Is It Time for a Jail Break?

“But during the night an angel…opened the prison doors, brought them out and said, ‘Go, stand in the temple and tell the people the whole message about this life.”
 
“So they entered at daybreak and went on with their teaching.”
 
                                                                        Acts 5.17-21

Maybe it’s the pandemic blues, the wan never-ending-ness of our collective uncertainties.  Whatever the cause, and I’m sure there are several, the idea of a jail break is speaking to me.

This week, the story about the days right after the death and resurrection of Jesus has grabbed me as it never has before.

Once they could accept the empty tomb, the followers of Jesus are fired up with the conviction that a new social and cosmic order has begun…a new understanding of our humanness, our participation in divine essence.  It has changed them, and they believe it is capable of liberating all who hear about it.  Besides this, it is what Jesus commanded them to do.

The powers that be, the temple elders’, are deeply threatened by these public antics.  They command the followers to stay silent, never use Jesus’s name, and not to share his teachings.

When they disobey, they are thrown into prison.

There is an old adage about shooting the messenger.  Though less familiar in America than elsewhere across the globe and history:  it is the writers and poets and artists who are the first to be silenced.  The visionaries, the non-conformists, those who bring hope and truth to their countryfolk, are arrested or killed first.

But for a moment, I want to pause and consider not the prisons imposed on us, of which every life offers many — but those we make for ourselves.   Some fear binds us.  Some bright attraction draws us with invisible hooks.  Before we know what has happened, we’ve lost our freedom.

What would it take for us to identify and escape our own prisons — all of the things that hem us in, and make us small?

Discomfort, anxiety, sleepless nights, dreams, if we sit with them long enough can be the angels we’d otherwise ignore.  The many ways in which we distract ourselves to avoid confronting truths we need to hear.  The insights of loved ones who can see more clearly than we can at certain times what we need to break out of, or into.

Carl Jung was fascinated by the power of serendipity.   He taught that one of the most important things in life is to remain awake — to what isn’t obvious or expected, to the accidental, to the mystery dropping its clues everywhere around us.

We don’t usually experience the high drama and clarity of a prison door being flung open.   It is more like cracks that appear, possibilities.  An insight, a stray realization, a stranger, an invitation.

But it is precisely these that offer us the cracks in the door, the trajectories into freedom.  It is said that we don’t grow unless we risk, stretch beyond our comfort zones.

Sometimes asking questions about our own diminishment, our modus operandi and coping mechanisms can send us into a labyrinth of regret, and self-recrimination.  This is decidedly NOT the route of the angels.  It can sometimes be easier to contemplate what keeps us stuck if we ask ourselves this question:

What, if I were free, would I “teach” in the public square?  What new ways and possibilities glimmer at the margins of my imagination, for my own life?

I hope that you will meditate on this question as you begin your new week, and that the collage above offers its own invitations to your imaginations.

Namaste