...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.”
This article is incredible. It made me smile, it made me cry, it has haunted me for days, it is doing something to the way I see the world. It is about Mother Antonia, an amazing heroine very different to the usual Sparkles & Crumbs sort. As Mary Clarke, she raised her seven children and ran a business in Hollywood; after her second divorce, she was forbidden by the Catholic Church to join a religious order, so she founded her own - the Servants of the Eleventh Order - and has lived for the past 25 years in the infamous prison La Mesa in Tijuana.
"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."
"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.'”
"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.' "
Love, love and more love xxx
