[Background to today's blog; much of this info is discussed in the last chapter of Way Opens. Scroll down to the * if you already know about FMC's inner workings.]

A few years ago, 8 to 12 people doing what’s sometimes called prison ministry, formed a quasi-support group at Friends Meeting at Cambridge (FMC) and called this group, what else, Prison Ministry. These people were visiting prisoners in jail, writing letters to men and women behind bars, advocating for a more just criminal justice system, volunteering in agencies working with families impacted by violent crime, etc., etc. Uncomfortable with the word “ministry,” this group, which meets once a month, is now called Prison Fellowship (PF).

Over time, PF, while continuing to support its members’ individual efforts, took on a new role: sponsoring talks and lectures about the criminal justice system and sharing the stories of individuals directly affected by what some call “the very criminal justice system” for the entire Meeting’s edification. PF also proposed FMC offer a weekly meal-and-sharing opportunity for the formerly incarcerated which is now in its second year and has attracted eight to twelve regular attenders. My husband (who cooks amazing meals for these weekly, powerful, community-building gatherings) and I attend faithfully.

* About a year ago, in the Spirit-led, organic way that these things happen, three people from Prison Fellowship found themselves raising funds, mostly from the larger FMC community, to bail out a young man who’d been held in jail for three years. This oh-my-God-we-actually-DID-this! has led PF to wonder: Should we create a bail fund? A legal defense fund?  Both? Neither? (Twice, through PF members’ efforts, money has also been raised to pay for lawyers, too.)

Over the past few months, at our monthly potluck-plus-meetings, PF has gone around and around on this should-we/ shouldn’t we. Lots of good meals, little progress. Last month, someone suggested we do a kind of personal assessment, ask ourselves what’s keeping us back, what’s a concern, fear, ” a stop,” as they say.

So I did. And here’s what I discovered when I listened to that still, small voice: Given how many people could use bail and/or legal defense funds, including, God forbid, people I love, people I break bread with every Wednesday night, how do you decide who gets what? I am simply not up to such a challenge. It’s too much.

Usually an energetic and optimistic person, I prefaced my gloomy remarks (last night) with: “Maybe it’s the rain but. . . ” (We haven’t seen sunshine around here FOR A LONG TIME!)

But in the organic, Spirit-led way that these meetings go, another PF member suggested that the decision-making process re who gets what should be the responsibility of a wider group, including, she suggested, mothers whose children had either been the victims of the perpetrators of violence and people from the Wednesday night group!

Yes. Once again I’ve assumed primary responsibility for some endeavor. Once again I have decided it’s all up to me! Once again I have failed to appreciate the power of community.

Can’t blame the rain for THAT!

Having recently taken a workshop on unlikable characters (Takeaway: Don’t get hung up on some readers’ need for sympathetic characters when writing fiction.), I have both created a main character who steals from her generous landlady/employer and reread Flannery O’Connor. Talk about unlikable characters!

O’Connor was Southern—as is my sticky-fingered protagonist—and self-identified as a Catholic writer, two more reasons why this Quaker fiction writer decided to read her again.

But, oh my: Much as I had yearned to learn from O’Connor’s art, her treatment of her black characters appalled me. Hoping I’d find something more, dare I say enlightened, I read her letters, too. Which, sad to say, made her worse in my eyes. Example: In one letter, she tells a story and uses “colored people.” In another letter, to a different friend, she tells the same story but says “niggers.” So don’t tell me she was a product of her time and place. She knew better.

Tons of writers have written about O’Connor and race (Check out Links for an excellent but looong piece.) I want to add my two cents:

My personal theory re why this severely ill (lupus), Southern, white, female, Catholic writer living during the civil rights movement (1925-1964) was so drawn to the grotesque, so convinced that the South was “Christ-haunted” and so clueless that it was, in fact, slavery-haunted, is that she was absolutely all of those defining words AND Irish-American.

My hero James Carroll wrote a wonderful piece in the Boston Globe today re Irish Catholics in light of the recent abuse scandal in Ireland. His point was that to the Irish Catholics, oppressed by the British and decimated by famine, “the Catholic Church had such a grip on the Irish psyche, if not soul. . . ”

No wonder her stories are so fiercely concerned with redemption! And Original Sin. No wonder she believed that “the Catholic writer, in so far as he [sic] has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that is, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.” No “cafeteria-style Catholicism” for our Flannery, no sirree. She puts ALL of it on her tray. Add all that painful Irish history/baggage to her Irish-American, day-to-day struggle to be Catholic in small-town, Bible Belt Georgia and, maybe, just maybe, you’ve got yourself someone so caught up in her own spiritual identity and survival, she was absolutely blind to the horror of racism.

Maybe.