[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]For the last five years,[.small-caps] a community of Catholic nuns in Waco, Texas, has made monthly visits to the seven incarcerated women on Death Row. The nuns are part of an order called the Sisters of Mary Morning Star. One Friday every month, they load into a blue van and drive forty minutes west on Highway 84, from their convent on Old MacGregor Road to Gatesville. The prison town is home to twelve thousand inmates, living in six different correctional facilities. The nuns have been given special access to the Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit, where, just past the ward where suicidal and psychologically disturbed prisoners are kept, live the seven women of Texas awaiting execution.[.article__paragraph--cap]

The nuns arrive in their gray habits and white veils. The guards usher them inside a white-walled common room where they meet the condemned women. Usually all seven of them are waiting, seated in plastic chairs, dressed in crisp white uniforms. The nuns join the circle. Together, the women pray, study the Bible or the catechism, and sing hymns. After two hours, they all go back to their cells – the nuns to the monastery, the inmates to Death Row.

There are striking similarities between the two groups. Both live in close quarters with other women, neighbors not of their own choosing, sealed off from the rest of the world. They wear uniforms and sleep in cells. They keep strict daily routines and fill their days with manual work. They live under obedience. And both, in different ways, spend their lives waiting to die. The major difference is that the prisoners are forced to live this way. The nuns have freely chosen it. What could convince someone to make such a choice?

Whatever the secret is, the nuns seem to have shared it with the prisoners. All seven women were condemned for gruesome murders. Most grew up sexually abused and addicted to drugs. Many suffered violations of due process. Now they each live in a cell roughly the size of a parking spot – some for as long as three decades. Fights used to be common.

But since entering Gatesville, five of the incarcerated women have converted to the Catholic Church. Since 2021, six of them have become oblates of the Sisters of Mary Morning Star, lay members of the order. The women call each other “the sisters in white and the sisters in gray.” They have rechristened the Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit “Light Row.”

“Humanly, this cannot be explained,” said Sister Lydia Maria, the nun and Mexican native who was prioress of the Waco convent when the community first began visiting Gatesville, “but the love and light of Christ is perceived in a very strong way in this corner of the prison in this small town in Central Texas.”

One of the oblates, and close friend of Sister Lydia Maria, is Brittany Marlowe Holberg. A former sex worker condemned for capital murder in Amarillo twenty-eight years ago, Brittany has just published a book of spiritual meditations. She calls it Flowers in the Garden of Mercy: Meditations from Death Row. It reads like Augustine’s Confessions.

“I find certainty in the undeniable change you brought about in me and in my friends,” Brittany writes in one meditation, directly addressing God. “We met something exceptional – we met You.”[.footnote-link]1[.footnote-link]

But what does it mean to meet God in a six-by-fourteen-foot cell? Is that enough to turn a prison into a monastery? What secret do the sisters of Light Row share about the true nature of freedom?

I first came across the story of Light Row in February 2025, when I read the long essay about it in The New Yorker by Lawrence Wright, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist from Austin. At the time, I was a visiting researcher at the University of Notre Dame, holing up in my windowless, cinderblock carrel in the Theology Library, trying to finish a 350-page doctoral dissertation before April. Reading the story, I was surprised by two things. First, that The New Yorker would publish an essay about nuns. Second, that nuns lived in Waco. Waco, Texas? Between the ages of seven and ten, I lived thirty minutes south on I-35. We’d occasionally drive up to Waco to go to the zoo. It was the town full of rhinos and Whataburgers and Baptists, not Catholic nuns. I didn’t even realize it was so close to the Gatesville prisons.

Back in snowy South Bend, I skimmed the New Yorker story and promptly forgot about it. I had a dissertation to finish in my library carrel, then a documentary to shoot in Japan, then a dissertation to defend in Oxford. At the end of June, when all that was done, I was tired. I needed a reset. A friend recommended I visit a community of contemplative nuns in Lynton, a charming English town tucked into the North Devon coast an hour west of Bristol. I went.

The journey was not straightforward. Starting from Oxford, I had to change trains three times. I was self-consciously overpacked, hauling a bulging suitcase, an overstuffed backpack, a lumpy tote-bag, a ukulele, and a used copy of Saint Augustine’s City of God that weighed as much as a brick. I waddled around under all that weight like a lumpy icon of the last three years of graduate school. Here I was again, the self-overburdened overachiever, trying to do everything – take everything with me, leave nothing behind. It did not go according to plan.

After a minute delay between Reading and Exeter St Davids I barely made my last train. Then I buried my nose so deep in Augustine, I almost missed my last stop. As the announcement faded over the intercom, I threw everything together and literally tripped off the train. My foot got stuck in the doors. After attracting the attention of the whole carriage, I managed to pry myself loose. The doors slammed, and the train rattled down the tracks. Then I discovered I had left The City of God onboard – and had gotten off one stop too early. I hitchhiked to Barnstaple and arrived five minutes after the last bus left for Lynton. After wandering around Tescos and vape shops for twenty minutes, I bribed a surly taxi driver to please take me the rest of the way to the convent. An hour later, and sixty Great British pounds lighter, I knocked on the door.

