Fr Mark Oakley, former Curate of St John’s Wood,
preaching at Fr Andrew Hammond’s First Eucharist, July 2008
Fr Andrew Hammond’s First Eucharist, 13th July 2008 - Mass of St Benedict
Canon Mark Oakley
The story is told of the man out walking in the mountains one day and enjoying himself until, suddenly, an enormous great bear stood in front of him. The man ran for his life. The bear followed, faster and faster until, at last, the man was cornered. The bear lunged for him and the man, who had never prayed before suddenly gives it a go: “O God! Please! Please make this creature of yours a good Christian!” Straight away there was a flash of light and the bear froze, his huge paws suspended in the air. Then slowly the bear bowed his head and the huge paws slowly came together. And the bear prayed. “For what I am about to receive may the Lord….”
Well, Andrew decided to be ordained in the Church of England at a particularly turbulent and passionate time when all of us Anglican Christians can be turned back into bears. Some of us become Grizzlys (with a developed sense of smell and ferociously on the attack), some become Polars (icy and isolated) and some Pandas (pandering to themselves or to anything for a quiet life). And if you believe journalists we have all become Teddy bears - pretty well stuffed. The words of that other bear, Winnie the Pooh, hang over some of our words and behaviour at the moment: Did you ever stop to think and forget to start again? The issue for us all in an anxious Church facing new questions is not how to make bears Christian but to how to make us Christians Christian so that our lives might draw others into reflecting whether we are spiritually authentic and believable.
But this is nothing new. About the year 540 St Benedict, from the town that is now Norcia in Umbria, whose memory we celebrate today, wrote what he called his little rule for beginners, a practical guide on how to keep a group of Christians living in community Christian. It is an impressive spiritual manual with a concise set of guidelines all relating to the creation of a harmonious community of individuals, aimed at allowing each of them to make progress in the Christian virtues. One example is his teaching against the endemic vice of murmuring in Christian communities, the whining and sniping, the passive anger, that freezes the soul and paralyses communal life.
And at the very beginning of his Rule for monastics he says that he hopes that each Christian community will be a school, a school for relating, where the lessons of Jesus Christ are learned and breathed in, our necessary resucitation, and then translated into who we become and how we live - a school of relating to God, to self, to one another. For Benedict, graduation at this school was not going to be in this life. We remain beginners. But in the meantime we work hard to build our lives with some stability on the foundations of prayer, study, play, work, hospitality, care of the weak and stranger, and, what he stresses time and time again, humility and the ability to see Christ in the strangeness of the other.
Now, I have to admit to you I am very moved tonight. First, I am here alongside my new brother priest Andrew whose journey towards ordination I was a very minor part of but who I knew from the moment I met him had the necessary qualities to be an important part of our school of relating. St Gregory tells us that Benedict had an old man’s heart even from his youth. Andrew similarly has that attractive partnership in him of wisdom and energy, insight but with a desire to know, experience, and enjoy more. This is the sort of companion we need on a journey, stable, loyal, and a little bit unnerving in his sense of adventure. It is a great joy for me to be beside him tonight. They say middle age is when your broad mind and narrow waist change places. Annoyingly, neither is true in Andrew’s case.
And secondly I am moved because it is exactly 14 years ago that I stood here in this same church and celebrated my first eucharist. And if you ever needed proof that Benedict was right that as the years progress we remain spiritual beginners well here you are! I am only grateful that the school is still big enough for Christians who haven’t lived up to their calling very well. A thought I pass on to Andrew tonight, as I reflect on this, is that to be a priest at the end of the day is to try and help others have that relationship with God that you only wish you had yourself. People and priests alike remain beginners and therefore they need each other very much.
