About Peace
In the midst of all the disaster on September 11, I saw Peace run free. He ran down the streets full of rubble and he was beautiful ‚ happy to be free and just running. And I realized that so often Peace only runs free when there are great disasters, when something happens that strips the bars of difference away, and we treat each other with the love and equality and dignity that expresses the heart of who we really are. In great disasters we pay no attention to race, color, creed, politics, culture or any of the things we generally use to separate each other. We see each other in the face and in the heart, and we help each other no matter what. What I learned from September 11 is that we have to see that Peace runs free in times other than tragedy. We have to let this beautiful creature have space in our lives so that he can breathe and live and show us the joy and hope and freedom he is made of. Peace is always beautiful, but Peace is most beautiful when he is outside the cages of our prejudices and preferences. Peace is most beautiful when we are most beautiful; when we greet each other heart to heart, when there is no difference between your hart and mine.
Jane Lee Wolfe, President
World YWCA
Little Rock, AR

Gateside signs of hope
Relative to "reimagining faith and action" (TW 7/8-01) during these days of great sadness in New York, let me add to your growing list of remarkable signs of hope and healing appearing in spite of profound tragedy.

Thirty years ago, on September 13, 1971, tragic events took place in Attica, N.Y., that left folks in that community and throughout the state grieving and vengeful, raging, fearful and numb. On the scale of tragedy that all the world now knows firsthand, that was a local event. Somewhere in the world today similar human disasters are leaving in their wake inconsolable mothers and wives, husbands and lovers and children and an anxious public.

But not long after autumn passed and winter settled in at Attica that year some church folk and civic leaders and corrections staff noticed and began to pay attention to an old fact. On the morning of each visiting day scores of mothers and wives and kids and brothers and sisters were showing up in the facility parking lot, waiting to visit a loved one and hopefully preserve and strengthen family ties. So from a couple of local station wagons they began to offer simple "tailgate breakfasts" and respond to questions.

Some months later an unused building alongside the walls was made available and by 1976 Attica’s small local volunteer committee of hospitality providers was there each morning, seven days a week, serving an average of slightly more than 40,000 city family members a year. Spontaneously, local citizens in Auburn and in Plattsburg also began to provide gateside hospitality to families arriving after overnight bus trips from Manhattan.

As small groups in other upstate prison-hosting villages caught the spirit, we worked with them: place by place, year by year. Gateside buildings were built with non-tax-revenue funds to shelter visiting families, local sponsor committees organized, volunteers recruited and trained, long range financial support developed. Now, 30 years later, families making a visit at 36 of the state’s 70 prisons have access to professional civilian-staffed gateside services when they arrive and after they’ve said goodbye again. At those front gates this year over 500,000 city family members will find hospitality. One in five will be a child. Our people will be there: without fanfare, without claims to be doing something.

Planted and born in Attica’s 1971 atmosphere of violence and hatred and death, the visitors’ centers quietly actualized a latent culture of hospitality for strangers in a strange land. The idea took wings across the state and now grows from corner to corner. With uncertain funding, no official sponsor and only "a Benedictine/Buddhist agenda," the Gateside Hospitality Centers are a living witness to a community’s natural need to extend hospitality to strangers and a family’s natural need to be with a loved one. So in the wilderness stress of a front gate situation, to reduce obstacles for folks hoping to preserve and strengthen family ties, the hospitality centers try to "make straight in the wilderness" a pathway.
James W. Bergland, Executive Director
Patmos Associates, Ltd.
New York, NY