A sister in a gray habit and white veil answered. Something in her smile made all the stress from the journey evaporate. She took two of my bags and ushered me inside. “Come in, come in,” she said, in a bright voice touched by a French accent. “Welcome to the home of the Sisters of Mary Morning Star.”

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]I spent all of July[.small-caps] with the sisters. It was the most peaceful month of my life. The convent is nestled on a gently sloping hill overlooking Lynton, the quaint coastal village built on a cliff above the mouth of the River Lyn, which runs through lush green woods at the edge of the Bristol Channel. Tucked between sloping green moors and the sea, Lynton is the crown jewel of North Devonshire. It perches at the head of the dramatic Valley of Rocks, a sweeping valley carved by erosion, hemmed by great stacks of stone towers leftover from the Ice Age. It looks like a postcard from Middle Earth. The region was affectionately called “Little Switzerland” in the nineteenth century, in the heyday of the Romantic movement, when Victorians from across Britain flocked to the cliff-crowned coast to scribble poetry in between their sea baths and long country strolls.[.article__paragraph--cap]

The sisters had moved into the convent six years before, taking over the cream stone building from a community of Poor Clares. I lived in the guest house. For those long summer days, I shared the sisters’ contemplative life. I’d wake up before sunrise and join them for an hour of silent prayer in the chapel. Then I’d return to my room to write or read until mid-morning mass. I’d spend the early afternoons in study, reading Scripture or Saint Thomas Aquinas with the sisters, and take up manual chores in the later afternoons. I cleaned bathrooms, folded sheets, painted buckets, made rosaries, swept the chicken coop – whatever the sisters needed.

I hadn’t worked with my hands like that for years. My great-grandparents on my dad’s side were farmers, Swedes who moved to the middle of nowhere Kansas on a homestead. They were not the type to write doctoral dissertations. Weeding the garden, mowing the grass, oiling the wooden pews in the chapel – these small, simple things brought me in touch with them again. I was going back to the root of things, remembering I was not a blinking cursor on a Word document but an embodied soul with calluses worn around her palms from the garden shears.

Every afternoon, as I pulled weeds or made rosaries alongside a sister, I wanted to ask the obvious question: “So how did you end up here?” But no sister asked me that question, so it felt rude to pry. They simply accepted who I was. I was there. That’s what mattered.

Sometimes the backstory came out in glimpses – when Sister Ann Raphael mentioned that she was also from Kansas, for instance, as she showed me how to use the weed-whacker. Or when Sister Josephine Marie from New Zealand told me one evening, after I got back from a jog, that she had once run a marathon. She said it grinning cheekily, like a confession. (“I think people who have Jesus don’t need to run a marathon,” she said, thoughtfully, a second later.) I later found out that the nuns themselves knew little about each other’s lives before they entered the convent. It didn’t matter. When they gave up their homes, families, and bank accounts, they had also, to some degree, given up their past.

Perhaps as a result, they moved with a certain lightness. They had crowfeet etched around their eyes from smiling. They worked diligently for the time allotted to any task, but promptly left it, even unfinished, as soon as the bell called them to prayer. They were just as quick to stop their work and boil water for tea if someone knocked on the convent door. The whole place had an aura of peace.

For the day-to-day rhythms of contemplative life, the sisters found a close companion in Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897). Nicknamed “the Little Flower,” Saint Thérèse was a Carmelite nun in Normandy, the youngest of five sisters who also became nuns. She entered the convent at age fifteen and died of tuberculosis nine years later, at twenty-four. She moved in an orbit as small as that of the Sisters of Mary Morning Star, spending her brief years between her cell and the chapel. Before she died, the prioress – her older sister – instructed her to write down her spiritual autobiography, her dialogue with God. Saint Thérèse has since been named patron saint of missionaries and a Doctor of the Catholic Church, a status she shares with Augustine and Aquinas.

“You know well enough,” Thérèse writes in one famous passage, “that Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, but at the love with which we do them.” This, in a nutshell, is her “little way to holiness.” Over and over, Thérèse speaks of loving God in the small ways her small life afforded her: smiling at a sister who annoyed her, choosing not to be annoyed when someone interrupted her work, thanking God for the drops of dirty laundry water that hit her face during chores. The sisters in Lynton look to her as a model for how to live in community. They speak to each other with the simplicity and directness of children.

“To remain little is to recognize one’s nothingness,” Thérèse writes, “to expect everything from God, as a little child expects everything from his father.” Elsewhere, Thérèse compares herself to a little bird, who dares not soar on her own, but throws herself upon Jesus, “flying toward the Sun of Love with the Divine Eagle’s own wings!" Reading Thérèse, one forgets that she spent her brief life in a cell. She interceded fervently for priests and missionaries. She speaks with the vision of someone who spent her life praying for the earth from a chapel in the clouds. Or better yet, she speaks as a child, running into the arms of her father, who lifts her up, weightless, to show her the world from a great height.

