A Soul’s Worth

Last year around this time, I wrote a short piece on my first Christmas at the jail, about how Christmas carols sound different surrounded by plastic and concrete than they do in candle-lit church sanctuaries, about how lines like “And you, beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low” or “For sinners here, the silent Word is pleading” seem somehow more urgent or pressing or something here. The familiar words come crashing into the ugliness of the human condition from out there in “abstract theology land” with startling force.

This year, it was once again my task to go around with treat bags and carols to all the units that weren’t allowed to come to the gym for the Christmas services. These are the inmates who are either on the disciplinary unit (“the hole,” as they very much un-affectionately refer to it) or in protective custody or stuck in health care due to suicide risk or some other thing. These are the guys (and occasionally girls) who for whatever reason just can’t make it on the units. They struggle in more ways than can be enumerated. In many ways, they occupy the bottom rung of the ladder in a place that many regard as the bottom rung of the societal ladder.

It’s hard to express how it feels to sing to people who you can only see through a narrow slit in a door. Often there are smiles of appreciation on the other side. Sometimes there are looks of indifference. Sometimes people just lay on their beds looking at the ceiling. Sometimes they pound their applause (or frustration?) on their doors. Often there is simply heart-rending sadness. One person retreated under their blanket and just cried.

One guy in particular looked wary throughout, but I kept trying to make eye contact to make the experience seem somehow more human. When we finished our last song, I walked over to his cell and went right up to his window. I wanted to tell him that we had a treat bag for him, but he was just sobbing, his face red with anguish. He put his hand on the glass, and I moved mine to meet his on the other side. Every time I started to pull away, he kept insistently pounding the glass with his hand until I put my hand back near his. How desperately we crave basic human contact, to know that we are not alone.

We got back from doing the rounds around the units. I sat through the remainder of the services with this gnawing empty feeling that wouldn’t go away. A few lines from O Holy Night came to mind:

Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.

Souls need to feel worth. This is acutely, desperately true in the jail, obviously. Many of the people there feel like trash, have been treated like trash for much of their lives, have treated others like trash for much of their lives. They are well-acquainted with what life looks and feels like when souls are deemed to have little worth. Their sins and errors have piled up. The sins and errors of others have ground them down. A soul is reduced to pressing tear-stained hands against a piece of glass designed to prevent the contact, the worth it so desperately craves.

Till he appeared. The Christian conviction is that this appearing changed something for all the souls that struggle to feel anything like worth. “Immanuel” was and is one of the most hopeful names for Jesus the Christ. God with us. God come to share in and transform the human condition. God come to demonstrate a soul’s worth. God come to identify with his sinful and error-prone image-bearers. God come, ultimately, to subject himself to the worst we could come up with in order to save our souls. God on the bottom rung.

Souls have worth. Every last one of them. His appearing settled the issue for all time.

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

——-

Image source.