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They met in a jail chapel, shared a love for Downton Abbey and wrote letters to one another for years. Now, outside of institutional walls, Christian Science volunteer Chaplain Ginny Stopfel and her student, Vincent 'Vinny' Leo, remain friends.
Vinny first attended Ginny's Bible study class at Middleton House of Correction in 2014. He liked it, he said, because he didn't feel like a religion was being pushed onto him, and because he could talk there.
"It was more an embrace of the Bible as a whole," Vinnie said. "It was a small group, we were able to talk about the lesson of the week, and it was very comfortable spot for me."
Ginny, who has conducted a weekly Bible study session at the Middleton jail for both pre-trial and sentenced men for 18 years, said she used to simply read the Christian Science Bible Lesson to inmates there, but found that didn't quite work for her.
"It was a vocabulary people weren't familiar with," she said. As Ginny set to re-designing her study sessions, she remembered back to her own experience as a child, before she was a Christian Scientist.
"It wasn't until I actually answered a religious question that I had that something began to make sense to me," she said. Her burning question at the time was: what is heaven?
Ginny grew up on a farm in Troy, Maine, and she said, "I used to lie in the daisy field across the street and look up at the sky and think, is there really a God up there, sitting on a throne? Somehow, I always got the answer, I don't think so."
One day, a friend asked her to go to the local Christian Science Sunday School, and that's where Ginny first heard Mary Baker Eddy's definition of heaven from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: "Heaven is not a locality, but a divine state of Mind" (p. 291).
"I literally stopped in my tracks - at last, I know what heaven is," Ginny recalled. "That was such a clarifying moment."
The chaplain tries to facilitate similar moments for the inmates she works with. These days, Ginny - who has attended seminary at Andover Newton Theological School - puts together pamphlets that contain two sections of that week's Christian Science Bible Lesson. She gives it a new title, and she focuses the handout to meet the needs of the men she works with.
"[I] help people to ask questions of the Bible so it isn't just ink on paper," Ginny said. "The whole point of being there is to try and help people find a personal relationship with God."
She succeeded with Vinny, who said he kept going back after that first Bible study session because of Ginny's open approach.
"I could tell she wanted to be there," Vinny said. "That meant a lot to me - that made me want to come back."
Vinny also continued attending, he said, because he found something at Ginny's Bible study that he needed. At Middleton jail, he waited for his sentence for the identity fraud crimes he committed.
"I knew something had to change in my life," he said. "I wasn't sure it was religion, though I did feel something leading me [in] that direction."
And even though he was looking "at some pretty serious stuff," Vinny said he left that first Bible study session with Ginny renewed.
"I had a sense of peace and that was for the first time in a long time I had a feeling that everything was going to be okay," he said. "I knew the Lord wouldn't give me more than I could handle. I just had to pay my dues for what I had done."
Vinny continued pursuing that sense of peace and was always the first one, Ginny said, to show up to her sessions in the Middleton jail chapel. As Vinny was transferred to the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Norfolk in 2015 and later to the Northweast Correctional Facility in Concord in 2017, Ginny kept sending him her Bible study handouts by mail. She also decided to keep a running correspondence with him.
"I'm very careful who I give my address to," she said. But, she noted with a laugh, "when I met somebody who was so concerned that he might not be able to view the final season of Downton Abbey, I thought, really. The fun of writing to Vinny - it wasn't a sense of duty - it was like corresponding with a friend."
"Ginny sent me the TV Guide for WGBH every month," Vinny said.
"I could just see the core," Ginny said. "A good person was there."
Over time, Vinny recognized that core part of himself, too. "My relationship with God changed," he said. "I just knew I had His divine light in my life."
There was a time, for instance, that Vinny wrote Ginny with an odd experience he'd had: he hadn't prayed, but somehow, when his heartburn medicine got delayed for four days, he was okay that entire time.
Whereas in the past, Vinny said, he might have blamed God for bad things in his life, nowadays, he prays in gratitude.
"I try to acknowledge God's gifts," he said. "I start the morning with a prayer and as the day goes, on I try to be thankful."
He added that he's been thankful lately for the things that have fallen into place since his release a couple months ago. Vinny has been able to get his driver's license, find a car, and continue working the job he had in his pre-release program.
"Thank God I was able to get things done quickly," he said.
Ginny confirmed just how quickly everything has happened for Vinny.
"I have a number of experiences with people trying to get their life back on track, and with Vinny, it just moved along at such a clip" she said. She pointed out that he also hasn't had to wear the GPS ankle bracelet that was originally part of his parole conditions.
"The parole officer was like, 'You seem like a nice enough guy, I'm not going to make you put on this bracelet - just don't give me a reason to have you put this on,'" Vinny said.
He added that all of these experiences have helped him change his perspective on who he is as a person.
"I realized that now I'm really a good person, I really have a lot to offer," Vinny said.
Vinny compared to before he went to prison and met Ginny, to when he committed identity fraud.
"I had the notion in my mind that maybe this wasn't going to affect anybody because their credit company would reimburse them," he said. "Now it's like, why would I want to tie up anyone's mind like that, put that darkness in their life. I don't want to bring any negative elements into someone's life."
Instead, Vinny is focusing on the light, the light that Ginny says she hopes all the inmates she works with will eventually see.
"My only reason for doing this is to help people get a relationship with God, to affirm the relationship they already have," she said. "I honestly go in there knowing that these men are the image and likeness of God - the Christ light that is in them, it's already in them, I'm not bringing it in."
"Maybe," Ginny added, "what I can do is help fan it into a flame."
