What Hope Sounds Like

Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.

-- Terry Tempest Williams

I dreamed about prison again. I hate dreaming about prison. The last time I dreamed of prison I woke up and immediately started crying. In the dream, I was sentenced for years and I would only be able to see my loved ones once a week on Sundays if they were willing to come all the way to the prison, which was out of their way, as most prisons are.

This time, in the dream, I was in prison with a friend of mine who actually spent two and a half years in prison before receiving clemency from the governor. He was one of those innocent men who went to prison "for a crime he didn't commit."

This is one of those virtuous groups we like to talk about like the single mothers working two or three jobs, or those "happy poor people" you always hear about from privileged people when they return from another mission trip with sun tans and suitcases full of souvenirs.

The judge in my friend's case was reading a newspaper during his trial and the prosecutor claimed he was responsible for bringing drugs from Columbia to Chicago, which was impossible, considering he had never even been out of the country.

I know what prompted my dream. I made the mistake of reading Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" before bed. The book is a science fiction novel based on Vonnegut's time as a soldier in Dresden during World War II. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, recounts his traumatic experience as a prisoner of war. That's what triggered me about prisons.

I've only been behind bars once, and that was enough for me (more on that below, keep reading!). I've visited prisons many times though, and it's one of the most traumatic places on earth, in my humble First World opinion.

Stacks and stacks of men in cages calling out, desperate to talk to somebody. When I would go, I tried to stay focused on the guys I knew, but it's hard when everyone you see is missing someone. As a certified prison volunteer, I made it through the troubling orientation where the “Christian” chaplain described the inmates under his spiritual care as "your worst nightmares" and where I had to pee in a cup while a correctional officer closely examined my aim. Afterwards, I was granted the ability to roam the prison, cell to cell, to visit men in the religion class my chaplain friend ran. Once a week for over year I went to sit in on the class. There's nothing like studying religion in prison. It's really the only place you should. Religion has to answer for places like that.

I expected I'd have to go in and explain to men serving life in prison what God thought of the whole production. Obviously, I had no answers. There are no answers. Thankfully, they were more in touch with God in prison than I was on the outside. That's how it usually goes I suppose.

It's kinda surreal listening to a room full of so-called murderers talking theology. I use the word "murderers" lightly because most of these guys didn't fit society's definition of a killer, they certainly didn't fit mine. These weren't trained assassins, serial killers, or heartless sociopaths like you see in the movies. These were men like me who lost it, and in their worst moment, took things too far. Society just happened to punish their worst five minutes by taking the rest of their lives. Besides a couple of them who could afford good lawyers or who had a more sympathetic skin color, I mean case, they would die in a cage, with no family standing by their side to mourn them. So it goes. That's what the aliens say in "Slaughterhouse Five" whenever they talk about someone who died in the book I'm reading. It's used as an effective literary device that marks all the deaths throughout the book, which are many.

My first day visiting the class, I was sitting in a classroom inside the prison complex in a circle of desks with about thirteen men. They were discussing books written by authors who had been to prison. There's quite a few: "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King, Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "Letters from Prison," and, of course, the Bible, well, at least parts of it. Most of the New Testament really. I told you, prison is one of the best places to discuss religion. It's not hard to think how Paul could write so liberally about grace, liberation, and hope if you've spent any time on the other side of a prison wall.

They were dissecting the author's theology with passion and precision. I've been to seminary, a couple of them, and I had never been part of a discussion on religion quite like this. They systematically popped every caricature of a prisoner that society, politics, media, film, faith, family, and my own overactive imagination had constructed in my head. What was left was simply human beings who were as precious and redeemable as you and me.

While I needed to go into the prison, I couldn't wait to leave. Spending three hours there once a week was exhausting and sickening. Seeing men live in cells the size of a bathroom, hearing stories of verbal abuse by COs and restricted freedoms, smelling the stench of humanity being suffocated was enough to squelch my appetite. But we weren't done yet.

On our way out we would stop off at the staff quarters where we would eat an authentic prison meal in order to take the prison home inside of us and complete the sacrament. My chaplain friend had developed a tolerance for the absurd concoctions they dreamt up for the prisoners and gobbled it up.

Whatever ingredients they happened to have in bulk would make it's way into the mystery meat. Half the time I didnt know what I was consuming. I took a few obligatory bites and guzzled down the small cartons of half-frozen orange juice. I couldn't wait to exit the long stuffy hallways past the bank vault-sized locked doors and universally suspicious security guards who were trained to assume the worst about you.

Every time I made it out I felt and smelt the freedom. It wasn't rare to cry in my car on the long drive home, unless I was carpooling with the chaplain, in which case, I acted as if what we had just witnessed was normal and I was a cyborg who had been programmed with elite super powers to be unaffected by the insane horrors of our so-called free democracy.

Many of the men inside were writers. One had written several fiction novels that had been uploaded online. One of the men gave me a warning about their explicit content to which I told him I didn't mind. I like real writing. If you cuss in your everyday life when you see things that upset you, I'd like to see that in print. Helps me remember where I am.

