In Praise of Holy Women

In Praise
of Holy
Women

From Church of St Seraphim of Sarov, Paris: ‘If you remain in Me and
I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from Me you can do nothing.’
(John 15:5)

Journal of the Community of the
Servants of the Will of God
CONTENTS
'In Praise of Holy Women'
Father Superior’s Letter – Colin CSWG........................................................2
Introduction to Articles......................................................................................4
Page
Iulia de Beausobre on Creative Suffering
– Caroline Walton, Associate CSWG....................6
Thérèse of Lisieux: her Human Face
‒ Sr Mary Michael CHC................................................12
Lift Up Your Hearts: the Spiritual Formation of
Nun-Iconographer, Joanna Reitlinger
‒ Christopher Mark CSWG.........................................19
Evelyn Underhill on St Paul the Mystic and the Monastic Ideal
‒ Philip Gorski, Associate CSWG...........................39
A Harsh and Dreadful Love: Dorothy Day's Witness to the Gospel
‒ Jim Forest.........................................................................44
Cover: Theotokos (Virgin Mary) holding the Child Jesus at her side while pointing to
Him as the source of salvation for humankind. A Hodigetria type of icon: "She who
shows the Way"; In the Western tradition, this type of icon is frequently called Our
Lady of the Way.
To be included on our mailing list for Come to the Father, please send your name
and address to father.peter@cswg.org.uk, or to the postal address on the back cover.
Bulk orders: 5 copies for £10; 10 copies for £15.
Epiphany 2018 No. 32

Dear Friends,
FROM THE SUPERIOR
Counting our blessings
Earlier this year we decided to employ someone to cook for us. After various
enquiries and advertisements, Louise Marcinkowski began as our cook in
the middle of May. Louise is a professional cook and lives in the village. She
was previously employed as a cook at the McIndoe plastic surgery and burns
unit at the hospital in East Grinstead. She works Monday to Friday mornings,
cooking our main meal and doing some preparation for supper. We, and our
guests, are enjoying her delicious meals, beautifully cooked and presented.
We are very thankful for all the care and thought that she puts into it. The
kitchen and storeroom has been tidied up and at some stage we will need to
make considerable improvements to the kitchen.
We have changed the way we purchase our food and supplies, buying more
locally and in smaller quantities. We hope this will reduce costs and avoid
waste. When we have seen how this is working out financially, then we may
see if we can find someone to do some housework and housekeeping, and
also have some help in the garden when needed.
Sheep may safely graze
A local man heard that we had some open fields on our property and asked
if he could put his flock of sheep in one of our pastures. Some adult sheep
and their lambs duly arrived in April. Having eaten all the grass in the field
by the barn, they then moved on to the field by the lake and having eaten all
of that they have now moved back again into the barn field. It is certainly a
very effective way of keeping the grass mown. The sheep seem content and
it is good to have some animals in the place. We are not getting too attached
to them, as the lambs are being reared for meat.
Associates
A dozen or so of our Associates met at the Monastery at the beginning of
May. On the first day we spent some time looking at two sermons of Father
Gilbert Shaw. On the second day Dr Peta Dunstan spoke to us about the life
of Father William of Glasshampton, revealing some interesting facts about
his early life and exploring his decision to pursue a call to contemplative
monastic life.
We admitted Clive Holding, from Portslade, as a probationer Associate. We
also admitted Paul Veitch as a probationer Associate on 7 May. Paul had been
to stay with us on several occasions in the past, originally recommended by
Associate, the late Father Michael Stagg. In more recent years, he has found
it difficult to visit, undergoing treatment for cancer. After various courses of
treatment, which gave him some lengthy periods of remission, he accepted
2

