GOD'S TEARS

One of the most intimate and memorable moments of worship I have known came in a seemingly unlikely place, although I have come to expect such things from God. The place was the dayroom on the psychiatric floor of the clinic in Twin Towers Correctional Facility. Twin Towers houses about 4,000 inmates, both male and female, all of whom are diagnosed with varying degrees of psychological challenges. It is the largest mental health facility in the United States, and it’s a jail. This is clear and alarming evidence that we are incarcerating our mentally ill in numbers we have never seen before. It both saddens and disturbs me that because of our failing as a society to properly deal with issues such as mental illness, we instead just throw people in jail. But using incarceration as an answer to our mental health care challenge doesn’t make people’s problems go away. As Angela Davis said some forty years ago, the only thing that disappears is the human being.

I have met thousands of these “invisible” people. And by invisible, I mean people who are tucked away in jails and institutions, hidden from the mainstream view. But I am here to say that there are no throwaway people. There are only people who, regardless of who they are or what they may or may not have done, are held in God’s grace and love as God’s beloved children. Chavez is one such person.

Chavez speaks only broken English. She was deeply fractured from the tragic and traumatic events that had landed her in jail. She would come to my small intimate gathering for worship in the psych unit on the fourth floor of the clinic each Tuesday morning with four or five others, shuffling into the small recreation room draped in dark blue “suicide gowns” fashioned out of the same material used for furniture pads and fastened only with Velcro strips. It’s bizarre that they refer to these as gowns. They are terribly degrading and yet, oddly, the women seem to somehow transcend the degradation with grace, in a way that helps me to not see the gown, but only the person. Of those who would attend, Chavez was the one who, while never saying anything, always helped me set the altar, which was a three-foot-square table. Together, we would spread the white altar covering, liturgical colored band and fair linen. She always did it with such gentle intention and reverence. She loved placing the cross and she always sat directly across from me, with just the width of the table separating us. She would fix her gentle gaze upon that cross during Eucharist.

Once, while we were taking a quiet moment of reflection, as we always did after sharing Communion, I opened my eyes to the sight of the white fair linen. Suddenly and silently, I saw her teardrop land. I heard Chavez whisper, “Thank you, Jesus.” I knew that God’s tears were mingling with her own in that moment.

God’s grace was with her pain and her comfort. This is a place where the awareness of one’s need of God’s healing is very real. It is also a place where the experience of that grace is very real. And there are moments when this divine grace cuts through all the complexities of life here, and we are allowed to experience the stunning and breathtaking reality of God’s love up close.

Brother Dennis