If you were to pause the Christian story of Easter at the moment Jesus dies on the cross, it would look like a victory for power and cruelty. But soon there’s the empty tomb, the angel of the Lord proclaims, “He is risen,” and a resurrected Jesus tells his disciples, “I am with you always.”
In other words, death isn’t death. That is the radical, provocative, hopeful message of Easter. I believe that same familiar notion of resurrection applies to events in our lives, too. Ironically enough, my appreciation for this possibility deepened while I was in prison.
As part of my path to incarceration, my career in politics died a sudden, shocking, dramatic death when I was convicted at trial on two of six counts of public corruption. Before that, too much of my sense of who I was was conflated with the office I held (I became a Cincinnati City Council member at 27) and those I planned to hold. I defined too much of myself by the number of votes I received and the amount of positive media and praise of my public service I got.
To say that being the subject of a very public federal prosecution and imprisonment is humbling would be a significant understatement. The process was harrowing and utterly ego shattering. And yet, as a result, I had the chance to ask myself: Do I want to put these pieces back together as they were before?
Instead I chose a new and different life, realizing that what I most wanted to do, as well as what Jesus modeled — being of service to others, loving my neighbor, offering a hand to those in need — doesn’t require a public office or any recognition at all.
When you’re focused on filling your cup with accolades and accomplishments, it’s harder to pour yourself out in service to others. The part of me that cared a lot about winning and rising — and about doing so quickly — had to die so I could fully inhabit the part of me that cared most about serving.
Marriages can die; careers can die; reputations can die; financial stability can die; dreams and aspirations can die; your very sense of yourself can die. It’s scary to face these forms of death, but letting things die — so that they can be created anew — is also natural, and even necessary. The Apostle Paul writes in I Corinthians 15:31, “I die daily,” and in Romans 6:6, he says that it is OK, even good and right, to let our old self die.
I know the last group I need to remind about the mini and the not-so-mini deaths we experience in life is a room full of prisoners who have, to put it lightly, led messy lives. But here is what I know about what comes next. For starters, I remember walking the prison yard in spring and lifting my gaze above our camp’s razor wire perimeter. I could see the barren hills that surrounded us just starting to blossom. As Jesus says in John 12:24, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
For those who feel they have a strictly scientific brain, the biblical stories of Jesus’ resurrection — or of bringing his friend Lazarus back to life — might feel like a stretch, if not an outright fiction. I know from my wife, who is a radiation oncologist, as well as from other physician friends, that it is not a once-every-2,000-years phenomenon for someone to go from dead to alive, but an everyday occurrence in hospitals across the country — and I mean medically, clinically, without-a-heartbeat dead, even if only for several seconds, and then revived.
To believe that resurrection occurs everywhere, we can also just listen to one another.
One man I knew in prison told me his brain used to be in the possession of the drugs that he felt entirely dependent on. His early days in prison felt like death, as if a demon inside him were torturing him.
With a supportive community of fellow inmates around him and the grace of God, this man started putting together one clean day after another. I saw him moving around our prison camp, a smile on his face and giving out fist bumps as he shared how many days he’d been clean.
Another man shared with me how before he came to prison his marriage was on a path to divorce, largely because of his own selfishness. When he had to self-surrender to prison, he and his wife sat in their car in the parking lot. The last words she said to him before he walked inside were, “Don’t count on me being here when you get home.”
During this man’s time in prison, he came to grips with his anger toward the world, toward other people and toward himself. After about a month at Ashland, he prayed, “God, I need help. Please, soften my heart.”
Months later, from his brokenness emerged a humility and a peace, and even though he was still in prison, he and his wife were in a better place than they’d been during their many years of marriage.
Resurrection is real, and it is all around us. Imprisonment, defeat and death might get their say, but they do not get the last word.
P.G. Sittenfeld delivered a version of this essay to his fellow prisoners at Ashland Satellite Prison Camp in Kentucky.
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