So, like the man in the Gospel today all of us ask, what must I do? What do I still lack? How can we live up to the name we bear of Christian? And at the heart of the reply is what Andrew does for the first time tonight, to break bread and share a cup of wine together so that Christ comes into our midst. The Church is born again each time the eucharist is celebrated. As we remember him, so we re-member him as his body. And as Andrew leads you here in celebration I hope that the community of Christ that this act of gratitude creates will always be rooted in three things. First, that you will be a church with a still centre. What I mean is I hope that the heartland of your community will be your longing for God. That is the pulse of faith. I hope that you will continue to make your worship, prayer, retreats, and study of the scriptures and the world, the centre of who you are. You are here not so much to be relevant as resonant, to enable men and women today to recognise their deeper needs that lie beyond their wants, that longing for the freshness of God. I am from Shropshire and shepherds there will tell you that those crooks they carry are not for roping in sheep around the neck. They are there to stick in the ground and hold yourself still with so that the sheep eventually learn to trust you. Similarly, as a church you will be grounded, you will be trustworthy, you will be authentic, if before everything else you ensure that you pray, worship, adore - to be eucharistic, a people of thank yous. The ancient Assyrians had a word for prayer that was the same word they used for opening a clenched fist not banging a clenched one.
Secondly, then, I hope that you will be a place of radical generosity and hospitality, helping people up to the table. Opening hands should lead to opening lives. This should be a Noah´s ark where everyone has to budge up a bit to allow another weird and wonderful animal to get some straw. We all need to work a bit harder at the moment to make the Church a home for others. We are not only to pray but to practice what we pray for, a care, an attention to each other, that in the spirit of the gospel brings goodness, liberation, and dismantles what oppresses. There is an enormous hunger to know more about what Christianity is about, what the Church is, who Christ is, who we are. Our invitation and desire to educate must reflect God´s prejudice towards everyone. For our early Christian ancestors, church was not a place you went to. It was who you were. And together they listened to the story of Jesus Christ and as they shared the bread they learned that strangely a human self is most truly itself when not selfish. They learned as they drank from the cup that this is a man who wants not our piety but our lifeblood as he gives up his, they learned that the way we divide ourselves up, build walls and point fingers, is not how God is. They learned that God loves us all just the way we are and that he loves us so much he doesn´t want us to stay like that - faith is a journey of trust. They learned that they were to be servants to each other, that is, they learned that we are all incomplete by ourselves, we need each other and we need to recognise it. This man Jesus Christ did not so much answer all their questions as question all their answers, and by doing so their existence was constantly in the process of being changed into life worthy of the name. This is the faith entrusted to us and in all the change and anxiety of the times, that bread and that cup remain.
Lastly, as well as being a school for relating, I hope this church will continue to be a place of fun. It is a celebration of the eucharist, it is not a pastime for ecclesiastical eeyores. Celebration is key to the Christian response to life. It is vital that we enjoy one another, encourage each other, be able to laugh and cry with one another. Tears are a gift too offered at the altar. In the medieval church they had a strange practice in Eastertide called the risus paschalis. This was when the priest would get in the pulpit and try to make the congregation laugh. As this was probably a bit slow to get going, he would tell jokes and often rather saucy and unsavoury ones. It must have been like Carry On Vicar! But the truth glimpsed by this was that laughter was the only true way to celebrate the resurrection for in the gospels we learn that easter is a dancing day, it is a running away from the tomb day, it is a having a picnic with friends on the beach day, it is a sharing peace with one another day, it is an unexpected meeting in a garden with one you thought lost day, it is a laughing day. Icons of the resurrection often show Jesus pulling Adam and Eve out of their hells and pulling them towards each other, there had been so much blame over that apple, they needed to be reintroduced. Resurrection faith means seeing one another through fresh eyes and celebrating our faith through sharing bread and a cup, through friendships and fun. Every celebration of the eucharist is a celebration of resurrection, and introduces us to each other again.
So, Andrew celebrate the eucharist always with joy somewhere in your heart, celebrate it to help us Christians become more Christ-like, celebrate it as the one privileged, entrusted with words of grace and transformation. Celebrate what God is making of you and us together. Celebrate. So that when you lift your arms and open your hands, evoking the freshness of God into our lives, something will slowly and quietly slip into place for you as priest and for us as people you shepherd - and may Benedict pray for you as we do too with love and pride. Amen.
