Day
This is the chapter I've been waiting for . .
. .
The last reference to me in Prosecutor Bugliosi's
Helter Skelter has me off the Row and no
longer "playing insane," with a "girl
friend who visits him regularly." That was
1974, and except for the fact that I had never
been playing insane, the statement pretty much
says it. But Helter Skelter was not the
last word. Even if I wanted to forget that moment
when out of the void and darkness around me the
light and love of Christ reached out to me, God
was not going to forget it. He was going to see
that what He had begun in me was completed, as
was promised in Philippians 1:6.
Late in 1974 it seemed that everything started
going stale. My job in the psychiatric unit wasn't
interesting anymore, the future stretched out
to nothing, going nowhere, and even my relationship
with Freda seemed to have run its course. She
still visited me every weekend, but we were strained
with each other, falling back on habit, and trying
to avoid the fact that we had nothing more to
say to each other. At the time I couldn't explain
what was happening to me, but now I realize that
it was the Lord-as that great Christian Saint
Augustine said". . . the heart of man is
restless until it finds its rest in Thee."
Augustine knew what he was talking about; he'd
spent a lot of years running from God himself,
just as I had. But it was time to stop running
and face the inescapable love that was being poured
down on me in spite of my disinterest, in spite
of all I'd been and done.
I had no way of knowing it then, but hundreds
of people across the country were praying for
me at this time, not just my family and the little
church in Copeville, but all kinds of brothers
and sisters whom God touched with a concern for
me. I know now that all good comes from the Lord,
but I will always be grateful to those people
as well, many that I'll never even know about
in this life, who were willing to trust the shocking
promise of God that there is no soul so corrupted
that His grace can't heal it and make it new.
Their faith in the face of what would seem so
obvious to the world-that someone like Tex Watson
was beyond hope-was the instrument of God's full
salvation in my life and I praise Him for it.
I cling to that same hope when I remember Charlie
and all the others each day in my prayers. I know
that idea may shock some, even some Christians,
but the Word of God makes it clear that even Manson
is a creation of the Father-no matter how hard
he tried to turn himself into the incarnation
of Satan-and that God loves and waits for him,
just as the father of the prodigal son waited
each day on the road, hoping to see his son come
back to him (see Luke 15:11 ff.). I know most
ordinary people can't help but be so frightened
and horrified by Manson and the crimes that Charlie
almost ceases to seem human to them, but the grace
of God calls us to become more than ordinary people,
to see things as He sees them. I'm convinced that
God sees Charles Manson's acts, what he created
in himself and in us to spill over into the world
in death, as the stench of the very Bottomless
Pit which Charlie was hoping to find. But I'm
just as convinced that God looks on Charlie himself,
even seeing all that he is, and loves him, and
would send His Son to the cross for him alone,
as He would (and in a sense did) for every one
of us. When I pray for Charlie, I have no doubt
I'm praying at one with the will of my Father
in heaven, at one with the love of Jesus who gave
Himself for Charlie Manson, as for every other
man, woman, and child on God's earth. But I'm
getting ahead of myself.
One Saturday, as 1974 was dragging to an end,
I overheard a conversation in the visiting room
while I was with Freda. A girl was sharing Jesus
with a buddy of mine who sat near us. As she went
on, I couldn't stop listening. There was a life
and a spirit in her, a real excitement as she
talked about giving everything over to Christ-not
just her problems and needs, but all she had and
was-and making it her only purpose to serve and
follow Him wherever He led her. Even when I'd
been reading the Bible every day and trying to
pray, I'd never had the kind of intimate, loving
relationship with Christ that she was talking
about.
Freda had had a bad experience with her religious
upbringing as a child, and she got very annoyed
when I tried to join in the conversation. Religion,
she said, was for idiots-a crutch. I wasn't so
sure. Something about what I'd seen in that other
girl, pouring out her love so simply and so beautifully
there in the visiting room, stayed with me and
kept me thinking.
The fantastic thing about God's sovereignty-when
it's something you experience and not a theological
principle you argue about-is seeing how He can
draw together a dozen different separate events
to achieve His purpose, without any individual
part necessarily being aware of how it fits into
the larger plan of the Father.
Shortly after hearing that conversation in the
visiting room, I got a letter from Chico Holiday,
an evangelist who has had a unique ministry to
prisoners, due to his own powerful personal testimony
of how God touched his life. I'd never heard of
this man with the funny name, and I had no way
of knowing that my mother had written to him earlier
and asked him to contact me. (His first reaction
was that her letter was a hoax, but he stepped
out in faith and wrote to me anyway.) He'd sent
two of his books along, so I decided I might as
well read them. Time is one thing you have plenty
of, with a life sentence.
