Spiritual Survival Guide
1: Starting Well: Surviving Spiritually on the Inside
Voices from the NRC: Changing Your Life and Connecting to God
Or maybe you’re haunted by a nagging fear about losing your relation- ships with your people on the outside. In fact, speaking of family and friends, you may already be feeling a certain amount of rejection and abandonment from them. And for that, you may already be feeling a certain amount of resentment in return. You may have overdone things while you were in lock-up—demanding things from them, basically telling them to “take care of me. Now!” And that didn’t exactly go over too well, did it? So here you are. Lying on your bunk, hitting the rewind button on your life. Replaying your past, over and over again. How far back are you re- winding the tape? To the night it supposedly all went wrong? Or are you rewinding a lot further back than that? “I know I was told things again and again as a kid, but I wouldn’t listen. Why wouldn’t I listen? ” Here you are. Like most of us who are finding our way through this system, you’re probably totally self-absorbed and thinking that you’re not worth anything. You’re simultaneously focused on the man in the mirror, and angry and disappointed and fed-up with the face looking back at you. And here you are with a “Spiritual Survival Guide” in your hands. How strange is that? Maybe you’re a Christian. And even if you’re not, you’ve probably have had some passing acquaintance with God, with the Christian message, with the way of Jesus. Maybe you weren’t brought up in a very religious family, but you probably have an aunt or uncle, a grandmother, or someone in your circle of family and friends that was a Jesus follower. Maybe you never had much time or interest in all that. But you’re here now, and maybe that door can finally begin to open for you. You’re reading, because you want to survive. Good choice. Keep reading . . .
Any way you cut it, the NRC is one strange place. Every time we vol- unteer chaplains step inside the Northern Reception Center at Stateville Prison, we find ourselves filled with seriously mixed feelings. On the one hand, the facility is bright, clean, modern, organized, and almost silent—a welcome contrast to the century-old, hectic, uncomfortable and noisy maximum-security facility next door. On the other hand, the NRC feels strangely cold and antiseptic, impersonal—not really a place for human beings. And in a very real way, it isn’t. It’s not meant to be. It’s a transit point, a “place-in-between”—a scheduled stopover on the trip from conviction and sentencing to the new prison assignment. By its very nature, the NRC inevitably has a kind of “warehouse feel” to it. Its purpose is to receive and process inmates who’ve just been con- victed and who need to be assigned to a new prison. So it’s little wonder that many of the men who pass through it tend to “zone out” while they’re there. They’re being “processed,” after all. The truth is, there’s a lot of depression. With no windows to clue them into the rhythms of the sun, guys tend to sleep a lot . With heavy steel doors making cell-to- cell conversation difficult, life tends to turn inward. And yet, it’s not all dreary. Here and there we see signs of life and vital- ity—like lights in a dark place. As we make our way around the nearly silent hallways with our carts of books and Bibles to hand out, we’re sometimes struck by the contrast between the cells where the lights are switched on and where the lights are switched off. It’s like day and night. And not only because of the light bulb in the cell. Sometimes it’s like the guys themselves are either “lights on” or “lights out.” The lights-out guys are so obviously being pulled down by their depression, anger, despair, fearfulness or regret. It’s like they’ve switched off spiritually.
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