the news with great faith and courage that no more could be done. His visit to
us in early May was cut short when his back became very painful so I admitted
him as an Associate there and then, which he greatly appreciated. On his
return home, his condition continued to deteriorate, and he died on 28 June.
Some years ago, Paul started a contemplative prayer group in his parish which
is now well-established, a lasting witness to his commitment to prayer and
attentiveness to God.
Fairacres
In September, three of us – myself, Fr Peter and Br Christopher attended a
Study Day on Fr Gilbert Shaw organised by the Sisters of the Love of God
at Fairacres, Oxford, to commemorate the 50 th anniversary of his death. Fr
Gilbert was Warden there for several years up until his death in 1967. The
study day was a fitting tribute to his witness, with some papers given by the
Sisters and by ourselves. The day concluded with a tour of the Sisters' new
wing, and with recollections of earlier shared visits at Burwash.
A testing time
Brother Andrew is having a year out of the usual day-to-day life of the
Community. He is living in one of the hermitages, coming to Lauds each day
and the Eucharist on Sunday. He is continuing to look after the accounts, to
deal with guest bookings and other administrative matters but otherwise is
not as involved in the life of the Community as he used to be. This is to give
him time and space to reflect on his vocation and what God wants him to be
doing with his life. This is for a twelve-month period and it began just after
Easter last year (2017). Please remember him in your prayers.
Father John Patrick Buckingham
Patrick made his first profession in our Community on 8 December 1980
and his life vows in 1984. He went with the first group of monks to the
Monastery of Christ the Saviour at Hove in 1985. He left the Community and
was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1996, subsequently joining
the Communities of Jerusalem and making his life profession at All Saints
1999. He was later ordained priest. In 2001, he went to the priory at Vezelay,
which is on the pilgrimage route to Compostella and had a much-appreciated
ministry welcoming pilgrims and hearing confessions. He went into hospital
for a routine operation, but died unexpectedly on 25 July 2017. He was 82.
He had kept in touch with us, always expressing his gratitude for all that he
had received through his membership of our Community, and praying for
the unity of the church.
Isaac, Chae Choong Suk
Isaac, a retired journalist, lives in Seoul in South Korea where his niece, Sister
Jemma, is a member of the Community of St Francis. He wrote and asked if he
could come and stay with us, in order to experience monastic life. He arrived
3

at the beginning of September and stayed for two months. He valued the
silence and the solitude as the setting for writing his next book. In addition,
he supervised the picking of our large apple crop, doing an immense amount
of work gently and quietly. It was a privilege to have him with us.
Seekers
Many religious communities nowadays provide the opportunity for people
to live ‘alongside’ them, to explore a possible vocation to religious life or to
provide the opportunity to share in a life of prayer whilst deciding on the
next step. We have had the opportunity for people to be Seekers here since
the early 1980's. We remain open to welcoming Seekers and enquiries from
anyone wanting to live with us, from one month to six months or longer.
Help
In addition, we are always glad to receive any offers of help if anyone would
like to do some work in the place for a day or few days (accommodation
free). Work in our library in particular is needed with help in thinning out
books to make room for new books.
We thank you as always for your prayers, gifts and donations, and assure you
of our continuing prayers for you.
Colin CSWG
INTRODUCTION TO ARTICLES – ON HOLINESS
Our theme in this current issue, In Praise of Holy Women, opens itself of
course to the critical question: what is holiness? We are frequently warned
in scripture to avoid unholiness: 1 Peter 2:1-2 for example: 'put away malice,
deceit, hypocrisy, envy, slander' – and few of us would puzzle over what
those things mean. Would practising the opposite – kindness, truthfulness,
honesty, generosity, praise – make us holy? If so, there would have been no
need for Christ to die on the Cross (Galatians 2:21). Being nice is a matter
of social skills, not transformation. In the Christian sense holiness implies
some sort of consummation: a ‘new heaven’, a ‘new earth’, a ‘new creation’;
indeed, we are invited to participate in a ‘new reality’. This reality is not just
the 'flipside' of the reality we already know. Inherently and experientially it
is joyful because it is endowed overwhelmingly with the truth of existence,
but to attain it involves mental or physical suffering, or God forbid both.
It is a matter of denying the desires and attractions with whch we are
already overly familiar and ‘putting on’ the ‘Other’, a Person – the Christ,
the Anointed One, the Messiah. Holiness is the outcome of our everdeepening
relationship with that Person. For the Christian, this relationship
4

