By Aracely
Uranga Palacio, CCVI
I had the
grace of accompanying men and women in prison areas in Nuevo León, offering
workshops on Forgiveness and Reconciliation, as part of a psycho-spiritual
program designed to help people to give new meaning to their lives.
I started
without knowing clearly what lead me to participate in this project, apart from
the Mission of the Congregation which is to promote human dignity. Little by
little, the encounter with these people in this place revealed my mission to me;
to give and receive love, having a deep experience of self-determination and
freedom.
I could meet
evil with names and surnames, and at the same time I could see their
vulnerability and the inability for self-defense. In both cases, the ‘guilty’
and the ‘non-guilty’ reveal the results of a system that has led them to where
they are today. That is why Pope Francis, in his talk at the Social Reinsertion Center [Centro de
Reinserción Social (CERESO) in Ciudad Juárez, said: “Divine mercy reminds us that prisons are a symptom of the state of
society, they are in many cases a symptom, of silences and omissions that have
been the cause of a culture that rejects individuals”.
I had the
opportunity to meet intelligent men and women, who are great artists,
draftsmen, draftswomen, painters, sculptors--with a truncated life, due to the
social poverty which surrounds them. I found human beings who show respect when
addressed by name and treated with equality. At the beginning, they would ask
me: “Why do you come here? Why do you visit
us since we are not members of your family? There is common ground in
humanity that we all share and I cannot be indifferent to the pain others feel.
They often
asked me whether I was not afraid,
and frankly I only felt fear once or twice thinking I was at risk. After a
violent incident, a security guard explained to me the dangers I was exposed
to, not due to a direct aggression against me or against my team, but due to a
fight among the prisoners themselves. My experience at all times was that in the
case of personal danger, many of them would have risked their integrity to
protect my life. We should be afraid of a repressive system, an unjust system
that is unable/unwilling to break the vicious cycle of victims vs. assailants.
I close my
eyes and I can see the faces of these men and women and remember their names.
They are in my heart, like Tencha and Aracely, two women who accompanied me in
this learning experience in which I could come close to these inmates without
fear, embrace them as my brothers and sisters, and feel the presence of God in
them.
