The gift of choosing innocence

Wednesday, April 10, 2024

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The gift of choosing innocence

During the night the angel of the Lord opened the doors of the prison, led the apostles outside and said, “Go and take your place near the temple, and tell the people everything about this new life.”

And so they did what they were told to do by the angel of the Lord. They did not obey the high priest or his council, but they did obey God. Later at a reasonable time of the morning the Sanhedrin sent for them, but they could find no one in the cells, only the guards outside the locked doors.

Then someone came in and reported to them, “The men whom you put in prison are in the temple area and are teaching the people.”

The leader of the Sanhedrin, Annas, was known for his hot temper. But the council did not immediately assassinate their Christ-following adversaries. The leaders were chastened by the popularity of the apostles’ words.

The captain and court officers went to the temple and brought them, but without force, because they were afraid of being stoned by the people.

How did these men spend their night in jail?

I remember one night in 1968 in the Hammond, Indiana city jail, where my friend Paul and I were held until our English Comp teacher Miss Griffin came to bail us out. We had dropped off rolls of movie film from our Valpo class to be developed and were headed home in a rainstorm.

Paul was ticketed for driving far too fast on his big motorcycle through I 294 traffic south of Chicago, and the Hammond police let me stay in the cell overnight with him, since I had nowhere else to go. (Do they do that nowadays?)

We sang a few songs, wrote something on the wall, and soothed each other’s fears. Kathy Griffin arrived in the morning, glad that we were still alive. I rode back with her, and Paul rode back on his Harley. Circumspectly.

But back to the men who had been with Jesus for three years, through thick and thin. They sang too, I’m sure. They prayed. They waited for the morning. Were they afraid? Paul and I had each other to stir up our confidence, and they had not only each other, but the stirring ineffable presence of Jesus with them in their cell.

In his second meditation on what he calls our “daily rendezvous with God” Jim Finley reminds me that Jesus is with me in every prison cell of my life, virtual or real, whether or not I realize it. “The thread breaks many times from our end, but it never breaks from God’s end.”

Although no more nights, I have spent countless days in various Illinois state penitentiaries, leading worship, sharing talks during Kogudus retreats, eating meals with inmates, performing countless weddings with prisoners and their fiancees coming in from the outside. I know the reverberation of ten doors locking behind me on the way into Danville Correctional Center. And I understand that the bright side of life in prison is time available to create a rhythm of solitude and silence, a “rendezvous” with God. Often it’s easier in prison than on the outside. Finley encourages us, wherever we are:

The essential, that which is given to us in the metaphorical fire of this quiet oneness, never imposes itself on us, while the unessential is constantly imposing itself. We begin to wonder, “How can I learn not to get so caught up in the complexities of the day-to-day that I keep losing my sense of connectedness with this depth, this fire, which alone is ultimately real?” Thomas Merton says it beats in our very blood whether we want it to or not. 

It doesn’t lie in our power to make these insights happen, but here’s the key. We can freely choose to assume the stance that offers the least resistance to being overtaken by the fire that we cannot make happen. This is our daily rendezvous, and the key is that it’s personal. We have to find those acts, those persons, those modes of service, those moments of creative unfolding, those moments where we feel something is being asked of us.

We want to set aside a quiet time of availability to this. And at the end of each rendezvous with the deeper place, we ask for the grace not to break the thread of that sensitivity as we go through the rest of our day.

It’s a kind of obediential fidelity that nobody can see but which matters more than everything. We try to live out of it with integrity because it changes the way we see everybody. Everyone is an infinitely loved, broken person in a fleeting, often not-so-fair, gorgeous, lovely, unexplainable world. 

This description of life with God applied to those apostles in the prison cell. And when they were released? What did they say about, as the angel called it, “this new life?”

I think they might well have said what Jesus told Nicodemus, at night, a little distance from the fire, words at last to be shared with everyone everywhere.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever shall believe in him, will have eternal life. God did not send his son to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

 (Acts 5, Psalm 34, John 3)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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(Acts 5, Psalm 34, John 3)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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