IV. GENTLY REMOVING THE LAYERS
“All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.”
— Richard Rohr
Hopefully, just by seeing this is a regular module—”Not the Story We Wanted”—you are already feeling the core message: THIS UNFORTUNATE EXPERIENCE IS (OFTEN) PART OF THE JOURNEY.
We don’t just mean the One Parish One Prisoner journey of relationship and reentry out of incarceration’s underground realm today. We mean any journey through disappointment and grief can take us even deeper: into the heart and mystery of our faith.
For centuries, Christian liturgies have proclaimed “the Mystery of Faith” towards the climax of the service:
We proclaim your Death, O Lord and profess your Resurrection until you come again.
Theologians call it “the Paschal Mystery:” Christ’s descent, death, and resurrection. That’s the mystery we proclaim. Not merely life-support. Not just death-avoidance.
THIS IS OUR STORY
Jesus told his disciples as they approached the holy city Jerusalem—what they hoped would be the exciting climax of the adventure—that he would soon be betrayed, arrested, handed over to death.
His friends—who had invested their entire lives to journey with him—had to think: Wait, what?!
That’s not the story they wanted, not what they signed up for.
They believed this Jesus was the promised Anointed One—and that meant he was the great reformer, the righteous king-to-be. They were on a winning team. All the healings, the wonders, the crowds of followers, the spiritual and political teachings that would set God’s people of Israel back on track for liberation from Roman occupation—all of it was leading to a face-off with the Jerusalem establishment, and their beloved Jesus would triumph. He’d sit on the throne—and they’d get to be his next cabinet officials!
But now Jesus told them disaster was ahead? He even sounded OK with the fact that the forces against them might destroy their entire mission. Actually worse: that there was suffering and even death around the corner.
Peter responded the way any of us might respond to a threat—to our hopes, plans or efforts:
Fight: First Peter argued with Jesus, that he wouldn’t let this happen. Then, when the police showed up to arrest Jesus, Peter got his weapon out and started swinging.
Of course none of you would ever argue with Jesus (nor aim a firearm at police). But are there ways you want to fight against this sad reality right now?
Freeze: One way to freeze when threatened is to go numb. Shut down. Try to go on with your life. Peter goes into the city without following Jesus’ trial. That’s where others start to recognize him.
Do you find yourself wanting to not think about this, just move on with daily life? Watch more shows online or get busy with another project?
Flight: When people ask Peter if he has anything to do with this arrested man, Peter distances himself. Denies his love and friendship with the newly-condemned man. He flees and hides.
Are there ways you want to distance yourself from your released friend you’ve walked with? Do you feel this when people ask about him/her at church? Do you yourself feel disillusioned? (“Maybe I don’t really know this person, after all . . . “) Do you feel embarrassed of him or her now? Do you want to close your heart and deny the hurt?
Eventually, Peter flees into the shadows and weeps bitterly. Privately. Maybe this is where you’re at.
But the best thing Peter did was to gather once again with the others. They are feeling some of the same things. They resist the temptation to scatter.
So should your team.
“Holy Saturday” by Eugene Burnand
GATHER AS A TEAM AND RE-READ OUR STORY TOGETHER
What happens next is so important for this journey, we ask that you use your upcoming team meeting—meet sooner than later—to read through this moment in John’s Gospel (John 20:19-22).
After your Welcoming Prayer, slowly read this passage aloud, pausing with these questions below (and your own) to let this Story shape our story:
It was late that Sunday evening, and the disciples were gathered together behind locked doors, because they were afraid of the authorities.
The disciples’ mission and hopes are crushed. How do you think they are feeling, besides fear?
How are each of you on the team feeling? (Give time to go around and share.) Are there ways you are hiding behind locked doors?
Now imagine your release friend somewhere out there, this very moment: What do you imagine they are feeling right now? What might they be afraid of? How might they be locking the world out?
Then Jesus came and stood among them. “Peace be with you,” he said.
This is one of our favorite moments in the gospels:
How did Jesus get through the locked doors?? It’s a mystery. It’s as if our locked doors can’t keep the Resurrected Christ out.
Remember, Jesus founded this entire movement (ekklesia/church) on Peter with the words, “and the gates of Hades cannot stand against it/us” (Matthew 16:18). These doors Peter and the disciples locked, shut inside their own personal hells and hopelessness—these locked doors of fear and despair are their personal gates of Hades (realm of the dead). Peter and the disciples are now experiencing in their own lives what Jesus’ entire mission is about: God’s love breaking through all the barriers we build to find us in our hell and hurt.