is not an optional extra; it comes with the force of a commandment:
'You shall be holy, for I am holy.' (1 Peter 1:16; cf Lev 11:45, 20:26, 21:8)
In this issue, five authors – three Anglicans and two Orthodox – look at
five contemporary women – one Anglican, two Roman Catholics and two
Orthodox – all of whom aimed to fulfil the commandment to be holy. Only
one of the five women has been canonised. The other four are simply ‘doers
of the word, and not hearers only’ [James 1:22]. Caroline Walton on Julia de
Beausobre, shows that attaining to holiness, one encounters what appears
to be an insurmountable obstacle – that quintessential blockade called ‘the
Cross’; it always involves suffering, but refusing to draw back from it, in
what Beausobre calls ‘creative suffering’, leads surprisingly to such joy and
freedom that the present reality begins to lose its grip on us. Like a woman
giving birth – a classic metaphor for suffering – inescapable pain is followed
by wondrous joy. Sister Mary Michael writing on Thérèse of Liseux, will not
let us, however, exhaust women’s contribution with mere metaphors. ‘There
is no respect for us poor, wretched women anywhere’, St Thérèse writes;
‘And yet you’ll find the love of God much more common among women than
among men, and the women during the Passion showed much more courage
than the Apostles….’ In our feature article on Sister Joanna [Reitlinger], a
nun-iconographer, who in her chosen profession as an artist is continually
repudiating self-importance, holiness begins essentially with an encounter
with Christ. This marks the advent of a decisive winter thaw: the world
loses its frozen grip on us, and we become aware, if only momentarily,
of the other, Christ-sown, spiritual reality. Spiritual work then begins in
earnest as we endeavour, with God's help, to reclaim the original image of
God in us (distorted by idolatry of self) as we now ‘strain forward’ (Phil
3:13) to embrace Christ's likeness, while he in turn manifests to the world
our uniqueness. Philip Gorski writes on the Anglican mystic and scholar,
Evelyn Underhill, who, ‘speaking from profound personal experience’ while
swimming mightily against the academic, mainstream, theological currents
of her time, develops the theme of contemplative prayer as practised by
St Paul and continued by monastics and contemplatives down through
the ages as the highway to holiness. ‘Holiness is not sinlessness’ is one of
Sergii Bulgakov's remarks, meaning we are not obliged to become holy
before holiness takes up residence in those practicing ongoing repentance
and service to fellow pilgrims, as Jim Forest demonstrates in his article
on Dorothy Day, whose contemplation opened out in social action. A holy
person, he tells us quite simply is someone ‘who in a remarkable way, shows
us what it means to follow Christ.’
Christopher Mark CSWG
5

