To Live is Christ
When the Reverend Stanley McGuire came to California
Men's Colony as Protestant chaplain in 1967-the
same year I was leaving Texas for California-he
had a vision for a different kind of prison ministry.
Traditionally, prison chaplaincies have been
like a lot of missionary outreach activities to
the Third World: colonialistic. That is, many
a chaplain has never worked himself out of a job
by building an actual, self-sustaining, organic
church-a true "body of Christ" that
ministers to and governs and disciplines itself.
The traditional view has assumed that convicts
(or people from less advanced cultures) can never
be anything more than babes in Christ, saved by
the grace of God but kept in perpetual spiritual
infancy. They are not to be trusted to mature
and function together as a gathered company of
believers without the supervision and control
of an outsider, be it a chaplain or a white missionary.
Stanley McGuire did not share this traditional
position. Looking to the New Testament, he saw
that God's intent in redeeming men and women was
to have them personally grow and mature in Him-not
just "get saved" and stop there-and
also to build together a living organism that
would be a vehicle for Christ's Spirit to minister
to the members through the members and bear witness
to the world in which they found themselves.
Chaplain McGuire decided that, according to the
Word of God, a redeemed sinner is a redeemed sinner
whether he happens to be behind bars or on the
outside, and if those on the outside could be
trusted-by the grace and transforming power of
Christ-to grow and build up the church, the same
was true of the Christian convict, even if he
was still incarcerated.
If the Scriptures are correct when they say that
"the old has passed away" for the new,
growing Christian, McGuire reasoned, then there
is absolutely no difference between the spiritual
status of a Christian brother or sister in jail
and one outside. To assume otherwise and to treat
prisoners as a special class within the church
was the worst kind of spiritual pride. It said,
if not in words, that some sins are worse than
others (at least getting caught at them is) and
therefore some sinners are worse than others,
less trustworthy after they have been touched
by grace. This was obviously in direct conflict
with the teaching of the Bible, which says that
all sin is equally damaging to our relationship
with God (James 2:10) and all sinners equally
eligible for redemption (1 John 1:8-10). Chaplain
McGuire also noted that many of the first apostolic
churches were made up not of the conventionally
virtuous, but of redeemed prostitutes, murderers,
thieves, extortionists, and outlaws-the very people
who make up a prison chapel-and that these early
Christians had managed to become great saints
and witnesses for their Lord (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).
Stanley McGuire decided that the same thing could
happen at California Men's Colony-he would make
it happen by building a New Testament church among
the men, a real body of growing, mutually sustaining
believers in Jesus Christ.
By the time I became a part of the chapel program
in June 1975, this had happened. Prisoners were
deacons, counselors, preachers, liturgists and
teachers. It was their own church and they, submitting
to the Spirit of God, functioned like any body
of Jesus' disciples-not always perfectly, but
as growing Christian men not spiritual parasites.
Strangely, in some ways it is easier to admit
my sins than it is to try to talk about what God
has chosen, in His love, to do through me and
in me in the past two years.. With the guidance
and prayers of my brothers here-as well as the
support of many men and women outside these walls-I've
been able to not only grow in Christ but serve
Him as well.
Within the Plazaview Chapel community our life
together as a gathered body of Christians-and
my life as a part of that body-has only one goal:
to bring glory to our Lord Jesus Christ. Strengthened
by the Spirit of God Himself, we attempt to accomplish
this through mutual support of each individual
brother's growth and vocation in Christ, through
the offering of our praise and worship and through
witness to those around us, inmates and officers
alike. Not just by the testimony of our words,
but by the quality of our lives, we hope to make
it clear to anyone who is interested that Jesus
Christ is Lord, not only of Creation, but of our
individual lives, that He forgives and restores
and redeems anyone who turns to Him.
When I became a part of this community, this
local church in the Men's Colony, I discovered
I was desperately hungry for spiritual food: the
presence and Word of my newfound Lord. The Bible
that I had ignored in my childhood and stumbled
through half-blind as I began my slow struggle
back to humanity in the Los Angeles County Jail-the
Bible that had for so long seemed a black-bound
irrelevancy or a club in my parents' hands-that
Bible suddenly opened itself to me with new and
shattering power.
