Mother Maria and a “New Monasticism”

By Kevin Boddecker

A few years ago, I became aware of a movement in North American Christianity which referred to itself as ‘’New Monasticism.’’  A website representing those who associate themselves with that movement defines new monasticism as ‘’an attempt to discern the Holy Spirit’s movement in the abandoned places of the Empire called America.’’ At the time, I was generally interested in the idea and even considered perhaps buying an old house in the middle of a run-down neighbourhood in Niagara Falls, beginning to hold the daily office (according to the Book of Common Prayer as I was an Anglican then) and trying to meet the needs of the people around me. I have come to look with a bit of healthy suspicion on my own desires to do such though after conversations with traditional monastics and much spiritual reading, mainly because of the threat of delusion, a mixture of vainglory and deception that often overtakes those who attempt to live something of a monastic life without the formation one gains within the framework of cenobite monasticism. (Without spiritual direction or under self-direction, the risk is very high as the Fathers always say ‘’He who has himself for a spiritual director has a fool for a spiritual director.’’)

All that being said, I was interested to discover that the idea of a new monasticism had its origins, not in the ‘’Emergent’’ Christianity of ‘’post-Evangelicals’’, but, in the writings of a an Orthodox nun and martyr in the early part of the twentieth century. The holy and glorious venerable-martyr Maria Skobtsova (also known as St. Mary of Paris or Mother Maria), was brought up in Russia during the period leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution. As a teenager living in St. Petersburg she embraced the atheism that was prevalent among the intellectual circles and she became a writer and a poet. But, after her marriage to the Bolshevik Dmitri Kuzmin-Karaviev fell apart, she found herself drawn back to the Christianity of her childhood by the humanity of Jesus.

She married again and gave birth to children, but as the political tides became uncertain, she fled with her husband and family, first to Georgia, then to Yugoslavia, and finally to France. In Paris, Elizaveta (Mother Maria’s name in the world), began to devote herself to the study of theology and to serving the poor. At this time also, she was shaken by the death of her daughter Anastasia and the disintegration of her marriage to her second husband Daniel. As this all happened, Elizaveta moved deeper into Paris to work more directly with those in need and was soon encouraged by her bishop to take monastic vows. With her husband’s permission, an ecclesiastical divorce was granted and she received the monastic tonsure and the name Maria.

It was at this point the Mother Maria realized the necessity of a new monasticism. The monastic life that was led up till that time in her home country had been brought nearly to an end by the rise of communism – the Party had gone around closing and destroying monasteries and sending most of their inhabitants to death camps. Many had fled the country to form monasteries in neighbouring countries, like the New Valaamo in Finland. But for those who had fled further away, into non-Orthodox countries where monasticism had never really existed, the formation of cenobitic communities was incredibly difficult. With these changes in conditions, monasticism as it had been known in the immediately preceding centuries had become a virtual impossibility.

Mother Maria sought, therefore, to plunge into the essence of monasticism and to find away to live as a monastic in her new setting, as a poor Russian emigre nun living in Paris in a time of economic and spiritual depression. Looking into the heart of the monastic life, Maria pointed out that it was built on the three vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty. Chastity was a self-evident vow and, in the mind of Mother Maria, its necessity and nature would not change in the new situation.

Obedience, understood as the cutting off of one’s will and keeping the instruction and commands of a spiritual elder, would be frustrated by the new situation – such elders did not exist, at least in the number necessary for all monastics to have access to them, and their own inexperience would keep them from exercising their authority to any great extent.  Because of this, Mother Maria offered the following direction:
‘’Obedience as such remains unchanged, but its meaning becomes different. A monk should be obedient to the work of the Church to which he is assigned; he should give his will and all his creative powers to this work. Obedience becomes service,. In essence, this service should be no less strict than obedience to a starets [spiritual elder]. Only here responsibility rests with the monk himself, he himself takes the measure of his conscientiousness, his sacrificial self-giving.  The Church herself becomes his starets, and also judges him, while the obedience requested is the responsible fulfillment of what the Church has charged him to do.’’
Therefore, obedience is not done away with, or changed – rather the historical circumstance of the lack of elders necessitated that obedience be directed towards another and that other became the Church.

The third vow of poverty, or ‘non-possession’ as Mother Maria liked to put it, in the new context needed to be interpreted as something much larger than the renunciation of personal property. The accumulation of material wealth, in Mother Maria’s mind, was not the opposite of the vow and virtue of poverty, but rather the egocentrism which she found as a vibrant reality, even amidst the destitution and depression that surrounded her in early twentieth-century Europe (and we must admit is alive and well today in our American context). Of modern man, Mother Maria says: ‘’He is the center for which creation exists. Divine justice and divine mercy are measured from the point of view of his needs . . . We may say that any relationship, external or internal, material or spiritual, can always be an expression of egocentrism – religious life is also not free of it.’’ This being the case, the vow and virtue of non-possession needs to be lived out in every one of these relationships: ‘’In exactly the same way, the principle of non-possession can be expressed in any relationship. The subtler the egocentrism, the higher the limits of the human spirit it reaches, the more repulsive it is. The subtler the non-possession, the greater the spiritual values a person renounces, the more fully he gives his soul for his friends, the holier he is, and the more he corresponds to what Christ demands.’’

Mother Maria does not mean, by this,  to trivialize the renunciation of material goods, but only to take poverty in its fullness: ‘’A monk who makes a vow should strive to fulfill it in the most absolute and all-embracing sense. In the sphere of external things, a monk should  first of all be non-money-loving and a man who owns no private property, or if he does, he should place no value on it.’’ But ultimately, non-possession must be understood as ‘’the renunciation of one’s spiritual exclusiveness, it is the giving of one’s spirit to the service of God’s work on earth, and it is the only path to common life in the one sobornoe [Russian word, bearing the idea of a communion of free persons] organism of the Church.’’

This non-posession, says Mother Maria, should not simply give help to those who seek it, but ought actively to seek those in need to give of the gifts God which the monk receives.  This activity is expressed in the world in the form of social work, charity, and spiritual aid.  Mother Maria did this herself, in turning her rented house in Paris into a ‘convent,’ a place with an open door for refugees, the needy and the lonely, and where one could always find theological conversation.

Mother Maria spent herself fully, renouncing everything to help Parisian Jews during the Nazi occupation. She, along with Fr. Dmitri, provided a place of refuge for Jewish children, distributed baptismal certificates to Jews in an attempt to protect them from the Gestapo, and helped many others escape. When this was uncovered by the Gestapo, the closed down the house and arrested Mother Maria, Fr. Dmitri, Sophia (Maria’s Mother), and Yuri (her son). They all were sent to concentration camps. Mother Maria was sent to a camp in Ravensbruck, Germany where, on Holy Saturday in 1945, taking the place of another prisoner, she was put to death in a gas chamber.

Mother Maria of Paris offers us an image of a life lived in the world in accord with the two commandments of Christ, loving and living totally for God and for the neighbour. May she inspire us by her own life and strengthen us by her prayers to live ourselves according to Christ’s commandments. Mother Maria, pray for us sinners.

As witnesses of truth and preachers of piety,
let us worthily honour through divinely inspired chants:
Dmitri, Maria, Yuri and Elias,
who have borne the sufferings,
the bonds and unjust judgment,
in which like the martyrs
have received the imperishable crown.

Further Reading:
Mother Maria Skobtsova: Essential Writings