Living with the sisters, I got the sense that they see the world from the same altitude. They hosted a garden party the first Sunday I was in Lynton to celebrate one of the little girls of a family who attended the parish. The sisters had given her catechesis, and she had just taken first communion. I helped set the table, hang the streamers, blow up the pink balloons. It was a beautiful scene. The sisters ate cake with the family. They showered the little girl with gifts, a handmade rosary and a hand-painted pink candle, like a flock of doting aunts. We all sang hymns. Sister Mary Magadalen – the prioress of the community, a sinewy, fiercely articulate woman in her early fifties – played the guitar, strung with rainbow shoulder strap. The sister from New Zealand ran around with the little girl’s older brother, playing chase.

Afterward, Sister Mary Magdalen told me that she and the sisters had been praying that God would send them a family for over a year before the little girl, her parents, and siblings moved to Lynton. She smiled. God had answered their prayer, abundantly. The comment said much. Sister Mary Magdalen seemed to have a bird’s eye view of providence. If I had to wait a year between asking God for something and receiving the answer, I doubt I’d be able to recognize the event, when it did come, as an answered prayer. It would just be something that happened. But I suppose if prayer is your daily work, and you make the petition over and over, and you’ve taken deliberate steps to flee worldly distractions, you see God’s action from a greater height. A year is scaled differently sub species aeternitatis, just like a mile can look like half an inch from the right altitude. The sisters dwelt high enough to see the slow, patient movements God takes to answer prayers. Looking from that high above, one has an easier time believing Saint Thérèse when she calls prayer the fulcrum that moves the world.[.footnote-link]2[.footnote-link]

That garden party was as much a part of the nuns’ monastic life as their prayer. The Sisters of Mary Morning Star are non-cloistered contemplatives, which means they’re permitted to leave the convent. They go for long walks around the Valley of Rocks, praying their rosaries, drawing smiles from passersby. Sister Mary Magdalen fasted every Friday and went jogging in the Valley of Rocks every Saturday morning, all in her habit. She ran the same loop: along the coastal path, chiseled between the hillside and the sea, up to a craggy tor called the “White Lady.” Sister Mary Magadalen smiled, telling me about the route. “I meet my Lord there,” she said.

The sisters also regularly welcome guests to their home. Parishioners join for mass and afternoon study in the parlor. All kinds of people come through the open doors: a therapist recently escaped from London; a young soldier on leave; a retired married couple, both former Anglican priests and recent converts to Catholicism; two older ladies, one single and one a widow, both oblates of the order, who often stopped in the guesthouse for tea. They’re a little family. The source of their common life is prayer. At vespers, we’d often pray for everyone who was sick or in prison. We’d also pray, especially, for all the rich people in the world.

But for all their sociality, the sisters are nourished at the root by something deep, hidden, and private – a secret. It waits in the tabernacle, the little hand-carved wooden box, set inside the white chapel wall, where the Eucharist is kept. It’s the still, small center of the sisters’ life. For Catholics, the consecrated host conceals the Real Presence of Christ. The sisters spend hours in silent adoration before the Eucharist every day. Every Saturday – the “desert day,” as they call it – each nun keeps watch over the Blessed Sacrament for an hour alone. They usually sit on the floor, absorbed, sometimes bowing so deeply, they touch their foreheads to the ground. The posture reminds me of so many women in the Bible, who came to wait on Jesus: Mary listening to Christ’s words while Martha bustled about the kitchen, Mary Magadalen breaking the perfume and wiping Christ’s feet with her hair, the same Mary waiting at the foot of the cross, beside the Mother of God, watching her Lord die in agony.

I once asked Sister Agnes Imelda what she prays about for all those hours. “Pray about?” she asked me. “I just look at him.” Her eyes shone. I had the sense that I was hovering above deep waters.

The sisters carry this sacred silence back into their cells. They guard it like a treasure. No sister enters the room of another. Sister Agnes Imelda told me the reason for this ten minutes after I first arrived at the convent, when she showed me to my room: “Your cell,” she said, “is where you meet Jesus.”

There is no plumbing this mystery. It is a secret between spouses. But some light broke through the clouds during long conversations with Sister Mary Magdalen.

On one afternoon walk along the coastal path, she and I stopped for lunch at the edge of a rock jutting into the sea. She told me the story of how she became a nun. After she finished medical school, she said, she took a year out to work in youth ministry. She prayed a lot. And at the end of it, she saw her vocation.

“God showed me that I could help many people physically by becoming a doctor, but I could save so many more by becoming a nun and praying for them,” she said, smiling. “I felt like the luckiest person in the world.” It all began, she said, by accepting that God radically loved her, no matter what she did. That’s why she had chosen the name “Mary Magdalen.”

“Just think of her,” she went on. “A woman out of whom Jesus cast seven demons, who sought him out, washed his feet with her most precious perfume, wiped them with her hair, and followed him to the cross. She loved him so much,” Sister Mary Magdalen finished, shifting her eyes to the sea. “He saw her for who she was, not for anything she’d done. And she wanted nothing more than to be with him.” We fell into silence. The surf pounded the cliffside below.

