Sanctuary or Prison?

Last Saturday I took Cam, my grandson, and a fellow booklover, to Barnes and Noble.  I know, I know. You’ll tell me about Amazon and Half.com and the money I would save.  I know this, but I felt the need to look and heft and page through books. Books!  Paper, ink, brightly illustrated covers!

We came home with a very large sack, something like $150 worth of booty.  And so this week I have sat in the Texas sun, poolside, trying to forget the price we Texans are paying for the mellow yellow autumn sunshine.  Drought. Yes, I apologize to my Idaho friends who have begun to pay the price:  Ice and snow. Remember, however, my wise words:  "Weather is a state of mind."  I only wish I could live what I preach. . . every day, every winter.

And for this reason my first choice for Sunday afternoon was Neil White’s first book, a memoir, entitled In the Sanctuary of Outcasts.  How does a prison become a sanctuary?

White, a small-time publisher of magazines, finding himself strapped for money, desperately tried to keep his finger in a business that was oozing money like the Louisiana dike system. But it was like trying to hold back the Mississippi every rainy season.   White becomes a white-collar criminal.

Switching funds from one account to another, often where there was nothing but fabricated money to begin with, he was caught, tried and sent to Carville, a once ante-bellum South plantation, rescued by Woodrow Wilson as a refuge for a growing and unmanageable number of lepers—the Biblical outcasts—who until 1917 had no place to go.  Not a single state or city would accept them.

Facing a year in "prison," he learns about leprosy.  Interestingly enough, Carville becomes a “sanctuary” for him, as well as for the lepers and the broken-down, often immobilized, obese convicts. Both convicts and lepers could not be housed any place else in the prison system.  The criminals and the lepers—something out of the New Testament.

White introduces us to a cross-section of sick, physically disabled “convicts,” housed in one large wing and a host of courageous Lepers living in the second wing.

I am moved by such men as White, who can transform their surroundings into something “else,” like a cloudy, marrow-freezing day in Rexburg, or an ailment into something meaningful.

We are all in that business of "making the best of a bad situation." Certainly a job lost, [once a sanctuary--even if we didn’t realize it at the time] casts us into a kind of prison of fear, and I am sure a unique form of loneliness.  I assume here.

For students, my grandchildren, perhaps, a class or even a particular building, can become a “prison” of sorts.  I never liked the Eyring Science Center at BYU, because I don’t like the smell of chemicals. That usually means chemistry, a discipline I could not get my head around.  Sulfur, whew!  I wouldn’t make a good soldier either, even though I still try and convince my grandchildren that I was a Navy Seal in the 80s.

Let me leave you with the very epitome of courage at Carville—Ella Bounds, whom her father dropped off when she was 12, sick with Leprosy in her legs.  Now, at 80, she is up early, anxious for her paper and a cup of hickory coffee. Without legs, wheelchair-bound, she pushes her way through the long halls, singing out, “Ain’t no place like home.”  Do the math.  One building; true, rolling mounds of grass and flowers.  But one building.  Alone.

Those who like their reading in film form [streaming Netflix] might consider, “Bless You Prison,” the true story of Romanian Nicoleta Grossu, who spent 7 years in a communist prison for “traitors.”

She found God, memorized the several dozen scriptures carved into the cold cement walls that surrounded her, and transformed her prison into a sanctuary.  Later she found a whole huge Bible, which she tore into sections and handed to her inmate friends. They read their hearts into peace.

What about a short laundry list of possible prisons we may find ourselves facing now or soon?  Can you with God’s help, or the help of Buddha or that Energy Field Ella Bounds found, transform that prison into a sanctuary?

• Finding a major and then sticking with it until you finish; finding it hard to decide to decide.
• Living in a space you define as a prison, i.e., your own home, inhabited by other creatures called “family.”
• Living in an apartment without hope in the distant future of a better place to be.
• Finding yourself surrounded by people whom you find suffocating, those “Idiots,” Greg House calls his medical team.  Is there a Greg House in your life?
• Discovering the shock of realizing your marriage has cracks, is oozing river water, a dike ready to collapse.
• Facing a doctor who says taboo words like “cancer,” “neurological disorder.”
• Death—inevitable.
•  Looking in the mirror and facing the prospects of yet another Good Housekeeping magic diet.
• Discovering within yourself spiritual burnout [usually in your 40s], something Thomas a Kempis called “spiritual dryness.”  [The Imitation of Christ]
• Looking sideways at a child and thinking for a split second, "I love her—but I don’t like her..." 
• Looking inside yourself and realizing you have no desire to change.  How do I “desire to desire?” Asking yourself if you have the guts to plant the seed of hope, nourish it, cultivate it, and patiently allow it to grow.