Living unexpected grace
My greatest lesson in grace came in seminary, but not in a lecture hall.
I was enrolled in Clinical Pastoral Education at St. Elizabeths Hospital, then a federal psychiatric facility. My instruction? “Be a pastor.” This, in a geriatric ward where patients rarely spoke or made eye contact. Students were accompanied to their units and locked in by a supervisor. My heart sank each time as the stench of urine and despair overcame me.
Part of my requirement included one-on-one counseling. I didn’t know how to be a pastor anywhere, much less in a place that felt like a set from “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
After weeks of trying to engage non-communicative people who had been hospitalized for decades, I noticed a patient watching me when she thought I wasn’t looking. When she wouldn’t talk, I sang hymns. I recited the 23rd Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer and, little by little, she began to join me.
After weeks of singing together, I asked her how long she had been a patient. “About 60 years,” she answered. Timidly, I asked how she had come to “St. E’s,” unsure if I really wanted to know.
“Oh, I killed somebody,” she began.
I was all of 26 years old from a tiny church in Baltimore County. I had no idea how to respond. While she hadn’t told her story in years, it was vivid in her memory.
At 12, she had been raped. When the child of the resulting pregnancy died at birth, her pastor refused to bury the “bastard” on sacred ground. She and her father buried him secretly in a cardboard box in the church cemetery late one night.
Her family was rejected by the community because of the scandal (remember, this was the 1920s) and disowned her. She became a prostitute and an alcoholic and awoke one morning to find a dead white man on the floor beside a gun.
She said, “You know, I still don’t believe I shot him.” The court-appointed defense allowed her to be committed to the hospital, without objection, knowing she would never be released. That was considered justice — mercy even — for an African-American woman.
I couldn’t speak. As I sat there shaking, she reached over and took my hand. She leaned close to me and whispered, “It’s all right, honey. That’s why Jesus had to come and die.”
That was half a lifetime ago, and she has been with me every day of my ministry. When I am in the pulpit, when I counsel, when I am tempted to judge others or minimize my own sin, she whispers in my ear, “It’s all right, honey.”
She experienced God’s love and mercy in that desolate place. She never knew earthly justice or compassion, but she knew that in Christ she had been made new — set free.
And she understood the cost: “That’s why Jesus had to come and die.”
I will never know a better definition of grace.
The Rev. Terri S. Cofiell is pastor of Harmony UMC in Marlowe, W. Va.
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