Orange Is the New Black

formal prayer, but I was less skeptical about faith than I had been when I entered prison. On a late September day I had been sitting behind A Dorm at the picnic table with Gisela. Shewas my coworker in the construction shop, as well as the bus driver, and was one of the sweetest, kindest, gentlest women I’ve ever met, delicate and ladylike, and yet no simp, no Pollyanna. I can’t remember ever hearing Gisela raise her voice, and given that she was the CMS bus driver, this was pretty amazing. Gisela was also graceful and lovely, her face a perfect, pale-brown oval, big brown eyes, long wavy hair. She was from the Dominican Republic but had lived in Massachusetts for years—not in neighborhoods I knew well, but we shared some common ground. Her two kids were waiting for her there, in the care of an elderly woman named Noni Delgado, whom Gisela called her angel.
    On this particular day Gisela and I were talking about her upcoming release. Of course she was nervous. She was nervous about finding work. She was nervous about what her husband would do when she got out—he was in the DR, and they had what sounded like a tempestuous and tortured relationship. Gisela said she didn’t want to reunite with him, but he sounded like a person who was difficult to resist, and of course they had children together. I knew that Gisela had no money, and many responsibilities, and that she faced a massive number of unknown but looming challenges. But while she was quick to acknowledge that she was nervous, she also exhibited the peacefulness at her core, the loving calmness that made her the kind of person to whom everyone was drawn. And then she started to talk about God.
    Normally, professions of faith or discussions of religion in prison would win eye-rolling and a quick exit from me. I believed that everyone should be able to practice according to their own preferences and beliefs, but an awful lot of pilgrims in prison seem to be making it up as they go along, in silly ways—wearing a contraband napkin on their head one month when they’re practicing Islam, and then appearing in the Buddhist meditation circle the next—after realizing that they could duck out of work for this new brand of religious observance. Couple that with a pretty reliable volume of ignorance about the rest of the world’s faiths (“Well, the Jews did killJesus… everyone knows that!”), and I generally didn’t want any part of it.
    Gisela wasn’t talking about religion or church or even Jesus, though. She was talking about God. And when she talked about God, she looked so happy. She spoke so freely, and so easily, about how God had helped her through all the struggles in her life, and especially the years she had spent in prison; how she knew that God loved her completely, and watched over her, and gave her the peace of mind, the good sense, the clarity to be a good person, even in a bad place. She said that she trusted God to help her, by sending her angels like Noni Delgado to care for her children, and good friends when she most needed them to help her survive prison. She glowed while she talked calmly and quietly about God and how much His love had given her.
    I was startled to feel so moved by what Gisela had to say, and I listened quietly. Some of her beliefs weren’t stated all that differently from the scuttlebutt I had heard from the holy rollers in the Camp, but their protestations of faith were imbued with the need for redemption
—Jesus loves me even if I’m a bad person, even if no one else does.
Gisela already knew about love. She was talking about an unshakable faith that gave her real strength and that she had carried for a long time. She wasn’t talking about repentance or forgiveness, only love. What Gisela was describing to me was an exquisitely intimate and happy love. I thought it was the most compelling description of faith that I had ever heard. I wasn’t about to grab a Bible; nor was our conversation about me or my choices in any way. It was food for thought.
    I had long recognized that faith helped people understand their relationship to their community. In the best cases it helped women in Danbury focus on what they had to give instead of what they wanted. And that was a good thing. So for all my scoffing at “holy rollers,” was it such a bad thing if faith helped someone understand what others needed from them, rather than just thinking about themselves?
    In prison, for the first time, I understood that faith