Sweet Sounds of Heaven

I might not be able to tell you what Heaven looks like, but I’m sure I can tell you what it sounds like.

Tuesday evening, 7:40 PM. We were gathered in the basement classroom of a dilapidated prison. Ceiling tiles sagged low, stained dirty with water, others missing entirely. Mismatched chairs, wobbly tables, moths buzzing at the windows. As bleak a setting as one can imagine, not a place for joy and praise.

Evan tuned his guitar and began to sing.

I pulled into Nazareth, was feeling about half past dead.

I turned to the gentleman standing beside me and smiled. “The Weight,” I whispered. Rocky smiled back. What Rocky doesn’t know is that I had seen the two prayer requests he had made to another volunteer last week – one request was for the new job that he had started, the other was prayers for me. For me. God bless this man.

There’s a quote attributed to Saint Augustine that goes something like “to sing is to pray twice”. I’d come across the quote in an Anne Lamott book earlier that Tuesday and filed it away in my mind.

Hey Mister can you tell me where a man might find a bed? He just grinned and shook my hand, and ‘no’ was all he said.

The other 38 men and women in the classroom sang along. I glanced around at this motley crew - Hispanics, whites, blacks. Tears welled in my eyes. My gaze settled on Tommy, a lost 26-year-old who sat hunched by the door, head hidden away in a hoodie. Tommy had stumbled into the Alpha class two weeks before and sat quietly throughout our meetings, rarely speaking up. Last week we had discussed forgiveness and he approached me after class, eyes sullen and sad, to tell me that he wanted to talk more about forgiveness. I patted him on the shoulder and promised him we would find the time. I knew God was working on his heart, that some deep pain had been stirred up, that he was desperate to be free of his burdens and his sins. I prayed a silent prayer for Tommy, for every man and volunteer in that room. God, thank you, thank you, thank you. Help us all.

Many incarcerated people are never given the opportunity to confront their pain, to understand why they committed a crime in the first place, to face the trauma that they endured before, during, and after prison. Therapy is so hard to come by in prison. Incarcerated people are probably the population that need therapy the most, yet very few prisons have therapists or programs designed to promote mental wellness, honesty, and vulnerability. Subsequently, men and women are left to stew in their guilt and shame, unable to access the tools they desperately need to repair themselves and the damage that they’ve done to not only themselves, but their families and others. Unsurprisingly, more than two-thirds of prisoners will return to prison in their lifetime. Prison systems are setting prisoners up to fail, and fail they do.

Prison is not a typical place for singing either. As I listened to Evan’s guitar strum and the words echo around the room, I marveled at the beauty of what his song was accomplishing. In a brief moment of time, in a horribly messed-up place, we had all come together, united as one, singing a song about loneliness and heartbreak and wandering on the road of life. I knew just then what Saint Augustine was talking about. I knew in my very core just what it meant to sing and pray.

The songs continued, Stand by Me followed by Lean on Me. The chorus joined in with each song. We didn’t sound particularly good, but we were singing together, each man on his own journey, confronting the same questions that we all have:  Who am I and what is my purpose here?

When we broke into our groups, Tommy stirred restlessly. I finally asked him, “Tommy, you mentioned something last week about forgiveness. Would you like to talk about that more?” He spoke, his voice lowered to a whisper. “When I was eight or nine something really bad happened to me. I’m the baby of my family. It took me a long time to forgive that person; I’m 26 now.”

Later, a question was posed to the group. “What obstacle is holding you back from having a relationship with God?” Most of the group responded that nothing held them back. Tommy didn’t speak. We moved along. A couple minutes later, Tommy’s whisper returned. “Can we go back to that question about obstacles? I guess for me, I’ve just never seen a miracle.”

My heart broke. How many men like Tommy have been abused, born into broken, drug-addled households? One in three African American boys born today will be arrested in their lifetime. No little boy or girl dreams of growing up and going to prison, yet one in three Black men like Tommy will end up there. Tommy’s present-life is the future that awaits many, whether they know it or not. Oh Tommy, I thought. Why does it have to be this way?

The class ended and we were walking up the stairs out to our cars and the homes that awaited us. A man rushed past me asking, “Where’s Miss Adrienne? I got to see her.” I told him she was downstairs. He tore past, not waiting to hear my reply. I waited for Adrienne on the landing. She soon emerged with the same man, smiling her endearing smile and telling me that the man had a question for me.

“How do I get baptized? I need to be born again.” His lips trembled, his eyes watered.

“I got you. It might take me a few weeks, but I got you. We have two chaplains on staff and one of them can do it for you. “

He stated the obvious. “I think I’m about to cry.” I reached up and patted this huge man on the shoulder. “I’m so proud of you. It’s okay.”

On the street a few moments later, Adrienne shared more with me about the man asking to be baptized. “He told me previously that he’s been struggling to sleep for several weeks now. It’s like all this trauma and hurt has been bubbling up and he’s confronting it.” He’d finally found a place to share his hurt and pain. God had made his heart ready and HeartBound and Trinity Anglican Church had simply provided the space to let him finally share. This is real change, the kind that you can’t walk away from as the same person you were before. The change I had known almost a year and a half ago.

The Quran states that some people are simply destined for Hell, that some will not be chosen. They are not preapproved, no matter if they choose or not. I hear this from Muslim students in our class who tell me so. Christianity, on the other hand, does not teach you how to be a “warrior” or that you are destined for eternal paradise if only your good deeds outweigh your bad. Heaven is available through the completed work of Jesus. And that, friends, is the sweetest sound of Heaven.

May your days be filled with the Sweet Sounds of Heaven.

Spencer