Lorna and God

One of our chaplains, a really amazing man with a wicked sense of humor, used to say that he was absolutely sure God lived in the Yavapai County jail. He knew this because every inmate who came into the jail eventually found God, and every inmate who was released seemed to leave God there. Made sense to me.

Lorna seemed to have had an on-again-off-again relationship with God which was directly related to her consumption of alcohol. The more sober she was, the more she believed. After she had been in jail for a couple of weeks and had dried out sufficiently to understand how much trouble she was in, she proceeded to find her way back to religion.

Please do not misunderstand. I believe any course that leads away from lives of drugs, alcohol and crime is a good one, and if that course involves the use of religion and faith, so much the better. It’s just that I worked in the jail long enough to know that in 99 percent of all the cases, the love of drugs and alcohol, and the lifestyle that accompanies it, is just too strong to relinquish to God. We come back to that bad choices thing again, I suppose.

And now I have to eat my words and tell you that Lorna was that one percent inmate. Not in the beginning, mind you. In the beginning she was the Queen of Lip Service, and all the other, much younger inmates would gather around her looking for leadership and guidance. And a new and better way to style their hair at night with toilet paper rollers.

Gradually, over the course of the year and a half she was in jail waiting for trial, her entire being changed. The homemade makeup grew fainter and the audacious attitude mellowed. It was in good part due to the drying-out process, allowing her head to clear and the realization of what had happened to set in. She began keeping a journal and on several occasions showed me letters she had written and received from her family, all of whom had basically written her off as a lost cause and a point of embarrassment.

By the time her trial came around she was just “Mom” to the other girls in the dorm, and no longer the flamboyant, muddle-brained creature that had first thrust herself into the world of incarceration. She had even stopped preaching to the others. Instead she was the one who greeted the new ones and took time to listen to their worries, angers and fears. She had found her place so to speak, in the most unlikely of circumstances.

I still hear from Lorna occasionally. She writes from prison where she is serving a sentence of seventeen to twenty-five years. She teaches reading to the illiterate prisoners, works in the warden’s garden and leads Bible studies. Her letters are clear, introspective and well written. She is hopeful and even has a plan for her release. She will be seventy-two years old by then, if she is in there for 17 years, but feels she will still have something good to offer.

I agree. I’m sure she will. I hope I run into her somehow when that day comes because I would like to sit and talk with her, to have coffee and discuss the world and what has occurred in it, and to tell her I was wrong about her. She was the one percent.