Behind the Grille: How a Cloistered Nun’s Manuscript Changed Everything
A beach day, a thick manuscript, and five years of quiet access turned into a book that lets the world step inside a hidden monastery.
I didn’t expect a day at the beach to turn into a doorway into a cloistered monastery.
The manuscript was thick, intimidatingly so. I tossed it into my bag, with a bottle of water, a towel, and the excuse every work-from-anywhere person knows by heart: “I’m going to work… at the beach.” Ironically, I actually mentioned this very day in a previous piece.
The “work” was a draft by a cloistered Dominican nun friend from Our Lady of the Rosary Monastery in Summit, New Jersey. The title: Joy Within His House: A Cloistered Nun’s Reflections on Following Christ.
I’d already spent years photographing the community. Thousands of frames of their life behind the grille. But that afternoon, beneath a Marian blue sunny sky, with waves crashing on the shore, I journeyed deep into that world through the heart and mind of one of their own, Sister Mary Magdalene of the Immaculate Conception, OP.
By the time the sun started to set, I knew two things.
First: this was not just a “religious book.” It was a brutally honest, surprisingly funny, deeply wise tour through the spiritual life, narrated by a millennial bride of Christ who has lived this vocation long enough to know what it costs and why it’s worth it.
Second: whatever it took, this book needed to get out into the world.
The Hill in Summit
Our Lady of the Rosary Monastery sits on a hill, a kind of quiet city on a hill, to borrow a biblical image that actually fits. Founded in 1919, the community has prayed there for over a century, with adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and a steady stream of women who have left everything to live a hidden life of prayer.
Most people only ever see the grille, or the “public side” as it’s referred to.
You’d come into the chapel. The air smelling faintly of incense and old wood. Light slants in across worn wooden pews. The nuns are behind a screen, chanting the Office, present and yet unseen. It’s beautiful and mysterious. You know there is more there, more humanity, more joy, more little moments of grace that never make it past those walls.
But for reasons that still feel like pure Grace, the community opened that door to me.
Over roughly five years, I photographed what almost no one outside ever sees: work time in the laundry and kitchen, sisters hunched over sewing projects, recreation with games and laughter, the quiet intensity of prayer in choir. I was present for first vows and solemn vows, for the moment when a young woman lies prostrate on the floor and offers her entire life to Christ.
As the hard drive filled with thousands upon thousands of images, I said the fateful words photographers say far too easily and far too often: “I should make a book.”
“Hey, I Wrote a Book.”
And so I did what modern people do when they have an idea: I posted about it. Somewhere on social media, I announced my intention to put together a book about the Dominican Nuns of Summit.
Then, like a message dropping in from another world, I heard from one of the sisters.
“Hey,” wrote Sister Mary Magdalene. “I wrote a book.”
She attached a draft. I opened the file and just kept scrolling. This thing was dense—in the best way. Not saccharine, not pious clichés, not a tourist brochure for cloistered life. It was thoughtful, theologically rich, often humorous, occasionally bracing—a description of her vocation and the daily realities of monastic life.
She wrote about the call to be a bride of Christ in a world that struggles to understand marriage, let alone vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. She wrote about community life, conflict, laundry, silence, prayer that feels dry, and prayer that feels like fire. She wrote from inside the mystery.
Suddenly it hit me: my “book idea” had already been written…by a nun. In reality, her book was infinitely better than anything I could even dream, let alone write anyway…but let’s not let facts get in the way.
All I had to do was hold up the images to the words.
The Long Road to Print
Around the same time, Rebecca Martin, the acquisitions editor from Our Sunday Visitor, reached out to ask if I’d ever considered writing a book. I said “Absolutely!” But I also said something else: “You really need to look at this manuscript by my cloistered nun friend in Summit.”
At that point, I felt called and responsible for getting this hidden life in front of people who would never walk through the monastery door.
Then began the waiting, the bouncing around, the mysterious discernment process inside a publishing house.