PRISON VESPERS
In Autumn last year visiting preachers of considerable note in the prisons world came to St John’s Wood, in a sequence of Sunday evening Vespers devoted to the issues of prison welfare and justice. Here are two of the addresses from that season:
Sister Kathleen Diamond
Catholic Chaplain at HMP Holloway, London
Prison Ministry
Imagine waking up in the morning and in that hazy time before you open your eyes forget where you are. Then the reality hits - you’re in prison. The noises you hear are not the church bells or the postman’s knock or the hum of the traffic, - but the banging of doors, the jangle of keys and chains and the officers commands to get up and dressed. Sadly this is the reality for so many people, - in Holloway prison for almost 500 women, aged between 18 and 71.
You will have heard all the shocking statistics about prison in general from Anne Owers, chief inspector, whom I greatly respect. I would like to speak from the coal-face as it were, from my experience as a chaplain in Holloway Prison for the past 12 years. I’m the RC Chaplain and my CE colleague Revd Ken Wilkin and I are both full-time. We are part of a multi-faith team and work closely together, ecumenically and at a multi-faith level.
A brief outline of the role of a chaplain. Since the earliest days of the set-up of prisons, the Chaplain has had a central role being one of the 3 main officers of the prison, with the Governor and the Medical Officer. Although things have changed greatly since then, chaplains still have access to every part of the prison, and every person in prison has the right to practise their faith. Enshrined in the laws are statutory duties which must be fulfilled every day by a chaplain - to visit all the new receptions within 24 hours; to visit those in the hospital or healthcare centre every day; to visit everyone in the segregation or punishment unit every day.
Religious services are of course priority for the chaplain, from CE Communion or Pentecostal service and RC Mass on Sunday ; Friday Moslem prayers, as well as groups such as Alpha, Christianity explored, quiet meditative prayer, Mothers Union, etc. Often we are called to ‘bless’ a room as they feel spooked - its amazing what a splash of holy water and a prayer will do! But I’ve never been in any other situation where women will simply stop me on the corridor and ask me to pray with them, irrespective of how many others are around. It’s a beautiful experience. The simplest actions, rituals can mean so much to women at significant moments - anniversaries, children’s birthday, death of a relative or friend - I take them to chapel if they wish to light a candle and eg pick a rose from the garden, so they can feel they are able to do something special, or be united with the family at a funeral if they are unable to attend.
The overtly ‘religious’ sessions are only a part of our ministry. In fact most of our time is probably spent in being a ‘listening ear’. Chaplains are trusted, so we are privy to the fears, the despair, the stories of abuse and violence, the suicidal thoughts, the anxieties about children, many of whom are in care or adopted. The reading from Acts talks about Peter in chains, and through the Lord’s angel the chains were removed. I would like to think of our ministry as chaplains as the angel’s helpers, in even a small way to loosen the chains that bind the women in our care. Often the worse prison and chains is in their lives outside and the prison chains/locks can be the security blanket they need to recover, to regain their self-respect. ( Example of Cathy whom I knew well over the years. This time was different - she seemed to have lost all hope. When she asked to see me she said she was rubbish, useless, and worst of all she couldn’t even succeed in killing herself. I tried to let her know my acceptance and care for her no matter what…reminding her that however abused and broken and dirty she felt, that nothing could take away from her the real core person that was Cathy, created and loved by God and precious in his eyes. After many days when I reassured her I was there for her, she called to me very excited that she had found a passage in the bible which said ‘I will never forget you, I have carved you on the palm of my hand’.. Cathy got detoxed from drugs and things began to change for her…she chose to go on the voluntary drug-testing unit, she became a peer supporter for others who had drug problems, and has not returned to prison in over 8 years. I have heard that she is now married, has a baby and has her life back.) There are nearly 500 women in Holloway and as many stories could be told, though unfortunately not all with positive results Each story is so much bigger than the individual crime, and in each story we need to look primarily at the person, a unique human being, created and loved by God, who for whatever reason has taken the wrong path. Prison is aimed at rehabilitation, not punishment, and my role as chaplain is to be alongside the women, listening to their stories, however horrific and painful they may be, allowing them to be heard with gentleness, without judgment. It is only later when trust is built up, that it may be necessary to challenge where appropriate and help them to look at their lives, what led to their crime and to take responsibility for it, possibly through a victim awareness programme, of which I will speak later. Of course we are part of a wider network of carers and interventions - counsellors, art therapist, psychologists, probation, drug support etc.