By the time I was partway through the first of
the books, I felt something drawing me to the
prison chapel. I'd never gone to any services
since I'd come to the Colony, never had any dealings
with the men who were part of the program, but
now I felt like a hungry man who hears there's
dinner being served down the street-he has to
go and see what he can get. I had to go to the
chapel, even if I couldn't quite explain why.
I don't know how much I got out of those first
services, sitting quietly in the back, feeling
the eyes on me. Like any closed community, a prison
has an enormous amount of gossip, and I was a
prisoner lots of people knew about. Now word got
around that the guy who'd killed the Tate woman
was sitting in chapel.
I'll always be thankful that the Lord saw fit
to show His love to me not only through people
from "outside" but through solid Christian
brothers right here in the prison-men like Phil
Alleman and Joe Talley-fellow inmates who had
given themselves to Him and who started sharing
with me and supporting me, from the moment I set
foot in that chapel. As much as anything else,
it was their quiet, consistent love and witness-never
pushing themselves on me, never trying to force
the issue-that made me want to keep coming back,
made me feel that somewhere inside me there was
an emptiness that what they had could fill.
I continued to correspond with Chico Holiday,
and then in January 1975, a Christian musical
group called Psalm 150 appeared in a chapel program.
They took their name from the last of the Hebrew
Psalms, which includes the words: "Praise
him with blasts of trumpets. Praise him with lyre
and harp. Praise him with drums and dancing, with
strings and reeds, with cymbals" (see vv.
3-5). That pretty much described their music and
their ministry. When I'd been with Charlie I'd
thought music spoke to me-his and the Beatles'-and
now here was music that seemed to talk right into
my head. But the message was so much different:
no Helter Skelter, no death. This message talked
about the life that was waiting to explode inside
me if I'd just give myself to it.
But I held back, because by now I realized that
if I really said yes to this, it couldn't be what
it had been before-just giving God my problems
and asking Him to spring me from the joint, and
trying to do a little better in the way I lived.
This time I'd have to go the whole shot: I'd
have to admit that God really had made me, that
His Son's death was all that would remake the
mess I'd made of myself. My admission of that
meant the only possible response was to give myself
totally to Him, really let Him be God to me, let
Him be the whole of my being, the only ultimately
important thing, the focus and reason for my living
each day.
I tried to hedge. I'd think about it, I told
myself, I'd work into it gradually. But
every time I'd go into the chapel, every time
one of the Christian inmates would share with
me, so lovingly and so gently, I wanted more and
more to have what they were experiencing-the peace
and assurance that come from knowing that whatever
happens to you is all right because you can glorify
God in it and that's all that really matters anyway.
It was at this same time that God brought a man
by the name of Ray Hoekstra into my life, "Chaplain
Ray" to the millions of people who listen
to his radio broadcasts and have been touched
by his ministry. I didn't know much about him
except that the Lord had given him a special work
among prison inmates and correctional officials.
When he asked to see me, I was wondering in the
back of my mind if he had something he wanted
out of me-a famous convert maybe, somebody from
whom he could gain some publicity.
It was hard to keep thinking that way after I
met him. He was a fellow Texan in his fifties,
and that Texas accent and his direct, open smile
did a lot to lower my defenses. Most of all there
was the fact that he seemed totally untouched
by what he knew I'd been. It wasn't that he didn't
take my crimes seriously-he obviously did-but
that they didn't affect in any way the fact of
his loving me, of his wanting to tell me some
great news that he was so excited about he was
sure I couldn't help but be excited too: the news
that whatever I'd done could be completely washed
away and forgiven in God's eyes, and I could start
the rest of my life fresh and whole and clean
as a newborn child. God loved me-he made no bones
about it. Just as it was with the prisoners in
the chapel, the fact that Chaplain Ray so obviously
loved me, too, and that Jesus loved me through
him, was more convincing than all the words he
could have said.
Chaplain Ray also brought me some startling information:
Susan Atkins-the Sadie who'd shocked even me when
I first came to the Family with her wild life
and lack of inhibitions, who'd talked about killing
being like a sexual release-Susan Atkins had found
this forgiveness and rebirth that he was talking
about. So had Bruce Davis, who'd screamed down
messages from Charlie in the L.A. jail until I'd
felt I could never escape his voice again. Bruce
and Sadie-now they were part of what I'd seen
in the brothers in the chapel, in the young singers
and instrumentalists in Psalm 150, in this heavyset,
good-natured Texan with the glasses and unembarrassed
smile.
