Written from federal prison in West Virginia after McAlister's conviction for the 1983 Griffiss Ploughshares action.

When you were young, you fastened your belt and walked where you chose; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands and a stranger will bind you and lead you where you have no wish to go.
John 21:18

These words from the last chapter of John’s Gospel reduced Peter to silence for perhaps the first time in the Gospels. Well they might. In them Jesus painted a vivid image of what Peter’s fate would be as a witness to him. In dramatic relinquishment of control over his own life, Peter became a prisoner and was crucified for his Lord.

This is the kind of image that, at worst, fills our hearts with terror and, at best, causes us to falter or flee, especially when the cross of Christ passes its shadow over our lives. With diffident hearts we want to calculate with our God: “This much. Lord, okay? Just don’t let ‘such and such’ happen to me. Don’t touch this part of my life!” We project horrors and tragedies beyond our strength to endure.

I know moments when I go into a cold sweat about the future. A familiar interior monologue goes something like this: “God has asked this sacrifice of me. It is livable—not so bad, if the truth be known. . . . It’s painful—unbearably so at times (or so it seems), but if I let God think this is okay, what will God exact next? So I’d better pretend it’s harder than it is or that I’m weaker than I am.”

The monologue is foolish in the extreme. I emerge from it laughing at myself and trusting that God laughs too, because God knows what I perceive but dimly—that the sacrifice, the pain, the strength, and the joy are all God’s gift and that there can be no pretense before God.

Part of that gift is the ability to look over my shoulder and understand that the moments of deepest pain have been those in which I was most alive, most in tune with the sufferings of others, and, by a strange paradox, most joyful. I emerge from the fear and sweat only with an act of faith, with gratitude for all God’s gifts, with laughter, and with a renewed commitment to live in the present moment, the only time and place in which I can live or praise God.

Still, it is hard to surrender to God’s future. Something in me seems to need to believe that there is something other than love in God.

These are prison musings. They flow from the experience of having stretched out my arms and having “a stranger bind me and lead me where I had no wish to go.” They confess the pain that surrounds me in this place as well as my own grief at being separated from those I love passionately. And maybe they are the kind of musings that equip me to say something about the relinquishment or displacement to which we are summoned as Christians.

Displacement is moving from one’s “ordinary” or “proper” place in this culture or society. Usually it’s a place we have chosen for ourselves, one to which we have aspired and struggled. Usually it implies that we have come of age, have “made it,” or at least that we are on the way to “making it.”

Displacement is moving into a life of solidarity with the countless millions who live disrupted lives. We have all seen them: in Africa, fleeing famine in their emaciated bodies; in Central America, fleeing war and torture at the hands of tyrants; in Mexico, seeking refuge from a city split apart by earthquakes; in Colombia, displaced or killed by volcanic eruptions; and in this country, left homeless by floods or poverty.

These are but a few of the current, visible images of displacement, reminders of the fragility of all our settled places. We cannot refuse to see the sufferings of others—not anymore. The news is an endless litany of human pain. And, as if against a coming storm, we try to establish shelters, insurance policies, and nest eggs and become settled in an artificial comfort that denies our shared humanity and vulnerability.

I would like to hold up an image for our consideration. Imagine the refugee woman as the figure who replaces the hero in our consciousness. She is the archetype of our vulnerability fleshed out in the hostage, the homeless, the poor, the prisoner, the victim of human-made and natural disasters. Her image calls us to acknowledge that we are all vulnerable. No one is secure. It tells us that the more we cling to our securities, the more we become playthings of illusion.

If we know anything about the forces at work in our world, we are— all of us—adrift without bearings, out of our depths. The threat of annihilation is over us and our children, and our special accounts and insurance policies are useless. The “self-reliant” do not fare better than the “dependent.” The passengers aboard the Achille Lauro or the Korean Flight 007 were not homeless refugees. Their faces may be more like us than those referred to earlier.

To deny our vulnerability is to stand against life, to join forces with those who would destroy all of life rather than accept the displacement to which we are summoned. In this context the options before us become clear, as does the meaning of our nuclear arsenals and the religion or antifaith they have become. Let us look, for a few moments, at these images and try to feel them as two poles, each seeking to lure us to itself and press us to its service.

At the one pole, we are, most of us, citizens of a country with imperial claims and policies and weapons. We are enticed into absolutizing the state. Our nation-state has created weapons (idols) that its people, in the name of loyalty and patriotism, are told to trust in (worship)—trust in the security they offer us and our way of life.

With insatiable appetites our presidents, military, arms manufac¬ turers, and media incessantly cry for more and more of the resources of our country and its people to serve the research, development, and deployment of these weapons. They appeal to our fear of enemies, our selfish clinging to what is ours, to the threat we instinctively feel as we see the “refugee”—the poor of the world—reaching, stretching, strain¬ ing for the basic necessities of life.

Allowing ourselves to be drawn to this pole means accepting the irrationality of the whole stance of our civilization—threatened with annihilation, waiting for it to happen, using much of its resources toward making it happen and virtually none toward preventing it; accepting the injustice through which we claim so much of the world’s resources as our right; and accepting the none-too-gradual erosion of our freedoms in the name of national security.

The other pole calls to our hearts, to our shared humanity, to our dependency on and interdependency with the earth, air, water, fire. It speaks in whispers to what is best in us, not as citizens of one country over against all that threatens us, but as people who are part of one world. At times accusingly, at times with gentle coaxing, this pole speaks of the image of the refugee woman and all that she stands for, calling us to go where it hurts, to enter those places where pain is part of life, to share her brokenness and anguish and fear. To become vulnerable.

Standing with the world in this way means: learning to listen in compassion and to exchange competition with service to one another; learning reverence for the mystery of life and the intricate network of nature that serves life; learning that real strength is created through standing with one another in corporate vulnerability; and learning that suffering is not an end or goal but the occasion for healing, for birthing, for growth.

These two poles are the dramatic choices before us in this age and season. We cannot wait long to choose. Even as we wonder and weigh the choice, we are inducted. The imperial state requires little more than our silence and our monies to serve its purposes. Until we determine to withdraw them, we remain in complicity with it. That is to remain hopeless and faithless. And that is a hopelessness that doubts the power of God at work in our world. It is a faithlessness that fails to live in covenant with God and with life. In our waffling we choose to make covenant with other “gods” and so abort the promise of God before it can come to birth.

The atmosphere in nuclear nations must challenge us as Christians. Our God is a jealous God. God will not take a “rightful” place beside country, occupation, or family. Our God has made it clear that to know and worship God means to be just with one another—especially to be just toward those who are most needy. Our God calls us to that displacement which is only a matter of learning our place in creation.

We can choose displacements, or they can be imposed. The issue is to make them voluntary, to will them by acceptance if we are unwilling or unable to choose them. So we can choose to uproot our lives to serve the refugee, the prisoner, the poor one, or we can accept it with a willing spirit, if we are made such through some disaster or decision of conscience.

While there is no woman in this prison by choice, the way each chooses to live here radically affects the lives of us all. Whether chosen or accepted, poverty can be voluntary. As such it has a healing quality that finds its antithesis in the grasping, hoarding spirit.

If we cannot choose freely, we can choose to be chosen. If we cannot, in grace, come down to where we ought to be, perhaps we can confess, in the words of the poet Wendell Berry in his poem “We Who Prayed and Wept”: 

Those who will not learn in plenty
to keep their place
must learn it in their need,
when they have had their way and
the field has spumed their seed.
We have failed thy grace.
Lord, I flinch and pray:
“Send thy necessity.”