Wearing a protective vest, I stood on the compound of the federal penitentiary where I had just been hired as the prison’s first female chaplain. My uniform included handcuffs, pepper spray and a radio with an alarm that I would press if attacked. I was 30 years old and newly married.
As I watched men file out of a housing unit and into the cafeteria, I shifted in my boots and gazed at the hills beyond the watchtowers and lines of barbed wire.
An officer approached me and said, “I’ve got a question for you. How many of these inmates do you think you are going to help here? How many will actually change their lives as a result of your work?”
“Not very many,” I said. “Maybe five or six.”
“You know,” he said, “I asked the last chaplain here. He’d been in for eight years. How many do you think he told me?”
“Ten?”
“One. Just one. You can’t change these guys. It’s better not to care about them at all. You probably won’t come to hate the inmates since you’re a chaplain, but try to get as close to hate as possible.”
Any numinous idea I carried with me into the prison — any idea of making a big difference — quickly faded.
The prison held more than 1,000 incarcerated men, many of whom came from disadvantaged backgrounds and had turned to gangs in their youth in search of belonging. Nearly everyone was exposed to a significant amount of trauma ranging from harassment to life-threatening violence. Several years before my arrival, an officer had been brutally killed. In a place so volatile, I wondered what I would be able to offer.
Even the chapel wasn’t safe. It was a known spot for passing drugs and handling gang business, and violence could erupt without warning. The room was stark, with polished floors, fluorescent lights, concrete walls and large metal doors that I would lock if a fight broke out. Among the plastic chairs and portable pulpit sat a grand piano — an object of beauty in an ugly place.
After my first Sunday leading a worship service, one of the incarcerated men approached me and said, “We used to have a choir, and I was the director. Can we start it up again?”
I balked. Before incarceration, he had plotted to kill his wife and had shot her several times. Incredibly, she had survived.
His presence unnerved me. Still, I agreed to start the choir with him.
Neither of us knew what we were doing. Clumsily, out of practice, my fingers tripped their way through hymns on the piano. I wrestled with my feelings of revulsion for the director and asked for help from the unseen force of love I call “God.”
“If I can’t like him,” I prayed quietly, “please help me love him.”
We started with the song “What a Beautiful Name,” which turned out to be quite complicated for our skill level, a fact I realized after the five men who showed up for practice told me none of them could read music. The choir director couldn’t either. Since he couldn’t read the notes, he failed to keep time, and the group started on the wrong note when we got to the bridge. We practiced again and again; I nodded theatrically to cue the men to hit the note on time.
On Sunday, the little choir stood in front of our congregation of several dozen, timidly singing the first verse, barely audible, very off pitch. The director motioned to the congregation for help — “Join us!”
They didn’t know the words.
The next week, I printed copies of lyrics to pass around. Choir and congregation stumbled through the verses, voices growing stronger with the chorus. When we got to the bridge, the choir director again missed the note for what felt like the hundredth time. Everyone again started singing late.
This time, a little dam in me broke. In one rushing moment, my exasperation with what we lacked transformed into a flash of joy. I stifled a laugh from my spot at the piano, then snorted, then let it out. Playing notes and laughing, I sensed the magic of the moment, a moment in which we did not need to take ourselves so seriously. Outside the chapel, violence whirred on, but there we were, missing notes together, like a bunch of schoolchildren trying to nail an oratorio.
I looked at the men — the director, the choir — and felt love.
“All right!” I said after. “We’ll try again next time.”
“We’ll get it right next week,” said the choir director, smiling back at me.
Several weeks later, my life changed drastically. A mere five months after marrying, my husband told me he wanted a divorce.
I woke up for work the next morning, eyes puffy, and washed my face with cold water, attempting to remove evidence of my sorrow and prepare myself for the impossible task before me — to show up for others even as the person I loved most was leaving me.
Stunned and in denial, I stumbled through my daily tasks. I wondered where he was, what he was doing and thinking. Did he feel sad? Or worse, relieved?
One Sunday after another, the choir and congregation kept coming back. Our numbers grew. The choir never again tried to perform alone; they simply stood in front of the congregation, encouraging everyone to sing along.
Something happened in those moments together. The men started opening up, sharing their sorrows and fears: “I worry about my kids, because I’m not there to be their father.” “I need help facing my addiction.” “I found out my sister died last week.”
One summer evening, I stood on the prison compound, body aching, stab vest pressing into my chest, arms damp with sweat, boots tight around swollen feet. The sun dipped low, spreading gold across the prison yard, softening the end of a day baked in heat.
“Hey, Carson,” said an officer. “See that inmate over there?”
I squinted to see a man in the distance disfigured from severe burns.
“I call him ‘Deadpool,’ he said. “It pisses him off.”
The man came to church the next Sunday. The exposed parts of his body were a hairless patchwork of brown, pink and white. His hand, missing fingers, held a Bible against his torso.
To look at him was to feel pain.
So I looked at the congregation and tried not to think about the burned man or about the officer calling him Deadpool, the cruelty of it all.
After the service, I approached him and said, “It’s nice to have you here. Would you be willing to offer the closing prayer next Sunday?”
“Yes,” he said.
The next Sunday, after the final hymn, his eyes found mine from the back row, uncertain and searching. I nodded, encouraging him.
He walked to the pulpit, clutching a piece of paper, and said, “May the Lord bless everyone in this room with peace, love, happiness, understanding and forgiveness. For to reconcile with God, and to go from being a sinner and enemy to being righteous before him, we must confess our sins and our wrongdoings, and ask for forgiveness, and then we will be reconciled with God. For our loving God is a forgiving God.”
A tingling sensation swept up my forehead.
After his prayer, the silence held for a few seconds. Then plastic creaked as bodies shifted, the reverence rolled over and everything observable went back to normal. Except for this — the man who prayed was smiling. “I have never,” he said, “done something like that before.”
These were the stories I carried home to my husband — the rhythms of the prison choir, the jagged edges of the day, the prayers of our congregation, the unexpected moments of beauty and grace. When he left, I lost the person who knew what those moments meant to me.
Now here I was in this violent place, without his support, mulling the danger of it all, the terrible things we humans do to each other. And while it’s also true that to love is dangerous, because the people we love hold the most power to hurt us, it’s better than never loving at all.
I think often about the officer who told me I should try to hate the incarcerated men. Others voiced similar sentiments. “You see them in the chapel,” said one. “I see them in the housing unit. And they are entirely different there than they are for you.”
I believe that. In the chapel, we made space for something different to happen, however small, however temporary. Even if for just an hour on Sunday, hurting men could find relief. They could sing. We could sing.
Jenna Carson, an Air Force chaplain in Biloxi, Miss., is working on a memoir about her experiences as a prison chaplain.
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