IULIA DE BEAUSOBRE ON 'CREATIVE SUFFERING'
CAROLINE WALTON
‘Iulia spoke of suffering
as the most essential feature
of the Christian religion –
so often ignored or contradicted by liberal ideas.’ 1
A poster in my local tube station advertises a book: 'You were not born to
suffer,' which seems to sum up neatly the prevailing western secular attitude.
Suffering is something to be pushed away, denied or, if it is too persistent,
‘treated.’ It is rare to hear that, as the introduction to the first edition of Iulia
de Beausobre’s essay Creative Suffering 2 asserts, ‘something can be made
of suffering.’ Yet suffering is integral to the human experience and (in my
case anyway) our most powerful catalyst for change. In the words of Father
Sophrony, in its absence, man remains spiritually lazy, half-asleep, devoid of
Christ. 3
Born Iulia Kazarina in 1893, de Beausobre grew up in an aristocratic Russian
family. In 1917 she married a diplomat, Nikolai de Beausobre. Their only
child died of starvation during the Civil War that followed the Bolshevik
revolution. Both Iulia and Nikolai were arrested in 1932 and imprisoned
and tortured in Moscow’s Lubianka prison. She was later sent to a gulag
logging-camp; he was shot. De Beausobre was released after a year ‘on
health grounds.’ Although her ‘freedom’ was severely circumscribed, she
was able to get a message to an Englishwoman who had once been her nanny
and who paid a ransom for her to leave the country. 4 Iulia settled in Britain
where she became a writer and speaker, documenting her own experiences
and helping people in the West enhance their understanding of Russian
Orthodox spirituality. 5
Creative Suffering opens by stating that the history of the Russian people
is one of suffering, and of a particular type: 'the suffering of individuals
endowed with a feeling for personal freedom so profound as often to verge
on the anarchic', who at the same time have been 'continually compelled to
1
Constance Babington-Smith, Iulia de Beausobre, A Russian Christian in the West (Darton,
Longman and Todd 1983)
2
Iulia de Beausobre, Creative Suffering (Dacre Press 1940, republished by SLG press 1984)
3
Arch. Sophrony On Prayer (St Vladimir’s Press 1996).
4
In its drive to industrialise during those years, the USSR was anxious to acquire hard currency;
later this form of ransom became impossible.
5
De Beausobre’s books include Flame in the Snow, A Life of Saint Seraphim of Sarov (Templegate
1996) and a selection and translation of Russian Letters of Direction by Macarius, Staretz of Optino
(St Vladimir’s Press 1975)
6

live.... under a succession of despotisms resolutely bent on the destruction
of that freedom.' 6 De Beausobre describes the co-existence of despotism
and freedom in Orthodox Christianity, identifying 'two strains in Russian
Christianity, the one which was formed by and from people of ascetic or
disciplinarian temper, and the other by and from people of mystical temper
(mystical in the widest sense of the word).'
For De Beausobre, asceticism has a particular meaning and it is important
to distinguish her definition from the commonly understood meaning of the
word: it is 'a temper of mind that inhales fear and exudes fear.' She defines
it in this disciplinary sense as the exercise of power in which the individual
personality is crushed in the name of the ‘supreme good.’
Those of the mystical temper have always been in the majority. 'Popular
sympathy in Russia has always gone, and still goes, to any expression of this
mystical temper, explicitly religious or not.' This temper may be seen, for
example, in the popular veneration of St Seraphim of Sarov who rejected
the power struggles of his monastery, and went to live for many years as a
hermit in the forest.
So how do these elements co-exist? What is the interplay between them?
De Beausobre writes that for the first few centuries after the conversion
of Russia to Christianity 'both tempers persisted side by side, each finding
a Christian form of expression; during the whole of this time the deeper,
mystical temper was more widespread; the articulate, ascetic temper more
influential.' 7
As a result of the Mongol invasion of 1240 there was a tightening of authority
and hardening of convention in every area of life, until Russia reached its
peak of brutal, disciplinary asceticism under Ivan the Terrible. Then in the
seventeenth century, the reformer Peter the Great swept religious asceticism
into the monasteries and out of everyday life, as he reformed and westernised
the country.
Asceticism was not confined to Christianity. '[It] reconquered its lost position
in everyday life from outside the monasteries and outside the Church
altogether.' This temper re-appeared as the revolutionary movement, or at
least the strand that took power in 1917: 'The Bolshevik revolution...is in
fact essentially disciplinarian and ascetic.'
We need only look at Lenin, the arch-ascetic, the ruthless eliminator of dissent
who shied away from music because he said it made him feel like talking
6
Unless otherwise stated, all quotes are taken from the Creative Suffering essay.
7
I would add that the Russian Christian mystical temper also absorbed elements of mystical
paganism – sometimes referred to as dvoeveriye, a dual belief system – which still exists in this
part of the world and is to some extent undergoing a resurgence.
7