Another time, in the garden above the Lynton rooftops, we spoke about Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. I rambled on and on about how I had too many ambitions, too many great things I wanted to do for God, or something like that, and felt keenly aware that I would die before I got the chance to do them all. Sister Mary Magdalen smiled kindly and waited for me to finish.

“Ours,” she said after the silence hung in the air for a while, “is a martyrdom of desire. Saint Thérèse said that her desire for Christ was infinite. Not every desire on this side of heaven is going to be satisfied. Only God can do that. And as soon as we accept that, and stop trying to fulfill all our desires, we can get on with loving God.” That, she said, was the way of self-abandonment – of the little child in the arms of her father. So at the end of every day, she said, she surrendered herself to Jesus. It was his job to make her holy. “We’re his problem, now!” she finished, smiling. It was striking to think that both Mary Magdalen and Saint Thérèse, the former demon-possessed woman and the Carmelite nun, ended up at the same place – empty, self-abandoned, at the cross, clinging to the feet of Jesus.

I didn’t master this truth. I had barely wrapped my arms around it by the end of four weeks. But I did begin to feel born up, and drawn down, into a higher and deeper way of living. I kept my phone in the drawer. I wore the same overalls every day. I sank into the books I was reading in my cell, the Psalms we were chanting in the chapel. I’d often go sit in the garden and watch the fog sweep in from the sea. I ran long miles along the Coastal Path, the chalk-white trail etched into the rolling green slopes of the moor on one side, falling steeply away into the Bristol Channel on the other. The coastline unfolded behind me like a rippling emerald ribbon, bending into a new fold with every half-mile. Sometimes the fog would pour into the Valley of Rocks, so that, racing along the narrow path chiseled along the top of the moor, I felt like I was running atop the clouds.

Did I meet God there? I couldn’t say for sure. But I did meet the sisters. I went cold-swimming with the oblates whenever they spontaneously asked if I’d like to join, sometimes early morning, sometimes on a random Tuesday evening. After the icy water turned our arms and legs numb, the three of us would just float together, treading water, heads above the waves. One time we held hands and prayed a Hail Mary. All the things I had spent the last few years carrying – dissertation, credentials, job search, the answer to the endless repetitions of “So what do you work on?” – sank away. I was simply a friend of the sisters.

One night, I tagged along with the nuns as we carried their hymnals out of the chapel, drove to that same cove, and sang vespers on the beach. Our voices floated into the sky, catching the summer sun as it dipped into the sea, tinting the waters into purple wine. The sisters had donned wetsuits under their habits, and after we finished our prayers, we all waded into the sea. They treaded their arms and legs to keep their heads above the icy water, so only their white veils were visible. They bobbed, up and down with the patient waves, like so many white gulls, bones lighter than air. It was a living icon of the life of grace.

The days floated away, born along by the sea tides. Soon it was my last week in Lynton. I began to feel the weight of my imminent return to life outside the convent: going back to my home state after three years abroad; starting a professorship at the University of Texas, Austin; finding a place to live, buying car insurance. I wasn’t ready to go home. But soon enough, home came knocking at my door.

I opened it. Sister Mary Magdalen stood outside, a polite two steps away from the doorway. “Hello Lauren,” she said cheerfully, “I just got off the phone with Sister Lydia Maria, our sister from Waco.”

“Waco!” I said, “There are sisters in Texas?” A distant bell rang in my ears.

“Yes ... ” Sister Mary Magdalen said, “They were just featured in the New Yorker earlier this year.” The bell rang louder. “They’ve started an amazing ministry,” she went on. “They’re visiting the women on Death Row.”

The recognition flashed, and the bell rang, loud and clear. Three days later, I boarded the flight back home to Texas.

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]Waco does not look[.small-caps] like Little Switzerland. It’s hard to imagine a starker contrast with Lynton than an all-American university town crisscrossed by highways, faded Chick-fil-A billboards, and strip malls. But there, on the Old MacGregor road, sits another convent of the Sisters of Mary Morning Star. It’s a single-story ranch house, tucked behind a drainage ditch and artificial brick fence, cast in the late afternoons beneath the shadow of the multifamily apartment complex next door. Driving the hour north from Austin, I was struck by the spiritual poverty of the place. Consecrating your life to God on the green cliffs above the Bristol Channel is one thing. Spending every day praying in the suburban lot across from Motel Super 8 is another.[.article__paragraph--cap]

It was the end of November, the last weekend before Advent. I had driven up to join the Waco sisters for a silent retreat. The trip was significantly easier than the trek from Oxford to Lynton – a straight shot up the highway. I cut off the engine of my Toyota in the driveway and peered through the chain-link fence into the backyard. A huge pile of dirt loomed over the roof. The convent was under construction, Sister Lydia Maria later told me. In a few months, a chapel would stand where the dirt mound was, a guesthouse over the giant pit filled with rainwater, if the funding came through. I took her word for it.

