Open Doors 2-8-13

Anderson, South Carolina

For years I’ve driven past a low-profile collection of non-descript cement buildings, each of them ornamented with crowns of ribbon wire, and other prickly apparatus designed to keep things in their place. Society has deemed many troubled individuals in need of confinement for assorted misdeeds committed against those of us living on the outside of the ribbon wire. America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Millions of Americans, stripped of dignity and hope, are confined in concrete fortresses, often with no possibility of liberation.

Zbigniew Drecki experienced the daunting confinement and terror only Hitler and his Third Reich could have conceived. An inmate for nearly five years in the German death camps, Zbigniew came to experience a spiritual awakening, liberation of the kind only possible as an act of sublime mercy and grace. As he describes in his autobiography, Freedom and Justice, “Auschwitz gave me a complete answer, and more important a spiritual feeling that is difficult to put into words … Spiritual Powers existed which were stronger than man, controlling human destiny, and these dominated and superseded any human logic in this world, and our existence on earth. From then on death held no mystery for me … I became certain that the human power did not exist on earth, that could rob me of my life without the sanction of the Creator. In this hell I always felt protected and guarded by Him. Shielded by His Will, human beings were powerless to destroy me or take my life.” Drecki came to believe God had a plan for his life despite a detour through a man-made hell.

Drecki survived the death camps, becoming an accomplished artist. His large Madonna and Child above my chapel altar reminds me every day of the beauty and serenity deriving from a depth of faith even the gas chambers of Adolf Eichmann could not extinguish.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, best known for his classic, The Cost of discipleship, was stripped naked and died at the hands of the Nazis in the Flossenbürg concentration camp, a mere twenty-three days before the camps were liberated. The camp doctor who witnessed the execution wrote: “I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer ... kneeling on the floor praying fervently to God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the few steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.” Both Drecki and Bonhoeffer found complete peace and serenity in the Will of God.

Thousands of years earlier, Joseph found himself sold into slavery by his brothers, ending up as a slave in the house of an Egyptian military official. He was prospered by his faith and eventually given charge of the entire household. Falsely accused by the lusty wife of the Captain of the Guard, Joseph found himself stripped of his high station in life and cast into an Egyptian dungeon. Refusing advances by Potiphar’s wife, doing the right thing, Joseph found himself with years to think about God’s plan for his life. In prison, Joseph gained favor with the warden, becoming chief trustee, given charge of all internal affairs of the prison. Joseph proved capable of interpreting dreams. After a favorable dream interpretation for the King’s wine taster, a promise from the cup bearer to advocate for his release from prison was long forgotten. Joseph languished for years. Eventually the King had need of dream interpretation. Recalled from prison, Joseph offered accurate interpretation of the King’s disturbing dreams. In time, Joseph found himself in charge of all internal affairs of the Egyptian Kingdom, reporting directly to the king. He prospered greatly and is credited with saving much of the ancient world from famine by advancing a plan for harvesting and storing millage grains.

During the reign of King Herod in ancient Palestine, the Apostle Peter was imprisoned and put under guard by a squad of sixteen soldiers. It had been Herod’s intent to bring Peter to trial and have him executed to satisfying the growing bloodlust of the populace for Christian blood, to gain political capital with the restive people. “The night before Herod was to bring him to trial, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains. Other soldiers were guarding the door of the jail. Suddenly, an angel of the Lord stood there, and a light shined in the cell. The angel struck Peter on the side and woke him up. “Hurry! Get up!” the angel said. And the chains fell off Peter’s hands. Then the angel told him, “Get dressed and put on your sandals.” And Peter did. Then the angel said, “Put on your coat and follow me.” So Peter followed him out, but he did not know if what the angel was doing was real; he thought he might be seeing a vision. They went past the first and second guards and came to the iron gate that separated them from the city. The gate opened by itself for them, and they went through it. When they had walked down one street, the angel suddenly left him. Then Peter realized what had happened. He thought, “Now I know that the Lord really sent his angel to me.”

For more than twenty years reports have come from the gray and rust colored buildings making up the Anderson County Detention Center; reports of immense over-crowding, poor food, ad infinitum. I’ve never had a specific reason for making these ribbon-wired warrens a destination in my travels. I now find reason for the ACDC to be an important travel destination a mere three miles from my house.

Having just returned from my first journey there, I’m in wonderment. Having so often heard of the horrors of this place, I came out enchanted, in awe at how easily God’s love penetrates 2-inch thick bullet proof glass and a lot of cement and steel. The father in an orange prison jump suit on the opposite side of glass needed to know he was not being forgotten by those of us out here; that it matters to us where his journey is taking him.

Sixteen inmates on the opposite side of eight squares of that glass, screamed to be overheard by the forty of us visitors on this side, also clamoring to be heard. Bare cement, steel, and glass made for a nearly deafening circumstance. Yet the man in orange across from me could hear every syllable of hope and promise I launched through the glass. I heard every syllable of faith, trust, and transformation taking place in his life.

In a place where there is nothing but time; there wasn’t enough of it for us. An hour disappeared into concrete warrens with my friend’s jailers. Putting our hands on opposite sides of the glass we declared the supernatural love connecting our very different lives. I can hardly wait to call this man’s wife; telling her of the good work taking place in his life. I floated out of the place, thinking the universe a magical place despite its jailers.

Whether we leave Hitler’s death camp alive as did Drecki or deceased by hangman’s noose as did Bonhoeffer; are released by the King’s good favor and raised to positions of great power, perhaps released by angelic intervention from Herod’s gaol, we all share something in common – faith in the One Who will open the door to His Kingdom, to those willing to simply walk through. The freedom to be found there is liberation from the travails of life at its grandest. The man in orange and I are both banking on it.

‘When did we see you without clothes and give you something to wear? When did we see you sick or in prison and care for you?’ Then the King will answer, ‘I tell you the truth, anything you did for even the least of my people here, you also did for me.’

Blessings,

Craig C. Johnson