The Word of God began to make direct and inescapable
sense to me because it talked about death and
life, enslavement and liberation, sin and righteousness.
These things were my own story, a story now seen
and understood clearly for the first time. The
promises it made-forgiveness, renewal, and the
power of the Holy Spirit of God Himself falling
on and filling ordinary, rebellious men and women
and turning them into mighty witnesses for God-those
promises were no longer pious dreams. They were
the reality I was beginning to live each day along
with my brothers around me. As the Book of Acts
described the life of the earliest Christian community
in Jerusalem in the years just after the Resurrection,
it could have been describing what we were living,
day by day. We saw the same miracles: broken lives
put back together, hatred and violence turned
to love, the power of physical addictions and
perversities broken, sickness made well. We experienced
the same love that binds brother to brother in
support and fellowship. We knew the same life-giving
power in the gifts of the Spirit through which
God spoke and ministered directly to us and through
us. God's Word, especially the New Testament,
formed us as it described us. It became, as one
of the scriptural writers puts it, a living Word.
Our fellowship together was equally important.
It was (and is) not a matter of simply coming
together once a week out of custom or to listen
to a lecture or to have religious "entertainment"
or a reason to see friends. Our varying times
together each day, times of instruction, prayer,
praise, and ministry to each other, remain the
vital lifeblood of our individual spiritual growth,
the source of our life together as a body of Christians
and the power for our outreach into the sometimes
hostile prison world around us.
My first responsibility within the Plazaview
Chapel community was serving as worship clerk
for the Sunday interdenominational services. As
I became more involved and committed to the work
and shared life of our church, I was appointed
a deacon. It was while I was serving as senior
deacon two years ago that I began to think a great
deal about just how those of us in the Plazaview
community could reach out to the desperately needy,
broken prison population around us, a population
that at least conventional morality would see
as the most self-evident "fallen" in
all our world. It was not enough for us to nourish
and support each other through our prayers and
our fellowship, nor was it enough to try to live
straight lives in the quads and tiers that were
our home at Men's Colony. It was not even enough
to share the Good News of what Jesus Christ offered
in Himself to people who came to us with problems
or spiritual hunger.
I came to see that we could not stand apart and
wait for people to come to us. If we were to be
like Jesus our Lord, we had to reach out in caring
and healing to the world around us, throw ourselves
into it willingly and with real love, just as
He did. We must offer ourselves to their needs
with genuine concern for them, not just a desire
to get people to agree with us. It wouldn't do
any good to try to shove Jesus down people's throats,
I was sure of that. Too many men in prison have
already had too much "religion" pushed
at them by well-meaning do-gooders. But I became
convinced that in prison, just as out, people
are susceptible to genuine love that starts with
them, their own concerns and struggles, however
individual. Love was what the sometimes hardened,
cynical men around us needed and, whether they
would admit it or not, love was what they wanted.
Most important, love was what Christ would give
them first if He were locked up with them, just
as it was what He gave to the people who came
to Him during His life among us. Now we were Christ-Christ
to and for the world around us at the Men's Colony.
Christ lived in us by His Spirit and He could
love through us. I shared my vision with the other
deacons and they were equally excited by the idea:
a vigorous program of outreach and witness that
started not with a desire to force people to accept
what you said, what you believed, and had experienced,
but rather a program that started with a desire
to love and serve people, as Christ loves and
gives Himself for them, just as they are.
It began to have effect-not overnight, not all
at once, and not without setbacks and rejections
and disappointments, but we have seen tremendous
growth in the past two years. As we have laid
ourselves and our love on the line for those around
us-seeking them out in the quads and on the fields
and in their rooms, not to preach to them but
to find ways we can help them, ways we can offer
ourselves to them in Christ's love-the real spiritual
needs have time and again come out, and the answer
to those needs has been spoken and received: Jesus,
alive in His world through men and women who belong
to Him.
