WHAT IT’S LIKE TO SERVE COMMUNION IN JAIL
Photo courtesy of the Texas Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The first day that I visited the Los Angeles County Jails, we took communion to a row of solitary confinement cells. Each cell has a solid door with a glass window and a slot that can be unlocked to put food trays through. A row of cells faces a dayroom with a TV playing—loudly, to be heard through the solid glass of the doors. We prayed, leaning our faces close to the door and nearly shouting (if you hold your ear by the crack on the side of the door, you can hear better over the TV). We “laid hands” on the man inside, resting our hands on the glass window. Then we asked: “Holy communion?” He nodded. I waited for someone to open the food slot in the middle of the door, but instead, he slid a sheet of paper underneath it. The food slots were locked, he said. Anything we wanted to share had to be sent under the door.
I put the host on the floor, on the piece of paper. He pulled it back under the door. This, I thought, is the holiest moment of my life. This is what reverence for the blessed sacrament means: to set the broken body of Christ on the filthy concrete floor as Christ reaches down from heaven and the cross to embrace all people.
***
We don’t just take communion to people in isolation. Our usual Sunday procedure at the jails is to have services wherever we can, sending a volunteer or two to various floors with bulletins and consecrated bread. (Wine is forbidden inside the jails, so we are used to communion in one kind.) Our usual service uses a spoken Eucharistic liturgy without the words of institution or the epiclesis, since most of us aren’t priests.
In some units, the service is restricted to the first 10 or 12 people who make it to the door when church is announced. On the floor I’ve most often served on, in Men’s Central Jail, we are in the “chapel” (think of a space like a gymnasium, with rows of benches bolted to the floor and steps up to a stage in the front). Our services there can bring men from various dorms together; we’ve had as many as 55 at a service. We drag a narrow table in front of the first bench and drape it with an altar cloth and a battery-operated “candle,” from the clear vinyl bags we’ve brought in. We play music, echoing off the walls from a portable boombox labelled “approved” by the LA Sheriff’s Department.
The goal of the music is to make a holy space, and sometimes we’re trying to drown out more noise than others. For a few months, the time when we’re doing church is exactly when the deputies are doing strip searches in the hallway outside. (Everyone in the jail is strip-searched if they want to go for recreation on the roof—the only time anyone in Men’s Central Jail sees sunlight, as the jail has no windows.) “Squat and cough,” a deputy shouts, and we raise our voices louder in the Collect for Purity inside: “that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name…” Holy space persists.
When it comes time for communion, we open the silver ciborium we’ve brought to reveal stacks of consecrated hosts. (Imagine my surprise, one Sunday, to open the ciborium and find only one large host, for breaking, because the chaplain who packed the bag had forgotten to add bread. We had 17 men in church that day; I broke that host into the smallest pieces I dared and—somehow—all were fed, with broken pieces left over.) We invite them forward, reminding them that the Lord’s table is for all.
The men form two lines: one to receive bread (always in the hand, we sometimes have to remind them, never on the tongue), and then a second for anointing with oil. We almost always offer oil along with communion, and almost everyone takes us up on it. Physical touch is precious in the jails; there are no contact visits with loved ones, and the prisoners aren’t allowed to embrace one another, or us. The touch of anointing is the only non-violent touch some have felt in years. I make the sign of the cross, over and over: “As this holy oil anoints your forehead,” I say, “may God’s spirit dwell in your heart and give you peace.”
Some of the men kneel, after they receive, coming up to the front steps and leaning their heads down on the stairs in front of them, or turning around to kneel and lay their heads on the metal benches. Once, when I had forgotten to bring music, two men in the back broke into spontaneous song. “Amen, amen,” one sang, tears running down his face. “Hallelujah!”
