Our children’s choir went to sing in the city jail on the Sunday prior to Christmas one year. I remember it so well and can almost picture that large room holding three layers of cells on three walls. We walked in through the jailer’s office, down the wooden steps. The place was rather dark and dank with some unpleasant smells beyond my olfactory experience at that time. We stood on the rather wet concrete floor, all dressed in our white robes with red bows. And we were all afraid of the unknown.
The whole place was lighted by a huge single 300-watt bulb suspended in the center of the room of twenty or so cells, barely illuminating the figures that had now risen and were peering down at us through the bars. For reasons that were beyond my knowing at the time, these prisoners were all black men; so their countenance was even more obscured by the darkness, save only the whites of their eyes which seemed to be staring right at me. An eerie silence added to the obscurity of the darkness. This was the most fearful night of my little life so far, and I wondered why in tarnation we had been brought here. I would soon find out.
Someone started us singing “Silent Night, Holy Night”. Our little voices were magnified by the cavernous condition of the jail, and we sounded like giants…or at least teenagers! “…sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace”…words ending our first song. A man in the highest level of cells slowly clapped his hands, and a few others soon did the same.
From that first song we somehow mustered our courage to sing “Away in a Manger” and “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”. By the end of our repertoire, I almost felt at home in this prison. I felt safe among these men because we had all shared a kind of peace on earth and goodwill toward others that passes understanding. While they might indeed have been a captive audience for our early angelic endeavors of doing good for God’s sake, I was captured by the sheer humanity of those prisoners, a feeling that warmed my heart on that cold night and melted the bars between us.
With a gusty round of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”, we ended our first prison concert with gusto. As we started back up the stairs to the freedom outside this forbidding place, the words “Merry Christmas” began ricocheting of the walls, almost as if a heavenly host of angels were shouting down at us. But it was even better than angels; it was our newfound friends…the prisoners in the Canton jail.
As we left, it began to dawn on me why we had come here and the gift that had been given to us by those men behind those bars. We came in scared to death and left with a fuller understanding life. We came in with unspoken prejudices against black prisoners and left with that wonderful feeling of kinship that transcends our conditions of race and creed.
But it was there I also discovered the softer meaning of courage. The kind of courage that stands up in the face of your worst fears, trusting something beyond you to carry you through this moment in spite of your own uncertainty. The kind of courage that would lead me through many a danger and many a fear and shows me how fear can create a prison far worse than the city jail. Once you face your fears with the courage of a simple faith, you move even deeper into wisdom and learn how to live beyond your wildest fears. It was one of those Christmas gifts that is still giving!