Mother Maria Skobtsova: Mother Maria Skobtsova: by Jim Forest
Abba Joseph came to Abba Lot and said to him: "Father, according to my strength I keep a moderate rule of prayer and fasting, quiet and meditation, and as far as I can I control my imagination; what more must I do?" And the old man rose and held his hands toward the sky so that his fingers became like flames of fire and he said: "If you will, you shall become all flame." -- The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, The Alphabetical Collection, p xxi)
The Orthodox nun Mother Maria Skobtsova is one of those who became all flame.
She was born in 1891 into an aristocratic family in Riga, Latvia, in those days part of Russia. In her youth she wrote poetry; one of her works, Scythian Shards, was well-known in Saint Petersburg's literary circles. In the period of impending revolution, she joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party, but when the Bolsheviks overthrew the democratic government in October 1917, she left for Anapa on the Black Sea coast. There she married an anti-Bolshevik officer, bore two children, and also served as mayor, in the process facing abuse from both the left and the right. Then in 1923, threatened with assassination, she joined the throng of refugees uprooted by revolution and civil war and made her way to France. By then she had two children and was pregnant with a third.
In Paris her son Yuri was born safely, but her second child soon died of meningitis, a tragedy which initiated a profound conversion. She emerged from her mourning with a determination to seek "a more authentic and purified life." She felt she saw a "new road before me and a new meaning in life . . . to be a mother for all, for all who need maternal care, assistance, or protection." Immersing herself in efforts to assist destitute Russian refugees, she sought them out in prisons, hospitals, mental asylums, and in the slums. Increasingly she emphasized the religious dimension of this work, the insight that "each person is the very icon of God incarnate in the world." With this recognition came the need "to accept this awesome revelation of God unconditionally, to venerate the image of God" in her brothers and sisters.
Her bishop urged her to become a nun, but she took the step only with his assurance that she would be free to develop a new type of monasticism, engaged in the world and marked by the "complete absence of even the subtlest barrier which might separate the heart from the world and its wounds."
In 1932 she made her monastic profession and became Mother Maria. Rejecting monastic enclosure, she leased a house in Paris with space enough for a chapel, a soup kitchen, and a shelter for destitute refugees. Giving herself the least, her "cell" was a cot in the basement beside the boiler.
Her house became a center not only for the works of mercy but for dialogue. While her kitchen was crowded with the down and out, the drawing room -- and in the summer the backyard -- became a place where leading emigre intellectuals of Paris debated the relation between faith and the social questions of the day. Out of their discussions a new movement was born, Orthodox Action, committed to realizing the social implications of the Gospel."The meaning of the Liturgy must be translated into life," said Mother Maria. "It is why Christ came into the world and why he gave us our Liturgy."
The final act of Mother Maria's life began with the German occupation of Paris in 1940. In the context of Nazi racism, her commitment to seek out and reverence each person as an icon of God assumed a deliberately subversive significance. Aside from "normal" hospitality to the poor, she, her chaplain, Father Dimitri Klepinin, and her son, Yuri, did all that was in their power to assist Jews and others being sought by the Nazis. During the fearful days of July 1942, when thousands of Jews were rounded up in the Velodrome d'Hiver, Mother Maria succeeded in penetrating the sports stadium and, assisted by garbage collectors, smuggled out Jewish children in garbage bins. That same month, when an edict was published requiring Jews to wear the yellow star, she wrote a poem entitled "Israel":
Though aware she was under Gestapo surveillance, Mother Maria continued her work on behalf of Jews. To give up was out of the question, she told friends. A diary entry from that period of her life reveals the fidelity God had given her: "There is one moment when you start burning with love and you have the inner desire to throw yourself at the feet of some other human being. This one moment is enough. Immediately you know that instead of losing you life, it is being given back to you twofold."
On February 8, 1943, she and Father Dimitri were arrested. She readily admitted the charge of helping Jews elude police roundups -- it was nothing more than her Christian duty.
When Father Dimitri was brought in for interrogation, the Gestapo agent, a man named Hoffmann, decided at first on a conciliatory approach. It backfired, as the following dialogue testifies:
Hoffman: If we release you, will you give an undertaking never again to aid Jews?
Klepinin: I can say no such thing. I am a Christian and must act as I must. (Hoffman struck Klepinin across the face.)
Hoffman: Jew lover! How dare you talk of helping those swine as being a Christian duty!
(Klepinin, recovering his balance, held up the cross from his cassock.)
Klepinin: Do you know this Jew?
(For this, Father Dimitri was knocked to the floor.)
He, Mother Maria and her son Yuri were taken to Compiegne where Father Dimitri managed to serve the Liturgy each day and to begin preparing Yuri for ordination.
In his last letter from Compiegne to friends in Paris, later found in a suitcase returned to his home, Yuri wrote, "I am absolutely calm, even somewhat proud to share mama's fate. I promise you I will bear everything with dignity. Whatever happens, sooner or later we shall all be together. I can say in all honesty that I am not afraid of anything any longer. . . . I ask anyone whom I have hurt in any way to forgive me. Christ be with you!" In December Father Dimitri and Yuri were transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp where both died that winter. Yuri was 24.
Sent to the notorious Ravensbrück women's concentration camp north of Berlin, Mother Maria managed to survive almost to the war's end, all the while caring for the bodies and souls of her fellow prisoners. In captivity she occasionally traded bread for needle and thread in order to embroider images which gave her strength. Her last work of art was an embroidered icon of Mary the Mother of God holding the child Jesus, his hands and feet already bearing the wounds of the Cross.
On Good Friday, March 31, 1945, with the gunfire of approaching Russian troops audible in the distance, Mother Maria took the place of a Jewish prisoner who was to be sent to the gas chamber and died her place.
"At the Last Judgment I shall not be asked whether I was successful in my ascetic exercises, nor how many bows and prostrations I made," she had explained earlier in her life. "Instead I shall be asked, Did I feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the prisoners. That is all I shall be asked."
"Types of Religious Lives," an essay by Mother Maria written in 1937, was recently discovered, has been translated into English, and is posted on this web site...
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posted September 9, 1998