Christmas in Prison: the Authorized Version

In memory and in honor of Brian Doyle.

Most days I don’t think about prison. There’s one in sight of the dog park where our streak of lightning, Lyra, delights in bounding over gentle swales in pursuit of the robins who take off in terror at her approach only to settle on the ground within striking distance a few seconds later as if they are in on the game and Lyra never tires of obliging them until they finally hop the fence and then she returns to me for the frisbee, all quivering energy and hopeful eyes. I thought about prison two weeks ago when a friend I only know from social media who is not just one of those social media friends but who has become something of an actual friend over the years as we message back and forth about life in all its mess and mystery, in particular the men in prison with whom he visits weekly, and with whom he read one of my books a while back, a book on the Ten Commandments, most of which – but maybe not quite all – had been broken at one time or another by the men with whom he sits for an hour after walking through several doors that are unlocked and locked behind him. He messaged me asking for a favour: would I be willing to record myself reading the Christmas story from Luke chapter two and maybe offer a few thoughts about the story that he could share with the men when he visited them before Christmas? And he asks me to read it from the King James Version, because that’s the Authorized Version of events, and I type ‘yes’ because that’s true, and also because the wonderful family into which I married has a tradition of reciting Luke chapter two in the Authorized Version on Christmas morning and every time the baby Jesus is mentioned we all ring one of the varied bells which have been distributed from the wicker basket that appears in our midst (and in which lie some actual jingle bells that every Christmas morning I secretly wish will reach me as the basket is passed but which never do) and over the years we started ringing those bells when the Christ child’s pronouns are read as well as his nouns, so there is much jollity in the midst of the solemnity of reciting from memory the Christmas story, although my memory is usually fuzzy by the time the shepherds go even unto Bethlehem. I tell my friend ‘yes, I would love to do that’ and I ponder what I might say to these men I have never and likely will never meet who will spend Christmas in a place that requires the locking and unlocking of doors, while I’m in the midst of writing liturgy for the lighting of an Advent candle and proofing bulletins for the three services the church which I serve will hold on the Sunday that is both the Fourth Sunday of Advent and Christmas Eve, because this has been the shortest possible season of Advent, much to the delight of young children who have grown up marking time by the church calendar as have those in my congregation, and who will light the fourth candle in the morning and the Christ candle in the evening and then it will be Christmas. Three days before my friend will visit these men I message him to assure him that I am still intending to send a video, even though I have not yet finished my pondering, and then a memory stirs, a memory of a man I first heard speak at Greenbelt festival in the U.K. when I was an adolescent, a man who talked about Jesus in a way I had never heard in the little Brethren chapel I attended and who claimed to know U2 (which he did), and who rode a Harley Davidson and was the President of a bike club called God Squad which sounded so cool to a teenager who rode a 90cc Honda step-through but who dreamed of leather jackets and the roar of straight-through pipes. I remembered him asking me a question many years later when we had become friends and he was no longer a hero in the faith but just another flawed saint who nevertheless continually nudged me in the direction of the Jesus whose story is told in the Gospels (Authorized Version or not), rather than the Jesus we have constructed in our own image who makes few demands on our lives, a question for which I did not have an immediate answer, but for which I suspected he did because he often asked questions he wanted to answer himself. The question was, “If you could ask Jesus just one question, what would it be?” and he told me he would ask Jesus, “When John was in prison and he sent his disciples to ask you, ‘Are you the one?’ and you sent them back with your answer, why didn’t you go visit John in prison? Why did you send his disciples back with your answer rather than go tell him yourself?’” and in that moment I could tell that really was the question he wanted to ask Jesus, and so that conversation lodged itself in some corner of my memory to come forth these many years later when I was pondering what I might have to say to some men in prison. So I set up my iPhone on a tripod in the sanctuary of our church, and sat in front of the advent wreath, three candles flickering, poinsettias ablaze beneath (which I think are poisonous in some way but as I’m not planning on eating one I wasn’t too worried), and I read the Christmas Story in the Authorized Version, and I talked about my friend’s question and I wondered whether Jesus ever regretted not going to see John in prison, or if his own disciples asked him why he hadn’t gone, and perhaps that was why he told those disciples three years later, just a few days before he went to Jerusalem where he himself would be arrested and questioned and beaten and worse, that when he returned he would separate the sheep from the goats, and one of the ways you could be a sheep was to visit people in prison, and maybe that’s why that made it on the list of the things the righteous do, because of John, and maybe that isn’t the case, but then again maybe it is. So I told those men that even though I couldn’t visit them in person (them being in Oregon and all), my friend could carry me in through doors that must be unlocked and locked behind him on a burned DVD (which I didn’t know people still did) so I could join them for a few minutes on a screen and tell them that the mystery of Christmas is that God became one of us to be God with us, and that Emmanuel grew up to tell us that we are to be that for each other – God with us – and that you could visit each other while you are in prison yourself and be Jesus for each other and my friend told me when he pressed ‘stop’ on the ancient DVD player these men rose to their feet and applauded and I like to think that my flawed saint friend heard their applause in heaven where he waits for the second advent and also that maybe John the Baptist elbowed Jesus and they smiled at each other. And maybe that’s what happened the night my righteous friend walked through doors that must be unlocked and locked behind him and shared the Christmas story with his brothers.