginning, because I thought he already would have known my answers. oops.

So, briefly: to protest the war and militarism and torture. I have done civil disobedience for all these things before, but have somehow not been arrested. But, that may change. I will travel this weekend to the Christian Peace Witness for Iraq in Washington, DC, where with several other seminary students, will be risking arrest during an overnight vigil. Over 700 people will be risking arrest with us.

Then, to join the Occupation Project in congresspeople's offices to get them to support an end to financing the Iraq war. That will probably be sometime the next week.

Then, there will be some time to consider that which I have been thinking of since 1999--which would be crossing the line at the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, GA. [This place has been shown to be responsible for torture throughout the world]. I am watching carefully to see what happens with this year's prisoners of conscience. And talking to my presbytery. And my seminary. It could put my graduation back a semester or year. However, I have a good supportive community in which to go through this now. And I am speeding through the process much more quickly than originally planned. I do not have all the answers now, and probably will not come to a final decision until late November before the protest.

In the meantime, if ending this reflection abruptly, I have books to hit and student sermons to write and student newspapers to edit...