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A hard day at the office for Jeremy Irons
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by Leslie Scrivener,
Toronto Star
November 28, 2001
He's a British actor and Academy Award winner; she's a Zen master and Roman Catholic nun - and they share a compelling interest in changing the lives of prisoners.
Sister Elaine MacInnes will receive the Order of Canada next week in recognition of her work teaching meditation in prisons in the United Kingdom and the Philippines.
Jeremy Irons, who is in Toronto making a film, has been visiting with his old friend who is anxious that Canadian prisons introduce the simple meditation that can bring calm, inner change and spiritual awareness. At 77, MacInnes is one of the world's highest ranking teachers of Zen. While acknowledging the award is well deserved, Irons says an even better way for Canada to show its appreciation for this remarkable, strong woman would be to open the doors to her work in Canada. "She's the real thing. Canada, having her here, has the most wonderful opportunity to make full use of her."
The actor and the nun have been friends since Irons became a patron of the Prison Phoenix Trust, the British charitable organization that teaches yoga and meditation in 86 prisons and where MacInnes was the director until her retirement in 1999. The nun and the actor met again this week in a small, fire-lit room at the Windsor Arms Hotel over strong tea as Irons smoked thin, black cigarettes. He's in the last week of filming
Against the Current, the story of American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald's last years.
Lean and languorous, he listened intently as she spoke; and she listened carefully as he spoke with the voice made famous in
Brideshead Revisited and
Lolita, and in the role of Claus von Bulow in
Reversal of Fortune, for which he won the Academy Award for best actor. Irons said he prefers local charities so he is involved with the Prison Phoenix Trust based in Oxford, which is close to his home in Oxfordshire.
Through meditation, people in deep pain can face up to the wrongs they've committed, and learn to live with themselves and later, in society, he says. "If you can teach them to turn their cells, which may be places of torment, into ashrams, which are places of contemplation and healing, it's an economic way to help people rebuild themselves instead of marking time and wasting away," Irons says. More practically, he believes meditation would reduce recidivism among prisoners once they are released.
Because she had lived away from Canada for many years, MacInnes says she doesn't know anyone prominent in the prison system here to explain what a prison trust does and how helpful it can be for some of the country's most troubled men and women. Recently, she gave four classes in Nova Scotia prisons, which confirmed her belief that the human heart is universal, and that just as the Prison Phoenix Trust was effective in Britain, a similar program would work in Canada.
Jane Robertson, a Nova Scotia woman who has volunteered in prisons for 25 years, watched MacInnes teaching meditation to men in a medium security prison and women in a maximum-security prison. "When the women came into the chapel - they are used to a very confined space - in this larger space, they were really restless and shuffling and one was walking around. Sister Elaine was very firm with them and in the second five-minute meditation, you could hear nothing. They sat through it. The women were amazed at what they had experienced. "If someone was guiding them this way each week, think how much they would develop."
MacInnes, born in Moncton, was a goalie on her brother's hockey team, trained at the Julliard School and played violin with the Calgary and Edmonton symphony orchestras, then joined Our Lady's Missionaries, a Canadian order. Shortly after taking her final orders, she was sent to Japan, where she immersed herself in the study of Zen, a practice that does not conflict with her Christian beliefs. In 1980, after 20 years of study, she was the first Canadian to be invested as a
roshi, or old teacher. Her autobiography,
Zen Contemplation: A Bridge of Living Water, was published by Novalis this month.
Having taught meditation to some of Britain's toughest, most dangerous prisoners, she has taught them to be aware of their breathing and has found them peaceful and willing to alter their self-destructive ways. MacInnes remembers being in
Wormwood Scrubs, a London prison, with 24 lifers. "They meditated in silence for 17 minutes and when I rang the bell no one wanted to move. Having been in silence, they had nothing to share."
She believes as her teacher,
Yamada Koun, Roshi, told her, everyone is born to be a mystic.
She told the hardened men at Wormwood Scrubs this. "Not one snickered. That's probably the basis of why I go into prisons. It has to be therapeutic. For me, I have to lead people to their deepest centre."
“Spirituality is what you do with those fires that burn within you.”
Irons joined MacInnes for one of her Zen classes in County Clare, Ireland. "You have to be a very advanced pupil to understand the depths of your teacher and I am a beginner."
He says society should care about prisoners for the same reason it should care about the poor or those who have failed. "We all fail constantly. The Bible tells us forgiveness is all and though I'm not particularly Christian, I know that if you don't forgive it eats you up. If it's not important that we care about prisoners, why not kill them? We don't do that because they are people and they live in prison and since they are living at taxpayers' expense, we want them to be better. We can't let people rot away without help."
Say again, Jeremy............we have to help people rot away?!? Zen masters are enjoying a good belly-laugh over that Freudian slip.
