"...the perpetual answer of life..."

Meditations of the Heart, by Rev. Howard Thurman, was first published in 1953 and then re-published in 1981 following his death at age 81. Rev. Thurman was a giant in the theological world of his time. He advised Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others in the civil rights movement. He was the first African-American dean of a Caucasian university. He was a prolific writer of Christian reflection and mystical thought. If I'd been fortunate enough to enter one of his congregations, I most likely would have never left. However, through his writings I can enter his thoughts and teachings, and so today I bring forward to our present one of his meditations: 

Merry Christmas

There is a strange irony in the usual salutation, "Merry Christmas," when most of the people on this planet are thrown back upon themselves for food which they do not possess, for resources that have long since been exhausted, and for vitality which has already run its course. Despite this condition, the inescapable fact remains that Christmas symbolizes hope even at a moment when hope seems utterly fantastic. The raw materials of the Christmas mood are a newborn baby, a family, friendly animals, and labor. An endless process of births is the perpetual answer of life to the fact of death. It says that life keeps coming on, keeps seeking to fulfill itself, keeps affirming the margin of hope in the presence of desolation, pestilence and despair. It is not an accident that the birth rate seems always to increase during times of war, when the formal processes of man are engaged in the destruction of others. Welling up out of the depths of vast vitality  there is Something at work that is more authentic than the formal, discursive design of the human mind. As long as this is true ultimately, despair about the human race is groundless.

This meditation brings to memory "J" unit at the Washington State prison for women just north of Tacoma. I would have named that particular unit  "H" unit for Hope. It was the only place, save for the chapel, that held any hope at all within the wires, fences, and armed guards. It was the place where nonviolent inmates with short sentences were housed with their infants. At least eighteen infants below the age of twelve months lived there with their convicted mothers in 2001. Stepping onto that unit was equal to stepping out of the prison every Thursday night. 

Within this week I'll be twelve years removed from my prison chaplaincy and those babies are now entering adolescence somewhere in Washington. At one time they were "the perpetual answer of life to the fact of death," as described by Thurman. Given the circumstances of their beginnings, my hope and prayer this morning is that they are not living on the streets of Tacoma or held by the juvenile authorities. May they continue to "affirm the margin of hope in the presence of desolation."