By Fr. Sebastian Vadakumpadan –
Prison Ministry Sunday – 12th August, 2018
As human beings, you and I experience a variety of feelings. However, one feeling you and I would rather not like to experience is the feeling of being alone. Certainly, there are many ways in which we may feel lonely. The feeling of being alone can be a difficult emotion to live with. The feeling of being lonely is felt most in prisons.
On this Prison Ministry Sunday, the Church is taking us to the lives of prisoners with the topic, “You are not alone”. Through the celebration of Prison Ministry Sunday, the Church wants to declare once again to each one of those 4,19, 623 prisoners held inside 1,401 prisons in India that they are not alone.
The Church also wants to enlighten us about the isolation and loneliness that many of the volunteers experience as they minister to our brothers and sisters in prisons. God created all of heaven and earth, the beasts of the fields, the birds of the air, and said it was all good. Everything was good. That is, until He made man. And then it happened. The first problem, the first of God’s concerns regarding mankind emerged. God looked at all that He had created and then looked at man. He said, “It is not good…that man should be alone…” Loneliness is not part of God’s plan for our lives.
Loneliness and the society at present
Prison is a sample of our society. Prison is the climax of loneliness and isolation that we see so often today. There is loneliness all around us, and it is our own fault. We arc, as God says, seeking to fulfill our own desires, and ignoring God. Within families, husbands and wives are distracted by social media, hobbies or entertainments. Our young are surrounded by so many people every day, but they are so lonely.
Look at the young who are not involved in all the acceptable activities our schools and culture offer to the youth. They spend hours by themselves playing video games, surfing the internet, often without supervision. They are allowed to follow their own desires and they grow, due to their parents’ negligence, to seek their own desires. They give their children gifts that are not generous, but selfish, because all these things do increase their loneliness and isolation within the family.
Staying Connected
Everyone is “connected,” but everyone is disconnected from real love and healthy relationships. Gone are the porches in front of our homes where we once made it a point to invite our neighbours over for a cup of coffee or a glass of lemonade.
According to God’s plan, we are not to be alone. Mother Teresa said, “Loneliness is the leprosy of modern society. And no one wants anybody to know they are a leper.” We are not alone in our suffering.
The message, “You are not alone in your suffering” is applicable both to inmates as well as to volunteers of Prison Ministry. Being together is very important in the lives of volunteers. Sometimes volunteers may be very active in the local prison. They may have to undergo a lot of hardships for the ministry. It may be personal, sometimes regarding finance, sometimes regarding permission. They may feel that there is a lack of cooperation from officials or from within the church.
Sometimes we hear from volunteers that a very active person has left the ministry. We wonder what had happened to his dreams and plans. What happened to his work as a volunteer for the Prison Ministry? Then we realize that perhaps he/she felt alone in his/her ministry, maybe he/she was abandoned by colleagues, maybe he/ she was abandoned by his/her own church, or he/she was just fed up with the corruption happening in prisons. So we have to realize that the message that “we are not alone “is not only valid and urgent for the inmates to whom we all give pastoral care, but also and especially, for die volunteers who work in the prisons.
Pain and Suffering
The gospel reading tells us that suffering may block our eves from seeing God. In the lovely passage of the disciples at Emmaus, (Luke 24:13-33), we see that the disciples were sorrowful and grieving. They were walking along disconsolate, and even though Jesus Himself was with them, they did not recognize Him, What prevented them from recognizing Him was precisely their suffering and sorrow on Jesus’ death. Time and again we cannot see Jesus either because we are very hurt or the suffering keeps us from recognizing Jesus. Often prisoners cannot see Jesus because their personal suffering is so great that it overwhelms them.
Sometimes their crime is so heinous that they believe that they cannot be forgiven. Therefore it is important to believe in His promise and to share with the message that they are not alone. Let us recall the testimony of Mr. Elie Wiessel, a Jew who survived the Nazi Concentration Camp. People asked him, “Where was God when so many people were burning in the Crematoria of Auschwitz? Where was God when thousands of prisoners were in that concentration camp?”
Mr. Wiessel replied, “God was in those concentration camps, God was in those Crematoria.” When we see the dead, the injured, and the innocent in the prisons of India, when we see the inhuman treatment meted out to prisoners, when people arc raped and brutally killed, can we answer along with the Jew in Faith, with the same words, God was in those prisons, police stations, victims houses, God was with those injured and dead? How hard it is to say that he or she is not alone. How hard it is to tell ourselves in our tribulations, we are not alone. It is difficult but necessary since, that is precisely our mission as Prison Ministry Volunteers.
Fr. Sebastian Vadakumpadan is the National Co-ordinator for Prison Ministry India