 September/October 2000 (XXXVIII 4) |
n a prison system based on fear, where everything functions but the heart, and the individual basically has no more value than the space he or she takes up, a visit from the outside can turn into a life support system.
A good visit can dissolve the dreadful loneliness of being one prisoner among hundreds, and still that secret fear of becoming a number ... lost forever and forgotten.
If someone had told me just a few years ago that I would be spending hours with prisoners ... listening to them, hoping for them, believing in then, walking with them a little ways ... I would have said, “Prisons? Dungeons? You must be kidding!” Because, even five years later, a part of me still urges me to leave the shadows and find the sun.
But that would be mostly my intellect speaking. It doesn’t know the dialect of my heart and soul. When the fishermen left their nets by the sea it wasn’t their heads they were heeding.
Still, you might say that no one is more surprised than I to find myself on journey with 10 prisoners and being glad for it. So glad, in fact, that on my way back from prison, I am often in a state of bliss! Mind you, I have even sung some hallelujahs across the Commodore Barry Bridge!
Because souls have been touched; the darkness, befriended. Finding meaning and healing brings Light to dark places.
I have been challenged in the past by life in foreign countries, being in a war, left without parents, divorced. But nothing measures up to this, the Adventure called living with a leading, day by day ... hour by hour ... minute by minute ... thought by thought. Living with a leading, meaning listening for God.
Kay Rowe
Gwynedd Meeting (PA)Editor's Note: Kay Rowe volunteers through Prisoner Visitation and Support, an independent national program with offices at Friends Center in Philadelphia. For information on PVS, call 215-241-7117.
Last modified: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 at 08:19 AM