A Life With Criminals
By Paulo Baleinakorodawa
Paulo Baleinakorodawa worked for three years in the Philippines as a Columban lay missionary. He is now coordinator of Columban Companions in Mission in his native Fiji.
People used to ask me in the Philippines why I hung around so much with criminals. It wasn’t easy to answer. Perhaps it was because of my love and compassion for them. But deep within me was a burning passion to help them know and feel that, despite their wrongdoing, God loved them in the same way He loved those in free society. Here the strength of the message of the Cross became real – God loves and accepts each one of us with no strings attached.
As a Columban Lay Missionary from Fiji I got involved with the prisoners in Olongapo District Jail soon after being assigned to Immaculate Conception Parish, Barretto, Olongapo, in mid-1997. The jail had about 250 inmates. About eight percent were serving sentences of three years and below while the rest were detained pending trials. It was rather shocking to know that because of the snail-paced judicial system many had been languishing in this situation for three years or more.
I used to spend six days a week in the jail. This involved coordinating and providing Bible services, prayer meetings and such, and arranging for the celebration of the sacraments. I also coordinated religious instruction, seminars and retreats for the formation of the prisoners. In addition, I coordinated legal assistance, literacy programs and basic guidance and counseling sessions.
The ministry tremendously widened my view of Mission. As I understand it now, it enables people to experience God in Jesus in their own ways. To put this in my mission context then, it was enabling prisoners to experience God in Jesus as prisoners. It was journeying with them in their search for God and Life in ways that were truly theirs, no matter what their circumstances in life were. These ways allowed them to see, taste, smell, hear and feel God. Through this they could claim they were at home with God, with the whole of humanity and creation. They could make their own the beautiful opening words of the First Letter of St. John, This is what we proclaim to you: what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked upon and our hands have touched – we speak of the word of life.
It is a real challenge for a missionary to try to enable people to make this experience a reality in their lives. For me as a lay missionary, walking daily with prisoners in their difficult journey through life, it was even more challenging. I was relating to people with no public face, the voiceless, the poorest of the poor and the outcasts of society. Through my interaction with them I came to realize the great need to be a voice for them. Given their circumstances, prisoners have a very low sense of self-worth, if any at all. How could I show God’s compassionate love for them in the wretched state they were in? Because of negative attitudes in society towards them, they have often been deprived of their human dignity. In many cases, because of their confinement, they have been stripped of their basic human rights. Many are innocent and languishing behind bars because of an unjust legal system. Many times there is little that can be done, but just being there for them and to have the time to listen to the cry of their souls is for me an opening where they can experience the love of God flourishing in their lives.
I was in this ministry for almost three years. At times I wonder if my presence had an impact on the lives of the prisoners. But deep inside I can feel a great sense of gratitude and satisfaction that at least I was trying to do all I could. I know and believe that God did the rest.
This for me is Mission, because this is not just my mission but God’s mission. I’m called as a missionary to become a visible sign of the invisible grace of God, and to awaken people to the mystery of the Divine in their lives so that they will come to experience God in Jesus in their very being!