OUR FEARS & personal underground
“The underground is a dangerous but potentially life-giving 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. This is the best image I can offer . . . of the field of forces surrounding the experience of God.”
Prison is a society’s subconscious.
Our subconscious, or “underground,” buried parts of ourselves, is like an internal prison.
They mirror each other.
One woman in our church, upon hearing this: “As you spoke about all this, one word keeps coming up for me. Abandonment.”
Bingo.
Kinship so quickly.
“I learn by going where I have to go.”
Story:
Man coming home has DV issues. Church families have DV issues! It took welcoming an “outsider” with DV charges to get a church talking about domestic violence within the church! That’s the gift of the prisoner.
Prisons are society’s subconscious.
What is cut off, repressed, locked up beneath our line of conscious sight? Racism, gun violence, domestic violence, sexual abuses, financial dealings, etc. Prisoners embody our widespread projections—the parts of ourselves we hide and repress within. We are getting at the root of mass incarceration when we see this connection. In welcoming these prisoners home, it’s going to resonate with, and resurrect, parts of our fears and issues we’ve not dealt with.
“Any spiritual journey . . . will take us inward and downward, toward the hardest realities of our lives, rather than outward and upward toward abstraction, idealization, and exhortation. The spiritual journey runs counter to the power of positive thinking.”
Your stuff will come up. Old wounds, parts of your past self may be mirrored in this person. Instead of blindly reacting with the same impulses we use to control these parts inside ourselves, we want to create a culture in your group where those parts are welcomed.
Be gentle with each other. Create a safe environment where we commit to 1) seeking self-understanding and Christ’s transforming work within us over trying to change the person coming home, and 2) letting fellow team members gently call us to this reflection when they see our issues coming up before we do.
This is our Covenant. Return this week to review that.
Stuff will come up. It just will. It’s not a problem to manage, but rather the gift of Christ meeting us in the prison: it’s part of our own transformation.
Story
A man feels very anxious about a need to create a curriculum, a contract, a program, accountability for their OPOP partner coming home. He critiques the program, presses this even against the feel of the rest of the group. He becomes intense in team meeting. His stuff is coming up. This is more about him than the suffering inmate working through his reentry. This man in the group had a nephew struggling through a heroin addiction, and this man did what he could, gave money, was manipulated and burned over the last two years. He’s afraid of stepping into that again. But he never told many people about it. And, of course, the issues go deeper than that, back further in his life.
We can’t fix each other, but we reorient towards Christ, welcoming whatever buried issues rising within us. That’s mutual resurrection. It’s scary.
“Why must we go down and in? Because as we do so, we will meet the darkness that we carry within ourselves—the ultimate source of the shadows that we project onto other people. If we do not understand that the enemy is within, we will find a thousand ways of making someone “out there” into the enemy, becoming [people] who oppress rather than liberate others.”
“There is a light in us that only darkness itself can illuminate.
Only the experience of our own darkness gives us the light we need to be of help to others whose journey into the dark spots of life is only just beginning.
It’s then that our own taste of darkness qualifies us to be an illuminating part of the human expedition. Without that, we are only words, only false witnesses to the truth of what it means to be pressed to the ground and rise again.”
“If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this is shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”
Heartbreaks & Mistakes
The light we gain in darkness is the awareness that, however bleak the place of darkness was for us, we did not die there. We know now that life begins again on the other side of the darkness. Another life. A new life. After the death, the loss, the rejection, the failure, life does go on. Differently, but on. Having been sunk into the cold night of despair—and having survived it—we rise to new light, calm and clear and confident that what will be will be enough for us.
The Welcoming Prayer
I welcome everything that comes to me in this moment for I know it is for my healing.
I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, situations, and conditions.
I let go of my desire for approval.
I let go of my desire for control.
I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person, or myself.
I open to the love and presence of God and the healing action and grace within.