And the edits…
Meanwhile, I called in someone who had shaped my own path more than she probably realizes: the legendary writer and editor Elizabeth Scalia. Years earlier, Elizabeth had encouraged/forced me into writing for Aleteia. She gave me my first real platform as a Catholic photojournalist. When I needed an expert for Sister Mary Magdalen’s epic manuscript, she was the obvious choice.
At first, life swallowed her time. The pages sat. Then, in the kind of twist God seems to enjoy, Elizabeth eventually went to work at OSV. And the book she’d once had to set aside ended up on her desk again—this time as its editor.
Fast-forward through design meetings, photo selections, and quiet prayers inside the Summit chapel. Joy Within His House was finally released through OSV Books and the community’s own Cloister Shoppe, tucked among the soaps and candles like a small spiritual hand grenade waiting to go off in someone’s heart.
Deacon Greg Kandra , a veteran deacon and writer, called it “an instant classic… a clear-eyed, hope-filled, wisdom-saturated look into the life of a wonderfully down-to-earth Dominican nun.”
He’s not wrong.
The Eyes That Smiled
What was it like, making the images that now live inside the book?
It felt like being handed a key I wasn’t entirely sure I deserved.
You don’t march into a cloister with a camera and start firing away. Every release of the shutter is an act of trust—and, frankly, of risk for the community. These women live hidden lives on purpose. Allowing a layman, let alone me, into that space is not a small decision.
It progressed over time. And somewhere along the way, friendships formed.
One afternoon, I was photographing Sr. Maria Lucia as she worked on calligraphy. She was bent over the page, serious, focused—the kind of concentration that makes you hold your breath so you don’t disturb it. I was close beside her, maybe too close, peering through the viewfinder.
The only sound was the gentle scratch of her pen on paper. And then I saw it: her eyes starting to smile.
She was trying to hold it together. I was trying to hold it together. The seriousness of the moment—this hidden life, the sacred work, this photographer bearing witness—all of it suddenly struck us both as ridiculous and wonderful at the same time. We burst out laughing.
That’s an image of cloistered life I carry with me. Not grim asceticism. Not pious distance. A beautiful community living in communion with Christ and each other, doing their work, and then the laughter, breaking through the seriousness of it all.
That’s the tone of the book, too: grounded, honest, breathtakingly oriented on Christ—but never afraid of joy.
A Door Left Open—for You
What I love about Joy Within His House is that it does, in words, what I tried to do in pictures: it quietly opens a door.
Most people will never ring the monastery doorbell or sit in the parlor with a grille between them and a nun in full habit. They won’t see the second cup of coffee at breakfast, the sister who always burns the cookies, the nervous laugh of a novice trying on the full habit for the first time.
But they can pick up this book. They can read a chapter on prayer that explains how cloistered nuns stand at the heart of the Church, holding the world’s needs in a silence that would terrify most of us—and yet is the place they meet Christ most deeply. They can see that this life is not an escape from reality. It’s a deeper plunge into it.
I started as a guy with a camera, grateful to be allowed beyond the grille. I ended up as a kind of courier—carrying a cloistered nun’s reflections and a community’s hidden life out into the world.
Every time I flip through its pages and see a familiar face, a chapel corner, a bit of sunlight on a wooden floor, I remember what a gift it was to be let in at all.
I think of that day at the beach, the waves, the thick stack of pages that looked a little overwhelming at first.
It turns out the same is true of the cloister: from the outside, it can feel distant, mysterious, “not for me.”
But once you step inside—even through the pages of a book—you discover something else…there’s a deep and abiding joy within those walls.
And we’re all invited into that joy, too.
Joy Within His House: A Cloistered Nun’s Reflections on Following Christ is available now from OSV Books and the Cloister Shoppe at summitdominicans.org.
If you’ve ever wondered what hidden joy looks like, this is your invitation.
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You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff
Thank you for this story. I happen to have our latest order from these Dominican Nuns ( at The Cloister Shoppe) and have to confess that I passed by the book mention on last visit. But now I will surely get several copies. And we wondered what happened to their happy dog, Siena (he was pictured in their group photo). This goes it all together.
Thank you for this