In the past two years my own experience in my
God has deepened as well and-surprising as it
may sound to some-I have come to understand that
His call for me is to training and preparation
for ordained ministry within the church of Christ's
redeemed people. Through an excellent student-chaplaincy
program that Chaplain McGuire has developed, others
within the Chapel community and I are given extensive
preparation and study (a process I'm still in
the midst of as this is being written) as well
as practical experience of leadership in our own
local church in the prison.
My life is very full-sometimes almost too full,
it seems, when I have to wait for days to find
time to write a letter. I spend at least an hour
each day visiting inmates in my quad in the outreach
program I've already described. Sometimes a visit
may mean nothing more than a hello or supplying
the inmate with greeting cards, writing supplies,
or a dictionary; sometimes it may mean serious
counseling and prayer together in the room. Whatever
good comes of it-and a great deal does-is not
my doing. It is God's Spirit who moves in men's
lives to change and heal them. I can only bear
witness, live out my witness as best I can, and
give the result over the God. It is His work anyway,
not mine.
As a student chaplain and also associate administrator
for the Plazaview Chapel program (as I noted earlier,
Chaplain McGuire means business when he talks
about an inmate-run church), I have a small office
just off the sanctuary of our Protestant chapel.
It's there that a lot of my study goes on (approximately
six hours a day), as well as further counseling.
Since the goal of the program, as of every authentic
Christian community, is to develop discipleship-spiritual
maturity and a genuinely and increasingly Christlike
life-instruction for new believers is an important
part of the program, and I teach one weekly class
for new Christians. My time with these twenty
or so new brothers is one of the highlights of
each week.
As part of my responsibilities as a student chaplain,
I preach several times each month, celebrate the
Communion, baptize, and lead in worship in our
more structured Sunday-morning services. During
the week, in less formal times of prayer and praise,
I lead one of several Bible-study groups in the
program and participate with my brothers in times
of free worship and sharing in the powerfully
present and guiding Spirit of Jesus.
Since the prison environment-just like the world
outside-has enormous negative spiritual resources
for attacking a new believer, we have an active
program of "shepherding" for new Christians
that provides each new believer with a more mature
brother who accepts personal responsibility for
support, counsel, and encouragement. As I look
back on my own so-called decision for Christ as
a child in the local church in Copeville, after
which it was assumed that I was "taken care
of," now that I'd been baptized, I can only
wish that more churches outside prison walls would
take seriously their responsibility for young
(not necessarily in calendar years) converts and
the struggles and discouragements they must inevitably
face. "You are not alone" is the most
important thing a new Christian needs to know,
and the shepherding program assures this knowledge,
reminding the new believer that now not only Christ
stands by him; fellow believers are also with
him to encourage and support him, even at times
to hold him accountable.
Perhaps the two most beautiful times of each
day are the times spent with some of my brothers
in prayer and openness before the Lord. The Old
Testament Psalmist was constantly writing about
how good it was to praise and bless the Lord,
and I know it's true. It only makes me sad that,
for so many Christians today, coming together
for worship has become a sterile exercise in patient
listening and unthinking form. It is good to praise
the One who made and remakes and in the end will
transform us into something more glorious than
we can even begin to imagine.
At the Men's Colony I experience just how good
it is to praise and pray to my God when, during
each noon hour, Charlie Kerrigan and Claudie Conover
(the two fellow Student Chaplains who have been
so important in my own Christian walk) join me
in my office for an hour of worship and intercession,
and again each evening when the brothers from
my quad join in the sometimes dark and sometimes
cold and sometimes rain on the bleachers of our
quad's athletic field for a time of intercessory
prayer.
Each night we lift up each other and our needs,
the needs of those around us in the prison, and
requests for prayer from friends and family outside.