nonsense and caressing the people who could create such beauty in the
midst of the filth of life. And today too, the teetotal, black-belt Putin presents
a disciplinarian counterbalance to the anarchic ‘gangster capitalism’ that
prevailed during the Yeltsin era and caused the impoverishment of so many.
Paradoxically, however, the disciplinarians at times may have even fostered
mysticism by throwing people back onto their inner resources to cultivate
internal freedom, a freedom that would inevitably have an effect on those
around them. De Beausobre and others such as Vladimir Lossky argue that
this happened to the Church during the Soviet period. 'In every place where
the faith has been put to the test, there have been abundant outpourings
of grace, the most astonishing miracles – icons renewing themselves... the
cupolas of churches shining with light not of this world...' 8
On the one hand countless thousands of Christians were persecuted during
the decades of terror and repression that followed the Russian revolution
of 1917. Theological schools, churches and monasteries were closed and
religious publications prohibited. During Stalin’s terror, thousands of clergy
and the faithful were shot or sent to camps. Yet on the other hand the
Church survived underground, on both sides of the barbed wire. 9 It not only
survived, it was purified in the crucible of repression.
There are accounts of extraordinary experiences in Soviet prisons. Father
Sophrony’s brother Nicholas was imprisoned in 1949. After his interrogator
had finished questioning him, he picked up the phone and gave the order
for his execution. But before the guards could come to take Nicholas away
to shoot him in the back of the neck in the corridor, his interrogator fell ill
with a suspected heart attack. Nicholas immediately called for help. It came
in time, and the interrogator survived. He countermanded the order for
execution, saying to Nicholas, ‘You saved my life. Now I will save yours.’
When Father Sophrony asked his brother later how he had endured all his
sufferings, Nicholas replied, ‘without prayer it is impossible.’ 10
De Beausobre had gone through the interrogation process some 16 years
earlier. Explaining in detail how she was able to survive, she writes that when
one is tortured, there is only one way to save yourself: to fail to react. Then
you will no longer be of interest to the inner sadism of the torturer, and will
eventually be left alone. There are two ways to cease reacting: one is to render
yourself completely unfeeling. But De Beausobre points out the dangers of
8
Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (St Vladimir’s Press 1976).
9
See in particular Father Arseny 1983-1973, Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father (trans. Vera
Bouteneff, St. Vladimir’s Press 1998), Father Arseny – A Cloud of Witnesses, (trans. Vera
Bouteneff, St. Vladimir’s Press 2001) and With God in Russia by Jesuit priest Walter J. Ciszek
(Doubleday 1966).
10
Arch. Sophrony Letters to his Family (Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist 2015)
8

