During the season of Lent this year, as we lament the ways that both we  and the world in in which we live are broken, my church community is particularly focusing on the theme of imprisonment, the liberating power of Christ, and the places where we long to see that freedom break through.

Celine Chuang, another writer in our community, put together a beautiful booklet of readings for each day of the season, inviting us to use poetry, prose, and visual art to engage with the question, “What prisons – whether literal, spiritual, physical, or structural – are present in our world today: in our city, country, society, and in ourselves?” In this booklet, familiar voices from our own neighborhood find their way onto the page alongside those of theologians, activists, and artists from around the world, exploring what it means to “acknowledge and lament imprisonment” and to “posture ourselves towards and participate in liberation from these forms of captivity.”

The first step to getting somewhere is knowing where you want to go. And so as we seek to live into the vision of God’s Kingdom on earth, we are trying to imagine together:  “What does freedom from prisons look like?”

The poem below was my attempt to name some of the prisons I see around me and to envision a life beyond them.

Prisons of Our Own Making: Fear in the Age of the Refugee

We

imprisoned by narratives of fear

and scarcity

label the other as

Terrorist;

Illegal:

taker of lives,

taker of jobs,

taking away our homogeneity

and sense of security.

 

We call our prison a fortress,

believing it is we

who have prevailed over

the chaos outside,

and not our own fear

that has won by

relegating our existence

to captivity and isolation.

 

And they—

those from whom

we have separated from ourselves

by language

by place of origin

by passport stamp–

or lack thereof–

they

are imprisoned, too.

 

But their cells are not

the walls of their own imagining.

They are the real cement and iron

of immigration detention centres

turning profit

by the bed

by the day,

punishing the audacity

of those who have the nerve to

cross politically imagined lines in the sand

and seek opportunity

seek safety

seek survival.

 

What would it be

if we could look them in the eye

and see

not outsider

or villain

or poster child

or political symbol

or threat to our way of life,

but a reflection

of ourselves?

A spark of the Divine;

a life that’s on the line.

A human being

who belongs,

and who longs

to be free?