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posted on Tuesday, May 30, 2006

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SACRIFICE IS THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE
THE INCREDIBLE STORY OF A MODERN-DAY SAINT
By Maura R. O'Connor
What Is Enlightenment?
Issue 32 / March–May 2006

http://www.wie.org/j32/mother-antonia.asp?pf=1

Thirty years ago, Mother Antonia left behind her life as a mother of seven in Beverly Hills to care for thousands of inmates within the hellish confines of a Mexican prison -- the place, she says, that “freed” her.

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When you think about it, very few of us ever come in contact with holiness in our lifetime. Most of us have to dust the word off just to use it. We may have visited sacred sites such as cathedrals in Europe that house holy relics -- the ancient remains of a saint tightly sealed within a crypt, a mummified toe or a bone maybe. But authentic holiness, what the German theologian Rudolf Otto called Ganz Andere, “Total Otherness” -- that type of holiness capable of melting our personal significance into its greatness -- remains largely alien to us. No doubt, it’s in part due to the times we live in. Most of us have been raised in a secular culture that avoids even the intimations of hierarchy and absolutes, perfection and reverence. Look “holiness” up in the dictionary and you’ll find that someone who is holy is by definition morally and spiritually perfect; they evoke reverence in those around them as a result of their conviction and fearlessness; they are in a persistent state of godliness. Do we believe in perfection nowadays? Are we capable of reverence? Is godliness something we bother to strive for?

These were the sorts of questions I found myself absorbed by while reading about the life of Mary Clarke. In a new book called The Prison Angel, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan tell the story of how Mary, the daughter of Irish immigrants, grew up in glamour-infused Beverly Hills, was married twice, and raised seven children in relative domestic bliss. Then, at the age of fifty, she experienced a calling to serve God so strong that it led her to literally sew her own habit and move to one of the most infamous penitentiaries in Mexico in order to help the inmates there. For nearly fifteen years, she had no ecclesiastical support for her work at the prison. Now eighty years old, Mother Antonia, as she is known, is considered by many to be a living saint, someone who has walked directly into the middle of prison riots and gunfire to save lives. By all accounts, there isn’t anything she wouldn’t do for her “beloved hijos” (sons), and she has given everything to them, unconditionally, for nearly thirty years. To this day, she lives in a small cell, unequipped with either heat or hot water, alongside drug addicts, murderers, and the poor.

I spoke with Mother Antonia several times in the process of writing this article, and I can tell you that she is perhaps the most effusive and enthusiastic person you could ever meet. “I have not been depressed one day in thirty years,” she once marveled. “Perhaps sad, but never depressed.” Indeed, after every conversation with Mother Antonia, I found myself strangely lifted, as if I had been in touch with the Divine. Though I was in awe of her seemingly bottomless joy, like others I was also mystified by it. “The first time you meet her, you think she’s not real,” a friend explains in The Prison Angel. “She’s nuts, she’s not normal. But in twenty years I’ve never seen her change. . . . There’s an exuberance about her relationship with God. . . . It is normal. It’s what we’re supposed to be and we all wish we could be.”

Ever since she can remember, Mother Antonia was drawn to help the poor and the disenfranchised, even while growing up and then raising her own seven children in Beverly Hills among movie stars and directors. In 1965, a priest by the name of Henry Vetter heard about her ambitious charity work sending clothes, medicine, and supplies around the world on container ships whose captains she had coerced into helping her. He invited her to go on a tour of Tijuana with him, and during the trip they stopped at a prison called La Mesa. At that time, La Mesa was already well on its way to earning its reputation as what some have called the “Black Legend,” a place overrun by corruption and human rights violations. Mother Antonia relates the horror of seeing “F-Tank” for the first time -- nothing more than a stretch of dirt behind chain-link fence where insane prisoners were kept without access to running water or toilets. But most striking to her was what happened when they visited the prison’s infirmary. As soon as the sick inmates saw Father Vetter and Mary, they instantly stood up from their cots out of respect. “I immediately felt this caring and a love for them,” she told me. “I felt their goodness.” Over the next decade, Mary began to travel to La Mesa more and more -- often several times a week -- bringing anything she could to help the prisoners. “Charity is not a thing you do,” she says in The Prison Angel. “It’s love. It’s who you become. I was a salesman for the poor.”