this path: 'as Berdyaev has remarked: "Inability to suffer sometimes proves
to be the greatest evil of all"... if you lapse into such a condition, it is unlikely
that you will ever get out of it without the help of a psychiatrist.'
That state was very dangerous indeed. The gulag was full of inmates –
usually ‘criminal’ prisoners – who had taken that path. 11 The other road
was even harder. De Beausobre writes that this second way of coping
with the sadism of torturers was excruciating: ‘It exacts of the victim who
undertakes it a heightening of consciousness, which is inseparable from
the pain that goes with any expansion of awareness.’ She explains that the
victim has to make an intense effort to gain sympathetic insight into the
situation, to be attentive to every detail of the moment, and to penetrate
as far as possible into the minds of her torturers. She warns that this
empathy must not veer into any sentimentality; you must avoid both selfpity
and any absolution of your tormentors’ responsibility. 'All this is very
hard. But the point is that once it is achieved, you realise that you have
been privileged to take part in nothing less than an act of redemption...'
Complete attention necessitated complete acceptance of the situation:
no inner protest – ‘Why me?’ or ‘This is unfair; I am entirely innocent!’ –
because resistance would mean absconding from the present. Acceptance
meant surrendering to the reality of the moment, as Nicholas Sakharov had
done by responding immediately his interrogator fell ill.
This kind of attentiveness could only be attained through faith. De Beausobre
stressed that it was important that the tortured belonged to the Church, so
that they did not just think of themselves as poor or brave, lonely wretches
but as members of the mystical body of Christ.... They alone can raise their
harrowing experience from the level of a personal evil... and make it an
impersonal enrichment, a universal good, a part of the redemptive work of
Christ through his mystical body – the Church.
In her memoirs, de Beausobre recounts how she received Divine help during
her periods of interrogation. She called it the voice of Peace which came to
11
In St Petersburg in the late 1990s I met a woman who had been an actor in a Siberian
logging camp like the one to which De Beausobre had been sent. Tamara Petkevich suffered
the consequences of the numbness, the spiritual deadness, against which De Beausobre
warned. She described how female criminal prisoners had beaten her up as a ‘political’ – but
a few weeks later they were weeping as she read them a story. “Perhaps you have to suffer
a great deal in order to understand the effect of creative expression on the spirit,” Tamara
Petkevich told me. “Only then do you truly appreciate how it enables you to survive an ordeal.
The human psyche is capable of enormous transformation. It is only by living through this
process that you appreciate it.” She saw her role as that of performing the equivalent of
cardio-pulmonary resuscitation on the prisoners – and on the guards too, by reminding them
that beauty and emotion existed. And in doing this Tamara saved herself from lapsing into the
condition of numbness and disconnection that De Beausobre warned against – a condition
from which there is virtually no way back.
9

her as she was summoned from her cell at nights: 'Peace. My peace be with
you.' Later: 'The eyes of Peace are lighting up in my heart again. It is as though
they were shining into my face, inundating it with light from the inside. The
light seems to change the bones and muscles, it shines out through my eyes,
my ears, the whole of my skull, changes the meaning of the world I see, the
world I hear, the world I comprehend. And gives it up, thus illumined and
transformed, to One who understands all things...'
A few pages later, she is able to affirm that 'prayer resounding out of the
depths of darkest profundity, out of the despairing marrow of human bones,
is always answered fully.'
De Beausobre’s point is that by overcoming the pain inflicted on them, the
tortured not only make the criminality of the torturers less heinous, they
bring something of beauty into the situation. If the tortured can make
themselves invulnerable, they not only save themselves, they are actually
performing an act of kindness to the torturers. 12
By bringing the whole focus of her attention onto what was taking place both
outside and within herself, de Beausobre attained an extraordinary depth of
serenity and even joy in having redeemed the evil deed. Through her faith,
De Beausobre was able to transcend and transfigure her cir-cumstances. Her
sense of inner peace became so deep and tangible that her torturers finally
understood that she would not succumb.
There was of course another form of surrender – surrender to the torturers
by agreeing to join them. Many took that route and de Beausobre does
not condemn them. In her memoirs 13 she describes Emma, a woman who
shares her cell for a time, returning from an interrogation looking elated. De
Beausobre realises what has happened and wishes that the future victims of
Emma’s betrayal will themselves learn to redeem that ugliness, and that the
ugliness of the betrayal will be redeemed by something beautiful and human
in her life out there.
In the logging camp too, de Beausobre received assistance, both human – in
the form of imprisoned nuns, and Divine. She – and others – were aware of
the presence of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, who had lived as a hermit in the
surrounding forest: 'among the trees, an old cripple with an injured spine
stands silently, his eyes two shining wells of blue.'
To survive, she said, she had to make a ‘holy fool’ of herself, a figure that
features large in Russian spirituality. De Beausobre emphasises that the
12
The case of Nicholas Sophrony, p 8 above, is another example. Upon hearing the order of
execution, he did not react outwardly; but inwardly he must have suffered inconsolably, even
while calling for help for his executioner.
13
The Woman Who Could Not Die, Iulia de Beausobre (Gollancz 1948).
10

