hell, prison, punishment, and justice

My dear friend Caroline graced me with a stream of consciousness email that she spoke into her phone while driving across a couple of states that included a bunch of hilarious little language ditties (eg. "my wife on earth" instead of "my life on earth") as well as a really moving consideration of what happens when we die.

Heck, I don't know.  Obviously.

Caroline talked about how she was running out of the motivation to do good stuff in her life so that she would have it made when she dies.  That's not a/the reason to do good stuff, she said (but she said it better).  We should do good stuff because it matters now.

I've never been one for the whole heaven/hell thing myself, but watching Cosmos today freaked the shit out of me and reminded me that I wanted to think and write about the similarities between hell and prison and what they reveal, not about our afterlife, but about our now-life.

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When I first started going to church at New Covenant, and while doing some research to find out if/how wack that church is (Turns out it isn't.), I came across this piece Ron wrote about hell.  Here's an excerpt:

“Judgment” and “justice” are key biblical issues, and a key part of the Judeo-Christian hope is that God will bring a final judgment—ie., a re-ordering of society so that the relationships between people are what they ought to be in the broadest and most wholesome sense of that hope. 

However, “hell” as a word describing separation from God is a very small part of the imagery the biblical writers use to describe the future of those who reject God’s re-ordering of human society. 

The word “hell” appears 16 times in the NIV. Three are a mistranslation of the word “Hades,” which means “the place of the dead.” In the other 13 instances, “hell” is probably a terrible translation of the word “Gehenna” (literally, “garden of Hinnom”), which actually referred to a place just outside the walls of Jerusalem... 

And in another post:

[R]eferences to “Hell/Gehenna” in the New Testament are almost all from words credited to Jesus and are almost all warnings to church/religious leaders not to abuse their influence. Never once does Jesus threaten the tax gatherers, the prostitutes, or the wounded and oppressed with “Hell”
 …
 “Gehenna” was a very concrete location in Jesus’ time. The books of Kings and Chronicles tell us that a wealthy family named “Hinnom” owned a garden near Jerusalem which first King Ahaz, and then even more audaciously, King Manasseh turned into a place for burning children as a sacrifice to the god Molech. When he came to the throne, King Josiah was so distraught by this practice of his forefathers that he destroyed the altars and turned the garden into a garbage dump—the beautiful garden did, in reality, become a place where the flames never went out and the worms never died out.
 Jesus would have passed by this place when he visited Jerusalem.  And, everyone who heard Jesus use the word “Gehenna” would have pictured the main city garbage dump and known its history.

If we put this image that every hearer would have pictured immediately,  together with Jesus’ use of this image as a warning to church/religious leaders, we have Jesus warning current synagogue leaders and future church leaders not to let their arrogance cause them to turn God’s garden into a garbage dump. It is church leaders, not the lost and outcast of Jesus’ day, who are consistently warned of the danger of harming others in a manner that turns their own lives into the garbage of history.

(That was around the time that I learned that I really like learning about the historical context of scripture, especially learning all of the alternative translations for given words.  And the time I learned how grateful I am to have Ron as a teacher.)

Twelve years of Catholic school and nobody ever explained it to me that way.  I would just go in to Confession once a semester, and just in case God was real, recite my obligatory, "Bless me, father, for I have sinned, it has been six months since my last confession.  These are my sins..."  And I always said, "I could be nicer to my brothers," because I couldn't think of any sins.  (What kind of fourth grader is all up in their own brokenness?  Well, I wasn't, anyway.) Then I'd say my six Hail Mary's, or whatever penance I was given, just to make sure that I didn't end up still carrying those "sins," (of not being as nice to my brothers as I could be) and thereby going to hell.

I only ever imagined hell through readings of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," and other stuff like that (which is probably why I never believed in it, and further, found the whole God thing to be a strange bunch of bologna). My second grade "Religion" teacher drew a circle on the chalkboard, and said, "This is your soul."  Then, she drew an "x" in the middle of the soul, and said, "This is a sin on your soul."  Then she drew a bunch more x's.  Confession, she explained, does this: and she erased the x's in the center of the circle.  (Jess and I think it's so funny how in Catholic school, you have "Religion," as if the Catholic stuff we learned is universally "religion."  Jess remembers lamenting, "God, Religion sucked today!")  

Saying, "Bless me, father for I have sinned," etc. and then saying my Hail Mary's brings me no closer to "being nicer to my brothers."  The Hail Mary's are a punishment (a really ineffective one for a ten-year-old who doesn't know what "and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus" means.)

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Thursday, one of the guys I work with at the prison told me that his best friend of fifteen years had committed suicide.  He was innocent, my friend explained, and he wouldn't just tell the parole board that he felt remorse for his crime (which you have to convincingly do to be released on parole).  My friend said that he had begged his friend to just fucking apologize already, to not let his integrity keep him in that shit-hole any longer.  

I've been thinking a lot lately about how obsessed with are with punishment, about how that obsession fuels mass incarceration even more than the prison industry that has emerged and now thrives alongside mass incarceration.  

I've never been the victim of a violent crime, nor has anyone close to me.  So I get that I don't get what it's like to be victimized in that way.  And I can understand the desire to throw someone away for 40+ years.  I have zero stomach for sexual violence, domestic abuse, or child abuse -- hearing/reading about them makes me want to vomit immediately.

But throwing someone away for 40+ years (or whatever) is not justice.  There is no justice for the rape of a child, for the murder of a mother, for the theft of peoples' life savings.  Throwing someone away for 40+ years is certainly some serious punishment, but it has nothing to do with God's kind of justice.

I let my (fabulous) new roommate Ricky borrow my copy of that Rob Bell book I'm always yammering on about, so I can't quote it directly, but I know that in it he argues that God has always wanted to be with us -- but that we can't be with God if we want to bring along our shit.  Our violence, our greed, our racism, our sexism, etc.  If we insist on holding on to that stuff, we remain disconnected from God; we remain in hell.

The kind of justice I'm looking for, when I think about why I do work in the prison industrial complex, is that kind of ubiquitous shit-dropping.  I'll never call locking people in cages justice, and I'll keep on working toward the collective creation of a community-without-our-shit.  Even though that's way more complicated and difficult (and certainly humanly impossible) than our current efforts toward justice.

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We love punishing, maybe because we're not capable of coming together to create real justice.

Caroline said, brilliantly: "And lately I've been wondering if perhaps people are going to be what fixes the earth.  Like, perhaps our real story will be that we evolve and become a good enough group of species that we stop destroying each other and the earth. Or maybe even that at some point the whole entire world and all of the species in it will become evolved enough that we stop wanting to kill each other.  But then I drive and see a bunch of animal carcasses and I think, "If my desire to go to a baby shower in St. Louis and see my best friend and have the convenience of driving in a car is outweighing my fear that I might mistakenly kill an innocent animal as I drive, then there is no way that wild animals are going to stop eating one another in order to stay alive."

When we're ready to drop the shit, we can draw closer to God.  If we continue our obsession with punishment, we continue to heap garbage into that dump.  

I feel like we can get better, but not that much better without the help of some of those wildly mysterious (and sacred) coincidences described in the post where I got punked.