Viennese Journals 1.0 - Walking on Holy Ground, Evensong, and the Amnesty Candle

I am attending the United Nations Commission on Crime in Vienna as a delegate with the Friends World Committee for Consultation. It is an amazing opportunity and confluence of my Quaker spirituality, social justice activism, and criminal justice work. My wife, Caroline, and I are going together. We are now in Lymington, England with our host and mentor Nicholas McGeorge and his wife Ellen McGeorge.

Today was our first day in England, preparing for the Commission work and seeing the sights.

I spent the morning trying to get up to speed on the treatment of women in prisoners and the collateral consequences of incarceration on children. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the Quaker United Nations Office has some good publications on these issues:

 Children of Prisoners

http://www.quno.org/geneva/pdf/humanrights/women-in-prison/201203Analytical%20DGD%20Report-internet.pdf

Women in Prisons

http://www.unodc.org/documents/justice-and-prison-reform/women-and-imprisonment.pdf

UN Manuel on Restorative Justice:

http://www.unodc.org/pdf/criminal_justice/06-56290_Ebook.pdf

In the afternoon we visited Salisbury Cathedral.

 In the cathedral there is a stained glass window, installed in 1980, dedicated to Prisoners of Conscience. In the corner of the cathedral there is a candle that always burns as a vigil to these prisoners. 

  We attended the Evensong service and heard the voices of young people singing many of the same words that have been sung continuously in this holy place for more than 750 years. There is beauty in these young live voices rising and soaring into the spires and thinning out into silence. Bringing life into a beautiful tomb. The contrast of life and death, the tradition refreshed in young voices, made me think that the comfort of repetition and the strength of tradition. As a Quaker I am highly suspicious of the way these rituals can become great weights that hold us from discovering the freedom of the Spirit on our own.  My experience of Evensong today was refreshing, rejuvenating, and nothing like a weight.  We need these traditions to be strong enough to hold us over time, and flexible enough to bend with the wind of the Truth.