Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice

“Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice” is a prayer Bryan Stevenson first encountered as a working musician and understood anew on the night Jimmy Dill was executed. Its movement from brokenness toward joy gives the phrase its force in the book: it does not deny injury or grief, but asks whether damaged lives can still be met with compassion and made capable of hope.

Origin as a remembered prayer

When Bryan Stevenson was a college student, he worked as a musician in a poor section of West Philadelphia, playing the organ during services at a Black church. Before the choir began to sing, the minister would stand with his arms spread wide and recite the prayer. Stevenson remembered hearing it there, but said that he had never fully appreciated its meaning until the night Jimmy Dill was executed. The phrase therefore enters the narrative first as a repeated act of worship and returns later as an understanding formed under the pressure of a death.

The prayer’s image of broken bones holds injury and possible rejoicing in the same breath. In the account, that tension matters: the words do not make suffering disappear, nor do they suggest that a person must be unbroken before joy is possible. Their significance emerges through the contrast between the physical and emotional damage Stevenson encounters and the possibility of responding to that damage with care rather than punishment alone.

Meaning sharpened by execution

Stevenson’s recollection connects the prayer directly to Jimmy Dill’s execution, making that night a turning point in how he heard the minister’s words. The memoir does not describe the prayer as an answer that resolves the execution; instead, its belated understanding points to the question raised by the event. What could it mean to seek joy and gladness when the person facing death was himself vulnerable and broken?

That question accords with Stevenson’s broader reflection that acknowledging human brokenness might change how society treats people who have harmed others. He considers whether recognizing weakness, bias, fear, and trauma could make people less willing to kill those who have killed, and more willing to seek ways of caring for people who are disabled, abused, neglected, or traumatized. In this context, the prayer’s movement toward rejoicing is not a claim that accountability is unnecessary. It offers a counterpoint to the assumption that suffering must be answered only by imposing more suffering.

Injury, grief, and the need for care

Other encounters in the memoir give that concern a concrete human setting. After a hearing for Herbert Richardson, Stevenson met the mother of Rena Mae, the victim. She and several family members had been promised help but had not received it. She told him that MaryLynn’s hearing had never been right since the bomb and that her sister and she also had nerve problems. Nervous and hesitant, she asked whether he could help them. Stevenson, who represented Herbert Richardson, held her hand and apologized that the assistance they had been promised had not arrived. The scene places the injuries of a victim’s family beside the legal proceeding over the man who caused them; compassion cannot be reserved for only one side of that human damage.

A different form of prolonged injury appears in Ian Manuel’s relationship with Debbie Baigre. On Christmas Eve in 1992, during his monthly phone call from prison, Ian called the woman he had shot and apologized. The unexpected call began years of correspondence. Debbie had recovered physically and pursued her work in bodybuilding and women’s health, while Ian, who had spent eighteen years in uninterrupted solitary confinement, sank into despair. She encouraged him to remain strong and later wrote to the judge who sentenced him, arguing that his sentence was too harsh and his confinement inhumane. Her advocacy did not erase the reckless harm of his crime; it held that fact together with his childhood, his lack of supervision and help, and the damage being done to him in prison.

From sorrow toward mercy

The prayer’s pairing of brokenness and possible gladness also resonates with the account of a woman whose sixteen-year-old grandson was murdered. She had grieved through the trial of the boys convicted of killing him and cried after they were sentenced to prison forever, finding that their punishment did not make her feel better. A stranger sat with her for nearly two hours; for well over an hour, neither woman spoke. The comfort she remembered came not from a verdict but from having someone beside her while she grieved. The episode gives the prayer’s hope a modest, practical shape: care can begin with presence, even when words and remedies fail.

Stevenson later told a congregation that Walter McMillian had taught him that mercy is just when it is rooted in hopefulness and freely given. Walter forgave people who had unfairly accused and convicted him and judged him unworthy of mercy; Stevenson described that mercy as helping Walter recover a life worth celebrating, with love and freedom, until it was time for him to die on God’s schedule. Read alongside the prayer, this account does not turn pain into an easy lesson. It shows why the words remained with Stevenson: brokenness is real, and yet it need not be the final measure of a person or the limit of what others owe one another.