The landscape still felt strangely foreign, coming back from my years abroad, but the rhythm of life was familiar. Silent prayer before the tabernacle, study, rosary-making, more prayer. The sisters had converted the side porch of the house into a chapel, leaving the hard, cool white tile in the floor. It was the same kind of flooring my family had in the kitchen when we lived a half-hour down the road in Temple. Many sisters grimaced as they knelt down in adoration, their knees clacking against the hard tile. On Sunday, we read the Bible together and chatted about Aquinas on the front porch as the suburban traffic rumbled by. I learned that one of the sisters prays for Elon Musk every day. An hour or so before I left, I spoke with Sister Lydia Maria about Light Row. Her green eyes flashed as she smiled, took a breath, and summarized the story in four words that came to mind after she first visited Gatesville: “Something from heaven happened.”

The idea originally came from Deacon Ronnie Lastovica, a retired Army helicopter pilot and cattleman who has ministered to the women on Death Row since 2014. Sister Lydia Maria called him a good shepherd. Inspiration struck when Brittany Holberg and another inmate asked Deacon Ronnie if they could receive the Eucharist in their cells. Deacon Ronnie thought the nuns might be able to relate to the women in ways he couldn’t. He knocked on the convent door.

The sisters were surprised, then hesitant, at his suggestion. They shared their contemplative life with people outside the convent, yes. But what of people who couldn’t seek them out? Could the sisters bring the convent to them?

The superior of the order – Sister Mary Thomas, a graduate of Notre Dame – granted permission for one visit. The sisters drove to Gatesville and walked into the Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit. The incarcerated women were waiting for them.

“The simplicity of our contemplative life broke down any barriers,” Sister Lydia Maria said. “We quickly felt very close to them.” So began the life on Light Row.

It follows the same rhythms as the life the sisters share in Lynton. Everything revolves around prayer and the Eucharist. A local priest celebrates mass once a week. (The Bishop of the Diocese of Austin celebrated a special mass in the prison three years ago.) Deacon Ronnie sets up adoration in the common room, the same place the women gather once a week to ask forgiveness for the ways they’ve offended each other. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux is a spiritual companion in their daily manual work – knitting, crocheting, cooking. They keep a garden in the prison yard.

“Thérèse’s ‘little way to holiness’ helps us to live as children of God in trust and abandonment, receiving the mercy and love of the Father,” Sister Lydia Maria said, “to live our common life with charity.” She smiled. “Her teachings are very concrete for their lives.”

Sister Lydia Maria describes much of her time on Light Row as simply accompanying the women through suffering. She is present to them, even silently, in the way the sisters in the convent are simply present before the tabernacle, the tabernacle present to them.

On the sisters’ third visit to Gatesville, in April 2022, one of the inmates, Melissa Lucio, mother of twelve from the Rio Grande Valley, was days away from execution. Sister Lydia Maria and the other sisters walked into the common room and found Melissa in the corner, standing in a cage. The nuns sat around her, prayed, sang, and clasped fingers through the bars. It was enough to bring them all to laughs and tears. Days later, Melissa’s execution was stayed. Her case is currently with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

Six months after that, in October 2022, Sister Lydia Maria met the newest inmate in the unit the day she arrived in prison, a then twenty-nine-year-old woman named Taylor. “There was a very serious, heavy atmosphere of pain,” Sister Lydia Maria remembered. She met Taylor, prayed with her through the bars of her cell, and assured her that she wasn’t alone. They sang together, a hymn called “Gentle Lamb,” composed by one of the Sisters of Mary Morning Star:

Gentle Lamb, let me draw near to rest on your heart,
listen to your word and receive your secrets.
There, I lay down my life, and I receive your life.

Taylor began to cry. She had asked God for a sign, she later explained. Sister Lydia Maria was her answer.

“It was heartbreaking!” Sister Lydia Maria remembered. During that visit, she broke down in tears before she reached the end of the hallway. “Christ gave us his own gaze,” she went on. “We did not judge, we only came on God’s behalf to accompany Taylor in her suffering.”

The women also accompany Sister Lydia Maria. She carries them with her, their friendship as something precious. A few years after she began the visits to Gatesville, she was sent by superiors to Uruguay to set up a foundation. Sister Lydia Maria was separated from her friends on Light Row for a year and a half. Finally, after the work was finished in Uruguay, the superiors asked if she wanted to return to Texas, but this time, without resuming her role as prioress. Many, perhaps, would have shrunk away from the sting to the ego. Sister Lydia Maria said yes. She missed her friends.

“We have learned that every life is worth living because there is always an opportunity to change, transform, and do good,” she said. “We cannot define people by what they have done, nor judge them by appearances because we do not know what others have been through.” She smiled. “The sisters in gray bear witness to the sisters in white, and the sisters in white bear witness to their great faith to the sisters in gray.”

