Denker: What can’t be confined

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For me, this time of year used to mean standing before a crowded church, preaching about the good news of Christmas to pews packed with good, wholesome, Bible-believing American Christians.

On more than one occasion on those Christmas Eve’s past, I stood desperately (if not literally) in the pulpit, clinging to it like a port in the storm, trying to claim some semblance of a message for Christmas that wasn’t weighed down by the commercialism, capitalism and gross inequality that hampers our holiday season.

Again and again, from the coast of California to the prairies of Minnesota, I preached some version of this message: that Christmas was not ultimately about the presents but about the presence, that somehow being together in a holy space and bearing witness to a God who gave much more than God ever received, would counteract all the ways in which we too as church leaders — and me, as a parent of young kids — fed into the idea that the meaning of the season was he who dies with the most toys wins, a theme, by the way, that fits pretty well with our current political discourse and winner-takes-all mentality.

This Christmas, I was not preaching. And so, five days before Christmas Eve, I tried to find that message of presence over presents in a place far from the bustling gaiety and consumer cheer of our packed local shopping malls and churches. On Dec. 19 in Stillwater, I sought the presence of Christmas in prison.

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In one of his most-famous and most strident parables, Jesus told his disciples that they would be judged not upon how ardently they believed, or the purity of their religious doctrine — but instead on how they treated their fellow humans. He told them that the Son of Man would remind people that they’d met God before, in unexpected places, such as in people who are poor, hungry, thirsty, naked and, yes, in prison. Jesus says the righteous ones are those who visited people in prison, a theme picked up later in the Bible, including by the Apostle Paul, who wrote much of the New Testament while imprisoned himself.

The hallowed halls of history are filled with fellow martyrs and faith leaders who themselves were imprisoned, too, a oft-forgotten reminder in a Christian faith tradition founded on a savior who himself was arrested and sentenced to capital punishment.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was imprisoned. So was German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was killed in a concentration camp during World War II. Civil rights leader and pastor James Lawson Jr. was imprisoned for a year in 1951 due to his conscientious objection to the Korean War. In recent years, American religious leaders are commonly among those arrested when peacefully protesting.

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I had been invited to Stillwater on Dec. 19 at 1 p.m., for a graduation ceremony of the nation’s only iteration of clinical pastoral education (CPE) to be held inside a prison. The program, much-beloved at Stillwater but always on the edge of securing enough funding to continue from session to session, began in 2019, just a year after an incarcerated man at Stillwater, Edward Muhammad Johnson, had bludgeoned correctional officer Joseph Gomm to death.

In the aftermath of the guard’s murder, the Stillwater prison could have closed its doors to programs from the outside meant to emphasize the “rehabilitative” side of incarceration. But instead, the Social Justice CPE program was allowed to begin, the first of what would be five approximately three-month sessions held inside Stillwater up until the present day, mixing together students from outside seminaries, who in many cases were pursuing traditional ordained pastoral ministry, alongside incarcerated men, some of whom were serving life sentences for murder.

Clinical pastoral education is a required part of education in preparation for ordained ministry in many faith traditions, including my own Lutheran one. Among my fellow pastors, CPE is often known as one of the most grueling parts of ministerial preparation. It involves serving as an intern in a clinical setting, most often a hospital or skilled nursing facility. As part of CPE, students are expected to be “on call,” and to learn the skills and tools of visitation ministry: training in deep and active listening, understanding body language and nonverbal communication, helping people process deep trauma. An essential part of CPE is not just ministering to others but also learning to listen to yourself, and understand your own emotional processing and past trauma, in order to be present in visitation and ministry to others.

Prisons provide none of the crutches that so many of us need to handle emotional trauma. There is little private space. There are deeply curtailed freedoms. You are surrounded by others who are also processing past traumas; many people who experienced deep trauma as children, without the help of safe adults to get through it. There are no particular comfort foods available, at least on most occasions. No access to a bathtub with soothing salts, or yoga on-demand, or wine, or chocolate — or any of the practices popular today for self-care.

Instead, there are cells, bars and more than 1,200 angry men, plus staff people tasked with keeping order in the midst of what could quickly descend to chaos and violence.

Here, in this place, the CPE team would attempt to teach incarcerated men and outside seminary students and faith leaders to become spiritual care providers. Once the unit was completed by the incarcerated men, they could go on to be spiritual care providers within the walls of the prison. They could become trusted leaders among staff and incarcerated people alike. Warden William Bolin told me today, five years and five sessions since the program began, that he notices how the alums of the program serve in invaluable roles in every different wing of the prison. They are seen as trusted leaders among the community of incarcerated men. They understand how to minister, care and de-escalate potentially violent situations.

Warden Bolin said there were several obstacles to the continuation of the CPE program, sometimes related to funding, sometimes related to security. But he was committed to supporting the continuation of CPE within the prison.

And then Bolin said something that sounded distinctively un-warden-like.

He referenced what one of the CPE graduates had said during the graduation ceremony, that the CPE program was one of the things that brought a “glimmer” of light into the prison.

“We have 1,200 men here,” Bolin said. “Some of them aren’t at this stage where they want to see and make change. If we can get more of that glimmer, that’s how more lives are transformed.”

And there, in that windowless office lit by fluorescent overhead lights, I saw a glimmer of the Christmas presence.

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The truth is that I didn’t fully “get” it until after the graduation ceremony, when I sat in an office and interviewed, one by one, several past graduates of the CPE program who were also incarcerated at Stillwater, some of them serving life sentences.

