For the last several years at Easter, the image of women as witnesses to the Resurrection has been an important aspect of our personal study and community worship. According to the gospel accounts, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Joanna faithfully returned to the tomb, prepared to attend to Jesus' body, and discovered it was empty. They were the first ones to know that Jesus' promise to rise again had been kept.
Women all over the world are today faithfully ministering to the bodies and souls of the oppressed and needy. And their willingness to face pain and sometimes danger because of that work creates opportunities for them to witness Jesus' resurrection power.
We have asked several women to share their understanding of resurrection faith and power at this Easter time. We hope their words will challenge and encourage women and men of faith to see the resurrected Christ among us.
-The Editors
In 1980 I was serving a 30-day sentence in the D.C. jail for holding a banner in the driveway at the White House. My second week in jail included Easter, and I attended the Catholic services. I flushed with shame and anger as the priest spoke of jail being our tomb, and release from prison an experience of resurrection.
True! The jail is tomb-like. But there was life there of which - to judge from his remarks - the priest knew nothing. There was hope that women built together in that tomb; there was love that they shared in a thousand small and large ways to make "the wilderness and dry land glad, the deserts rejoice and blossom " (Isaiah 35:1).
Thirty days was too brief. I could do little more than suspect, see glimmers, hints. But from 1984 to 1986, I spent 25 months in a federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia, which provided me with a deeper experience of women practicing resurrection, witnessing to resurrection even in the land of the dead. Or in the "Valley of the Forgotten Women," as the Washington Post called it.
Relationships in prison are difficult. The staff watches them carefully, suspiciously. One-to-one relationships are acceptable because they are controllable. But a friendship among four or more is regarded as a potential conspiracy, a threat to "security." As such, we were monitored carefully.
Yet, despite these barriers, a community was born among us - a blessed event, a gift. It was not a formalized community - it couldn't be. We sought out each other, spent time together. It had a flow to it, an openness to others. At the same time, there was need in it. We all needed to be with people who cared deeply about our world, about the life of the Spirit, about the life of the mind.
For the most part, the community was composed of "the political people,"those labeled "terrorists," and was therefore even more suspect in the eyes of the authorities. Those who dared this venture were mostly women who had learned to stand up to illegitimate authority.
Some were women who had chosen fidelity with their loved ones, or with their beliefs, rather than their own freedom. As a result their "offenses" were "aggravated," which means the parole board can increase the severity of their offenses and extend the prison sentence. Thus insinuation and innuendo replace evidence, and crucial years of a woman's life hang in the balance. Those who chose fidelity shone with an inner freedom. They inspired and strengthened all whom they touched; their friendship was a priceless gift of the Alderson experience.
The willingness to build community with people is itself a witness to the Resurrection of Jesus. It is part of his last will and testament, an act of obedience to his mandate "Remember me," which means to bring into unity the scattered members of his body. Community was a sacrament for us, a reminder of everything absent that we loved. We shared our lives, our hopes for the future, and we shared the kairos, the present moment.
Strengthened by community, we were able to be sisters to the other women, to share their pain and joy. Within a span of minutes, I'd talk with a woman just back from court with a 30-year sentence - she, her three young children, and her parents and friends all in shock - then turn to rejoice with another whose sentence had been cut to 18 months, who could begin to see daylight and normalcy for her family. To be there in community was to be where women hurt, to enter a place where pain is part of life, to share in the brokenness, anguish, and fear, to become vulnerable.
We planted a garden there in soil that was hard, dry, and cracked - a metaphor of the place itself - brutish, improper for life. We dreamed, imagined, worked it, watered it. Our bodies overflowed and fertilized the world in that garden. And at last, in wonder at the mystery of life, we shared its fruits in the most memorable meals of that sojourn. The world overflowed, and our bodies received it.
We laughed! At ourselves, at one another sometimes, in the hope that the other could also see her foolishness, her over-seriousness. We laughed at the absurdity of the place. The laughter was ironic sometimes, the kind that is the only option to tears; at other times it was joyous. Whoever is joyous, who laughs often and loves beauty, fights better - fights, that is, for right, for decency, for justice.
We played! The earth will yet be a place of laughter and play. But it is uncommon in prison. It happened more than once or twice that as we played the guard would come up to check what we were eating or drinking, to learn, if she or he could, what spirit moved us. As if the only explanation for such vitality were drugs or hooch. The tragedy is that the guard, like the priest in the D.C. jail, was not open to the Spirit alive in such a place.
When women in prison, far from families and loved ones, can laugh and play, they practice resurrection.
We wept. The night after our government bombed Libya, we gathered in a circle of concern and prayer. The emotions went from grief to rage - rage born, as it often is, of powerlessness. The day had been spent longing for a word that would tell us that some of our countrypeople felt that Reagan had indeed overstepped the limits of decency and that this action would backfire on him. No such word came. Nor would it. The liberals gathered around Reagan in solidarity.
We looked that night at the 24th chapter of Matthew's gospel and, avoiding all the exegetical problems, felt ourselves inside the whirlwind of the end time, looking for hope, for reassurance, for protest. We heard the word, addressed to ourselves: "Flee!" "Flee the consensus!" "See to it that it isn't unanimous!"
We heard the call to find our center in God's Word and from that center to reach out and be women of peace. And as we met on subsequent evenings to pray for those bombed in Libya, for those who lost loved ones, we prayed for forgiveness for our country and its deadly pretensions.
Did we sense God? Did we have communion with God? We felt nostalgia for the kingdom; we groaned with the whole of creation; and we felt within ourselves the future growing, growing like new life.
THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS SHOWS US that our work is not only one of dismantling but also the work of enfleshing the new life Christ inaugurated. This new life is undeserved and unextrapolated and perhaps a gift to which we become more receptive in the admitted failure of our best efforts. Our best efforts in Alderson were probably a failure. Virtually nothing was changed. It is a prison teeming with violence, anger, and hatred. The racism and the sexism are unaltered. The programs we worked to establish were quickly eradicated. Did it make any difference?
But our very failures are our assurance that peacemaking is not done by an outsider, a Monday-morning quarterback. The Crucifixion articulates God's odd freedom, strange justice, and peculiar power. And it lets us know that without suffering, our peacemaking and community-building are apt to become as strident and destructive as that which they criticize. We have known the grief, the failure and pain in ourselves, and it deepened our nonviolence.
It made a difference! I knew it the weekend before I was released from Alderson. For two consecutive nights that weekend, the sky filled with a double rainbow. I had never seen the like. On the second night, after the rainbow had faded, we walked on and saw, in the field beyond the prison, a pair of deer. Together we watched in awe and gratitude. It wasn't a question of seeing God; rather it was a question of seeing with God and being glad!
Elizabeth McAlister, a longtime peace activist, was a member of the Jonah House Community in Baltimore, Maryland, and a mother of three children when this article appeared.
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