Sister Lydia Maria is particularly close to Brittany Holberg. After twenty-eight years, Brittany has been in prison for as long as I’ve been alive. In the trial, back in 1998, her legal counsel tried to get her a life-sentence instead of the death penalty by making the case that she was “irrevocably broken.”[.footnote-link]3[.footnote-link]

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]Then, over a decade[.small-caps] into her time in prison, Brittany developed friendships with Deacon Ronnie and Karen Clifton, another woman in Catholic prison ministries. Brittany began sharing spiritual meditations from her prison cell. It started as short talks on a prison radio station called The Tank, shared with other female prisoners in Texas. Then her influence grew. Now, she writes regularly on a messaging system that anyone can access by downloading an app. She types from a state-issued tablet. With help from friends, she’s collected these meditations into her book, Flowers in the Garden of Mercy. It weaves reflections from her daily life in prison with visions from her prayer. Brittany’s candor lays bare whatever I was grasping toward in Lynton – what it means to abandon oneself to God.[.article__paragraph--cap]

“As I write this the air around me is filled with shrieks and screams,” she wrote in a meditation from the beginning of March. “Someone is screaming out to kill yourself while another is shouting profanities... . Oftentimes my room is flooded with water that is filled with urine and feces. This has been my life for twenty-eight years and I do not share these details with you for pity but to give you a very clear and profound picture of where God meets me each and every morning.” Brittany calls this place her prayer corner,[.footnote-link]4[.footnote-link] “the small space at the back of the cell” where, in her words, “I sit in silence” each morning “and wait to hear His voice speak into my heart of hearts.”[.footnote-link]5[.footnote-link]

She describes the visions she has in prayer. If her world without is all concrete and steel – a closet with a bed and desk welded to the floor – her world within is lush, green, organic, capacious, full of forests, sky, and sea.[.footnote-link]6[.footnote-link] In one vision, Brittany runs through the woods and scales a cliffside where Christ waits for her at the top. In another, she sinks beneath ocean waves, clinging to a boulder, until she dares to let go. Christ, again, is waiting for her at the surface.

Brittany borrows analogies for God’s mercy from her work in the prison garden: plunging her hands in the dirt, gathering rotting leaves, pulling weeds, breaking the hard, cracked ground, so it can bear fruit again. She has learned to see herself through Christ’s eyes of mercy. Like the nuns, she never refers to her past in any detail. To her, the crime that defines her in the eyes of the world is simply “the event.”[.footnote-link]7[.footnote-link]

“The horror of what happened was too great for me to survive,” she writes. “It was as if a boulder had been cast into the ocean, and I sunk to the bottom along with it.” She was drowning in shame and despair. And in this vision, God reveals that, in Brittany’s words, “the horrific event that had happened was never my identity.”

Brittany goes on. She was so busy looking at the event that she could not see what God was trying to show her. “I clung,” she writes, “to all of the rocks of that event and others that had occurred, as well, and together they became the boulder that held me under.” A still, small voice tells her to let go. “But let go of what?” she asks, “And how? ... Wouldn’t letting go of my shame and guilt mean I no longer cared? These were my rocks to carry. I owed it to those whom I had caused so much pain and those who had done the same to me.”

The still, small voice urges her, above every protest, to “Just let go.” As Brittany writes:

So I began to do this. There were so many stones I wasn’t even sure where to begin, or what it would feel like, but slowly I began to do so. Soon I realized that letting go did not mean I did not care; it meant I was made for more, and He was revealing to me my true identity was not in this event – it was in Him.

It took me years to let go of all the things that led up to that event, all of the things that had held me below and hardened the surface of my heart, but with each rock I released, I felt myself rise a little more to the surface. I felt the old break away and the new sifting through His fingers.

There still remains one rock, and I hold on to it with all that I am. It is the rock of grace.[.footnote-link]8[.footnote-link]

In entry after entry in her book, Brittany asks Jesus, “Who am I?” Each time he replies, simply, “You are mine.” And with those words, said anew every morning, Brittany floats back up to the surface until her head bobs above water, as if she were borne atop the Bristol tide by a white veil.

“Once the women accept God’s love,” Sister Mary Magadalen said, standing outside my door at the Lynton convent, “they are no longer prisoners.”

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]The last time I visited[.small-caps] the sisters in Waco, in late February of this year, the giant dirt pile in the backyard had been leveled. The yawning pit had been filled in, too, and in its place stood the concrete foundation and wooden beams of the guest house, construction well underway. Sister Lydia Maria took me on a tour. We walked through the chapel foundations, passing under the steel skeleton where the bell would hang. The naked beams cast shadows over us, painting light and dark stripes over Sister Lydia Maria’s gray habit.[.article__paragraph--cap]

“I’m a nun,” she told me simply over tea shortly afterward. “I just look outside and know it’s all providential.”

