Tag Archives: prison

Welcome our new Drama Therapy intern!

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Mary Schwabenland

Hello! I am Mary, the new Drama Therapy intern at common cathedral / Emmanuel Church. I am a few weeks into the internship now and have really been enjoying getting to know the community members. One of my goals for this internship is to aid community members in the creation of meaningful expressive art experiences and projects.  The first of which is our upcoming talent-show fundraiser, which was the idea of a long-time community member. We have about 14 sign-ups of varying talent acts, and I am very excited to see what everyone brings.

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Being Present Consistently

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This Monday (11/14/22) was my first time leading the opening and ending of the Art and Spirituality Program with other facilities and volunteers at Suffolk County House of Correction. This program provides people in prison with accessible art materials, valuable time just sitting together and making art, and space to express missing and thanking their loved ones.  As usual, we started by reading the poem, “Reflections after Compline” by Sue Stock [1] and sharing a word that reflects the day. Then we made cards or origami art together. After creation, we came back as a group and shared our creativity.

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The Harvest of Righteousness

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Advent 2C.  19 December 2021. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Baruch 5:1-9 Take off the garment of sorrow and affliction and put on the robe of righteousness.
Phillipians 1:31-11. And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God
Luke 3:1-6 All flesh shall see the salvation of God.

God all merciful and all compassionate, grant us the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may and cost what it will.

As I said last week, Advent is a season for communal and institutional reflection and repentance, for collective atonement and reparations. Our readings for this second Sunday in Advent are so full and big with calls for repentance and reparations; it is almost as if they are pregnant with possibility. The prophet Baruch and the evangelist Luke are both reminding their hearers about the words of the prophet Isaiah. And Luke draws a picture of John the Baptist that is just like the prophet Jeremiah, consecrated before he was born, and just like Elijah by the Jordan in the wilderness. Luke also has already explained that John’s work was so closely related to Jesus’s work, their purposes were so akin to one another, that it was as if they must have known one another before they were even born. Continue reading →

Engaging Participants

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This week at Boston Warm was slower. Everyone seemed a little tired and unmotivated, which made it difficult to get them to feel engaged. On Monday, however, at the Suffolk House of Corrections program on art and spirituality, I had some positive interactions that gave me a glimpse of the small ways I could be a positive presence at my sites. Continue reading →

Art & Spirituality Program

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One part of my internship at Emmanuel Church is with the Art and Spirituality program at the Suffolk County Correctional Facility. This program provides women housed at the prison with the time and materials to make cards to send to their friends and loved ones. They are provided with images that they can color in, and I have started drawing my own images for them each week. I have made drawings for specific holidays like Halloween and Thanksgiving, images to use for birthday cards, and images for cards that are not for any particular occasion. Continue reading →

Stories

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Something I have noticed the last couple weeks of my internship with Emmanuel is all the stories that people tell. All three of the populations with whom I am working, despite the wide age range and different backgrounds, have many stories to tell. I have been surprised by how willing many of the program participants are to tell their stories. In common art, I have found several people making art about events that have happened in their past, and being very willing to share despite the sometimes intense nature of these stories. It felt meaningful to me that they were given this artistic outlet to tell their stories. I want to explore this further, and see if there are projects I can come up with that could enhance their experience of telling their stories through art.

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