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In all the appalling brutality of Syria’s civil war, a remarkable scene was played out in the early hours of yesterday. Thirteen nuns, held prisoner since 3rd December by a group said by Human Rights Watch to be responsible for terrible atrocities against civilians, were released in a prisoner exchange. The nuns found themselves the focus of world media on their release despite one of them being too weak to walk to the car, carried there in the end by one of her captors. The politics are inevitably complicated and the violence with which the negotiations over prisoner exchanges is still surrounded, cannot be overstated. But one aspect of their story struck me. In a video of them publicised before Christmas, they’d been shown in captivity not wearing their customary crosses. This was assumed to be part of the restrictions imposed on them by their captors. But on their release, they said clearly that “no one forced us to remove our crosses. It seemed like the right thing to do”. Their capacity to be sensitive to this and by being so remaining connected with the humanity of their captors struck me as something surprising and moving. Their decision to remove their crosses reminded me of another striking comment made by the 84 year old Christian nun Sister Megan Rice who was jailed last month for three years in the United States for trespass and protest at a nuclear facility in Tenessee. She stated to the court at her trial “To remain in prison for the rest of my life would be the greatest gift you can give me”. The reputation of nuns has sometimes been undermined in recent years but the actions of these contemporary women, dedicated to Christ, from different nationalities, denominations and backgrounds seem to me to speak clearly far beyond the confines of their religious communities. They seem to find their own security not in labels or symbols of their status but in their interior world; their trust in God. For the Greek Orthodox nuns, removing their crosses was not a capitulation in a competitive religious environment; it was a freely chosen act of sensitivity, signalling that their faith was not dependent on such statements. Becoming an inmate for Sister Megan did not seem to her a loss of status but a gift. I see in these women more than individual acts of humility or kindness or courage. They are living lives that act as signposts for the rest of us; lives that act as an invitation to take seriously the depth and potential of our spiritual selves and to find ways to live from that depth in our own circumstances. They are lives that, as a Quaker saying puts it, are marked by boundless happiness, absolute fearlessness and constant difficulty.