Last March, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit vacated Brittany’s death sentence. One judge called her 1998 trial a “showcase” of prosecutorial misconduct: the prosecutors failed to disclose that the key witness in the trial was a paid informant. The full Court heard oral arguments for her case in January. Mid-August, the judges issued a split decision affirming her death sentence. Brittany’s legal team plans to submit an appeal to the Supreme Court. “I want you to know, really know, that it is well with my soul,” Brittany wrote two days after the decision was released, “I am standing still and waiting on the Lord. If he calls me to move I will but until I am called I will be still and know.”

My office at the University of Texas is ninety-eight square feet, fourteen more than Brittany’s cell. It has no windows. As a poor substitute for natural light, I’ve taped pictures from my travels on the blank white wall across from my desk. At the center of the collage is a shot of the Valley of Rocks. I often think back to my long runs through that landscape, racing the fog as it drifted in from the sea. I think of Sister Mary Magdalen jogging by the coast in her habit, of the oblates driving past the tors, on their way to the cove for an early morning swim.

Then I think of Brittany. I think of her looking outside the prison window. The Patrick L. O’Daniel unit used to be called Mountain View after the hills that stretch some miles beyond Gatesville, just visible from the windows. I think of her turning inward, into visions of earth, garden, sky, and sea. I picture her racing along the coastal path, on her way to meet her Lord on top of the cliff, even as she sits in her prayer corner one hundred miles north on I-35 – prison toilets leaking across the concrete floor, screams from the psychiatric ward echoing in her ears, at peace.

What, really, is the essential thing? Can a person be free until she’s found it? Can she trek all around the world, summit every mountain, earn every degree, and still miss it? Can someone stay locked up behind steel bars in a closet for three decades, told by the world she’s more useful dead than alive, and have a better chance at finding it?

Throughout the New Yorker story, Wright suggests that if the sisters in white and gray had somehow swapped childhoods, they might have swapped vocations. If Sister Lydia Maria had been abused in the ways that Brittany was, perhaps she would be the former sex worker behind bars, Brittany the nun in the convent. Sister Lydia Maria would no doubt accept that possibility. So would the prioress of Lynton, who took “Mary Magdalen” as her religious name.

But Wright’s reading, on its own, risks reducing what’s happening on Light Row to a sociological story. It makes the sisters the sum of the things that have happened to them. They have a different way of understanding it.

“We’re connected because we’re sinners,” Sister Pia Maria of the Waco convent said, as Wright quotes her in the article. “I’m not saying we killed anybody. But we’re not perfect,” she went on. “Maybe because of our studies of metaphysics, we can understand the human person better and receive them with dignity and respect, regardless of what crime they committed.”

Her reference to metaphysics reads almost naively in Wright’s story. What do theories of essence and existence have to do with the hard realities of botched due process and an eighty-billion-dollar prison industry? But the Sisters of Mary Morning Star spend too much time reading Aquinas for the reference to mean nothing. Sister Mary Thomas, the superior of the order, has put it another way. “For the seed of the word of God and of grace to fall into good soil,” she said in one interview, “we have to have a true understanding of who we are already as human persons created by God.”

Created. The word invites you into the way the sisters see the world – the circle of coherence into which Sister Agnes Imelda welcomed me, as she led me into the Lynton priory the first day of July. Saint Augustine paints the scene in the opening paragraph of Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, oh God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Compare this to Brittany’s meditation, when she sees Christ stand in the doorway of her prison cell. “I did not bring you to this place to destroy you but to restore you,” he tells her, “to free you from the prisons you were held captive in deep within your heart.”

Each person is God’s creature, and she will not find peace until she recognizes her lowliness. Until she admits, as the sisters of Lynton and Light Row have done, that she is, as the deepest level, nothing she has done, but only who she is. A child of God, held in existence by his gaze of mercy.

Perhaps it takes a witness as dramatic as Brittany’s to make that point. She who is forgiven much, loves much. She makes real the words of Saint Thérèse, writing from her cell in Lisieux: “I am certain that even if I had on my conscience every imaginable crime, I should lose nothing of my confidence; rather I would hurry, with a heart broken with sorrow, to throw myself into the Arms of my Jesus.”

But can it be just as difficult, perhaps even more difficult, to let go of good things you have done? What if the rocks that weigh you down are prizes, achievements, services rendered, souls touched, mountains climbed, problems solved, difficulties overcome? What if the good you achieve by that letting go is freedom in a sense less obvious than Brittany’s – not an identity free of a crime, but an identity free of accomplishment? That freedom begins to look like poverty. Perhaps there are good reasons the prostitutes and tax collectors are still entering the kingdom of God ahead of the Pharisees.

For so much of the Western philosophical tradition, freedom is about power – the ability to impose my will on the world. To be free is to be left alone, to self-actualize, to wrestle my essence from my existence on my own terms. To will, strive, act, accumulate, choose, unencumbered by limits. These shallow notions of freedom have seeped into our culture. I worked in tech investing before graduate school, and my boss at the time once told me he thought contemplative nuns were selfish. They chose to run away and pray, he said, instead of using their talents to help people. His was a world as metaphysically flat as it was existentially naive. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he later warned me against going on a silent retreat. It was dangerous, he said, to be quiet for too long. A friend of his had gone for a meditation retreat and had to leave before the end, he was driven so crazy by the quiet.

