Job 19:23–27
As a pastor, I can get lost in the world of words. Preaching, praying, reading, emails, cards… if I’m not careful, my brain can leave the present moment behind and get caught up in trying to find the right thing to write or say. Ironically, the purpose of many of these words is to provide a sense of presence, to remind myself and my community of God’s presence and the power of being in the presence of God’s creation.
But all this pales in comparison to the power and presence that words hold for some of my incarcerated siblings. After all, it was words—the interpretation of laws, sentencing guidelines, etc.—that helped build their cages. It is words—the arguments of lawyers, the recommendations of counselors—that can open those same cages. And while they are caged it is words that so often sustain them: The hand-written cards from friends, the love passed through all-to-brief telephone calls or video visits, the encouragement of fellow incarcerated people, the worlds opened by the words of poets and philosophers. When Pennsylvania decided that all mail to prisons must be routed to a company in Florida and passed on as black-and-white photocopies, it was little wonder that people were outraged and took to the streets to demand the state stop serving as a go-between for our words to each other.
Job cries out, “O that my words were written down!… O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever!” He wants, no, he needs to know that his pleas for justice will be heard beyond the life of his sick and frail body. He knows that our words live lives beyond us, they have a power beyond our own. Some of the most searing and profound reflections on our humanity and on our divinity come from the mouths and the pens of people in Job’s position: The oppressed, the incarcerated, those who live face to face with their mortality. Incarcerated journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal writes that, “On death’s brink, men begin to see things they’ve perhaps never seen before…. Men on Phase II – men whose death warrants have been signed, men with a date to die – live each day with a clarity and a vibrancy they might have lacked in less pressured times.” (Death Blossoms, 101)
We do well to heed the sacred power of words, their power to harm and to heal. And we do well to heed the words of those living in pressured times, our incarcerated siblings and others who light lamps of hope in desolate places and who dare to imagine a world free from punishment and state-sanctioned violence.
Rev. Jay Bergen is a pastor at Germantown Mennonite Church in Philadelphia, and a volunteer organizer with the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI), a campaign fighting to end life sentences and heal communities across Pennsylvania.