Courage

They will reply, “Lord, when did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and not help you?” And he will answer, “I assure you , when you refused to help the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were refusing to help me.” And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous will go into eternal life. Matthew 25:44-46

All sorts of things get in the way of doing what we’re called to do. Sometimes it’s sloth; sometimes we simply get distracted. But often it’s fear that stands in the way. And sometimes the only way to conquer fear is, as the commercial says, to “just do it.”

In the early 1800s English prisons were pits of indecency and brutality. In the the women’s division at Newgate Prison in London, for example, women awaiting trial for stealing apples were crammed into the same cell as women who had been convicted of murder or forgery (which was also a capital crime).

Eating, sleeping, and defecating all took place in the same confined area. Women begged or stole to get clothes, alcohol, and food. Many became despondent in such conditions and sat around in a drunken stupor, stark naked. Some even starved to death.

In short, it was no place for a lady, especially a seemingly delicate woman such as Elizabeth Fry.

Fry, the daughter of an English banker, married at age twenty into another wealthy family. Children came quickly, one on top of another, and eventually numbered eleven in all. Fry spent her days caring for her children and entertaining people of high society. Yet years earlier she had sensed a call to work on behalf of the downtrodden. While still a young bride and mother, she gave medicine and clothes to the homeless and helped establish a school for nurses. And at age thirty-three she found the courage to step inside London’s Newgate Prison and begin visiting female prisoners. Friends and prison officials warned her about the risk of both the disease and the violence to which she was exposing herself, but she waved aside the warnings and kept visiting.

Soon visiting wasn’t enough. She taught female prisoners basic hygiene, as well as sewing and quilting. She read the Bible to inmates and intervened for women on death row.

To nineteenth-century observers, Fry’s efforts produced a miracle: Many of the reportedly wild and shifty inmates became, under her care, orderly, disciplined, and devout. Mayors and sheriffs from the surrounding regions (and later from other European countries) visited Newgate and began initiating reforms in their own jails and prisons.

Today Elizabeth Fry is remembered as a pioneer in prison reform. And yet the only thing that separated her from many others of her day was her willingness to step into a frightening environment to see what she could do.

—Mark Galli