Notes from My Cell, April 13-14th

4/13

I am pretty comfortable in my cell, I hope not too comfortable, but after all, I seek out monastic retreats where I’ve just got a little cell to sit with myself, catch up on sleep perhaps, and write. I’ve been thinking of stripping my room down this summer to just such a situation. My room has been my office and my study for too long, and it does impact the quality of my sleep. This last winter I learned to spend time in my red chair, angled towards the window, where I got a little light and could watch the city and its people just go about its business. I think it began to click, that this was in some ways a spiritual discipline to be valued, earlier – before Christmas, when I got the opportunity to meet Martin Marty in his office and home in the Hancock tower. The whole world, it seems, is buzzing away below. (I especially liked the line of cars up and down all of Lake Shore Drive). But it does quickly give you a different perspective on life, floating above it like that. So that is what I try to do now also – take in that bustling corner of Hyde Park with its Metra trains and buses and people arriving and departing, the bank and the bookstore, and all.

For this reason also, I think, I am happy to have been bounced up to the second floor of cells in our block – where I can get a wider, “birds-eye” perspective on our daily lives in this jail, how we buzz about playing cards, helping one another, fighting with one another, all engrossed in a movie on TV, the crying and hand-holding by the phone, and the laughing at lunch table pranks. It also gets a little more sun during the day.

I think I’ve collected nearly enough information to begin a license investigation into the night nurse – the one who routinely refuses to distribute prescribed medication to inmates during her shift, or to tell inmates their prescription has expired – although the other nurses will show us that the prescription is still in place. One testimony I collected is from a young inmate who suffered a miscarriage late in her first trimester. When this nurse was on duty and called, she told the girl to “bleed it out in (her) cell.” That was about two years ago. We do apparently have a very good medical ward here, by most prisoners’ accounts, but it amazes me a nurse wouldn’t do anything. Meanwhile, I’m wondering just what this nurse is doing with all the drugs she’s withholding from her patients. (Worse is the girl who went into premature labor on an already high risk pregnancy this past summer; the nurse told her it was only a bladder infection. When the next nurse came on shift, she finally got to go to the hospital).
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9:15 and we are waiting for cell inspections – a daily ritual of checking our beds are neat and cells tidy, and no “contraband” lying out in the open. Today, I have two religious books – a Bible and a Qur’an, when you’re only allowed one; and I made a pencil-grip out of paper strips rolled, and secured with a sticky shampoo label. I also have too many photos and letters from the outside – when I finish with them, they’re supposed to go downstairs into my personal belongings container – but in my defense on this last one, I’ve asked three different guards so far, and none have bothered; they also didn’t touch it during shakedown.
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4/14
Monday afternoon, a beautiful sun shining, I can see through the window; I find myself especially at peace today. It is good to enter jail in late winter, when you haven’t experienced spring yet – in fact, it will be marvelous to step out into full bloom a few weeks from now. Then it may be hard to keep me inside to finish my studies the last two weeks of school.
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I just remember I forgot to call back the Witherspoon Society. Perhaps I can be of use to them still after my release. (A Presbyterian peace group).
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I confess the past several days I’ve done little more than read, write, and catch up on sleep – I felt a little guilty about this – I should be writing more! Reading more! But, on the other hand, it also feels like time well spent. Curiously enough, the whole ward’s been doing much the same. We’ve been quieter as a whole, too.

I answered some questions about religious life, training towards the pastorate, as well as formation as a nun; I explained what I could. I think often about bringing together various religious orders for a conversation with the New Monasticism movement, the Catholic Workers and the student cooperative housing movement, and I think also the interfaith youth movement. Here are five groups that have so much to share with one another and enormous potential to provide young adults something meaningful to do other than hope to work for good.

So many tears tonight – on the phone again – from those coming in tonight, and from those who are about to leave. It is a nurturing group of women here who look out for one another and its ok to cry around. I can see how it would be hard to exist on the “outside” world without this support.

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All I can think about tonight is food. The tv commercials are not helping – nor is my co-food-thinker who’s getting out tomorrow. You just don’t know how much that Dunkin Donuts commercial for coffee hurt to watch, especially the last scene with the chocolate-covered custard-filled – it’s a particular weakness… I am envisioning a day of pure comfort food when I get out, followed by many days of nonstop vegetables. No pasta surprise, and no beanie weenie for at least a month, okay? I also confess I dream of pizza. Fortunately, they do a nice treat for the inmates – they take orders every other Friday from a local restaurant, this week it will be a sub – we’ll divide up the ones we get for the women who have no money on their commissary accounts, just as we do with the candy. We’re charged a reasonable price, too – around $5. I am glad to have resources to share here. Also glad that when I leave my cellmates will have my things to share – shampoo, and things like this that I needed to order when I got here. Also hopefully a few leftover writing supplies, though I go through them fast.
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I’m beginning to think already of the time when I will be done here. It is coming soon.

Peace,
Le Anne

The Hope in Harry Potter

There's two good articles I've read about Harry Potter lately, so the topic's been on my mind. (It's amazing I have this kind of time right now to think of things, and also to write them down. I'll miss it when I'm back to the daily grind). One is TIME magazine's 'Person of the Year' profile of J.K. Rowling, a runner-up for the competition, reflecting on her work and its meaning. The other appears in 'The Lutheran' magazine, on why one pastor has no trouble with his grandchildren reading Potter.

