WELCOMING PRAYER

REPRESSION

Several years ago, I visited Old Folsom Prison in California, where Johnny Cash had his famous concert. I entered the old fortress with Ray Leonardini, who has been practicing contemplative (still, silent) prayer with the men inside there for many years. I had always been skeptical of the sitting-in-silence-for-a-long-time kind of prayer—I had seen it used as a snobbish hobby of spiritual elites and retirees and introverts—but I wanted to see how it worked with incarcerated populations.

Once the guards waved their metal detector wands over our bodies, we passed through heavy, clanging, wrought-iron gates, then down zig-zagging flights of steel stairwells, presenting our volunteer badges at another underground checkpoint of locked gates.

The prison was built down the backside of a ravine, so down and down we went—through loud tiers of prison cells that I recognized from multiple action movies filmed in the California facility, where men shouted, taunted, and barked at us from behind their bars, an obvious reaction to being caged like animals before a constant parade of outside visitors. We descended down more tunnels and stairwells, emptying out onto the chain-link-fenced yard, mixing with the general population of hundreds of men lifting weights and playing handball, until we finally reached Graystone Chapel, there at the very bottom of the prison.

Inside it was eerily quiet.

The men in the contemplative prayer group had arranged 75 chairs in a wonderfully open circle. They welcomed me—some with great kindness, others with skepticism.

After Ray hosted some introductions across the immense circle, he helped us prepare for twenty minutes of absolute stillness before God. His last words to us were: “Words are how we use religion to control the narrative and protect ourselves. In silence now, let’s go beneath the story we tell ourselves.” The prayer bell rang softly and we entered into silence together.

In twenty minutes of startling silence, I heard noises from the yard outside the chapel. I thought of the many chambers we’d passed through in our journey down to the bottom of this prison. It struck me that the journey down into our own hearts was not too different: the descent into the prisons is the same descent into the hidden places inside ourselves.

Or, the descent into prisons and the descent into our inner shadows is the same lengthy, tricky journey. It takes some doing.

Here inside this prison, in the stillness, in prayer with the men, I realized I was inside the nation’s subconscious, where we as a people have tried to bury our problems: our domestic violence, our gun violence, our many addictions, our racism, our mental illnesses, our sexual brokenness, our poor, all of our problems that we want to hide and erase, all that we cannot heal and that we’d rather not face.

Only in this stillness—with others, before God—could this connection happen inside my mind and heart.

Hours later, as we left the fortress and headed toward our cars, I looked back at the famous entrance and saw Folsom Prison was its own postal code, its telling name in brass letters there on the stony facade: REPRESA, CA.

God’s love reaches ever downwards, through our locked doors and systems of repression, and finds us. God brings us together and heals us there.

“I had always imagined God to be in the same general direction as everything else that I valued: up.

I had to be forced underground before I could understand that the way to God is not up but down.

The underground is a dangerous but potentially life-giving place to which [a deeply challenging experience] takes us; a place where we come to understand that the self is not set apart or special or superior but is a common mix of good and evil, darkness and light; a place where we can finally embrace the humanity we share with others.

That is the best image I can offer not only of the underground but also of the field of forces surrounding the experience of God.”

— Parker Palmer, "Let Your Life Speak"