There is much to pray for at the Men's Colony,
where God's creatures are trapped in patterns
of violence and hatred and vengeance, men are
tormented by addictions and twisted sexual drives,
and new believers are caught in the peer pressure
of their anti-Christian environment. But there
is also much to pray for in the world outside
our walls. There are friends who write to us with
aching hearts for people they love, torn by all
the same death and darkness we see on the inside.
Each night we come before our wise, loving Heavenly
Father in the name of His Son, knowing that He
hears and that His will will be accomplished.
We are only grateful that in His great love He
allows us to be a part of the working out of that
divine purpose through our faithful prayers.
We may be behind prison walls and electric fences
(and justly so), but in Jesus Christ, we are free.
Thanks be to God for His indescribable love. We
have known it. We live it. It is real.
What of the future? It would be foolish for any
man who is in prison to try to claim he has no
interest in whether or not he ever gets out. Outside
is always better than in, even at as good an institution
as Men's Colony. But I can say this truthfully:
All I ultimately care about is serving the God
who was willing to give Himself for me, to reach
down and draw me out of the living death I'd made
for myself. If I can serve Him better in prison,
so be it. If I can serve Him better outside, then
I will wait for Him to put me where He wants me.
Whatever happens, I do not think that what God
has done for me somehow entitles me to any sort
of special treatment or early release, and I would
never desecrate the gift of His love and redemption
by trying to use it to get some kind of legal
advantage for myself.
As Paul said, "I am not my own property;
I have been bought and paid for" (see 1 Corinthians
6:20). And at such a great price: the life of
my Lord. I would be a fool to try to claim any
rights over what belongs to Him, not to me. I
can be happy wherever He allows me to be, because
my happiness, my joy, and my life are in Him-and
He is everywhere.
The rebirth that has taken place in me has happened
to millions of God's children over the past two
thousand years. It is not unique to me or a few
like me. It is happening today, right now, as
you read this. Everywhere you go, you pass men
and women who live it as I do.
It is sadly ironic that what makes my story more
"interesting" than theirs is not the
light we share but the darkness I knew before
it. In one sense, all that darkness no longer
exists for me; its spiritual power is gone, nailed
to the cross with Jesus. I have dragged it all
out again, in more detail than ever, only in the
hope that those who learn the truth of that darkness
will take more seriously the reality of the light
that is there for them, too-and for you, if you
ask for it.
For the pain that any retelling of some of these
events must cause the families of the victims
or my own family, I can only pray that God will
ease the burden with His love. I hope the greater
truth, the fact of just how encompassing God's
power to bring new life can be-evidenced in what
He's done in me-will be what lasts in readers'
hearts and minds. I also hope that those who lost
family and friends they loved because of me will
be able to find the strength to forgive, somewhere
within their broken hearts.
The questions Why? and How? won't
go away. Bugliosi ends his book on those questions,
suggesting that Charlie's use of sex and drugs
and fantasy, of isolation and fear and religion,
even his use of real, though misdirected, love
all worked together to give him his peculiar control
over those of us who were finally willing to go
out into the night and kill innocent strangers
on his orders. But Prosecutor Bugliosi admits
that there must have been "something more,"
though he is at a loss to explain what it is.
My answer may not please the prosecutor or the
skeptics, but I lived it and I think Charlie was-perhaps
still is-possessed.
How it happened and when it happened, I have
no way of knowing. Perhaps a frightened, tormented
boy-passed from a prostitute mother to various
unfeeling relatives and spending seventeen years
in prison before he was thirty-made a deliberate
choice at some point, inviting the demonic forces
into himself. Or perhaps they came uninvited,
in the guise of his anger and hostility and desperate
need to be something, anything, even Satan if
that was all there was. However it happened, I'm
convinced it was true, that those of us who were
touched by Charlie, who opened ourselves to him,
opened ourselves to a larger presence, a deeper
darkness than just his twisted soul.
I do not mean by this that he was not responsible
for the monstrous horrors he created, or that
this somehow places him out of the bounds of God's
redeeming love, either. I simply offer it as an
explanation for the "something more"
that Bugliosi sensed but could not define. Perhaps
if we took the spiritual powers of evil in our
world more seriously, we might see more clearly
both the reality of and the solution for all our
evil and sin, seen and unseen.