I've been writing around the edges of a pit in my stomach that doesn't want to go back to school this coming semester, that doesn't want to do much anything except hide actually--it's a lousy time to be a leader in our student government if you ask me. Our beloved dean is headed on sabbatical, and the other powers that be seem not too interested in the life and wellbeing of students, let alone the neighborhood. In fact, there's a lot of forces that don't seem to be too concerned about the place in which we live and the wellbeing of people. One gets the sense that some would like the students to shut up and go away, in occasionally politer terms. I've been known to say out loud I'd rather take my chances in prison this spring, which is very well likely where I'll be once the SOA trial is over. In the meantime, I've dropped to part-time, and I don't hang out on campus much anymore.

Still, perhaps now is not the time to hide, behind bars or otherwise. And this is where I find great courage in reading and re-reading Potter. (I might also mention the Lord of the Rings, and the Chronicles of Narnia, epics I never thought I'd embrace before recent years). I need to hear, over and over again, that people can go wrong in the pursuit of their perceived good; to recognize it when it's happening in leaders I see, and to take warning it could happen in myself. I need to hear that there is hope in love, and there is hope even when those we love and who love us can't be there to help us. In fact, I might have still remained in seminary up to this point in good part due to reading Potter.

The thing I appreciate most about Rowling's archetypes in Potter is that they do help me to see, bad in good people and good in bad (or, rather, those who are causing harm and fear) people, and to seek to love them however I can. Yes, in my world I can identify Gilderoy Lockharts and Severus Snapes and Lucius Malfoys and any manner of Ministry officials. (I even knew a crooked dean once at another seminary who resembled in face and body and voice and personality and all other things Dolores Umbridge, as portrayed in this summer's fifth movie). I think I might even have encounters with the Dark Lord on occasion. And sometimes I don't know this until I feel the little deaths they've left behind.

But I also know Dumbledores, and Hagrids and Lupins, who love me and seek to help, and whom I love; and I have friends the likes of Hermione and Ron, Luna and house-elves even. Somehow, I am reminded I don't have to face things alone. This is different than being free to abandon the situation altogether. But also, not alone.

I think it could be egotistical to think of myself as Potter, but then, probably every child puts him or herself in Potter's shoes, or at least those children who must face trials in life and survive; those who are not sheltered from most things and are perhaps more vulnerable, but also have a few gifts to recognize and use to help themselves. I need to think of my gifts less as a curse or a source of personal pain, and more as gifts, and to practice them in order to be better and do better. I don't know. There are so many ways to go wrong when trying to use one's gifts well, to function in society, to know the good and work for it.

I hope I can work for the good, and remain good. I hope I will keep the students together, not to dissolve into factions and stir up enmity with each other, because there are so many ways that could happen. I hope not to be alone.

'Mean Girls' in Ministry

I finally got around to watching the movie 'Mean Girls,' which I've been meaning to do for a couple years now since it was made. I had a feeling it would help me come to terms with a few things.

'Mean Girls' chronicles a year in the life of a high school girl who's new and doesn't know how the typical social caste works. She ends up in the circle of the 'mean girls,' who are always cruel, humiliating, and manipulative towards everyone else, but still people look up to them as cool. Once she sees them for what they are, she tries to destroy them, but is herself destroyed in the process. So she has to find a way to seek healing for herself as well as the whole school.

I wanted to watch this because of the things which I've seen in seminary and ministry among women that I simply do not like. No, that's not strong enough. I am totally disillusioned by some of the things I see going on among women in power, in ministry and in seminary education, that only serve to hurt--other women in particular, sometimes to the point of forcing more vulnerable students out of the schools altogether. I have been hurt by these power games, and I've had plenty of friends hurt too. It would be easy to run away. It's harder to know how to work for change. And I don't want to become like that either, to have myself changed for the worse. There's a long list of women in ministry and women teaching in seminaries that I frankly don't want to be like, 'when I grow up.'

I don't do very well in challenging cruel and humiliating words, or manipulation, or any of the 'soft abuses,' such as verbal, emotional, or psychological abuse, or any of the other ways a person can use an institution to crush another person. Maybe it is because the seminary is the place where the institutions of religion and academy combine that it is a place vulnerable to such abuses.

Now, if I haven't said it before, I'm not talking about my female classmates, or even women who are newly colleagues in ministry, regardless of their age. The women in my seminary classes I've known, on the whole, have been wonderful sources of support. I think this is because we are all brought into the same place as students, facing the same challenges--at least in this one part of our lives. I don't know if I could say it of every seminary, but for now, this is what I see.

I've theorized here before, and elsewhere, that women in power, even at the height of their careers, still face the glass ceiling of tradition above them, still desire the esteem of their male colleagues and admiration of their male subordinates, but feel the advance of age and death that claims us all; in the process, female subordinates can only appear to them as threats until they find contentment with their own lives' work, and choose to prepare the next generation to carry on. I try to remember this when I am recovering from the latest blows. It doesn't always help.

I do worry that I will become like this also, that any step I make to lead others will somehow unwittingly cause me to treat 'subordinates' the way I've been treated. It makes me not want to hire anyone or ask volunteers for help. I don't want to give orders, and really, I don't want to lead at all. I'm still less afraid of having someone lead me than of stepping out and causing harm.

But no, there have to be other ways, ways of leading through healing. Or healing through leading. I think it'll be hard work. And as with many things, I don't know that I'll succeed. I do know I want to lash out sometimes, okay, many times, and make life as hard for them as they've made it for me. I also know that will only make things worse. I hope I can resist the temptation.

At least 'Mean Girls' has a happy ending. Relationships are restored, and even transformed. It doesn't have to be the way it was. Sometimes I think that if we let another generation of women pass, things will mellow out, but there's no guarantee of that. Some intervention is probably needed.

I hope happy endings in this situation won't end up only a thing of the movies.