***
After the service we pack it all back up in the bags, but we’re not done. Church is a privilege in the jail; programming isn’t accessible to everyone. And we won’t let the inability to gather get in the way of offering Christ’s body to other beloved siblings in the jail. A usual stop, for me, is a suicide-watch dorm, where men lie on bunks in an open room wearing nothing but a quilted “suicide vest”—a single knee-length garment, one piece, sleeveless, that velcroes in the front, designed to prevent the men from making a noose out of their clothes. We always serve there, but briefly: “Holy communion,” I shout, as we arrange ourselves at the front of the room. “If you want holy communion, make a line here, and a second line for anointing for healing.” I try to keep count, for our records, as they move through the line. One, two. Bread pressed into open hand, oil traced on tattooed forehead. Sixteen, seventeen. We thank the guards and offer them communion on our way out (they’ve never taken me up on it).
In the hallway, we run into some trustees—workers from among the incarcerated population. They’re in different colored clothes, with rubber boots and gloves as they push mop buckets or prepare meals. “Holy communion?” we ask, and press the body of Christ into gloved hands.
Sometimes, we serve at the doors of the large congregate dorms, where a hundred men live in one room on triple-decker beds. Sometimes we can get the deputies to open the door so the men inside can line up for communion. Sometimes we serve through the food slot in the dorm door, kneeling down on the floor to pass the hosts through. There’s a draft at the door that blows air into our faces, and if the men don’t reach out and grasp the host, if we try to lay it reverently on their palm, the draft blows it onto the floor. (“It’s ok,” they tell me, picking it up and eating it. “I’ve got it.”)
We go to another floor, where the men are housed in rows of cells, barred on one side. “Communion?” we ask. “Oil for anointing?” We lean close to the bars to hear the men over the ever-present TV. We step around trash that’s been left on the hallway floor. The rows of cells feel rougher than the dorms, darker, often with light only in the hallway where we walk, filtered through bars to cells that are left in darkness.
***
We are discussing the Sermon on the Mount. “Let your light so shine,” Jesus says, “that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”
A young man, who barely looks old enough to be in the adult jail, raises his hand. “When you’re in the hole”—solitary confinement—“and it’s totally dark,” he says, “you have to be your own light.”
***
In the end cell of one darkened row, a man has been there long enough to do enormous murals in pencil on the wall. You have to use toothpaste first, he tells me, to rough up the wall so it will hold the pencil (jailhouse fresco technique.) He’s a talented artist. In the center is a nearly-life-size image of a grim reaper. We offer the man communion: the Bread of Life in the shadow of the Angel of Death.
***
What does it mean to gather? What does it mean to share the Lord’s Supper when the only encounter we can have is a wafer, handed through bars or slipped under a door without touch? What is reverence for the sacrament, when all that can be done is handing it over in a moment in a hallway, or dropping it onto the floor, or tearing it into ever-smaller pieces so everyone gets a crumb of what’s left?
Communion in the jail is less Jesus’ Last Supper, reclining at table with his friends, and more the Passover meal eaten “hurriedly, with your loins girded and sandals on your feet” (Exodus 12:11). It is less the wedding feast of the Lamb in glory and more the traveling bread given to a despairing Elijah in the wilderness (1 Kings 19:6). The symbol that underlies the practice of communion in jail is less the communal meal than it is the reality of the cross: the broken body of Christ, made present for and handed over to his beloved siblings behind bars, in whom he himself is present and suffering.
The reality that communion in jail offers to our sacramental theology is that the Eucharist must always put our gathered, centered communities into relationship and proximity with people on the margins. The gathered church can only rightly celebrate the Eucharist when we recognize not only the body present together but the body that is absent, prevented by law or illness from joining the gathering. That absence, as much as the presence, is required because Jesus is not on our central altars, but is “outside the camp” (Hebrews 13:13), where he “suffered outside the city gate.” It is only because the blessed sacrament will be taken outside the camp, to the jails and prisons and the sick, that we are even able to find Jesus in it in the church. The carrying of communion to the incarcerated isn’t subsidiary to the celebration of the gathered community—rather, the naked encounter with Jesus in bread passed through bars reveals the central reality of the sacrament to the church. Jesus is known in the broken bread itself: this is what it means to affirm that the bread becomes his body. Take, then, and eat. Reach out and grasp it before a draft blows it away.