Imagine Jesus finding your team right now, saying “Peace” to you all. To your friend out there. Be still, close your eyes and imagine this. How might such a word shift your experience right now?
In John’s version of the story, this is where the disciples experience the resurrection: not at the actual tomb where he was buried, but Jesus finding them inside their own sort of tomb. Jesus not only overcame the betrayal and arrest, the community hatred and scapegoating, the religious/political corruption and torture itself—this divine love was able to overcome the small team’s hiding and hopelessness. When all went to crap, the Resurrected Christ still found a way back.
After saying this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were filled with joy at seeing the Lord.
The wounds aren’t erased or minimized. Jesus shows his wounds, vulnerably. As you all have been learning to do as a team, with your letters and storytelling and friendship.
What new wounds might your released friend have suffered through this ordeal? Might they be wounds God suffers as well?
What’s the connection between showing our wounds with those in our circle . . . and joy?
Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so I send you.”
Jesus essentially says, “The mission continues. I haven’t lost hope in you all.” As if to say God trusts us, despite all that’s happened.
There’s no change of course, no plan B. We move forward in the mission of all that God’s called us to be together.
What do you hear in these words of the Resurrected Christ?
Then he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive people’s sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”
This is John’s version of the “Pentecost” story: where the divine power that raised Christ from the dead is shared, poured out, on normal folks. Instead of a dramatic wind (as in Acts 2), it’s the direct breath of Jesus, something intimate and relational. Resurrection life isn’t just in Jesus. It’s shared with disciples like us. Like you.
Resurrection is a movement. It grows. Resurrected Jesus shares resurrection power (Spirit) with the disciples. In the next breath, he charges them to use it to forgive others. Resurrection is a forgiveness movement.
Are you able to start by forgiving your released friend now?
Are you able to forgive others on the team, whom you might feel dropped the ball or let you down?
Are you able to forgive yourself, if you’ve blamed yourself?
“If you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” As if to say, this isn’t just a private piety between you and God. People remained burdened with guilt and shame until you can bring them a healing word of your forgiveness.
People in society carry criminal charges, waste in jail, sit in prison for decades, carry felony records and never-ending barriers from a system that does not forgive.
With this, Jesus puts the responsibility on us—to go carry out the tangible forgiveness of sins for those who are still held under the powers of condemnation.
The next module is called “Rethinking Incarceration.” This is the next step. Repent can be translated as re-think. Transform our minds. rom the world’s systems of punishment and condemnation . . . to Jesus’ vision of restoration, healing, forgiveness and setting captives free:
In the meantime . . .
WAIT
We at Underground Ministries have too often dived into the underground chaos—calling, texting, pleading, driving to their friend’s apartments in the middle of the night, knocking on doors, trying to convince our struggling friends to please, get back on track—trying to drag them out of their shame mistakes. Rarely does this bear lasting fruit.
Merely waiting at the mouth of the tomb, so to say, is hard for us.
Lazarus has to face the uncertainty of stepping out of the tomb, exiting the underground. Jesus waits at the open tomb, with the community who’s rolled away the stone. This is Lazarus’ part alone. We can’t take these decisive steps for our friends.
Waiting has been part of our spiritual formation on the streets, in this work. We learn to wait for God. We learn to respect the slow process of hope, healing and resurrection. It’s a miracle we can’t force or fake.
We’ve been practicing this—silence, prayerful stillness together, waiting—for over a year with the Welcoming Prayer. We’ve been learning to let go of our desire for control, our desire for approval, all the ways we protect ourselves from heartbreak. We practice welcoming what we normally avoid.
“Only suffering and certain kinds of awe lead us into genuinely new experiences. All the rest is merely the confirmation of old experience.
It is amazing to me that the cross or crucifix became the central Christian logo, when its rather obvious message of inevitable suffering is aggressively disbelieved in most Christian countries, individuals, and churches. We are clearly into ascent, achievement, and accumulation. The cross became a mere totem, a piece of jewelry.
Resurrection will always take care of itself, whenever death is trusted. It is the cross, the journey into the necessary night, of which we must be convinced. And then resurrection is offered as a gift. ”— Richard Rohr, "Pain & Descent"
SHARE WITH THE CONGREGATION
People will want to know how your releasing friend is doing. Don’t hide this.
