If she were a Buddhist, everyone would be rushing to call her a bodhisattva. Yad Vashem, in Israel, awarded her the prize called Righteous Among the Nations. But, because she was a Christian, she is instead called a Saint. But it doesn’t matter too much. Those are only words, and inadequate to really describe her radical degree of compassion. They are only stabs at it, as all words are.
She was probably called Lisa (pronounced Lee-za, one of the standard nicknames for Elizavyota in Russian) for most of her life. And she was called Mother Maria only after she became a nun in 1932, in obedience to her spiritual parent, Fr. Sergei Bulgakov (he was, like her, an intellectual, and it seems he was one of those who did not consider obedience to be something that canceled out free will—obedience and free will in fact coexisted and complemented each other).
She was, from the outset, not a standard nun. She belonged to no community. She remained an intellectual. And she did not give up her heavy smoking. Plus, her “convent” was the soup kitchen she ran in Paris.
She knew what it was like to be a widow, and to be estranged from a husband, eventually to divorce. Also she knew what it was like to watch her child die. But she is also the one who said, “No matter how hard I try, I find it impossible to constuct anything greater than these three words: Love one another. Only to the end, and without exeception.”
Her main theme was that we can love God only by loving others. And vice-versa.
To me, her writings are an antidote to the idolatry that surrounds the number seven—when we talk about the Seven Ecumenical Councils. I feel like those councils talked about the god-aspect of the Christ event. But that the human side was not discussed adequately. Then along comes Mother Maria, who is unafraid to talk about the human side, in fact, she shows us how important the human side is. It’s revelatory, to say the least.
I think she would have a lot to say today. Not only about the love of God, but I think also she would write about the Evangelical heresy that arose from what’s called the Second Great Awakening in America. And that is now taking over the Orthodox Church in America. If you read her newly-discovered essay, “Types of Religious Life,” in the book Essential Writings (Orbis, 2003) you’ll see she has a lot of insight into that, and she would probably have more to say now.
But to me, her greatest teaching will always be the compassion that Christianity is all about. Sure she saved a lot of lives by giving false baptismal certificates to many Jews. Sure she went to the stadium in Paris with her friends. And maybe she took the place of a “real” Jew in the crematorium at Auschwitz. That’s just what you do when compassion shows you there is no essential difference between you and the rest of creation.
But it doesn’t matter all that much. She set herself in a compassionate direction, and that is what matters. She was compassionate and reminded us that compassion is what Christianity is all about.
Because we always forget.
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