---

When Barbara Holton, 76, says her newest ministry has been the most rewarding experience of her life as a volunteer, it means something.

The former head of a free community health clinic spent five decades helping her neighbors. She logged unpaid clinic hours, baked cookies with children with disabilities and did fundraising with a service club.

But all of that pales in comparison to spreading the Word of God to incarcerated women at the Saratoga County Jail.

"They have literally blown me away with the lives they have had," Mrs. Holton said of the 22 to 39 women serving sentences of up to a year in the Ballston Spa facility. "My role mainly is to listen; we can't offer advice [or] be judgmental."

Mrs. Holton has been attending St. Therese Chapel in Gansevoort, a mission of St. Clement's parish in Saratoga Springs, since she retired and relocated to Wilton in 2006. She discovered the opportunity to do jail ministry in her parish bulletin.

"This is really my first sojourn into anything related to the Church," she said. "It just seemed right for me. Since I've gone to this little chapel, I feel the need to do whatever I can do."

Once a week, Mrs. Holton and three or four other volunteers invite women at the jail to pray, talk, read the Bible and receive communion. The incarcerated women ask a lot of questions, from how Jesus died on the cross to how the people of Jerusalem felt about His death.

"We can only give them what we know. We don't offer them an opinion on anything," Mrs. Holton said. "It's very enlightening for me, having been born and brought up as a Catholic. They have not been privy to the education that I've been fortunate to have."

Mrs. Holton has been helping with the "Angel Tree" project: Volunteers take holiday gift requests for residents' children and St. Therese parishioners provide the wrapped items. The mothers dictate messages to be attached to the presents, and the volunteers make deliveries.

Mrs. Holton brings the women books and donated a sewing machine that residents are using to repair clothing. She gives out rosaries from St. Clement's and the Catholic Charities jail ministry.

The senior recently asked a neighbor in her apartment complex to start crocheting for the cause, declaring: "If Barbara volunteers, everybody volunteers. If a person is not asked to help, they never become involved."

Learning about the incarcerated women's life circumstances has touched Mrs. Holton.

"They didn't have enough guidance," she said. "Some of them didn't have parents, or they only had one parent and that parent was never home. Or they got in with the wrong crowd. I think most of them have not had religion in their lives.

"I've been so fortunate with my children and my grandchildren," she continued, "and now I've seen the other side of life."

Mrs. Holton encourages "contact with the outside world." She has presented several ideas to the jail's administration that would enrich the women's lives during their incarceration.

"Yes, we're locking them up - but if it's up to a year, it's such a year wasted," she explained.

Mrs. Holton grew up on Long Island, married and did liaison work in hospitals. She also began volunteering to visit girls in a residence for children with Down syndrome.

Each week when she arrived, "their faces were plastered to the windows," she remembered. "They knew we were coming and they were so excited. That was so rewarding."

When Mrs. Holton and her family moved to Florida, she worked for hospitals and continued volunteering, which set an example for her two sons. In the mid-1990s, she was asked to run the free clinic where she had spent evenings donating her talents. She checked with her husband and also with God, whom she felt was guiding her to the lower-paying position.

Mrs. Holton's work got the clinic a $1 million grant that enabled it to move from a house to a medical building by the time she retired.

"I had such a good time doing it," she said. "I would put my head on my pillow and say, 'You did God's work today.' I did something that I thought would make a difference in someone's life."

Mrs. Holton's husband died in 1998. Today, she is busy making memory books for her four grandchildren, shopping and socializing with her apartment complex neighbors, many of whom she drives to appointments. She has signed up to be a lector at St. Therese's and orchestrated its collection of food and snowsuits for Long Island residents after Superstorm Sandy last fall.

Mrs. Holton considers her jail ministry "the crowning touch" to all of her volunteer work: "I have to give back. I have to use what the Lord gave me."[[In-content Ad]]

---