He was completely naked; alone in the tiled shower section of the quiet prison dorm. His shining body, his natural ebony skin tone, stood in stark contrast to the old, poorly constructed concrete block building. It was built with inmate labor in the 1950s. The glare of institutional ceiling lights wrapped an eerie halo about him. He was alone. He was wet, potentially visible to at least 70 pairs of eyes. He was shaving his groin and legs.
For all the dreariness and relentless sameness of prison there are occasional and exceptional moments of strangeness, ugliness, beauty or uniqueness which have tattooed themselves in my memory. This was one.
It was off-putting and a bit jarring to observe this moment of reckless immodesty, primping and vanity. Could he be doing something he found personally satisfying? Was he grooming himself for some convict he was sexually attracted to? Or, was this part of his practice of sexual trolling, his purpose to draw to him a partner to hedge against the loneliness of the crude and rough environment he lived in. Or, an advertisement to attract another lonely man who might have coffee or potato chips or cigarettes to trade for a hidden moment of quick sex in the mop closet.
It was just a thought, an attempt to explain to myself a completely strange sight. I shifted in my bunk to remove this sight from my field of vision and continued reading my book.
Such an image becomes indelible and invites personal reflection and attempts at explanation or commentary. The perpetual pressure and intense interior physic hegemony of loneliness is common to the vast majority of God’s children and is magnified in the prison environment. The methods used to mitigate the pain of loneliness and to assuage the intolerable thirst it causes may vary widely. However, it certainly would unfold into predictable patterns of behavior that would surely include most, if not all, of humanity.
When I think of this man in what seemed to me an extreme exhibition of narcissism, I am troubled when I couple it with the familiar saying, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
It is indeed troubling to think that any expression of human behavior is potentially a mirror of who I am or who I could be. It is possible to take it even further and ask myself, “Is what he is doing really worse than what I do? Or what I think?”
It is easy to judge, easy to be hard, easy to think myself superior in the light of extreme, shocking or bad behavior. What we are required to do in our ancient holy faith is to see what disturbs us and to be thankful that Jesus Christ has paid for that behavior in his own blood.
Jesus could not say – the only human who could not – “there but for the grace of God go I”. Instead he says, “Any evil that can be properly judged must be paid for. And, in my death it is taken care of. It is paid in blood.”
So I must say to any memory of any person or behavior that I find disturbing, “the same blood flows for us all, because we all sin. And, we are all loved.”
Gano Reinhardt