One of the books the men read was on the prison system by a liberal theologian who my chaplain friend and I thought was the shit. He didn't talk about saving prisoner's souls or becoming the best prisoner you could be through Christ, he was pontificating about dismantling the whole goddamn prison system, from a theological perspective, of course. I expected the guys to love this book that essentially condemned the whole prison system as a demonic tool of oppression, a Goliath giant that needed to be cast down. They hated it.

Most of the LTOs (long-time offenders) in the class were very conservative. I mean VERY conservative, which didn't make sense to me. Wasn't it conservative theology that perpetuated penal substitutionary atonement theories that justified harsh punishment for crime in the eyes of most Bible believing Christians? And didn't many conservative Christians vote for conservative political candidates who tended to be tough on crime which sent more and more men to prison to spend their dying days in a fucking hell hole?

But in prison, as in most of life, you dance with the one who brung ya. And like it or not, by far the people who visit the prison, host church services on Sundays, and go cell to cell with warm smiles and free literature, were those soul saving evangelical types with big oozing hearts and even bigger hidden agendas.

I would also learn that the chaplains hired by prisons were overwhelmingly conservative and conservatives were out to reform individuals, not transform systems. So prisoners, like slaves before them, are nurtured into a brand of Christianity that will help them become acceptable church goers, but will never encourage them to protest the systems that keep them in chains. I guess this is how slavery could persist for centuries in a supposedly Christian nation, on plantations owned by supposedly upright, Christian people. So it goes.

We even brought the liberal author into the prison with us to discuss the book with them. Even though he had written this fancy theological book on the horrors of the prison system, he seemed pretty jarred and uncomfortable being in an actual prison. The men were very polite, not showing him their true feelings about his book or his theology.

One of the highlights of my writing career, was being able to smuggle in copies of my first book for the men to read. I say smuggle, because it was always a crap shoot whenever you were bringing in any items from the outside world. You had to have everything in clear plastic bags and they would search every book for any contraband or potential weapons. I was delighted to hear feedback from the men on my book, which they said they liked, and I believed them because the book was written to open the eyes of conservatives to the need for compassion and justice.

The book was filled with personal stories, conservatives love those, and my own experience entering into the world of my neighbors on the west side of Chicago where I had spent 16 years of my life. The men were captivated by why a white boy like me would decide to live in a low-income majority Black neighborhood. They asked me all about that.

Several men had written reflection papers on the book and gave them to me to read later. There's nothing like receiving a book report of your book from men serving life sentences in prison. I treasured their reviews more than any endorsements I ever got from any psuedo-famous people. They were gracious, presumably because they knew me, but also because I was writing about a world they were familiar. I also suppose it was because I included stories of hope.

Yes, I wrote of broken systems and agonizing pain, but I always tried to write my way to hope. I needed to find it for myself. Most of the time, it was those I least expected to be hopeful that taught me the most about hope. People like my friend who was wrongfully convicted, who, upon winning release, cofounded a house for men coming out of prison and a complimentary ministry to children and families of the incarcerated after seeing how his family suffered while he was locked up.

I would have been bitter as hell if I was forced to spend two and a half years in a prison for something I didn't do. Spending one night in a DC jail for protesting the death penalty was enough experience to make the reality of it sink in.

I shared a cell with a Jewish atheist activist and a swarm of cockroaches. We slept on hard metal beds under bright fluorescent lights with no watches or sense of time. We ate a stale baloney sandwich that my cellmate immediately puked up in the toilet (I haven't eaten baloney since).

We were chained in a number of ways and moved from one cage to another in the underbelly of the city. Not many people know that under their feet in the nation's capital, not far from the memorials and the monuments, is a massive jail, where bodies, mostly black and brown, are taken, processed, and locked away out of sight.

While we struggled to endure the conditions, another man who was locked up in the same wing of the jail as us, passed the time by singing. He sang every song in his memory banks, from spirituals to 80s classics like “I've had the time of my life" from the Dirty Dancing sound track. Vonnegut wrote about Englishmen who had been at the German prison camp for many years. Every night they sang together to lift their spirits.

As I swatted cockroaches off my legs, and wrapped my shirt around my eyes to block out the glaring light, I listened to the man sing himself to sleep. He didn't have perfect pitch, and from what I could tell, didn't have many connections or money to his name. But he found a way to transcend his environment, to lift up himself and those around him, and to hurl songs at a cruel, oppressive system with audacious faith like stones from a slingshot, waiting eagerly for the giant to fall. And that is, what I suppose, hope sounds like.

Shawn Casselberry is an obsessive writer, dog dad, and fan of humanity. He's the author of many fiction and nonfiction books, including a short story collection called "The Image of God," and a science fiction novel, "The Hemingway Bible." This story is from a religious memoir coming out later this year. He's the Co-founder and Nonfiction Editor for Story Sanctum, and lives in the Chicagoland area when he's not travelling the world.

Image credit: Kelly Wright via D-ALLE, Ideogram, and Midjourney