EPISTLES
PRISON LETTERS TODAY
We got started visiting people in jail. The conversations—laughter, confession, pushback, tears, honesty, stories—were better than anything we knew at home, on social media, in church, or at our favorite breweries.
When our incarcerated friends got shipped off to the human landfills called prisons in remote corners of our state, we stayed in touch with letters. We told each other our stories. We built friendships. We build re-entry plans. We built future dreams. Then we built an organization and a movement.
So you could too.
“The way I see it, the planet is sick. And when I came to prison, I was a sick individual. My symptoms were anger, gangbanging, drugs, ego, lying, and selfishness. Oh yeah, and denial.”
Working with the incarcerated for the past sixteen years has given us an unexpected preparation for this wearying era of quarantine, lockdown, mild house-arrest.
With Underground Ministries’ new EPISTLES resource center, we seek to equip a generation of Americans to be in direct, energized relationship with our incarcerated neighbors. We hope to help thousands on both sides of prison walls commune between isolations.
These kick-starting pages can build a process of solidarity and learning with those who’ve forged lives of reflection, courage, self-transformation, or prayer inside jail tiers and prison cells hidden across the land.
I want to invite you to join us every morning at 8:30am—for 25 minutes before the programs, lectures, workshops and readings begin, all on screens—to carve out a separate space for simple reflection and prayer, inspired by our incarcerated brothers and sisters finding rhythms in less comfortable lockdowns. We will ground ourselves inside the mystery of our created bodies, light a candle, and be still before God together.
Each morning will connect a part of of bodily temples’ role in prayer with a story from a formerly (or currently) incarcerated friend of mine—who will sometimes Zoom in from their homes or even collect call from a WA State prison.
Please bring:
paper
pencil
and a candle of any kind (and you can’t bum a light, so bring that too)
To help you prepare, you might enjoy these two teasers:
Madeline L’Engle’s Prison Letters
When the prolific author of A Wrinkle in Time began exchanging letters with a Black Panther imprisoned for a murder he didn’t commit, neither could have imagined what the relationship would yield.
Read the stunning Vanity Fair reporting on this underground correspondence—and friendship—that helped inspire EPISTLES.
CLICK THE IMAGE ON THE LEFT
New York Times illustrator Wendy MacNaughton came to our Skagit County Jail with me in 2019.
This is what she saw.
As the pandemic shut down America in 2020, and unincarcerated communities got a taste of lockdown life, this is what I saw.
LEARN MORE ABOUT UNDERGROUND MINISTRIES
