The John Howard Society: Poetic Justness & Hope by Margot Van Sluytman

COMMUNITY

Unexpected comfort
Permeated raw, cold ache.
Warmth melted sorrow.
Embraced we are.
Once again
Knowing we are loved.
And loving too.
©Margot Van Sluytman

~~~
“Supporting neighbours. Protecting communities. Providing supports. Rebuilding lives.”
Donna De Jong, Executive Director of The John Howard Society, Hamilton-Burlington, Ontario, Canada.
~~~

I think often about why and how community matters. About joy and justice and hope and healing. And indeed, the importance of spaces such as our own here on FAR, this community of poets, writers, artists, activists, advocates, allies, academics. Each whose choice to put pen to page, affords light and life to throb and to thrive.

Awareness that none of us can travel, both trammelled and untrammelled paths of life and living, without a hand and a heart: literal and figurative. A hand and a heart, many hearts and hands that offer willing ears, as well as supportive words. And helpful content that we can employ in our complex and betimes madly challenging lives.

Donna De Jong’s words at the opening of this piece, are words with which I share a deep resonance. Words for which I know profound gratitude. At this age that I now am, age-ing and sage-ing is my relationship to this time, I often harken back to when I was contacted by one of my father‘s murderers about 15 years ago, which was 30 years after he murdered my father. I think with gladness for community safe and supportive spaces where I could be myself. Unafraid to grieve. To show my “weaknesses”. My worry. My longing to survive.

Several months ago, an individual whose loved-one was newly released from prison, reached out to me asking me if I might have ideas about how their loved-one could negotiate-re-negotiate life after incarceration. An important question. One that points to the need for forthcoming answers. That process is linked to the criminal justice system, which is intricately tied to community. The HEARt and the heART of community. The John Howard Society was my first suggestion.

The content will be part of my keynote that I have been invited to give for the provincial conference for the John Howard Society, Ontario in June, will include not only this kindred conversation. I will address how Sawbonna is a siamesed-sibling of life with and within the terrain of justice. Sawbonna is an award-winning model of restorative justice that underscores the fundamental value of how we story, and re-story our lives. Respect. Responsibility. Relationship. Inclusivity. Diversity. Each of these are intricately tied to how and why community supports matter. To what JHS does. To poetic justness.

DEEP BREATH
Broken heart
Asked: Why this pain?
Fresh air & blue sky
Replied: Peer inward.
Breathe. Believe.
©Margot Van Sluytman

Justice. Community. Hope. Each a mosaic shard of sparkling possibility. Each underscore what we say to ourselves. How we come to know ourselves.  What other say to and about us. Our stories that are a call and response, a call to action to know we matter. Poetry, my own and reading the poetry of others who highlight that life is a mystery, continues to remind me that learning and un-learning, that forming and reforming and transforming our life is the grist for the mill of being.

Poetic joy and justice insist that we think about the children who are profoundly affected by crime. Recognizing the importance of support for children whose lives become catastrophized after crime, is vital. Vital. Vital.

I offered the information about The John Howard Society to person who contacted me.  Encouraging them to be cognizant too that no matter how deeply loved, no matter how deeply cared for, criminalized and victimized people often lose our sense of self-worth and our equilibrium. Facing castigation from family, friends, community, and society by varying degrees, is demoralizing. Disorienting. And can be destructive. My own experience has taught me the lesson that those who choose to work with and for victimized and criminalized people, supporting those who work with and for “both sides”, can be deemed pariah for “not being on the right side”. There is only one side: shared-humanity.

Clear boundaries of physical, spiritual, intellectual, and psychological safety are important. They do not destroy shared humanity. They do not eradicate joy and justice. They in fact strengthen each of our abilities to bring hope and healing in the way that works best for us.

When we acknowledge the beauty and the richness that is created because of organizations within communities that support, nurture, guide, and remind victimized and criminalized people that we are more than the crime committed against us or the crime we have committed, we understand the lush possibility of redemption and regeneration: new stories. New narratives. That we are a lineage of being that continually invites us to recognize our oneness as opposed to our separateness.   That our voices matter. That redemption matters.

When I will stand in and with community in June, deeply grateful and immersed in respect for being with individuals who value and infuse life with hope, Sawbonna will be my guide. Will be the simple beacon of invitation that offers us strength and clarity and raw-rich hopefulness.

BEACONS

We travel paths.
Some well-worn.
Some stark-new.
Ever we seek.
Becoming beacons.
Newly ripe with light.


The John Howard Society Canada

Sawbonna: Poetry. Justice. Joy.