Lyrics and Life

By Caitlin Ward

How Can I Keep From Singing?

My life flows on in endless song,
above earth’s lamentation.
I hear the clear, though far-off hymn
that sounds a new creation.

CHORUS
No storm can shake my inmost calm
while to that Rock I’m clinging.
Since love is Lord of heaven and earth,
how can I keep from singing?

Through all the tumult and the strife,
I hear that music ringing.
It finds an echo in my soul.
How can I keep from singing?

CHORUS

While though the tempest loudly roars
I hear the truth, it liveth
And though the darkness ‘round me close
Songs in the night it giveth

CHORUS

When tyrants tremble in their fear
And hear their death knell ringing
When friends rejoice both far and near
How can I keep from singing?

CHORUS

In prison cell and dungeon vile
Our thoughts to them are winging
When friends by shame are undefiled
How can I keep from singing?

After months of meetings, discussions, careful planning and orientations, the day had finally arrived: Madeline, one of the campus ministers, and I were taking a cohort of students to the Regional Psychiatric Centre to celebrate Sunday service with the Catholic chaplain, Peter. We had arranged to meet after 11 o’clock mass, get some lunch and drive to the federal correctional institute together for 12:30.

Well, the best laid plans, and all that. Bishop Remi De Roo, one of the few surviving bishops of the Second Vatican Council, was in Saskatoon to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the opening of Vatican II. Everything went long, as it often does in these cases, and it was 12:25 by the time we got out of mass. This did not seem to distress anyone except for Peter and me, who were busy making plans while everyone else was running off in all directions.

No one had eaten, so Madeline and I wrangled everyone together and ran and bought a dozen cheeseburgers before herding the cats to the car. We were getting texts from other students who were coming separately and didn’t know the way, so there were loads of people in cars lost in Sutherland, and one student waiting at RPC afraid he’d gone on the wrong day. I was fielding phone calls and pointing to the changing lights while Madeline leaned out the car window to say hello to someone she knew as we stopped on Central Avenue. She made up for nearly missing the light by going 20 kilometres above the speed limit the rest of the way.

It was at that point I decided that I would be driving next time.

We arrived at RPC around one, met the three students who’d found their way there separately, went through security and walked out into the first courtyard — the one the inmates/patients can’t go into. Peter stopped us in the yard, showed us the fences and the armed cars with snipers that circle the prison to stop escaping patients. I watched one of my students almost crumple when she asked if the snipers shot to wound, and Peter said gently but very matter-of-factly, “no. To kill.” I kept my arm around her as we walked into the main building.

We went inside to prepare and talk and eat cheeseburgers. The patients started arriving just before two, though they’re not supposed to get there until just before service starts. One man, round and childish in sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt (we’ll call him Jim), came a bit early, too, and Peter asked one of the students to help him go over the first reading. They went out into the hallway and practised the reading a few times. We started at 2:30, and this student sat beside me, leaned over and asked, “when is the first reading, again?” I laughed, and told him about the time I was reading at daily mass and I was so concerned about going up at the right time that I read the wrong day’s reading when I got to the lectern. But Peter called on him and Jim when it was the right time, so they went up and did the first reading (the right one).

Now, Jim can barely read. His eyes were wide, stuttering over the easy words and stopping at the hard ones. My student stood beside him, gently prompting Jim and, when he was done, one of the patients took Jim’s hand as he walked past and said, “good job there, man.” And Jim smiled like an angel.

After mass, after coffee with the patients and cleaning up, Peter took us around to the different wings of RPC, and we went out to talk about how the day had gone. One of the students, who’d been at mass that morning with me, said that the first reading had resonated more the second time she heard it — when Jim did it, struggling over the words, “I prayed, and prudence was given me; I pleaded, and the spirit of wisdom came to me.” It was the realization for all of us that wisdom is for these damaged and dangerous men just as it is for the scholarly worshipping community we had come from that morning.

Peter said he knew Jim would probably never leave RPC, and it was important for him to find a place here, so he did what he could to give Jim that place. He wasn’t going to say more than that, but this student has a knack for asking more questions than she wants to know the answer to, and so he told us that Jim is a dangerous offender who does not have the intellectual ability to go through the rigorous programs that would ever give him the opportunity to leave. We debriefed, had a coffee and everyone went home.

When I got back to my apartment, I cried for half an hour. Because here’s the thing: I looked into the eyes of a man who is the dregs of society, the worst kind alive. A man I should by all rights despise. Instead, I saw the face of Christ.

Now, I don’t mean to romanticize a place that holds some who really are the worst of society, but I can tell you this: the prison chaplaincy changes lives, for those inside and those of us who come to minister. Come the end of March 2013, it’ll be gone, because of cuts to the chaplaincy program in the federal prisons. And we will all be worse for that.

Ward is a freelance writer and aspiring documentary filmmaker based in Saskatoon. You can find her short bursts of insight and frustration at http://www.twitter.com/newsetofstrings