What the Pastor Suggested

Seventy Times

Chapter 9: What the Pastor Suggested

Pastor Dale Hargrove drove from Berea every other Thursday in a Buick LeSabre that was old enough to have opinions about highway speed and new enough to keep them to itself. He arrived at FCI Hardin at ten, signed the visitor log with the enthusiasm of a man who believed that the act of entering a prison was a ministry in itself, and walked to the chapel with the stride of someone who had never been required to walk in a straight line by anyone other than his own sense of purpose.

He was fifty-seven. Round in the way of men whose wives were good cooks and whose metabolisms had declined with the same gradual inevitability as their hairlines. He wore pressed khakis and a polo shirt with a cross embroidered on the breast pocket — a gift from his congregation at Berea Community Church, where he had served for twenty-two years and where the Sunday attendance averaged one hundred and forty-three, a number he tracked with the specific attention of a man who understood that ministry could be measured and that the measurement was not the ministry but that the absence of measurement was not humility — it was guesswork.

Dale was a good man.

Ezra believed this without reservation. Dale was kind, well-intentioned, generous with his time, faithful to his calling, and possessed of a conviction about the transformative power of Christian witness that had not been tested by the particular conditions that tested things inside the fence. He volunteered at Hardin because he believed that Christ's command to visit the imprisoned was literal and binding, and because his own congregation, while grateful for his ministry, did not produce the kind of spiritual drama that Dale's pastoral imagination required.

He brought donuts. He always brought donuts. The facility permitted them because the donuts had been searched and cleared at the gate and because the chaplain had filed the appropriate paperwork and because the Bureau of Prisons, in its comprehensive wisdom, had determined that glazed pastries did not constitute a security risk, though the regulations specified that donuts with filling were prohibited due to the concealment potential of the interior cavity, which was a sentence that existed in an actual Bureau policy document and that Ezra had read with the particular weariness of a man who worked in a system that understood cavities but not communion.

"Ezra," Dale said, setting the donut box on the desk. "How are we."

"We are fine."

"The men?"

"The men are the men."

Dale sat in the visitor's chair. He sat in it the way he sat in everything — fully, with the physical commitment of a man who believed that half-measures were incompatible with faith. He placed his hands on his knees.

"I heard something," he said.

Ezra waited.

"I was talking to Chaplain Morrow at the district meeting last week. He mentioned — in passing, you understand, nothing confidential — that you had a transfer situation that was... personal."

"Morrow," Ezra said.

"He didn't give details. He said you'd declined a recusal. He said it with respect — he respects you, Ezra, everyone does — but he mentioned it because he thought I might be able to help."

"Help."

"As a resource. A pastoral resource."

Ezra looked at the donuts. Glazed. No filling. Regulation-compliant.

"Dale."

"Yes."

"What did Morrow tell you."

Dale shifted in the chair. The shifting was the physical expression of a man who was preparing to say something he had rehearsed in the car and that had sounded better at highway speed than it sounded in a small office with institutional furniture and a chaplain whose stillness had the quality of a surface that would not support the weight of what was about to be placed on it.

"He said the man who was involved in your brother's death has been transferred here. He said the man has requested chapel access. He said you signed the request."

Ezra said nothing.

"And I thought," Dale continued, "what an incredible opportunity."

The word entered the room and landed on the desk between them with the weight of something that had been dropped from a height sufficient to cause damage.

Opportunity.

"An opportunity," Ezra said.

"For reconciliation. For witness. Ezra, think about it — a chaplain, a man of God, face to face with the person connected to his deepest loss, choosing to minister to him. Choosing forgiveness. Choosing to model the very thing Christ commands. That's — that's the sermon, Ezra. That's the whole sermon."

Dale's face was bright. Not with malice. Not with opportunism. With the genuine, undiluted belief that human suffering, when processed through the correct theological framework, produced stories, and that stories produced impact, and that impact was the measure of ministry.

He was not wrong about the theology.

He was wrong about the room.

"Dale," Ezra said.

"I'm not suggesting anything elaborate. But what if — and hear me out — what if we arranged a moment. A facilitated conversation. You and Washington. In the chapel. With prayer. Maybe even with the study group present, as witnesses. The power of that, Ezra. A man who lost his brother, sitting across from the man who — and choosing, publicly, in front of other incarcerated men who are wrestling with their own guilt and their own need for grace — choosing to say I forgive you."

He paused.

"I could write it up for the district newsletter. Not exploitatively — tastefully. As a testimony. Other chaplains need to hear this kind of story. Other congregations need to know what God is doing inside these walls."

Ezra looked at Dale for a long time.

The long time was not anger. It was the particular duration required for Ezra to sort through the responses available to him and select the one that would preserve both the truth and the relationship, because Dale was a good man and good men who were wrong about sacred things required a different kind of correction than men who were wrong about ordinary ones.

"Dale."

"Yes."

"What you are describing is a performance."

Dale blinked.

"A ceremony. A facilitated event with witnesses and documentation and a write-up for the newsletter. A moment designed to produce a story about forgiveness for an audience that is not in this room and does not live inside this fence and will read the story over coffee and feel something warm and brief and move on to the next page."

"That's not — "

"That is exactly what it is." Ezra's voice was quiet. Not raised. The quietness was the point. "Forgiveness — if it happens, Dale, and I am not telling you it will — forgiveness is not a ceremony. It is not a moment. It is not something that can be arranged by scheduling a conversation and placing two men in chairs and adding prayer and calling it reconciliation."

"I wasn't trying to — "

"Forgiveness is what happens in the room when no one is arranging it. When no one is watching. When the newsletter does not exist and the audience is not present and the only people in the room are the people who are required to be there by the facts of what happened between them. And in that room, Dale, the forgiveness takes as long as it takes and looks like whatever it looks like and may not look like forgiveness at all — it may look like silence, or avoidance, or a man's handwriting shaking on a form — and no one outside that room has the right to accelerate it or document it or turn it into a testimony for people who have never been inside a room where the cost of the testimony was paid."

Dale was quiet.

He was quiet because he was a good man and good men, when corrected accurately, had the capacity to hear the correction rather than defend against it, and Dale, for all his limitations, had this capacity.

"I overstepped," he said.

"You meant well."

"I did."

"I know."

Dale looked at the donuts. He looked at them with the expression of a man who had arrived with an offering and discovered that the offering was not the one the situation required.

"What can I do," he said.

"Bring the donuts. Lead the Thursday worship. Sit with the men who come. Do not mention Washington. Do not mention my brother. Do not arrange anything. If God is doing something in this situation — and I am not yet certain that he is — it will not be improved by administration."

Dale nodded.

He stood.

He left the donuts.

He walked to the door and turned back.

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"I'll pray for you."

"I would prefer you pray for the room."

Dale looked confused.

"The room does not need my theology to be correct," Ezra said. "It needs to survive what is about to be asked of it. Pray for that."

Dale left.

Ezra ate a donut.

He ate it slowly, with the deliberation of a man who had been given something small and sweet by a person who did not understand the situation but who had driven an hour in a Buick LeSabre to bring it, and that was its own form of ministry, even if the minister did not know what the ministry was.

He wiped his hands.

He returned to the work of preparing for a Sunday that would change the room in ways no newsletter could describe and no ceremony could contain and no well-meaning pastor from Berea could imagine, because the room was not a story. It was a covenant. And covenants did not submit to narrative structure or pastoral scheduling or the particular shape of a good man's idea of what God was doing, because God, in Ezra's experience, did not do things that could be captured in a district newsletter, and the things God did do required more from the people involved than a facilitated conversation and a plate of donuts, though the donuts, he had to admit, were good.