In 1977, when all of Mary’s children were independent and her second marriage had ended in divorce, she had a life-changing realization: “I’d been an outsider to suffering all my life. I had been on the outside helping people on the inside, whether it was in Africa or Bolivia or anywhere else.” As she explained to me, “I think there comes a time when it’s not enough for us just to help other people. There’s something inside us that yearns to give ourselves up for the sake of other people. Sacrifice is the language of love. Without sacrifice, there is no love.” Indeed, Mary felt that she was being called to give up her life “completely.” She sold everything she owned -- her business, her house, her belongings -- donned a black dress and veil that she had sewn herself and believed looked “nunny,” and took the name Mother Antonia in honor of her deceased spiritual mentor, Monsignor Anthony Brouwers. Before he died, he had told her, “That little cottage that you wanted to go away to and make Toll House cookies -- that wasn’t meant for you. This was meant for you. The front lines. God put you in that role.” With that, she crossed the border into Tijuana for good.

Unlike other prisons in Mexico or the United States where individual cement cells are used to contain inmates, La Mesa’s system of incarceration was highly unusual: located within the prison walls was a kind of miniature city called El Pueblito, or “Little Town,” a city built by the inmates themselves. Though surrounded by guard towers, the squalid streets of El Pueblito were relatively unpoliced and contained thriving businesses -- taco shacks, tequila bars, brothels -- run by the prisoners. The inmates lived in a mixture of shantytown-like sprawls where the very poorest struggled to survive and small apartments where entire families lived, wives and children moving in with convicts and leaving the prison walls every day for work or school. Dotting the city were luxury apartments replete with hot tubs, televisions, tiled bathrooms, and cell phones; some sold for as much as thirty thousand dollars on the prison’s black market. It’s said that the richest drug lords would have prostitutes brought to them every night and their favorite dinners flown in from San Diego. If a prisoner couldn’t afford to pay for one of the available dwellings or build one himself, he slept outside on the bare cement.

For the first few years that Mother Antonia lived in El Pueblito, her “cell” was located over a raw sewer drain, and the stench was so unbearable she slept with a surgical mask over her face. Her days were often eighteen hours long, spent feeding, giving medicine to, and talking with criminals, guards, wives, children, and the dying. Thousands suffered horribly in the prison’s system. For example, during evening roll calls, guards would mark inmates as present only for a charge of fifty cents. If prisoners couldn’t pay the bribe, they were considered absent and thus lost one day served toward their prison sentences. Everything cost money in El Pueblito -- clothes, food, blankets, toilet paper, even showers -- and without it, inmates were left to fend for themselves. As a result, Mother Antonia’s work was often as simple as making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to give to the hungry or handing out the miniature hotel shampoos and soaps that friends sent to her in bagfuls.

At other times, however, her work was unimaginably painful. Once, for three days and nights, she cried and banged on the door of an interrogation room where she could hear the screams of a prisoner being tortured. She would enter El Pueblito during riots, begging inmates to drop their weapons and then negotiate deals with riot squads and police on the outside. She was, as she has said, “an instrument of peace in this war zone. Wherever there is torture or there is hate, it is a war zone.” Occasionally, prisoners who died, whether from stab or gunshot wounds, beatings, or disease, were left unclaimed by family in the prison morgue. After nine days, Mother Antonia would take the body in a coffin, flag down a passing truck, and ask to be driven to the cemetery in Tijuana. There she would pay a few dollars for a simple grave site and cry for them, writing on a wooden cross “We Love You.” She not only earned the adoration of the inmates by doing these sorts of things, but she also earned the trust and respect of the prison guards. They were often suffering as well, whether from depression or poverty, alcoholism, or methamphetamine addiction.

