Today’s act of HOPE: a letter to my pen pal, Sarah.
Sarah is in prison in Texas. She and I were introduced to each other through a “Pen Pal Program” which matches a prison inmate with someone on the “outside” for the purpose of writing letters back and forth.
To me, there are not many places or situations that can be as hopeless as prison.
Sarah is a divorced mother of three adult children. She tells me that a relapse of alcoholism led to some “very unwise decisions” which landed her in prison, and she is certainly praying to get out soon.
It is hard to write to someone you don’t know. Doubly hard if that person is in prison. It seems so awkward to write of happy things like Christmas and family.
But such topics cannot be avoided. So, I write to her and tell her our family’s plans for Christmas. I tell her about an upcoming trip. I tell her how cold it is. Does this letter give her HOPE? Or does it plunge her into despair – reminding her that she cannot experience all these activities of a free life?
I do hope that beyond the content of the letter, she can see that I have HOPE in her and for her. I HOPE that she will be out of prison someday. I have HOPE for her redemption; I HOPE that she can be changed for the better through this very very difficult time.
I tell her I pray for her daily; I pray for her happiness, and safety, and faith in God.
Perhaps all this HOPE is a little naïve – I’ll surely never know what prison life is like. But I do know what it is to be human, to love another human being, and to have HOPE in every person I meet.
Here is the poem I sent her in honor of the season:
Advent
By Mary Jo Salter
Wind whistling, as it does
in winter, and I think
nothing of it until
it snaps a shutter off
her bedroom window, spins
it over the roof and down
to crash on the deck in back,
like something out of Oz.
We look up, stunned—then glad
to be safe and have a story,
characters in a fable
we only half-believe.
Look, in my surprise
I somehow split a wall,
the last one in the house
we’re making of gingerbread.
We’ll have to improvise:
prop the two halves forward
like an open double door
and with a tube of icing
cement them to the floor.
Five days until Christmas,
and the house cannot be closed.
When she peers into the cold
interior we’ve exposed,
she half-expects to find
three magi in the manger,
a mother and her child.
She half-expects to read
on tablets of gingerbread
a line or two of Scripture,
as she has every morning
inside a dated shutter
on her Advent calendar.
She takes it from the mantel
and coaxes one fingertip
under the perforation,
as if her future hinges
on not tearing off the flap
under which a thumbnail picture
by Raphael or Giorgione,
Hans Memling or David
of apses, niches, archways,
cradles a smaller scene
of a mother and her child,
of the lidded jewel-box
of Mary’s downcast eyes.
Flee into Egypt, cries
the angel of the Lord
to Joseph in a dream,
for Herod will seek the young
child to destroy him. While
she works to tile the roof
with shingled peppermints,
I wash my sugared hands
and step out to the deck
to lug the shutter in,
a page torn from a book
still blank for the two of us,
a mother and her child.