It’s amazing how serendipitous life changes can really affect your spirituality and the ways that you interact with the world.  Since becoming ordained in 2015 I’ve had an interest in pursuing professional chaplaincy, but as a minority religion there are even more barriers in place that there would be otherwise.  Even then, I thought I’d like higher education or hospital chaplaincy, and was pretty sure that prison chaplaincy was not for me.  But then this opportunity to work at the local women’s state prison fell into my lap, and I have found myself spirituality reinvigorated and deeply humbled in this work.  

Before ordination I was a high school teacher.  I really enjoyed some aspects of it (mostly the work that let me interact with students and teach), but other parts led to some pretty extreme professional burnout (mostly administrative and state mandated testing requirements).  Since starting this new job as a Prison Chaplain, I’ve said it’s like all things I loved about teaching and more, and almost nothing that I didn’t like. 

These women range from seekers to devout practitioners, and while I am there to counsel and to teach, like any teaching position I am absolutely also learning.   I have told them that I view my role in relation to them as guide, advocate, researcher, and spiritual leader.  They come from a huge variety of backgrounds and life experiences, and yet there is a unity that comes from their shared living arrangements, restrictions, and trauma.  Because I am new to them, and my path is new to most of them, we’re all starting together on the Dedicant Path, and even more introductory content than that. I know the path of Druidry won’t be for all of them, so I also spend much of my time researching other pagan paths so that I can get that information to them.  

We’ve discussed what polytheism and paganism is, various ways to believe and pray, forms that ritual can take, and how to build relationships with the spirits and build a community in this place.  They’ve spent much of their time here unable to make offerings outside of private thoughts.  So one of the first things I did was explain to them that each week we would have a ritual where they could bring offerings to the spirits that are important to them.  In that lesson we discussed that offerings should be something given freely that carries importance or meaning to them and/or the spirit they were honoring.  They are restricted in a lot of what they’re allowed to have, so we talked about some creative options (shout out to Rev. Kirk Thomas and the men of Frog Stone Circle PWG for their reflections on these topics!) including food from the commissary and moon-charged water.  

It was a fascinating and moving experience seeing what the women offered in the first rite they knew they could bring offerings. Yes there were flowers from the gardens they tend, a smooth stone from the yard, and crystal-infused water, but there was also a hair tie, a red hot jaw breaker, pressed flowers laminated with clear packing tape, and spoken-word poetry.

The work in the prison is fulfilling in ways that can only really be explained by vocation.  This is a job that is emotionally hard, but doing this work has been deeply meaningful to me, and has given me energy to engage in other religious projects to feed other aspects of my vocations.  Teaching is important to me, and working the Dedicant Path through the Wheel of the Year with the inmates has allowed me to organize those materials in a way that I can share them with the wider ADF community through Google Classrooms.  

So this work in the prison is not only allowing me to build connections in that community, but it’s allowing me to build and deepen connections to the ADF community.  And because those two pieces of work are inextricably linked for me, it is allowing connection across those communities.  ADF members have been donating books for use in the prison, and the womens’ reaction to those works and our discussions are allowing me to bring new perspectives to conversations in the Dedicant Classroom (and beyond!).  

We are, without a doubt, a religion based on building relationships with the spirits and each other, and Prison Chaplaincy has amplified that for me ten-fold.  

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