I didn’t believe in God. But in prison I prayed.
I tried, hard, to find God in prison.
I’d pull in my knees and curl up entirely into my hoodie, tucking my head like a turtle and rocking back and forth on the metal bunk as my stomach churned with anxiety that nothing could take away. I’d whisper prayers. Nothing complicated. Just please-God-please-Godplease.
I didn’t believe in God. But I wanted to.
I was coming off a decade of using drugs, and I was constantly fearful — not of the people but of my own head. And I just wanted anything that could take that away.
Being locked up meant the constant possibility of unexpected and awful things: Your family could disown you; your lover could leave you; you could get fired from your job because you were in jail; you could lose all your belongings when people read about your arrest in the paper and helped themselves to everything you had; a guard could accuse you of something and throw you in solitary, whether or not you actually did it.
And yes, I knew that I’d put myself there. But knowing that you are guilty does not make it any easier to survive solitary confinement, or the constant fear of going back. I don’t know if anything does. But I wanted to find something that would.
Maybe, I thought, it would be God.
It’s such a worn-out trope, right? Everyone finds God in prison. No atheists in foxholes — or in 10-by-6-foot cells.
I started going to church. In the county jail, the weekly services were just five or six people in the visitation room, often interrupted by psychiatric episodes, fights or other outbursts. A rotating cast of nice ladies with graying hair came to lead the conversation and talk to us about God. Some of us were religious, but a lot of us were just bored, and often the hourlong meetings got sidetracked with our anxious questions about how to get basic supplies and whether they could help relay messages to our families.
I read the Bible. I even had my own Bible because that was the only book you were guaranteed to be able to take with you if you got shipped to a different facility. The inside margins were lined with phone numbers and addresses of loved ones so I’d still know how to get in touch if I wound up somewhere else.
I made an obsessive, superstitious ritual of praying. I told myself that if I did for just the right amount of time every day, I would be OK: I wouldn’t get outsourced to another jail. Guards wouldn’t plant anything in my cell. I wouldn’t get sentenced to the maximum. I wouldn’t get tossed in solitary.
I hoped that I didn’t have to mean it for it to work.
When I went to state prison, I “converted” to Catholicism, but not because I’d seen the light: I just wanted to spend more time around my prison girlfriend. She’d registered with the prison as a Catholic, which was the only way you could go to the weekly Catholic services.
Maybe that’s the worst reason ever to convert — or maybe it’s the best, bonding with other women who had done horrible things and survived horrible things and were in the middle of going through the same horrible things. That might have been more of what I needed at that point than any sermon.
By the time I got out, I had stopped praying or trying to pray. But in the interim, I had grown, grown up, calmed down a little, become less bitter. I'd changed not because of, but in spite of, prison.
I did not find God there. But some days, now, I look at where I am and where I was 10 years ago and how wildly life has exceeded my expectations, and it seems like a miracle. There was hard work, and luck, and privilege, and opportunity. But there was something that might be called God.
I still haven’t found Him. But some days, I think I might have come close.