A reflection by Caron, ID Prison Ministry’s Volunteer Course Facilitator
“I can’t go in,” she said, her face frozen in fear. “I don’t do groups.” It was a chilly September morning in prison and as the women filed into the chapel for the morning’s Understanding Forgiveness course, this one woman (let’s call her M) hesitated by the door, eventually turning to me to reveal her fears.
I could completely understand her fear. She was coming into an Understanding Forgiveness course, which can be a hard topic for any of us. And she was having to walk into a room full of women she barely knew and certainly didn’t trust. I reassured her that she could take it at her own pace and prioritise her own needs, even step out of the room if she felt she needed to. Reluctantly, she walked into the room and took her seat.
As the session unfolded, the women began to open up about their experiences and ongoing struggles, and we looked at some different thoughts and perspectives around the concept of forgiveness. There was a warming up, there were connections being made. Some of the women used their own experience to help others in the group. But M stayed completely impassive. Her face revealed no expression, she did not speak a word. She did, however, stay until the very end of the session and did not walk out once.
As the course moved into its second and third weeks, I began to notice changes in M. She would whisper things to the person next to her. She began to contribute. Just small things, a word here or there. Sometimes her face would flush red and she would shake with nervous laughter. Emotions and thoughts were beginning to move through her, she was unlocking in front of our eyes.
The forgiveness course tends to go to some deep and painful places at times. The focus, for us, is always about how we help women move beyond their pain into choices and behaviours that are going to bring them to health and closer to the person they were meant to be. There’s a lot of vulnerability, shame and guilt that is worked on over the sessions. With these courses we have a set curriculum of “content” to cover. Ideas, videos, quotes etc to help us all think about and look at aspects of the process of forgiveness. However, the part that is always unique and can never be prepped or replicated is the group dynamic. The individuals that make up the group, the spirit of the group as a changing entity in its own right and the divine Grace that makes transformation and connection possible, even in these most challenging of circumstances.
Anybody who has ever been wronged has struggled with ideas of forgiveness, just as any of us who have ever hurt anyone has struggled with guilt and regret. Again and again, I personally find myself learning so much from these courses, from the women and from the wonderful co facilitators as we work through these deep themes.
Seeing M open up more and more each week was heart warming. Knowing how much of that had come not from us, but from the women right alongside her in the group was truly awe-inspiring. The generosity of spirit of these women, to reach out and hold out their own suffering and experience as a way of helping others was a profound reminder to me that we, as humans, and as women in particular, are stronger when we are together.
Whilst the external world may appear to have adopted a Darwinian approach to survival, we as women have generations of understanding that survival and thriving is about cooperation and collaboration.
That’s why, as simple as it may seem, our first exercise in the group work is always about sharing perspectives. We present shapes within shapes. A triangle within many triangles, for example. It seems simple but it’s profound. We are showing them what we all need to be reminded of at times:
Your perspective is valuable,
you are unique
and how you see things might differ from others
and we all want to know what that is.
Your viewpoint is welcome here.
We are open to learning from each other.
We appreciate the attempt,
we appreciate the collaboration,
together we can be more than we are alone.
As the last session ended and M was given her certificate of completion, I wondered what that piece of paper really meant. I wondered what she would do with it, whether it would lie discarded in a waste paper basket or hang on a wall. I contemplated (not for the first time) how inadequate a piece of paper is in summing up the distance travelled in acquiring it and in representing the transformation along the way. We said our goodbyes to the group and they all filed out, ready to carry on with the daily life of living out their sentences. As we tidied up and did the last pieces of admin, it fell to me to connect with two of the course participants to follow up on a couple of administrative things. I left the chaplaincy to find them, only to find the women milling around outside in the “exercise yard”. I found one of the women I was looking for and, as divinely directed, she was in a cluster of women including M.
As I approached, there was a difference in M’s countenance. A relief perhaps. It was done. She had her certificate. She was outside. She was surrounded by her friends. I was surprised then when she seemed genuinely pleased to see me and wanted to talk with me more. To my amazement, the woman standing next to her asked me if she could be added to the list for the next Forgiveness course. M was beaming at her. Her friend carried on, enthused: “I just heard it’s really good and I think I really need to do it.”
This drove home to me an important point. We are so often completely unaware of our impact. We do our part and the rest is invisible. We don’t know how it lands or if or when it hits. This was a beautiful instance where I was able to see a piece of the impact. From the terrified and frozen first day of M’s participation to her confident and beaming sharing with others in the prison yard, she was inspiring the people around her to dig deep and be brave, to confront the difficult and to move through into light. I realise that I was very privileged to be allowed this glimmer of visibility into the impact of our work.
I was also left wondering whether the other women who had been part of our group would understand the importance of their own impact. For I know that what happened in that room had very little to do with me, the course content or even the other facilitators.
I wonder whether the women were aware of just how much they had all helped each other in their participation in the group. Each and every woman had added her own perspective, her own flavour as it were, to the pot of experiences, wisdom, vulnerabilities and learnings that every one of us was blessed to be a part of on this course.
I recently heard a beautiful quote about faith that said that we often misunderstand what faith is. We think faith is believing in something unbelievable, in something huge or incredible. Instead, it might be helpful to think of faith as this:
When faced with unknowing, faith is choosing to believe good.
In the face of impact that is largely unseen, invisible in many ways, I hope that each of the women on our courses can find her way to this faith, the faith that says that the unknown means good is possible, good is coming or that good has already arrived and we just haven’t been made aware of it yet.
The way that we women are with each other, the way in which we support each other and pay forward our hardest experiences for the benefit of those to come, this, for me, is so much of the goodness. More goodness can flow, the more we allow these spaces to be created for women to be with each other in compassion, in support and in a shared endeavour of moving forward together.