Reading the gospel passage for this coming Sunday, I notice more clearly than ever how transactional it sounds. Do something kind, and a kind response will come back to you. But does any one of us have the power to set ourselves up to receive kindness from another person or group of persons? Might this saying offer a false sense of our being able to control and predict the world around us?
Perhaps we can trust God to be kind to all, without exception, because that is just how God is. I know I do. But can we trust human beings to abide by a system of dealmaking in which our kindness is supposed to guarantee that we will be treated with kindness in return?
In his recent essay, "Sisterhood," Lawrence Wright tells of a group of nuns from Sisters of Mary Morning Star, near Waco, Texas, who said yes to an invitation to visit women living on death row at a nearby prison in Gatesville. The nuns had said a wholehearted yes, after a time of discernment, but on the day of the first visit, they were scared, shaking.
"'We didn't know what to expect,' Sister Lydia Maria recalled of the initial prison visit. The nuns, in their gray habits, found the women dressed all in white. Deacon Ronnie said words of introduction."
It was the prisoners who offered the first gesture of connection: "'Then something supernatural happened,' Brittany recalled. 'It was just instant. There wasn't a moment of discomfort. There wasn't a moment of unease. We opened our arms and they opened their arms, and we embraced one another.'"
"Both groups were surprised that they had so much in common. The condemned women were astonished that the nuns had *chosen* to live a life nearly as confined as their own, in rooms that they, too, called 'cells'."
While writing this story, Lawrence Wright has also been drawn into this welcoming spiritual community. "That first service I attended with the nuns and the condemned women was on a bright morning in May. Afterward, the inmates invited us to visit their garden. Several years ago, they carved it out of a stretch of the recreation yard between the cell block and the razor-wire.... Doves make their nests in the fence; in the springtime, chicks take their first leaps into the air, an event the prisoners look forward to."
"When the warden permitted the women to create the garden, they weren't allowed to use tools, so they fashioned a plot using rocks, plastic peanut-butter jars, and broken tree limbs. For two hours a day, they weeded and pruned and harvested. It was the only time they were allowed outside, a modicum of freedom that became precious to them."
In a letter to Lawrence last year, Brittany said, "For me, this is so much more than a garden. It represents my promised land. In so many profound and beautiful ways, this is what the Lord has shown me.... In it, I see the ways he took my brokenness and nurtured it into something able to bear fruit and bring joy"...
Looking back on his first visit to the garden, Lawrence observes, "The prisoners were exuberant that morning, dancing among the rows as they showed off the bounty to the nuns." The garden has now expanded to fill a half acre that brings forth tomatoes, carrots, mustard greens, beans, collards, cantaloupes, herbs, and flowers.
How is it that these condemned women, and these contemplative nuns, now in spiritual community with Deacon Ronnie and Lawrence Wright, have slipped the bonds of society's condemnation? They are not trapped in society's systems anymore. They are dancing in the light of God's kindness, where they befriend one another, learn together, dream together, and grow in love together, just as Jesus knew it could be. Like all of us, each person in this spiritual community lives on earth temporarily. Yet, by God's kindness, there are no dead ends here.
"Sisterhood," by Lawrence Wright, is an essay in the 100th Anniversary Issue of The New Yorker, February 17 & 24, 2025.