Our women are for a large part a vulnerable community. Over 80% of women in prison have at least one diagnosed mental illness, which invariably has led to their offence, a great majority have a personality disorder which apparently is not a mental illness and therefore hospitals will not take them, and so-called ‘care in the community’ does not work. So the prison is left to pick up the pieces. (eg of Carol - has a personality disorder and is a regular in Holloway but when she leaves to go to a hostel she cant cope. Once she came to the prison doors asking to be let in - obviously she couldn’t so she later assaulted someone and was arrested and got back in where she feels safe and knows the officers care about her.)
You might think I’m making excuses for offending behaviour, but while there is an explanation in the above cases, most offences are the result of chaotic lifestyles. Drug and alcohol abuse is by far the greatest cause of offences, - from shoplifting, theft, burglary, GBH, importation of drugs, prostitution etc.
Young offenders (18-21, and we have 140) are more and more getting caught up in violent offences largely due to the gang culture. For me it is so sad to see lovely young women when I relate to them individually, change once they are part of a group - the peer pressure is so great. Many come from good homes and caring parents and have just got caught up with the wrong crowd, but the majority have lived chaotic lives, with no discipline and no boundaries.
While as chaplains our duty is of care, part of a loving care is to challenge appropriately. Part of that challenge may be to make them reflect on the harm done to their victim/s. I manage a ‘victim awareness’ programme in the prison called ‘Sycamore Tree’ based on the principles of Restorative Justice. In our present criminal justice system we operate according to Retributive Justice ie What law has been broken? Who is to blame? How do we punish them? Restorative Justice which operates in many countries such as Canada, New Zealand etc. puts the victim at the centre - Who has been hurt? What are their needs? Whose responsibility are they? This different approach is being introduced gradually in this country and there are various programmes with the aim of heightening victim awareness with the possible outcome of meeting between offender and victim if that is appropriate. The Sycamore Tree is a six-session course, developed and tutored by Prison Fellowship, based on the story of Zaccheus or Zac as we call him, who after his encounter with Jesus, recognised the harm he had done to his victims, and made restitution by paying back 4 times what he had defrauded as well as giving half his wealth to the poor. In our groups (16) in Holloway we carefully select those who genuinely want to take responsibility for their crime, be it robbery, GBH, murder etc. and it is amazing to see the growth in them over the weeks. A turning point for many is after the 3rd session when we invite victim/s of crime (not of the group) to tell their story and how crime has affected their lives. We have heard from victims of burglary, drugs, but most powerful of all from a couple whose son had been kicked to death by a gang of youths. The victims of course are carefully prepared if necessary through Victim Support, and for them it helps towards their own healing. This is a powerful and painful time for the prisoners when they grasp the reality of the ripple effects of their own crime, esp. girl gangs involved in a similar murder. In the final session, participants are invited to make a token act of restitution (as it’s usually too soon to make contact with their victim, and it needs to be done through the proper channels). Some write the letter they would like to send to their victims, saying sorry etc. others may write a poem, make something in craft, or contribute from their limited ‘canteen’ money to an appropriate charity. In time they may be able to have direct contact, which has proven constructive and healing for all involved.
People ask me sometimes - ‘Aren’t you afraid of prisoners esp of murderers?’ To be honest I’d be more afraid walking in certain parts of London. Of course we have to be sensible, and will always notify an officer when on a wing, and will be warned if someone is a risk - mainly those with severe mental health problems. The more I have seen of prisoners, the more I have heard of their lives and what led up to their crime, the more I can say ‘ There but for the grace of God …..there but for a decent family….there but for no exposure to drugs….there but for not being used as a punch-bag….go I’ When I see the person, not the crime, my bottom line is ‘This person is as worthy of respect as I am. Prison ministry is not just one-way - so often I receive from prisoners words of care, of hope, of encouragement and affirmation. Kim in the segregation block…usually greeted me with outbursts of frustration punctuated by words usually beginning with f…… She surprised me one day by saying..Why do you visit me when I’m so awful?…but went on to say..You talked to me like a real person and not a problem….so I must be worth something… and added …And you didn’t chuck the f….bible at me!!!
