I was in prison and you visited me
This past weekend The New York Times published a story that was both moving and chilling. Its subtitle summarized it concisely.
Devin Moss spent a year ministering to convicted killer Phillip Hancock. Together, they wrestled with one question: How to face death without God.
The article was titled: “An Atheist Chaplain and a Death Row Inmate’s Final Hours.”
Atheist chaplain? Yes, that’s a thing. And as the story shows, Devin Moss is a very good one. He grew up in Idaho in a devout Pentecostal Assemblies of God family but was a skeptic from early on. After a stint in the Marines, he went to college and discovered existentialism and Buddhism, eventually deciding he really didn’t believe in God.
Nonetheless, Moss had a strong sense of spirituality and that opened an unexpected door.
He decided to make a podcast about spirituality and death called “The Adventures of Memento Mori,” referring to the Latin phrase: “Remember you must die.” During a podcast interview, a Buddhist chaplain, the Rev. Trudi Jinpu Hirsch-Abramson, told Moss: “You’d make a good chaplain.”
The remark stuck with him. He learned that there was a theological seminary in Chicago launching a new program for humanists. Moss enrolled at the Meadville Lombard Theological School in 2019, taking classes on ethics, Buddhism and creating inclusive communities. He did a residency as a chaplain at Bellevue Hospital in New York during the pandemic and graduated in June 2022.
He did not know what kind of job a freshly graduated atheist chaplain could land. But the opportunity arrived quickly when the American Humanist Association heard from a team of lawyers whose client on death row in Oklahoma wanted a chaplain who did not believe in God.
First by phone and then later in-person, Moss had a short but remarkable relationship with Phillip Hancock, convicted of murdering two people in 2001 and on death row at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. Hancock insisted the killings were self-defense, an argument accepted later by a parole board but rejected at the last moment by the governor. Hancock was put to death this past November 30.
Hancock had always been a nominal Christian. But life was difficult from early on, living with a physically abusive father and a younger brother with cerebral palsy. Prior to his murder conviction, he had had one for manslaughter. He gave up his Christian identity in prison, partly due to interactions with visiting “missionaries.”
He met proselytizers who told him they had personally raised people from the dead, or witnessed mass graves come back to life, which Hancock called “hooey and hokum.” He started to view these proselytizing visitors as insurance agents, selling insurance not for life but for the afterlife. “We’ve got a special this month on afterlife insurance,” Hancock liked to joke.
Hancock began earnestly studying humanist philosophers to rebut the missionaries. And his approaching death did not change his disbelief in God, nor did it for Moss.
There is an adage that says there are no atheists in foxholes — even skeptics will pray when facing death. But Hancock, in the time leading up to his execution, only became more insistent about his nonbelief. He and his chaplain were both confident that there was no God who might grant last-minute salvation, if only they produced a desperate prayer. They had only one another.
At the end, this is what Moss told Hancock.
As his eyes closed and his chest rose and fell, liquid moving through the I.V., Moss stood at his feet, hoping his friend could hear him. “You are loved,” Moss said over and over. “You are not alone.”
From the story, it is evident that Hancock had come to know this, and it was enough.
The late religion professor and New Testament scholar, Marcus Borg, would say to skeptical students, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.” After their response, Borg would often say, “Well, I don’t believe in that God either.” The God Borg’s students rejected was often the God Moss and Hancock had rejected: a God “out there”, intervening in the world and in people’s lives to do good for those God liked and to punish those God rejected.
While still popular with a certain kind of piety, today such a God is increasingly met with skepticism and mockery. The modern understanding of the universe makes locating that God impossible. And for many people, their life experiences, as with Moss and Hancock, make believing in that God impossible. Far too many times, the “divine cavalry” never arrives.
As Borg understood, as have countless Christians over the ages, and even the Bible itself, there are other ways to understand God. The books of Ecclesiastes and Job are the Hebrew Bible’s most vehement rejection of the intervening God-our-there. The Christian mystical tradition has been an ancient and continuing witness to God being a transcendent reality here and now.
The medieval scholar and mystic, Meister Eckhart, viewed God as “the ground of being”, an idea revived in modern theology by Paul Tillich. Even earlier, St. Augustine declared that “God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves.” In Jesus’ words, the kingdom of God is within you. Paul’s salvation experience was to experience that “it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.”
As the story makes clear, however, Moss and Hancock experienced a divine presence in their relationship. It was only the outdated notion of God from their religious upbringings that kept them from recognizing it. At the end, in the execution chamber
Moss turned to his final words for Hancock. “In the beginning of this, when I asked what you really wanted out of a spiritual care adviser, it was Philippians chapter 4,” he said. “Show me something real, show me something true.” Moss looked at the face he had come to know well. “What is real is that you are loved,” he told his friend. “What is true is you are not alone.”
We may ask, “Where is God?” But Meister Eckhart says that’s the wrong question. “God is at home. It is we who have gone for a walk.” In the love among family and friends, in the act of compassion for a stranger, in the lilies of the field and birds of the air, in the silent depths of our heart, a sacred presence upholds us and all things. Its simple message, so perfectly summarized by Devin Moss, is for all of us if we have eyes to see and ears to hear: “You are loved…you are not alone.”