I’m almost through drawing all the Corporal works of Mercy with this latest one, visit the imprisoned.
Visit the Imprisoned Coloring Page
(For the best results in printing, open and save to your computer. Print from Adobe acrobat or another pdf viewer. Bubble letters sometimes don’t print well from your internet browser)
This can be a tricky work of mercy. If you personally know someone imprisoned you can and should visit them. However if you have little children, and don’t know someone personally in prison, I can’t recommend just showing up at one hoping to visit someone. There are other ways to work this act of mercy into your Lenten season though, so don’t worry. As Kendra talks about in her post on the Year of Mercy at Catholic All Year, there are other people who can feel imprisoned besides those in jail. I love that she put the mother of young children as someone who feels imprisoned! This is so true, even if you only have one or two little ones, it’s easy to feel isolated or alone. So if you want, help out a mom somewhere! It can be as simple as showing up to take her kids for a walk down the street to give her 20min of alone time.
Also, many parishes, do support a prison ministry somewhere local. Even if you don’t personally visit the imprisoned, I bet you your priest does. And if he visits them, then you could easily put together a care package (think books, magazines, or sudoku/puzzle books) or even just bake some homemade cookies for him to bring next time he visits a prison.
Thanks!
