These Walls Are Funny...

One of my favorite movies of all time is the Shawshank Redemption, and when I was surfing the news one evening I came upon an article which seemed to be a case of life imitating art.

Walter Unbehaun, aged 74, recently robbed a bank and calmly waited for police to arrive in order to secure a return to prison, a place in which he spent almost his entire adult like; a place which he longed for as home. So just to clear, a free man walked in with no disguise walked into a bank and committed a crime, and expressed joy when the police came to him to take him away. The article describes Unbehaun as "bored and lonely" as he spent his days watching television or drawing. In a court filing he compared his life at the trailer park to living in a prison isolation "hole."

As a parallel, the Shawshank Redemption features a number of prisoners, one of which is Brooks Hatlen, an old-timer who expresses grief upon getting paroled. After struggling with adopting to life "on the outside", Brooks commits suicide, leaving his friends still in prison grappling with understanding why. As they mourn, one prisoner, Red, makes the following observation about the prison walls:

These walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That's institutionalized... They send you here for life, and that's exactly what they take. The part that counts, anyway.

There's a lot of reasons why I love this film, but reading this article reminded me of how we easily fall in love with parts of our lives which are actually negative and destructive, but hold on tightly to them because, well.... they're comfortable. I'm not just talking about things such as addictions to drugs, alcohol or porn (all of which apply), but more subtle things such as a predisposition to be self-centered or self-focused, or an inclination to lash out in criticism and contempt as a means of masking one's own insecurity.

I'm convinced that a lot of what we'd call "sin" fits into this category. We know that these things are wrong and destructive, yet our souls and hearts are so broken and deceived that we succumb to the fallacy that we'd rather live lives as prisoners as opposed to living free. Jesus himself speaks about "proclaiming freedom for the prisoners" and his fulfillment of that prophesy. Tragically, like Brooks Hatlen and Walter Unbehaun, we too often look longingly at those prison walls.