I had a postcard from another woman Lynn after she left prison where she wrote ‘Thank you for helping to make life a little easier for me in prison, and for helping me find my best friend, the Lord. He’s still with me and I don’t intend to lose him’.
Prison ministry is a unique way of responding to God’s call in a broken and hurting world. At a time when our society seems in freefall, I recall the words of the founder of my order in 1851 to the Holy Family Sisters, ‘As companions of their good angel, you follow them in the valley of tears, and to bring them back or to keep them for Jesus Christ, you share with them, as far as you can all the fatigue, the trials and the dangers of the journey’. I feel privileged to be part of this ministry.
Sir Joseph Pilling
Chairman, The Koestler Trust; former Director-General of the Prison Service
November 2nd, 2008
I think that I ought to explain that I began my involvement with the church in a Methodist Sunday School in South-East Lancashire. It was 1948. I was three. By my mid-teens I was describing myself, and was happy to be described by others, as a Christian. Around then I began a slow move from my parents’ Methodist church to the local parish church. Although my motives might have been questionable, it has not been a move that I have come to regret and I have been a worshipping Anglican ever since.
I have never sensed a call to ordination or even to preach. Now and again I accept an invitation such as the one to come here but I always feel a little torn because I am more comfortable giving an address than preaching a sermon.
Nevertheless I want to thank you for the chance to talk about prisons. I have felt passionately about them for many years.
Coming at the end of this mini-series there is a risk that I will cover the same ground as the previous speakers. I can only apologise that that risk is rather greater for you than for me.
To reduce the risk but also because it strikes me as a neglected but vital area I want to begin by talking about prison staff. I hope that you noticed the reading from Exodus. It always amuses me because most of us see management consultants as a 20th century innovation. You may believe that the world would be a better place if they had never been invented. But here is Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses giving the twin messages of organize and delegate. It was not only management consultancy but successful and sensible consultancy.
Contrary to the popular fashion for criticising them and what they cost, my experience of management consultants throughout my working life was almost entirely positive.
The purpose of the reading this evening is to remind us that the Prison Service is a massive organisation functioning throughout England and Wales with tens of thousands of staff. It may seem banal and obvious to say it but it is often overlooked. The experience of being a prisoner in this country depends critically on the top management catching the spirit of Jethro’s advice. Thousands of managers must be chosen, equipped and then empowered to take responsibility for their area of work.
I have delivered a sermon before on the Christian understanding that underpins management. This is not the occasion to repeat it. But we should note that prison managers are stewards of huge resources. No doubt they fight for more and they should have more, facing the challenges they do. Nevertheless their first task is to manage the people and money they have to get as much from them as is reasonably possible.
That is what determines how often a prisoner gets clean clothes and a change of sheets, how often he gets a shower, how much time he has with a visitor and how much time is spent out of the cell. When you have been deprived of liberty, issues like that take on the utmost importance. I have been a hospital patient. Some of you may recognise what I say if I recall how quickly one’s horizons contract and what importance is assumed by the relatively trivial detail of the life of the ward. Prison has the same effect and lasts longer.
If senior and middle managers are important for prisoners, front-line staff, prison officers themselves are even more important. Prisons are partly so fascinating because they are enclosed institutions filled up with human beings, prisoners and staff. It follows that nothing is more important to the quality of the experience than the relationships within the walls, between prisoners, between staff and between staff and prisoners.
Inevitably there are sad cases of staff behaving badly. Also inevitably, that behaviour is publicised when it comes to light. In my experience it was a tiny minority who ever behaved positively badly. Staff in prisons can also be idle and fearful as people are in other walks of life. For the most part they want to do a good job and do just that.
