Living on the inside, you don’t much get to see the new bridge at Chester.
And that’s a shame, because it’s a beautiful thing – a gleaming and impressive cable-suspension span…twice as wide as the rusting 80-year-old steel-girder structure it replaces.
Built at a cost of $307 million, the Don Welge Memorial Bridge lies a hundred yards south of IDOC’s Menard Correctional Center, where we just wrapped up our Kairos #26 retreat.
The bridge is right there, on the edge of the prison. But if you’re an inmate (or “resident,” as we prefer to call our Kairos brothers), you don’t get to see the bridge. Menard’s stone walls and razor wire fences get in the way. So you depend on visitors … if you’re gonna hear about this striking new addition to the neighborhood.
And what struck me, as we Kairos team members headed into the prison just after dawn the other day, is how the new bridge (perhaps unwittingly) offers something of a divine consolation to the thousands of men who live in its shadow.
The bridge, you see, boasts three cable towers – a trinity of superstructure to keep everything flowing smoothly on the road deck below. In the beauty of the early morning light, it’s not hard to see the bridge as an imago Dei … Father, Son and Spirit … silently blessing the whole scene.
In some small way, it’s our job as Kairos team members to share that kind of Good News with the men who live inside Menard. They can’t see the bridge. But they can hear us speak of God’s love and mercy. They can witness, too, the many demonstrations of the wider Christian community’s continuing connection to them – the posters, the prayers, the banners, the cookies we bring with us, all fashioned for them by people they will never meet in person.
It is Good News they hear, and come to embrace, over the course of the four days we spend with them. Just as St. Paul writes to the Philippians in the passage we hear at Mass today, our Inside Brothers “know how to live in humble circumstances” … and they truly believe “it was kind of you to share in [our] distress.”
So on their behalf, let me say “thanks” to everyone who supported our team’s efforts with their prayers and art and sacrifices in the past week (and in the weeks leading up to the retreat.) You have been an imago Dei for the men on the inside … proving that “God will supply whatever [they] need” … while also providing a strong new bridge to “glorious riches in Christ Jesus.”
Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.
IHS
