God’s silence is our meeting place, our commons. By entering, we consent to God’s grace peeling away the rind of our small selves, transforming our wrongdoings, virtues, moralities, and fears into boundless Love. In the commons, we intimately meet all others who answer that same call, whether they enter from a neighbor’s home, a hospital, or a prison.
We meet in spirit in God’s commons. Our given names, riches, and physical scars all disappear. God’s darkness dissolves us into God. There we meet Mary Magdalene, Judas Iscariot, and the innumerable unnamed. After touching God’s silence, many of us crave someone else to share the experience with. This is especially true for those locked behind prison walls.
John of the Cross overcame many obstacles to write about God while in prison. Little has changed in the five hundred years since his time. People in prisons today encounter God in profound ways. Like him, they want to share their encounters, ask crucial questions, and crave connection with others who seek God’s commons. Their souls slip out unseen to relish in God’s tender caress. They overcome mighty odds to write down their thoughts. Concrete floors help them sharpen nubby pencils. In solitary confinement they’re stripped of anything to write with or on. Yet like John of the Cross, they still find ways to write, to share, to reach out.
Those in prison who write Contemplative Outreach reach out blindly from God’s commons. They never know who reads their letters. And we who read and reply don’t know if they are surrounded by seventy people in a dormitory or are battling hallucinations in solitary confinement. It doesn’t matter. They reach out from a desire for love and need to be seen and heard. Some share how shame haunts their hearts. Some confide how inhuman isolation can bring profound spiritual connection. Discovering Centering Prayer in prison, many write, is the difference between living with hope rather than despair. On the whole, they fill pages with gratitude for Centering Prayer, for meeting God in silence.
Reading letters from contemplatives in prisons is to meet them in the Silence. It is a Lectio, a prayerful reading, with real-life consequences. We read their letters precisely as they offer themselves, without our judgements, biases, or false hopes clouding our replies. When they share tragedy, we hold their heaviness in our hearts. When they share how Centering Prayer brings them a sense of peace and belonging, we say, “Yes, we understand you.”
In our replies, we understand we are guests they invite into their souls. Our replies must reach out with love and intimacy, like a tender and light dance in God’s silence. We avoid taking on or offering flattery while offering encouragement and care. We are invited guests in prisons and the souls of those who are living in prisons. Our obligation to take care has consequences from the organizational level down to the soul level.
When Centering Prayer ends, God’s Silence continues to reverberate as our eyes open and our scars become visible. Some get in cars and drive home. Others return to overcrowded rooms, solitary loneliness, and hunger that must wait until the next meal arrives.
In Silence we heal together because we are spiritually bound, but our daily lives provide vastly different grounds for carrying out our contemplative practice. Meeting there is one gift of Centering Prayer, but it comes with the responsibility to meet each other in bodies with scars, faces with stories, and lives that are complex and human. For those in prison to take time and speak from their contemplative silence is an act of faith that they will be heard. To hear them and respond to their call is to meet them in God’s love.
The last word belongs to Rumi, who so loved God’s Silence that his invitation to us still resounds to this very day:
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
Yours in God’s love,
a member of the COPOST team
To learn more or find out how to volunteer with us, contact [email protected].