And Brittany is the one supposed to be trapped? Only someone who hasn’t come to terms with his own contingency can be so terrified of silence.

Perhaps that’s why Sister Mary Alix prays for Elon Musk every day. And perhaps it’s another reason why Jesus called “blessed” the meek, the poor, the mournful. The sisters in white and gray live face-to-face with their finitude. Freely chosen or not, they practice their creaturehood – silence, simplicity, worship, manual work, love of neighbor. Their lives are more in tune with reality, closer to the sky, more full of oxygen, than lives spent clinging to rocks, sinking into created things, trying to run away from death and suffering. “Suffering alone,” Saint Thérèse says in one of her most bracing insights, “gives birth to souls.”[.footnote-link]9[.footnote-link] The pain of having everything stripped away has set Brittany free. It has cleared her vision. She sees herself truly: through the eyes of her Creator.

If there is some striving involved in freedom, this, I think, is the most difficult: to suffer and still trust that God is good. To see the cross, and the finitude, as His gift to me, somehow. Creatures, after all, cannot be without limits. Silence comes before and after whatever notes a life sounds. Perhaps the most moving part of Brittany’s testimony is that she has learned to see whatever happens – delayed sentence, upheld sentence, early frost, cellmate squabble, trauma, the event – as an expression of God’s goodness, his way, in the end, of loving her. “It was in the silence I began to hear Him speak to me,” she writes in one meditation, “not in words of anger, but love and mercy.”[.footnote-link]10[.footnote-link]

What makes someone accept suffering in this way? Perhaps the only answer is grace. But on Light Row, and in Lynton, God has chosen to use his friends as the means of grace – the way to make his love believable. Deacon Ronnie, Karen Clifton, Sister Lydia Maria, Brittany, the other sisters in white and gray: Each strives to look at one another with the eyes of Christ, and so make the reality of his life-giving love – reality itself – felt, believed, lived. “Love alone,” as one theologian has said, “is credible.”[.footnote-link]11[.footnote-link]

It’s a mystery, I think, why God would make us so dependent on our fellow creatures. Why would He trust us to bear his image to one another? And yet, somehow, does it not make sense that we would be bound so closely together, so dependent on one another to bring us back to the Father, if the only freedom is ultimately found in the love we live for one another? Is this not another severe mercy?

It’s sobering to realize that this question – what will we make of suffering? – is not optional. Friedrich Nietzsche called it the only real philosophical problem. Venture capitalists and capital offenders alike will both lose everything in the end. What then?

This struck me in a particularly poignant way one evening in the parlor of the Lynton convent. I joined a reading group of sisters and parishioners, and we were making our way through a sermon by Saint John Henry Newman. One oblate, one of the two cold-swimmers, had recently lost her husband of fifty years. She had told me beautiful stories over tea about how they met – the sixth- form dance when she was seventeen and Richard one year older, the way he looked from her bedroom window, walking up to her front door, knocking, shaking her father’s hand. As she read Newman’s words, she broke down in tears:

Life passes, riches fly away, popularity is fickle, the senses decay, the world changes, friends die. One alone is constant; One alone is true to us; One alone can be true; One alone can be all things to us; One alone can supply our needs; One alone can train us up to our full perfection; One alone can give a meaning to our complex and intricate nature; One alone can give us tune and harmony; One alone can form and possess us…

Sister Josephine Marie finished reading the end of the sermon for her:

And we trust, that, in spite of our sins, He will receive us still, every one of us, if we seek His face in love unfeigned, and holy fear. Let us then do our part, as He has done His, and much more. Let us say with the Psalmist, “Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth I desire in comparison of Thee. My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.”[.footnote-link]12[.footnote-link]

The nuns, once again, helped their sister carry her cross. I suspect that all the sisters in white and gray are kept afloat by the prayers traded across Lynton and Light Row, rising up into the same sky like so many clouds, born across the same seas like so many tides of grace.

Newman’s words shed some light on the sisters’ secret. The nuns and oblates love Love himself. They have given themselves, as brides, to the only One who will never change, never leave, never pass away. The cell is their bridal chamber. Why would they want to be anywhere else? “The grating in a Carmelite monastery,” Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said, “is not to keep the sisters in, but to keep the world out.” Here the sisters live their thirst for heaven, waiting for the higher consummation, when their creaturehood will be turned inside-out, into perfect communion with God.

All this is mysterious. Words meet their limit. But perhaps John Paul II came closest when he said that freedom is the means. Love is the end.

One can deny all this, of course. One can keep clinging to travel and money and degrees and good investments and other sinking rocks. But one cannot deny the change that such love has wrought on Light Row. “If my twenty-eight years of enduring was all to help you do the same,” Brittany said in her last meditation from March, “then it is worth every second I have done so ... If the next time you are facing an impossible situation and find strength in remembering what I shared ... that means He gets the glory. On our own we can do nothing but with him ... nothing is impossible.”