AARP-Eligible and Incarcerated

Over 200,000 people over the age of 50 are incarcerated in the U.S.

That's why, on Christmas Eve last year, Human Rights Watch called American prisons "nursing homes with razor wire."

Given the low recidivism rates of older offenders, and their astronomical healthcare costs, one might think compassionate release would be used more often. But our culture, for a generation now, has unrelentingly insisted on getting its pound of flesh - year after aging year.

From the Margins to the Manger

Shepherds were ritually unclean under Rabbinic law and could not testify in a court of law. But in the Gospel of Luke, it was they, along with the angels, who gave the first testimony to the birth of Jesus.

For it isn't to the palace that the Christ child comes
But to shepherds and street people, hookers and bums.
- Bruce Cockburn, "Cry of a Tiny Babe"

African Americans, like shepherds, have often been relegated to the margins of society, and an affinity between the two groups is readily apparent in Langston Hughes's Black Nativity. In one version of the play, now in its eleventh year at the Lorraine Hansbery Theatre in San Francisco, wayward shepherds find their way to the baby Jesus singing songs of musicians who have died in the last year.

This year, the shepherds made sure to include songs by Michael Jackson, the King of Pop. Way to go, shepherds! A nice combination of sacred and secular, paying respects to the King of Pop while on the way to honoring the King of Kings!

Christmas in Prison

My friends Mark and Jen periodically host “hootenannies” at their house in St. Paul. Friends gather in the living room or, in summer, on the back porch, to make music together.

Friday’s edition quite naturally had a holiday theme. The numbers ranged from traditional religious (“We Three Kings”) to seasonal secular (“Run Run Rudolph”) to contemporary country (Alan Jackson’s “Please Daddy Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas”). So clearly we covered the waterfront, with each contribution adding something to the mosaic.

Yet the moment that really stood out for me was when someone sang John Prine’s “Christmas in Prison.” Just the title itself is enough to give one pause — and the lyrics? Well, give them a listen.

God Grows Tired - of Same Old Same Old Christmas

Nearly fifteen years after fleeing Sudan in a harrowing exodus of biblical proportions, a number of the Lost Boys made their way to America. A deeply moving documentary film, God Grew Tired Us, follows three of their stories in particular: John Bul Pai, who settled in Syracuse, New York, and two others, Daniel and Panther, who went to Pittsburgh.



Of all the memorable scenes, I’ll focus here on only one. Spending his first Christmas in America, only two months removed from the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, where he spent ten years, John Bul seeks to understand the role of Santa in the American celebration of the holiday.

Santa doesn’t make sense to John Bul on any level. Quite rightly, he asks what a kitschy photo op prop for sales in the shopping mall has to do with the birth of Christ. After all, there is no Santa in the Bible. John Bul contrasts the preoccupation with the bulbous, bearded caricature of our commercial imagination with the experience of Christmas Eve at Kakuma, where the whole camp pulsed with dancing expectation of the imminent birth of Christ in each person’s heart.

And they really did dance at Kakuma − in a joyous, vibrant way that broke down the separation between people, what some philosophers call the principium individuationis.

In America, our experience of Christmas is highly privatized. Even those who venture out for worship do so for little more (or even less) than an hour before returning to the exclusivity of their private presents and expected foods of feasting.

At Kakuma, by contrast, the shared experience seemed to be more than the sum of the individual parts. Surely we have much to learn from our African brothers and sisters in this regard. Wouldn’t it be something, this Christmas Eve, if we not only reenacted the ageless story of the birth in the stable, but also linked arms in a more systematic way than we’re used to doing? Yes, we’re dealing with H1N1, but still . . . .

A place to start might be by recalling that St. Nicholas of Myra, the primary inspiration for Santa Claus, was a 4th-century bishop in what is now Turkey who was known for his generous gifts to the poor. What are we doing, for our part, for the many people struggling in this tough economy?