transformed lives, and touch

Date: 19 February 2006 19:33:00

I am noticing things a lot more. I'm much more awake.

Sitting concentrating extremely hard at the start of the service, running SongPro and Powerpoint both at once, trying to coordinate them, and to work out the running order, etc. An ex-IRA member passes, a huge, scarred bear of a man, giving my shoulder an affectionate squeeze, his arm around his down's syndrome son. After this I notice how many other once-extremely-dangerous people pass me and give me a wink or touch me as they enter the service. What a strange job I have. I feel oddly privileged. I'm not a welcomer, they're out in the foyer, all suits and handshakes. And I'm usually too busy to even look at people as they come in, so on some Sundays I seem to become a kind of a touchstone, often literally. Particular people always seem to touch me as they pass. I notice it much more around the church after the service too, and I am particularly aware of its significance from once-really-dangerous males. It's really something I grew up around, so it took me a long time to see that it's not how things are everywhere. I'm sure there used to be more hugging here, but that may just be a distorted childhood memory: any hug seems a lot more all-enveloping when you're little. From my own point of view I was very aware of its particular significance to males.

During my theology degree I looked at this from the outside, examining the behaviour of rehabilitated males in an evangelical Christian situation, when I did a qualitative research exercise on a ministry to Kilmarnock Prison.

"CPM's day at Kilmarnock prison begons on arrival at 10am, and immediately a ritual process begins which will eventually get us across the threshold, into the prison - seven or eight large men exit their cars and begin hugging one another indiscriminately. Despite the men all having said hello to one another beforehand, it was only at this point that the group was all together... Whatever the answer to the problem of scapegoating, it is certainly clear that sexuality plays a dominating role in a male prison's societal structure. Goffman¹ notes that "in prisons, denial of heterosexual opportunities can induce fear of losing one's masculinity". This is perhaps a reason for the excessive amounts of hugging that go on among the specific group of the CPM team who used to be inmates themselves. The hugs happen before and after groups come into the Chaplaincy; before and after entering the prison; before and after prayer times within the day, and so on. When I tentatively raised the issue I was informed that they had "no need to protect their masculinity" as Christ had saved them from such concerns. The hugging symbolises an openness, a communitas experience, which might be longed for by all but is necessarily held back strongly in a prison situation, lest one's sexuality be called into question - the role of the "beast" [sex offender] as scapegoat serves both to reinforce and to justify the sacredness of sexuality in the structure of the inmate world."²

Clearly there was a great deal more to that research than is found above (the rest of that exercise is reproduced here), and I wasn't looking at a church, and the exploration of sexuality in particular would probably rightly bemuse most of the guys who hugged or otherwise touched me in affection during this morning. But sexuality is just a crude sociological element on which to hang the human thing I enjoyed this morning. Repeated deliberate physical contact from people who would once have been quite incapable of it, whose identities were entirely different. Who are now quite genuinely in a different place: who have, in their own words, been born again.

I'd like to do more work on the process whereby people leave behind one life and begin another. In my undergrad work I just examined very minor liminal processes like the weekly journey to the prison, but I'd love to really grapple with the major life events. The transformation of lives that can provide me with hugs from murderers this morning is a genuinely amazing thing. I guess mountains of work must have been done on it but I'd love to do more. It's also a big part of what keeps me in the church. Literally: wonders never cease.

Footnotes
1. Goffman, E. - Asylums (Penguin 1961), p97
2. An analysis of the symbolic and ritual elements involved in Christian Prison Ministries’ visits to Kilmarnock Prison.