Whatever spiritual forces were at work in Charlie,
however, he did not create the materials of his
bizarre theories and lifestyle out of nothing.
The raw materials were all there. In a real sense,
he simply took the rhetoric and the symbols of
the sixties counterculture-at least its radical
edge-and gave them flesh, translated them into
life.
Charlie was not the first to label the establishment
as pigs. And while the Beatles may not have been
speaking to him directly, there is little doubt
that the lyrics of some of the songs on the White
Album are a not particularly subtle call to violent
overthrow of the establishment, whether or not
the Beatles themselves took them seriously. They
were not alone in this, of course. Violent revolution
in one form or another was a constant theme in
mid- to late-sixties rock, standing unabashedly
next to all the songs about peace and love.
Charlie didn't invent the counterculture's infatuation
with madness as a separate, sometimes preferable
reality, either; nor did he create the search
for at least some of the tamer symptoms of that
madness through the use of mind-bending drugs.
Though Charlie may never have heard of him, R.
D. Laing's Politics of Experience was a
best-seller on college campuses, and whatever
the Scottish psychiatrist's bizarre theories of
sanity and insanity may have meant to him, when
they trickled down to the mass youth culture-in
books like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
and films like King o f Hearts and Harold
and Maude, all of them with cult followings
in the counterculture-what the kids read was:
"Crazy is groovy!"
Charlie didn't even manage to dream up the Family
lifestyle. There were communes and group marriages
all across the country in the late sixties, and
Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land,
a campus best-seller, featured an extraterrestrial
traveler who built up a family that thought as
one through group sex and mind reading ("grokking").
Michael Valentine Smith, the "stranger"
of the title, is treated in the book as a hero,
not a monster. I don't think it was an accident
that Mary's baby, the first child born to Charlie
by one of the Family women, was named Michael
Valentine Manson.
Even the establishment he rejected was not totally
disconnected from Charlie's warped truth. At the
same time some of Charlie's Family was on trial,
an army lieutenant named Calley was being defended
by much of the right-wing establishment for "just
obeying orders" in the killing of dozens
of women and children in Vietnam. If a respected
military commander could explain, "We had
to destroy the village in order to save it,"
why shouldn't Charlie announce that "death
is life"? The two statements are basically
the same; only the victims were different.
I don't say any of this to exonerate Charlie
or the rest of us. I only want to place our terrible
crimes in their proper context: a world that worships
death and sin instead of turning to life and light.
Charlie, like others before him, just broke down
the facades and let the vile, demonic truth run
loose for all to see. But God and His love is
greater than Charlie's madness or the world's
madness disguised as the way things are. And one
day God's Kingdom, not Helter Skelter, will come
down, and it will be the City of God, the New
Jerusalem where the Creator lives in the midst
of His Creation, and all evil-personal and corporate,
seen and unseen-will be healed.
Until then, the only sane way to live is in the
hope of that healing that is to come. In this
present world of darkness and death, the only
way to truly live is in Christ, because He is
the only true life there is, the only light.
My parents have come to the Men's Colony twice
since my conversion, and both times we have filled
the visitors' trailer we're assigned with praise
and thanksgiving to God for finally bringing us
back together again in Him after so much grief
and pain. The scars are there, but scars mean
healing. And my parents, through the anguish of
it all, have themselves come to a deeper, more
Spirit-filled experience of the faith they always
held. It's as King David sang in one of his Psalms:
Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes
with the morning . . . Thou hast turned for
me my mourning into dancing . . . That my soul
may praise thee and not be silent. O Lord my
God, I will give thanks to thee for ever. Psalms
30:5, 11, 12 RSV
My deepest prayer is that these words could become
true for all those who have suffered so much because
of me. I pray it each day. I pray it now.
Charles Denton Watson
California Men's Colony
Spring 1977
(Will You Die For Me? Copyright 1978, by Ray
Hoekstra. Published by Cross Roads Publications,
Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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