You are probably familiar by now with the WCCM, the World Community for Christian Meditation. For some time now Chris Cotton and a small group of meditators have been facilitating a meditation group in this women's prison every Thursday. They do so with great love and dedication, this year even going to meditate with the women on US Thanksgiving - the equivalent for the rest of the world of Christmas Day. During my visit to the US in November I visited this prison to celebrate their weekly mass in the chapel and afterwards to talk and meditate with the regular meditation group.
Prisons are strange worlds, places of paradox, full of surprises.
To get in as a visitor you undergo a security clearance and a thorough physical search similar to the rite of initiation the prisoners are subjected to when they arrive. For the prisoners however it symbolises a terrible baptism, a stripping off of the old self and an induction into a new community with new clothes, new language, new timetable. It is a kind of desacralised, mirror image of a monastery. One of the sharpest paradoxes of a prison is precisely the discovery of the sacred and the human in so dehumanising and unholy an institution. The refectory where we ate dinner was self-service and one could see the surrogate family groupings that form among the women in their isolation from the normal world.