By Martin Smith
Have you ever received a letter from a friend, only to discover that he or she was already dead by the time you opened it? It does sharpen the message to fine point. I remember being so touched when I opened a package sent by Henri Nouwen containing a signed copy of his latest book. And then I learned he had died within hours of mailing it. His inscription made me think even more reverently of the craft of spiritual writing to which he was so dedicated, and to cherish powerful words he wrote about this vocation in his book Reaching Out. “Writing about the spiritual life is like taking prints from negatives…Maybe it is precisely the shocking confrontation with our hostile self that gives us words to speak about hospitality as a real option, and maybe we will never find the courage to speak about prayer as a human vocation without the disturbing discovery of our own illusions. Often it is the dark forest that makes us speak about the open field. Frequently it is prison that makes us think about freedom, hunger helps us to appreciate food and war gives us words for peace.”
“It is prison that makes us think about freedom.” Henri was talking wisely about all kinds of spiritual constraints, but that wisdom is founded in real history too. Some of Paul’s most liberating words are found in the letters smuggled out from his prison cell. The transcendent Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross was composed in a stifling jail cell in Toledo. And there is Martin Luther King Jr.’s immortal Letter from a Birmingham Jail of April 16, 1963. The power of words of freedom that issue from captivity is the reason why hundreds of former prisons are now pilgrimage sites. We are on holy ground when we lean against the bars of Nelson Mandela’s cell on Robben Island. Those who have always taken liberty for granted can never craft words about freedom that have anything like the ring of those voiced by imprisoned prophets.
Perhaps the mysterious providence that guided those who put the books of the New Testament in their present order really meant the book of Revelation to be the “last word” of God’s Word, because it is the supreme example of the truth that those who have experienced the despair of imprisonment have the most right to call us to the task of setting one another free in the Spirit of God. Last year I visited some of the sites of the tiny struggling Christian communities to which the prophet John sent his galvanic tract about resistance and hope from his exile on the isle of Patmos. Standing in the ramparts of the castle that juts out into the sea at Kusadasi, looking out towards the island, one can sense how near the churches he cared for must have seemed—just across the water—and yet how far. “I, John, your brother who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.”
This wasn’t a supernatural vision revealing the plot of the so-called second coming. It was a summons to hope in the coded poetry of apocalypse, recasting the whole resplendent array of biblical imagery. It was an up-to-the minute appeal to contemporary churches, and paradoxically that’s why it can strike us now with such force. Its core is the appeal: Expect God to surprise us. Jailed prophets specialize in reminding us that God is not merely the God who is, let alone the God who was. God is the one “who is to come, the Almighty.” Conventional religion looks to the past, but the passion of prophetic religion leans into the future of God. The God who is to come overturns our predictions and confounds plans. Divine innovation sets in play the unforeseen and makes human forecasting look ridiculous. Expect surprise, and let that expectation liberate you from all that oppresses you with a sense that power structures are immovable, custom set in stone, that history runs inexorably on rails of steel, and we are impotent to make an unprecedented future for humanity’s wellbeing.
We are praying at this time as nation taken by surprise through its own flawed but magnificent democratic process. We thought it was just another election, but surprise!—the launching of the third stage of American history is upon us! We open our Bibles again, and return to a message forged by prophets who let captivity become the crucible for hope. Our hope is in a God of surprises, of resurrection, and we can awaken again to the fact that the one certainty we have to offer is that God will continually take the world by surprise.
Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is the senior associate rector at St. Columba’s, D.C.