Minister's Blog
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one year ago
The sun does shine
I’ve just finished reading an incredible book called ‘The sun does shine’. It’s written by a black man called Anthony Ray Hinton, who spent almost 30 years on death row in Alabama for a crime he didn’t commit. Despite overwhelming evidence that he was innocent, Ray was sentenced to death by an institutionally racist legal system. And even more shockingly, he was repeatedly denied the opportunity to clear his name over almost 3 decades. All that time he remained on death row, haunted by the prospect of his own future execution. He could even hear and smell the brutal executions of 54 of his fellow inmates during that hellish time. For the first few years, Ray was so consumed by a burning sense of injustice that he chose not even to communicate with anyone else. But over time, he began to see that he still retained the freedom to choose his own emotional reactions, despite nearly every other freedom being denied to him. One of the most incredible stories in the book is how Ray befriended a man called Henry Hays, despite Henry being a Ku Klux Klan member who had brutally beaten a black teenager to death. They went on to form a close friendship, something that would have been unthinkable out in the “real world”.
I find it incredible that someone can still hold on to hope and have their faith deepened in such circumstances. It reminded me of another incredible book that I read last year by a man called Victor Frankl. Victor was a Jewish prisoner of war in Auschwitz, living through the most brutal and inhumane treatment from their captors. And yet Victor chose, like Ray, to maintain the freedom of his inner life. He wrote these astonishing words about his time in a Nazi concentration camp: “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way” (Man’s Search for Meaning).
Just like Ray and Victor, Jesus was also unjustly imprisoned and cruelly tortured: “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth… He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7-9). All 3 of these men knew what it was to experience burning injustice, and yet they chose not to harbour bitter thoughts of revenge but instead to hold on to hope and faith in the midst of such depravity. May God grant us the strength to follow their examples.