Drugs were a constant problem in El Pueblito. In fact, it’s said that marijuana was cheaper on the streets of Little Town than anywhere else in Mexico, and it’s estimated that as many as fifty percent of the prisoners were on heroin or other drugs. At night, soccer balls stuffed with cocaine would fly over the prison walls along with smuggled guns and food. Then in the summer of 2002, fifteen hundred armed police entered La Mesa at the command of the Mexican government and bulldozed Little Town to the ground. Children who lived there with their mothers or fathers were put in orphanages. Wives were put on the street and prisoners were put in “proper” cells. At the time, the prison held sixty-seven hundred inmates, two thousand more than its maximum capacity. Despite these efforts to clean up La Mesa, however, four years later it still retains something of its Black Legend status: a place where two justice systems exist, one for the poor and one for the rich, where women and men prostitute themselves in order to survive, and where drug and arms trafficking is still rampant.

When trying to explain why she has stayed in this living hell on earth for nearly thirty years, Mother Antonia relates an unforgettable dream she once had, years before she ever knew about or visited La Mesa. In the dream, she was at Calvary (the location of Christ’s crucifixion) and a Roman guard approached her, telling her that she was going to be crucified. Terrified and filled with dread, she prayed that God would take her away so she would not have to suffer. However, the Roman guard approached her again and said, “You don’t have to pray. There’s a man here and he wants to take your place.” She saw a man standing in a white robe, and when he looked at her, she understood that he was going to die for her and that she wouldn’t owe him anything in return. But then the Roman guard said, “He needs you to stand by him.” She began to cry, protesting that she hated violence and couldn’t bear to watch someone being crucified. The guard said, “Woman, he’s there in your place.” As Mother Antonia explained, “Suddenly, I loved more than I feared. I ran behind him and knelt down and took his face in my hands. But he didn’t have a face any longer -- it was blank where his face should have been. I said, ‘I’m afraid, but I’m more afraid to leave you. I’m never going to leave you, no matter what they do to me.’ I waited for the blow of the hammer, and then I woke up.” Over the years in the prison infirmary, Mother Antonia would often hold the face of a dying inmate and think, “Look, Lord, I’m with you again. . . . I’m never going to leave you.”

At the age of eighty, Mother Antonia suffers from a number of serious ailments and has to sleep with an oxygen tank next to her bed. On nights when she is especially exhausted, she wears a long nightgown to sleep just in case the guards have to retrieve her body in the morning; they’ve never seen her out of her habit. Nevertheless, her work continues. She pays for the release of prisoners who are convicted of nonviolent crimes and helps them find jobs and apartments so they can support themselves. She still arranges for hundreds of visits by dentists and oral surgeons to fix prisoners’ teeth in an effort to give them some measure of self-esteem. She prays for the souls of infamous murderers she has counseled so that they will repent in their hearts, and she visits their victims’ families in the hope that they will discover the release of forgiveness. This tireless work on behalf of the suffering, this practice of self-sacrifice is, she says, the very thing that has given her freedom. “I don’t just work for them; I am one of them. I live the way they live. Once you’re on the inside, it’s so different. Somehow prison was the place where I finally experienced the freedom to be myself, to really be myself. I think prison freed me.”

Even in death, Mother Antonia wants to be with the poor and the suffering, the people to whom she feels “thankful” for giving her the opportunity to serve God. Indeed, Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan write in The Prison Angel that she hopes to be buried in one of the mass graves at the same cemetery in Tijuana where she has brought so many of her beloved sons. “I wish to be buried with the poor,” she told me, “because in my heart I’m one of them. And I know that the poor people in Tijuana or wherever they are, if I’m there, they’ll say, ‘Mother’s buried here.’”

What makes someone capable of such self-sacrifice? How does a person come to love more than they are afraid, even of death? Mother Antonia gave me something of an answer to these questions when I asked her where her bravery came from. “I’m not brave,” she said emphatically. “Brave were the gladiators. But the Christians in Rome who died for what they believed in, they were courageous. Maybe that’s the gift I have -- I’m courageous. But you know, Jiminy Cricket spoke the truth! ‘Let your conscience be your guide!’ My conviction comes from my conscience. And my conscience is my relationship with God.”

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Wikipedia on Mother Antonia