Work with congregation’s leadership to set up a few minutes in the next service or gathering to give an update. You can take a few minutes to share something from your experience and reading the gospel passage above.
Something like:
“Our friend _________ has been struggling in their resurrection journey home from prison. We can’t give all the details, but here’s some of the story. We are learning how difficult reentry is for millions of men and women trying to heal and rebuild their lives after prison. We are learning about the “stones” that are so hard to roll away, like ____________ and __________. As we get to know our friend better, we are learning more about the trauma, their long history of pain that’s slow to heal beneath the “layers” of addiction or unhealthy behaviors.
The One Parish One Prisoner program actually includes this part of the journey. We are continuing to meet as a team, and there are more chapters in our curriculum to cover. We are re-reading the stories of how the father waits for the prodigal son, how the disciples wait in the upper room . . . and the resurrected Christ comes and finds them.
We invite you as a church to pray with us. For ____________. That God’s love find and reach ________ wherever they are right now. That we grow in compassion for all those who are in the underground of jail, prison, addiction out there. Lord, give us more of your heart as we wait with Easter hope.
Thank you everyone for caring and supporting this journey. We’ll keep you updated.”
“We seek a compassion that stands in awe of what some people have had to carry—rather than standing in judgment of how they carry it.”
— Greg Boyle, Homeboy Industries
Carlos Rodriguez, The Happy Givers
WHAT IF THEY SURFACE?
IF YOUR FRIEND SURFACES BUT IS NOT ON A LEGAL PATH—back in addiction and not wanting recovery—HERE’S OUR POLICY AT ONE PARISH ONE PRISONER
While it's not our role to volunteer/share information about our releasing friends' poor decisions with their authorities, we want to make sure whenever they are walking off the legal path (of probation or DOC parole) that:
We are only helping them get back on the path as the immediate next step (get back to WA, be straight forward with your probation officer, do things the right way, comply, comply, comply)
We aren't helping maintain or further strategize their moves off the path (not enabling any unapproved housing situations, unapproved trips out of the county, paying a penny for any of their off-path existence).
We don’t scold or judge if your friend is in survival mode with moves like these. We just say, We love you and can only provide assistance back to the legal path. Other than that, we are here to listen and care no matter what path you choose
We are non-anxious, not trying to fix or save—just being healthy, loving people ready to hear our friend’s struggles and encourage them back into the work of legal reentry
WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR CHOICES AS ADULTS.
WE ARE CALLED TO THE WORK OF RELATIONSHIP.
“Jesus did not seem to teach that one size fits all. But instead, that His God adjusts to the vagaries and failures of the moment.
This ability to adjust to human disorder and failure is often named God’s ‘providence,’ or compassion.
Every time God forgives us, God is saying God’s rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.”— Richard Rohr
All of these men here at a recent Christmas dinner—we built relationships of trust and friendship with each of them during an initial incarceration/reentry round. And they all disappeared back into the underground, more than once. We waited. It wasn’t over. It was just the beginning. Faithfulness over time: we just kept our hearts open, our doors open. Sometimes a phone call. Maybe a letter from treatment or a new prison. When they were ready, they reached out again. “I’m ready this time.”
Coming back from the dead takes years sometimes.
Advent teaches us to wait in hope.
A release date taught us to wait and prepare.
This is a spiritual practice. Stick together. Your friend needs a community who won’t turn their back, who will be there when they’re ready.
“Ours is a God who waits.
Who are we not to?”— Father Greg Boyle
MOVING FORWARD
While you wait—staying together as a team, not scattering—continue through the remaining monthly modules in your journey:
As you continue to read, reflect, and gather together in the coming weeks or months, you are also giving your friend time to maybe hit a place where they’re ready to reach out.
When or if they do, and they are seeking to resume the reentry work (on a legal and accountable path) you can spend time together first. Rebuild connection.
THEN you as a team can return to the modules where you left off, as applicable:
A BENEDICTION
“Lord, we pray we never find ourselves without hope, without a glimpse of the empty tomb each time we happen upon a cross.
Help us begin our daily journey expecting both crosses and empty tombs and rejoicing when we encounter either because we know you are with us.
Amen.”— "Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals"
Bless you.
Let us know if we can be of any help at this point: info@undergroundministries.org
