Letter to my Penpal
Happy Father’s
Day, Emancipation Day, and First Sunday after Trinity Sunday. Father’s Day is the easiest to remember, as
it’s the same date in Britain as it is in America, even though we celebrate
Mother’s Day on different dates.
I hope you enjoy
having phone conversations with your sons.
If they want you to call them from prison every week, I think it’s a
good idea to do that. If they were
worried about how to pay the phone bill, they’d have told you. And they’re probably disappointed that they
weren’t able to come and visit you, with Father’s Day and your birthday coming
up, because of the Covid outbreak.
I didn’t know
about 19th June being Emancipation Day in America until today, when
I had an email from the Innocence Project explaining that
Today, Juneteenth, is the day we celebrate “Emancipation Day” in the
United States. It’s the day that Union soldiers reached Galveston, Texas,
bringing with them the news that the Civil War was over and all enslaved people
were now free.
Though they arrived nearly two and a half years
after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the news still had not
reached Texas, where hundreds of thousands of people continued to work as
slaves. But on June 19, 1865, the last remaining slaves in the defeated Confederate
states were finally freed.
[I can safely say this much in my email to
Michael. But I’m not supposed to
criticise the prison he is in, in case it leads to him being treated
worse. In the version of this letter
that I can print on my blog, however, I can quote the rest of the Innocence
Project’s email to me:
Six months later, the 13th Amendment was
ratified, which abolished slavery in the form of one person owning another as
property, but allowed slavery “as punishment for crime.”
Those words allowed incarcerated people to be used
as free and forced labor after slavery was formally abolished, and they still
enable free and cheap prison labor to be exploited to this day.
Nowhere is
the legacy and evolution of slavery in this country clearer than in places like
Parchman Farm in Mississippi and Louisiana’s Angola farm. Both are prisons
built on former slave plantations.
Angola, you see, is the prison where Michael himself
is held. Well, let’s see what I can
say:]
The Innocence
Project’s email carried a link to an article about three wrongly convicted men who
were in Angola Prison, who finally managed to prove their innocence and were
freed.
[I can’t
include the link in Michael’s email – he doesn’t have internet access for anything
except a special email service for prisoners.
But then, Michael doesn’t need to read the Innocence Project’s reports
to know that prisoners are forced to work for just a few cents per hour, when
he wants to work for a normal wage and pay tax like a normal person.
I have no idea whether Michael himself is innocent
or not. My previous penpal, Walt Ogrod, was
another prisoner who, after decades in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, was
eventually freed after DNA testing proved his innocence. But Michael hasn’t said anything about what
he is in prison for, nor whether he did it or not, and I don’t intend to ask. All I know is that he has some things in his
past that he’s not proud of, and that he’s working on turning his life around
in prison.]
But thirdly, in
the Anglican Church, it’s the First Sunday after Trinity Sunday. The reading in church today (Galatians 3:23
to 4:7) seemed to bring the themes of emancipation and fatherhood together:
Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody
under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So the law was our guardian until Christ came
that we might be justified by faith. Now
that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.
So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith,
for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with
Christ. There is neither Jew nor
Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all
one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to
Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
What I am saying is that as long as an heir is underage, he
is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. The heir is subject to guardians and trustees until the
time set by his father. So also, when we were underage, we were
in slavery under the elemental spiritual forces of the world. But when the set time had
fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the
law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive
adoption to sonship. Because
you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the
Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer a slave, but God’s
child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.
Our vicar’s
sermon was mostly about how God’s grace means that God will not punish us as
our sins deserve. I thought, ‘Yes, but
God offers us so much more than JUST not being punished!’ But sometimes, hearing a sermon that doesn’t
really seem to go far enough makes me think for myself about what I’d say if I
was the one preaching.
When I read the
words ‘as long as an heir is underage, he is no different from a slave,’ at
first it makes me think, ‘What kind of parent treats their child like a slave? What does Paul mean by suggesting that God is
like that?’ I imagine an abusive parent,
like the mother in A Child Called It,
who starves and tortures her child, treats him as subhuman, won’t call him by
name, forbids other children to talk to him, and forces him to do all the
housework. And I wonder why anyone who
gave their child that sort of abusive upbringing would expect their child to be
suddenly able to cope with inheriting their estate and manage it responsibly.
But I’m sure
that isn’t at all what St Paul meant.
Paul was writing in the Roman Empire, a culture that accepted slavery as
normal, and of course I’m not saying that slavery is ever justifiable. But not all forms of slavery in history have
been as brutal and degrading as the ones we think of today, such as the
enslavement of black people by white people up until the 19th
century, or in Nazi concentration camps, or the hidden labour of people
illegally trafficked into slavery today.
The Romans weren’t
trying to fool themselves that some people were ‘racially inferior’ and too
stupid to be anything other than manual labourers. They weren’t trying to prevent slaves from
learning to read and write – in fact, many teachers WERE slaves, educating
freeborn children. In the analogy that
Paul draws, the ‘guardian’ who has authority over the child heir until he grows
up would probably be a slave himself.
And also, rich people who didn’t have a child to inherit their property
would often adopt an intelligent and competent slave to be their heir.
So I suppose
that what Paul is saying is not that God is an abusive parent who treats His
children like slaves, but the opposite: that even though, in a sense, God does
own us, because He created us, God chooses not to treat us like property. God is a master who frees His slaves and
adopts them as His heirs. And that this
is even though God, unlike the sort of rich Roman master who might do this,
already HAS a Son, but chooses to adopt us to be His sons and daughters
alongside Jesus. And since God does this
for everyone who is willing to accept Him, then human distinctions based on
status or ethnicity no longer make sense – so how can there be any justification
for one human being owning another?
When we are
young children, we are not free, not because our parents want to exploit us for
their own gain, but because we aren’t responsible enough to do things like
handle kitchen knives or cross roads on our own, until our parents have taught
us how to do it safely. As we grow up,
we go from being bound by rules like ‘Never touch sharp things!’ and ‘Never
cross roads on your own!’ to understanding why we need to be careful in dealing
with knives and roads. In the same way,
Paul is saying, being freed from rigid legalism isn’t a licence to do stupid
and irresponsible things.
The other thing
I find strange about Paul’s analogy is that the ‘heir’ in Paul’s story is an
orphan, who legally owns the whole estate because his father died and left it
to him. But God isn’t dead. So the question now becomes ‘What kind of
parent hands their kids over to foster-carers as babies, and only have personal
contact with them when they’re older?’
Well, biological
parents don’t, of course, or not willingly (I realise that sometimes you don’t
have any choice). But adoptive parents
might well be taking on children who have been looked after by foster carers for
months or even years after being separated from their original parents.
And sometimes,
the reason children are taken away from their biological parents is that their
birth parents were neglecting and abusing them.
If so, they are likely to be traumatised by their past experiences, and
often don’t know how they are expected to behave. So part of the foster carer’s job might be
(for example) to teach them how to feel safe and secure, and know that they
will be fed regularly and don’t need to steal food to survive, but also that it
isn’t okay to bite people. This way, the
hope is that by the time they find their ‘forever family’, they will have
formed a more healthy idea than their biological parents could have taught them
of what being part of a family means.
So I suppose
Paul is also saying, ‘We are messed up by having been born into a messed-up
world, and so religion is here to teach us basic rules of how to behave. But don’t forget that religion isn’t our
forever family. Only our loving Heavenly
Father and His Son are that.’
Michael, don’t
forget that you don’t just bear the name of an archangel. You actually are God’s son, and no-one can
take that away from you.
God bless you,
Your friend
Temple
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