The chaplain and I have become good friends since
that day (obviously, since he ended up being the
one to whom I'd tell my story for this book),
but at that point I still wasn't ready, as much
as a part of myself wanted to say yes to what
he was talking about. I had given myself totally
once before, to Charlie, and even though I knew
this was something completely different-even though
I understood what Chaplain Ray meant when he told
me that as we give ourselves to Christ He doesn't
annihilate us, but rather rebuilds us and remakes
us into what we were created to be in the first
place-I was still afraid.
I kept on going to the chapel, and during the
last week of May there was a revival. I know that's
a term that makes a lot of people uncomfortable
nowadays, so maybe it would be better to call
it a time of intensive sharing of the Good News
that these Christian men in the prison were living
out every day. I attended every night and, after
the first of the services, when a student chaplain
asked all who wanted to take what God was offering
to raise their hands, I slipped mine up, as inconspicuously
as possible. But I wasn't ready to walk down to
the front with all those men watching me, to admit
in front of them all that I was dying inside,
desperately hungry for the life and spiritual
food that I saw all around me in the Christian
brothers who had witnessed to me. I went back
to my room torn apart.
Finally, on June 1, the last night of the special
services, I decided that this had to be it; I
couldn't play games any longer. I understood very
clearly what was being offered: God who made us,
God from whom we'd turned away to follow our own
selfishness, God who wanted us back as His sons
and daughters, wanted me back. To bridge the gap
between us, He'd sent His own Son to take our
death-the inevitable consequence of our sin-on
Himself. That had not only opened up an eternity
of fellowship with our Creator in this life and
the next, it made positive change and renewal
possible in our lives right now, in my life right
now. It began a process of slowly becoming the
whole person one was born to be, of becoming more
and more like Christ Himself. It wasn't just a
fire escape-that actually had very little to do
with it-it was letting ourselves be participants
in a total victory over evil and death that was
already won because Christ had risen from the
dead. It was deciding that His Kingdom and His
will for us were the only things that really mattered.
Having decided to give Him our whole lives, we
are to let the mighty Spirit of God come into
our own spirits to start building the life of
Christ in us, and to enable us to do the service
to which we are called.
That is what it is all about, I thought
as I sat in the back of the chapel on that last
night, sensing that the Reverend DeVito was reaching
the end of his sermon. It occurred to me suddenly
that to make this step would mean giving up even
that most precious thing I had: the determination
to somehow find the legal machinery that would
get me out of prison and back into the world.
It would mean, if that was God's will, accepting
a natural life that never extended beyond the
walls of the Colony; it would mean asking for
nothing except to be used or even set aside for
the glory of God. It would mean all that and more.
When the invitation was given, I ran to the front.
I was baptized by one of the student chaplains
fifteen days later, in a large plastic laundry
cart in the garden outside the chapel. It was
big enough for me to go completely under the water
and die there with Christ. No matter how silly
it might have looked to someone from the outside,
someone who didn't understand all that was going
on in that moment, to me it was as glorious as
the River Jordan where John washed people in preparation
for the coming of the Messiah. My Messiah had
come, at last; He had come to me and I was His.
As I burst up out of the water and it splattered
off me like liquid fire in the sunlight, I felt
all that horror and guilt that was rightfully
mine splash away with it, all the weight of what
I had done and been. That night two weeks before
when I'd stumbled forward in the chapel, I'd finally
had a full realization of exactly what I had done,
a realization so devastating that all I had been
able to do was weep for what seemed like hours.
Now that burden was lifted; I would weep again,
many times, for those I'd hurt-the dead and the
living-but from now on it would be tears shed
in the certainty that the punishment for that
hurt had been taken and the debt paid-not by me,
but by God Himself. If that sounds like unmerited
grace, I suppose it always is so for us, but for
God the cost was immeasurable. Who are we to reject
His gift because we can never pay for it? That's
what a gift is all about-a free, spontaneous act
of love.
Paul wrote in a letter to the squalid, backbiting,
sin-filled church at Corinth:
Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is
a new creation; the old has passed away, behold
the new has come. 2 Corinthians 5:17 RSV
That's how God sees it. We live it as a process
and a promise. I can only be grateful that I was
permitted by my wise Heavenly Father to begin
that process in the midst of the body of believers
at the Plazaview Chapel in the Colony, because
it is like no other prison chapel in the country.
(Will You Die For Me? Copyright 1978, by Ray
Hoekstra. Published by Cross Roads Publications,
Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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