There are prisons in the world where staff have little or no contact with prisoners. The closest analogy would be with the keepers of dangerous animals in a cage. I am proud to say that in our country we expect prison staff in small numbers to mix with prisoners in much larger numbers. They do it every day. Humour and a ready word can often defuse an ugly or even violent situation created perhaps by a prisoner receiving bad news from home.
In closed prisons at the end of each day a prison officer has to close each door and check that it is securely locked. Put yourself in the prisoner’s shoes. Imagine the different ways that that can be done. It helps one to begin to see just how much turns on the quality of prison staff.
Well-meaning and otherwise sensible prison reformers sometimes overlook the importance of prison staff. It is also easy to forget that unfair criticism and sneering rarely bring the best out of people. The best results come when people pressing for change take the trouble to listen to staff who know prisons like no-one else save for prisoners themselves and align themselves with the best staff in pressing for improvements.
If there are any would-be campaigners for prison reform present, I recommend this approach not because it will make for a comfortable life for my successors in the top management of prisons but because it is the only approach that will be effective.
With some trepidation, I want to say a little about the size of the prison population. The trepidation is because it is a political question on which people hold strongly differing views. For 40 years I was conditioned as a civil servant to avoid saying anything in public about controversial subjects and habits die hard.
I don’t want to say what the right population is. I would be suspicious about anyone who knew the answer to that question or thought they did. When I was the Director General in the early 90s, the prison population was about 40,000. It is now over 80,000 and rising. It is expected to rise very considerably in the next ten to 20 years. I want to make three points.
The nature of imprisonment is insufficiently understood and is never reflected accurately in calls for longer and longer sentences. A night in prison is a pretty unpleasant prospect. The loss of personal control, the vulnerability to other prisoners and to staff, the lack of easy contact with family and friends, the confinement in a small space, the loss of privacy; these are inescapable and appalling features of prison life even for people who have had to get used to them and for people who might never have articulated them in that middle-class fashion. So my first point is that we might have a different tariff in our mind for sentencing if we really understood what the deprivation of liberty means.
Second, it is a great mistake to send people to prison in order that they can be helped. There is an important and relatively simple distinction to be made. Once people have been sent to prison, staff are rightly committed to helping them. But prison is not an environment in which it is at all easy to prepare people to lead law-abiding and useful lives in the community after release. How can one learn to make the right choices when one has little or no scope to make choices of any description? If people go to prison, it should be because they represent a danger in the community or to mark the serious view society takes of what they have done but not in order that they can be reformed when it is not otherwise necessary.
Third, prisons are expensive places. Any sentence served in the community is bound to be cheaper than a prison sentence. The ladies and gentlemen of the Treasury interested in controlling public expenditure have always been the best allies of those groups who campaign for a smaller prison population. You may not think that the Treasury always recognises a poor investment when it is presented to them but they are certainly sceptical about the case for locking up more and more people.
Before I move on, let me break the habits of a lifetime and say that I believe that as a nation we are on the wrong track with the prison population. I won’t say that it should be 25,000 or 40.000 or 60,000 but I do say that there are people in prison who would be suitable for a non-custodial sentence and it is costing us all money to help them less effectively than they could be helped if they were in the community.
Nothing I said earlier about the people who work in prisons should be taken to imply that the welfare of prisoners is best left to the staff paid to do it. On the contrary. Prison staff suffer the inevitable occupational hazard of being institutionalized along with the prisoners in their care. It cannot be avoided. The walls and fences have as big an impact on their working lives as on the whole lives of prisoners.
Both staff and prisoners need the help and perspective that can be brought by volunteers from the community outside prison. The qualifications required are not terrifying. First and foremost one has to want to help. Second it helps to have some time. Third our New Testament reading comes into play. I am interested in the extent to which there might or might not be a hierarchy of sin from God’s perspective but it is not territory onto which I feel qualified to venture and it would be a diversion from what I am here to say. The point to be born in mind by a volunteer is that the casting of stones, as it were, has been done already by the court. The way a prisoner is treated should not be adding weight to the sentence of the court. At the same time and equally important, Jesus was not describing the woman as sinless. Just the opposite. It is really quite dangerous to forget that, with very few exceptions, prisoners committed the offence or offences that led to their sentence. The best approach combines a sense of realism with Christian hope.