The gift they gave me that day, the presents of our presence together for just a few hours, was the stripping away of the artifice we so often meet one another with on the “outside.” In our frenzied world, we size one another up quickly: online or in person. We make snap judgments based on how another person looks, what they’re wearing, how they speak, where they live, how they potentially voted in November’s presidential election. We meet one another behind a veil of sorts, hiding the shameful sins or embarrassments we’d rather die than reveal to a stranger.

The prison has no such luxury, no filters, no pleasantries. Each of these men had largely been defined by the very worst thing they’d ever done, or had been accused of doing. They’d each entered prison in their early 20s. One had only met his daughter through a prison window visit. Now, his daughter was the mother of his grandson.

“That’s the hardest part,” he told me.

Still, they’d each gone through the arduous education of CPE. They’d done so largely as part of the Restorative Justice group at Stillwater, and many of them served on its council.

What they showed me was the same truth that had been proclaimed from prison in the Bible itself, that even here in this place where men were sent to be confined, their presence spilled out from behind the bars, in the best cases in increased love and empathy, for themselves and for one another.

Again and again they told me about how CPE and work in restorative justice had helped them with accountability. About conversations they’d had around forgiveness and apology, for themselves, from their victims, and maybe even with God. Because CPE is not rooted in any particular faith tradition, the students represented a range of faith backgrounds. Abdul Al-Muqsit is a Muslim leader among the incarcerated men, and he dresses in traditional Islamic clothing. But he said he did CPE because it helped him provide spiritual care to all sorts of incarcerated men, including those who were turned off because of his religion.

Dimitri Harrell, 31, had spoken and shared testimony during the graduation ceremony. Harrell has completed three CPE units. He told me about conversations he’d had with his youngest daughter, whose mother Harrell had been convicted of killing during an argument.

Upon meeting Harrell, at first, you would never know the guilt and pain he carried deep within regarding his criminal history. His presence is one marked by a ready smile, an undeserved openness.

He told me that he’d told his daughter how deeply sorry he was, that she didn’t have to forgive him.

“Pain has to be articulated to be healed,” Harrell told me. “Especially in this setting.”

Through CPE, he had articulated his pain. And now, he holds space for the pain of others, even those whose pain he has caused, as he awaits release in 2035, or earlier.

I was struck by the way that Harrell trusted me with his story, in an American age where we are taught not to trust, to speak before listening, to be wary and withholding, especially among strangers.

I did nothing to deserve Harrell’s trust, especially from someone who’d grown up as a child facing all the difficulties this country can throw at children who grow up in poverty, without resources, with parents and adult guardians who are battling their own demons and structural inequities.

Still, in this shared presence, there was unearned trust and then — a glimmer, of something like hope.

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I saw in the graduation ceremony how much it meant that the CPE students, alums, CPE staff and prison/chaplaincy staff had one another. One incarcerated alumnus told me that in his previous facility, he’d been a “lone soldier” attempting to practice spiritual care on his own with then-Chaplain Marty Shanahan, who later began the CPE program at Stillwater with leadership from Volunteers of America, and Chaplain Sue Allers-Hatlie.

Lennell Martin, 47, told me that then he was just trying to “be a light in the darkness.” But now several lights had come together in presence, and the glimmer was brighter.

Michael Hall, 41, is another CPE alum and member of the Restorative Justice Council. He told me he’d grown up not far from the church in south Minneapolis where I currently serve as pastor of visitation and public theology. He’d played sports at the middle school where my son had just played a basketball game.

The prison was filled with walls, with anger, resentment, violence, justice, injustice … and somehow in this carved out space five days before Christmas — the walls between those gathered here for CPE graduation had fallen down.

Hall told me that prison wasn’t a place where people could usually express emotion. For him, that also went back to childhood. He said he once, as a very young child, told his mom that he felt like something was wrong, that he wanted to cry.

“My mom was a single mother, and she was very hard,” he said.

In that moment of childhood vulnerability, Hall remembered his mom looking back at him and shaking her head.

“I feel like that every day,” she told her son, and she walked away.

So Hall learned to stuff his feelings: his sadness, his despair, his anger.

He committed a serious crime, and he was sentenced to life, with the possibility of parole. When I met him last week, he had served 17 years in prison. His first unit of CPE was completed a few years ago.

“For me, it was very jarring when one of the cohorts, a female student, started to cry,” he said. “It felt like a cringeworthy moment. I didn’t know whether to leave, or to give her a tissue.”

Almost everything in Hall’s life up to that point had taught him in that moment to leave, to walk away, to build his own walls to withstand the ones built up around him by the world.

Instead, he chose to stay. He handed his fellow student a tissue.

That moment of CPE marked a turning point for Hall, and maybe for the other incarcerated men whose lives he’d impact as a spiritual care provider.

“I knew that in order to get the best out of [CPE], I was going to choose to be vulnerable,” he said. “In that moment, I knew I was human.”

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At the end of the ceremony the four graduates stood together, and Isabel, a CPE student from the outside, invited all the CPE alumni in attendance to join them at the center of the circle. Improbably, they were going to sing, and in these words a glimmer of light in shared presence burst upon the prison in Stillwater, five days before Christmas in 2024:

You do not carry this all alone

No, you do not carry this all alone

This is way too big for you

to carry this on your own

So, you do not carry this all alone

To support the Social Justice CPE program at Stillwater, you can make tax-deductible donations here (bit.ly/SupportSJCPE).