“They feel forgotten”
Sarah Wu writes on spiritual care of ICE detainees in the Boston Globe:
Broekhuysen said the visits are similar to other difficult pastoral visits in which “you want so badly sometimes to be able to offer some kind of fix, some kind of way of making a situation better, and you can’t.’’
Clergy said the visits are in keeping with their calling to welcome strangers and love neighbors as they love themselves.
“Part of the ministry has just grown out of necessity — that we have more and more detainees and the detainees are more and more isolated,’’ Whitcomb Slemmer said.
“There are times when people are concerned that nobody knows where they are, that they feel forgotten,’’ she said. “They worry that they are in prison, anonymous, and nobody is aware of what their circumstances are.’’
Whitcomb Slemmer said there are “moments of grace,’’ such as when she and a Muslim detainee compared passages of the Bible and the Quran.
While she was the interim rector at All Saints Parish in Brookline, Whitcomb Slemmer preached about the people she visited in jail to help her parishioners “better understand what immigration looks like through the lens of individual people.’’