In the final part of the sermon I want to identify some specific ways that Christians can help prisoners and those who work with them and to encourage you to consider whether there is something that you could do.
In the Christian tradition from which I come, one would always begin a list of this sort with prayer. I do so not for that reason but because a strong and powerful tradition has grown for specific prisons to be surrounded by prayer. It is organised by Prison Fellowship and I am convinced that it makes a difference and deserves to be supported. When I was the Director General of the Prison Service I had a strong sense of being strengthened by the prayers of many faithful Christians. There is nothing like it.
Across the country I have come across lots of examples of groups of Christians helping the chaplain of a nearby prison, for example by joining in an act of worship on Sunday morning and then chatting to prisoners from the same congregation over coffee. I am enthusiastic about this for more than one reason. Regular coming and going by people from outside the prison community may pose some problems for security but I am sure that the price is worth paying. It probably works well for a particular congregation to commit to supporting the service in a neighbouring prison on a specific Sunday each month.
I chair a charity, the Koestler Trust, which encourages the arts amongst prisoners. I am afraid that Koestler would most like your money but there is some scope for volunteering. I have copies of an information leaflet that explains in more detail than I can now how we would welcome sponsorship of prizes for prisoners’ art beginning at £60 per year. Copies will be available in the ambulatory after the service.
I am also involved with another prison charity, New Bridge, founded about 50 years ago by Lord Longford. He personally visited many obscure prisoners beginning before the war as well as one or two notorious prisoners rather later. New Bridge helps prisoners and ex-prisoners in several ways but its core work continues to be organising volunteers to visit regularly long-term prisoners who have no-one else to visit them and would like a visitor.
New Bridge recruits, screens, trains and supports volunteers financially and otherwise. Most volunteers eventually take on two prisoners. The commitment usually involves letters as well as several visits each year. The volunteer sticks with the prisoner throughout the sentence wherever the prisoner is moved to around the country so there can be quite a bit of travelling, not always to celebrated tourist spots. London is rather a good place for a volunteer to live because the country’s transport systems make it feasible to get to most places fairly readily from here.
The support includes organising volunteers into groups who meet from time to time to share experience and thus to learn from each other and to encourage each other in what can be a pretty demanding task.
I admire the New Bridge volunteers more than I can say. If there is any glamour involved in the work I have failed to notice it. The visits take place, without any privileges, in the normal visits room of a prison. Although all the prisoners must want to have a visitor, they are not all equally good at getting that across to the person who might have travelled a long way to see them. In exceptional cases, regular visits to a specific prisoner can go on for as long as 20 years.
If any of you would like to find out more about New Bridge I have some information packs in a bulky plain white envelope. They also will be available after the service.
About 20 years ago I chaired a promotion board in the Prison Service for which all the candidates had to be Roman Catholic priests. We were selecting a person to fill a vacancy for the most senior Roman Catholic chaplain in England and Wales. You will be as reassured as I was that I did have a Bishop, an ex-prison chaplain as it happened, sitting by my side. Even so it was one of the more unusual duties of my working life.
When the appointment was made, the church celebrated a mass in which the new holder of the post was commissioned. The late Cardinal Hume preached at the service in the crypt of Westminster Cathedral. I have never forgotten that he said that, whenever he visited a prison, he never left without being overwhelmed by the same feeling. I thought that I knew what he was going to say next. In my own early days of visiting prisons I had usually felt enormous relief, as I stepped through the gate, that some ghastly mistake had not been made leading to my being told that I could not leave and would have to be locked up. I don’t thank that I am the only person who has felt that.
I was wrong. Basil Hume said that he always felt envy of the chaplain because he was unambiguously engaged in the work of Christ. That tells us something of what he thought of the work of a Cardinal. More importantly, at the end of this series, it tells us something about Jesus and it tells us something about the opportunity that prisoners and prisons present for Christian service.
(Readings Exodus 18 13-23; John 7.53-8.11)
