Healing stories in womans prison

A powerful blog essay from Diane Pendola, Summer, 2010 came today and I really recommend reading the whole piece, here are a few snippets:


Granted, these women are not doing these kinds of sentences because they are saints, but that is precisely why we should be teaching sainthood!  Reality is cosmotheandric, interconnected.  Do we want evil and sadness and brokenness to continue to reverberate through the whole, rending the fabric of the real?  If so, then let us continue along this retributive path that breaks the human spirit and erodes the human soul.  Let us continue the penitentiary and all it represents, returning evil for evil, and an eye for an eye that, as Gandhi said, makes the whole world blind.  If we take seriously our cosmotheandric vocation, to participate in creating reality true to its fundamental goodness and unity, then our freedom consists precisely in walking this path, and liberation, (which is not for myself alone but for the community which constitutes my personhood), is deepened with each step along the way.
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 It is my hope that a freeing wind may begin to stir through us on the outside, to those in prison, and from them to us, so that the diabolical may be transformed into truly symbolic participations in healing, wholeness and forgiveness.
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What allows me to walk into a maximum security prison, to gather a circle of 12 women, some of whom have already spent 20 or more years of their lives in prison; some of whom have no hope of parole or seeing the world outside the razor wire fences again, some of whom will have spent their entire adult lives in this place and will die in this place, is this trust in the  harmonious nature of reality. It is what Raimon calls cosmic confidence. The ultimate ground for this cosmic confidence lies in the almost universal conviction that Reality is ordered- in other words is good, beautiful and true.[8] I am confident that these women are not outside this reality. They are not on the margins. They are at the very center. And in the midst of an inherently violent and dehumanizing system that would relegate them to the status of non-persons, they can claim their person-hood.  By virtue of their participation in the cosmotheandric nature of reality, learning how to become receptive to the rhythm of the ultimate structure of the universe, they become not the victims of a degrading system but the very instruments of its transformation.
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