Contra Mundum

You’ll have to pardon me some in this piece, but I’ve been thinking a great deal about all that’s taken place the last 5 ½ years; where I was, to where I am, to where I’m headed. And sometimes those thoughts have just rambled on their own, rushing over me with memories. I’ll sit there and think, “that really happened,” and look and see where I am now and wonder how did I not have the trust to believe.

            Believe. I used to roll my eyes when I’d hear someone at church ask to hear another worshiper’s “faith” story. It was always when we’d start with a new class of elders – good old Presbyterian bureaucracy – and I’d listen to someone thirty years my senior drone on about their parents’ church and their first Bible and I’d think “faith stories,” those don’t exist anymore. They ended with Joseph, and Daniel, and Paul. After all, I was master of my own future. Life was good – on the outside anyway – and appearances mattered.

            Early on at the jail, as my life was spinning out of control (as if my former life was ever really in control) I came across Charles Colson’s book, “Who Speaks for God.” Colson was one of the most powerful – and feared – members of Nixon’s inner Whitehouse circle. He was a brilliant lawyer. He was also ruthless, cunning, and not prone to tolerate dissent. Colson met his downfall in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. He was convicted in Federal Court for his role in that scandal and sent to prison. Everything that he had worked for was stripped from him.

            I read Colson’s book feeling hopeless and lost. I was in the initial weeks of the total collapse of my life. I didn’t think I could survive a day, let alone the rest of my life, with the pain and guilt of the past and fear of the future overwhelming me in that dirty cell. And I tried to focus on something Colson wrote in that book, something – a little thread – to help me hang on. You see, Colson found God at his worst moment. God was never lost, he said. It was Colson who had been lost. He wrote these words:

            “I had spent my first 40 years seeking the whole world to the neglect of my soul. But what I couldn’t find in my quest for power and success – that is, true security and meaning – I discovered in prison where all worldly props had been stripped away. And by God’s grace, I lost my life in order that I might find true life in Christ.”

            I couldn’t believe what I was reading. There was no way Colson could mean what he wrote. It made no sense. I knew his story, knew how he left prison and founded “Prison Fellowship” and devoted the remainder of his life to spreading the message of God’s power and love in all circumstances, but there was no way he honestly believed what he wrote.

            A few quick stories. The lawyer.  I have a friend – that word doesn’t begin to describe him – who I called from the jail moments after my arrest. He’s a lawyer and jeopardized his own career by staying by me through those first difficult months. He came to the jail every day for the first three months and then four or five times a week thereafter just to check on me. He asked his minister to visit me at my worst when my own minister refused to “get involved.”

            The minister.  So an Episcopal minister shows up to meet with me and we’re talking through Plexiglas – that’s the way visits are at the jail. And I lose it. I’m a mess, sobbing, wishing I was dead but knowing I can’t be since I’d made a pact with God to “see this through” (whatever that meant. I really hadn’t given it much thought). He listened to me and then didn’t offer me any cookie-cutter prayer or syrupy words of encouragement. He just simply said “God is with you, Larry,” and he asked if he could return for more visits.

            That minister – a man I never would have even met but for my lawyer friend and my own church’s abandonment of me – has become a close friend. He visited me at the receiving center, he’s come out here, and he has led the charge to get me released early.

He is like family which brings me to ...

The relative. My cousin and her husband, a successful couple living in Northern Virginia learn I was arrested. Over Thanksgiving – my first and worst Thanksgiving while locked up – I received a simple “thinking of you” card from them. “We are here for you,” the note said. Two months later, I was called to the visitation room. There again, through the dirty Plexiglas, I saw them. I was as pale as you can be from a lack of sunlight in six months, and I was scared, and lonely, and frankly tired of it all. And yet, after that visit I wrote in my journal something I hadn’t written before that day; I wrote, “I think all this will work out.”

            Five and a half years. I’ve been let down by people in here and out there and I have seen horrendous violence and the waste of many lives. Yet, there are the other moments, like when the big, black kid at the jail bear-hugged me and kept saying over and over “we did it!” when he passed his high school equivalency test. There’s my friendship with DC, a man who forty years ago was as notorious as any inmate in the Virginia prison system. Today, he is one of the kindest, most decent men I’ve ever met. I trust DC. I don’t say that very often in here. And, I feel a kinship to him and a brotherly love I didn’t think possible in the confines of prison.

            Chuck Colson kept a diary of his time behind bars. He wrote the following insightful thoughts early in his incarceration:

            “This is no country club … It is a prison and the conditions are really worse than I expected … there is everything here from lifelong, hardened criminals to young drug offenders.

            The reason I am glad to be here, however, is the sudden realization of how many needs there are here … My heart has ached for so many while I am here; more important, when I leave I hope I can do something about the concept of rehabilitation and punishment. All its high sounding names – deterrence, rehabilitation – are untrue. If it is punishment, so be it; but maybe it is more humane to whip a man’s body than destroy his soul slowly.”

            He concluded with these words:

            “I have an obligation to try to improve the fate and circumstances of man in this plight … I am convinced the Lord has planned this for me and will use me for His purpose.”

            There is a simple story in John’s Gospel about Jesus healing a young, blind man. Prior to the healing, the discussion centers on the cause of the man’s blindness. “Is it the result of his parents’ sin or his?” the disciples ask. “Neither,” comes Jesus’s reply. “It was so the works of God might be displayed in him.” And with those words Jesus gave the young man his sight. Those in power didn’t understand who did this; how could it be, they wondered. And they questioned the man about the “healer.” His answer comes to me often: “All I know is once I was blind and now I see.”

            “Contra Mundum” – “against the world” – it was the great Latin rallying cry of the fourth century Christian theologian Athanasius. It means to stand for Christ against the powers of the world and to understand that God’s ways are different. I see now why God has so long spoken through the perspective of the powerless, why He makes special demands on His people to care for the oppressed, sick, and suffering. Justice does not devolve from human institutions and laws but in the righteousness of God and His Word.

            That may sound all fanciful and self-delusional, but it simply means it is wiser to take refuge in the Lord than any earthly prince.

            What does all that mean? It means even when we get off course, God is in control. It means at my worst, God was at His best. It means that there is a reason for all this. As Bob Dylan sang in “My Back Pages,” “I once was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” The visits, the Bible coming from my friend Charlie, being befriended by an Episcopal minister, the cards from “Martha,” and even my divorce, they happened to put me where I am today in relation to my God. Or, as the young man told the Pharisees, “I was blind and now I see.”

            It is the season of Lent, preparation for Easter, and for the first time in six years I didn’t give up something like coffee or chips. Instead, I’m reading a treatise on the 91^st Psalm and a study of the Book of James. It is hard to fathom any sacrifice I could make worthy of what God has done for me.

            What does this have to do with prison? Probably nothing, but nothing happens by coincidence. I look back over these past 5 ½ years and see what Chuck Colson meant. Like Paul being blinded on the road to Damascus and the scales suddenly falling from his eyes and he saw, I see what it means. Or, as Mr. Colson so eloquently put it,

            “It is in God’s timing, not ours. And it is the result of His sovereign will, not of any magic wand we may think we wield.”

            This chapter of my life will someday come to an end and a new one will begin and the lessons of this chapter, the understanding of contra mundum will carry forward. And I don’t think the Circuit Court judge who sentenced me had any idea what God would do for me.