“God Allows Us to Wake Up”: Sister Helen Prejean Comes to BC

By: Craig A. Ford, Jr.

Where is Sister Helen?

This is what I thought to myself as I was hurrying into Stokes 201S just this last Thursday, 09 October, for a lunchtime conversation co-sponsored by the Graduate Students of Color Association, the Church in the 21^st Century Center, and the School of Theology and Ministry. As I enter the room, there is food arranged invitingly on a table stretching down the length of the wall on my right; in front of me I discover that the large seminar room has been rearranged into a rectangle, allowing everyone to see each other once the community conversation begins.

That must be her.

She looks how you might imagine a Catholic religious looking if you’ve ever been to a Catholic grade school with religious women teachers: large glasses, a face always on the brink of engulfing you within the largest smile you could possibly imagine issuing from a human being, and—how can one forget—the ubiquitous wearable religious symbol. Hers is a cross. Eventually I take a seat right by her, on her left and around the corner formed by two of the tables coming together. She greets me—that engulfing smile that I suspected finally fully unleashed—and reveals that verbal icon of hospitality and congeniality, a southern accent. She’s from Louisiana.

“We oughta print t-shirts with ‘Sneaky Jesus’ on them”—words that issue from her mouth in equal parts autobiography and proclamation of the Gospel, equal parts humor and instruction. One cannot help but laugh at this strikingly original combination of words. Sentences like these characterize the tenor of her conversation with us: they tell us her story—about how, in the midst of living her life, she experienced Jesus’ call moving her to advocate for the abolition of the death penalty—but, like the sentences of all the sages we know in our lives, her story simultaneously presents the horizon open to us, if only we also listen to how God is calling us. Sister Helen, in telling us her story, is giving us a sense of what all of our stories can be if we only recognized what they already are: empowered by God to serve others. “We’re good, not bad people,” Sr. Helen tells us reassuringly, “We’re just real ignorant!” That Southern accent gets me again.

Which is not to say that living into one’s vocation is easy to do. Indeed, as Sister Helen tells us her story, what she says at times is not even easy to listen to. For her story leads us to realizations about the interconnections between poverty, race, and fear if we choose to look at the reality of capital punishment for what it is and the types of persons it asks us to be. And, while she’s speaking, she explicitly asks us to be honest with ourselves: why do we feel that we need it?

Because people do heinous things, unspeakable evils; they hurt others as if they were invincible. I say all of these things to myself, and I don’t even support the death penalty. Like a reflex, this reaction gives me a clue to just how deep the sense of a need for reparations runs throughout my very being.

But when we choose to believe that capital punishment constitutes just reparation, Sister Helen tells us that we must be the sorts of persons who willingly turn our eyes from what that means in our country. It means that we turn our eyes away from the fact that the majority of persons on death row are living in poverty, revealing that capital punishment is classist; it means that we turn our eyes away from the fact that we view violence as redemptive—that we believe a sort of “peace” somehow comes from killing people to show that killing people is wrong—revealing that capital punishment is monstrous; it means that we turn our eyes away from the fact that, in the words of Sr. Helen, a prisoner dies 1000 times in the 20-25 years that s/he sits on death row before taking the final walk to the death chamber, revealing that capital punishment is traumatizing and cruel.

And once we turn our eyes from these things, we must turn them away, once more, from another thing: that capital punishment is racist. Sister Helen devastates us with the reality that the death penalty is sought more often against people of color than against whites; with the reality that 80% of executions take place in the so-called “Bible Belt,” which she calls the “death belt”; with the reality that about 75% of all executions take place in ten former slave states. When we also take into account that, in order to support the death penalty, we also have to turn our eyes away from the fact that 90% of death row inmates were themselves abused as children, and that, in Louisiana, for example, 75% of those on death row aren’t educated above a sixth grade level, where else is there to look? The only option left is to close our eyes, falling into the sleep of the false consciousness that avows that justice awaits these people on death row, “because they deserve it,” even though, since 1973, there have been 146 exonerations.

“God allows us to wake up!” Sister Helen says against closed eyes. The way forward is the path that refuses a ‘punishment mentality’ and instead embraces a notion of ‘reconciliation’— an attitude that works for the healing both of the perpetrators and the victims in a capital punishment situation. With respect to the victims, Sr. Helen tells us that such healing requires a community’s presence to them, reaching out in compassion; in offering grief counseling; and in assisting with the emotional and financial costs of burying loved ones. With respect to the perpetrators, Sr. Helen’s path has been one that embraces accompaniment, the ministry of presence to the person waiting on death row, all the way until the last breath.

And to us Sister Helen asks that we take the following path: to refuse a justice system based on retribution and fear, and to instead create one based on restoration and compassion. For many of us who identify as Christian, this is like hearing the Gospel message anew.

‘Anew’ is definitely the key word in this instance. For as one GSCA member asked during the question and answer period, how is it that Christianity can have any credibility when, in the past, Christians have disposed of the lives of black persons through justifications cloaked in Christian symbols and grammar —whether towards the end of justifying chattel slavery, the Jim Crow era, or our contemporary peculiar institution, mass incarceration? There is no way to answer this question if the goal is to justify them, Sr. Helen makes clear. But there nevertheless are examples of difference, of the proclamation of the Gospel anew; and, to this end, Sr. Helen invoked the ministry of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who showed us that the way of nonviolence—that the logic of anti-violence which was always for him a Christian logic, even if not exclusively so—can work. Will we ourselves allow this logic to become reality again?

Craig A. Ford, Jr. is a second-year PhD student in theological ethics. He is chair of the Graduate Students of Color Association and is editor of the Words in Color blog.