‘fool’ is someone who deliberately chooses to participate in all the badness
and degradation of society, because the Russian understanding is that
good and evil are inextricably bound together. 'That is, to us, the greatest
mystery of life on earth... evil must not be shunned, but first participated
in and understood through participation, and then through understanding
transfigured.' Iulia describes the vast numbers of religious men and women
who were imprisoned in the gulag who made holy fools of themselves in
accepting their torture at the hands of their ‘ascetic’ rulers.
Much later, in the 1970's in England, De Beausobre carried her practice of
creative suffering into the process of dying. This she saw as a great process
of sorting out of the ‘dieable from the ‘undieable,’ and for her the process
could not have lasted too long. She regarded her carnal remains (by which
she meant flesh, blood, bone, hair etc) as rags for cleaning up some of the
pollutants of this world. She spoke of ‘our task – as Christians – to use our
bodies of the Resurrection as purifiers’ of the earth that we increasingly
pollute. 14 This idea she had absorbed from the nuns back in the logging
camp in the 1930's.
At the marginal hour, guide, Lord
That my mortal remains decompose into cleansing substances,
Which, in your hands
Depollute your beautiful universe
Polluted, in ignorance, not of choice
By me, my ancestors and my contemporaries. 15
* * *
In her preface to Creative Suffering, Sister Rosemary SLG, says that Iulia de
Beausobre’s approach is 'a reminder to Western Christians that suffering has
a corporate as well as a personal aspect, and that this becomes redemptive
within the mystical body of Christ.' It was certainly a reminder for me.
Over the years I have learned to accept suffering as a necessary part of the
process of repentance and transformation. To be alive and present to it as
Iulia described, but within that, to constantly request Divine assistance. To
ask: ‘What am I being shown here? What am I reacting to? What behaviour
or belief system should I let go of?’ The response always comes, sooner or
later. Painful as it may feel at the time, in hindsight the suffering invariably
makes sense.
De Beausobre, however, opens up horizons beyond the individual viewpoint,
directing us towards new possibilities. One of these opened up to me recently,
14
Constance Babington Smith, op.cit..
15
A prayer Iulia composed as she was dying, quoted in Constance Babington Smith, ibid
11

when I found myself wide awake at night with an inner knowledge that
something terrible had happened nearby. I prayed, finally fell asleep, and
awoke to the news of the Grenfell tower fire five miles away. A few days later
I found myself awake at one in the morning. My state of inner disturbance
told me something was happening and I kept vigil, praying till 6 am when
I read the news of an attack on worshippers at a nearby mosque. At these
times it feels as though something is praying through me, despite myself
who would rather be fast asleep. If it is the spirit of peace then all I can do is
try to follow Iulia’s example and be prepared to participate.
In an era when, within the Anglican Church, the overtly mystical tends to be
relegated to the margins, De Beausobre’s writings help to reconnect us to
the essential Christian truth that our suffering may have a transfigurative
role on a collective level. Her thesis gives flesh to St Seraphim Sarov’s famous
dictum that if you ‘acquire the Spirit of Peace a thousand souls around you
will be saved.’ Iulia was visited by the Spirit of Peace; through it she touched
a great many souls, both here and in Russia.
Caroline Walton, a CSWG Associate, is a professional translator from Russian to English and the
author of several books on Russia and the Soviet Union. She is currently working on a book on
spirituality during the Soviet period, particularly in relation to war and catastrophe.
THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX: HER HUMAN FACE
Sister Mary Michael
In many ways Marie Françoise-Thérèse Martin (2 January 1873 –
30 September 1897) could seem to be a spoilt child. She was the youngest
daughter in a family of nine, five of whom, all girls, survived early childhood.
Her mother died when she was four years old, and Thérèse was specially
cherished by her father and her older sisters, but her lively personality was
not eclipsed by them or the circumstances of her life.
At the age of fourteen she had an ardent desire to enter the local Carmel at
Lisieux there and then. Marie and Pauline, two of her sisters, had already
done so, but this was not the reason for Thérèse to make her request. Only
a direct call from God could have given her the courage to break the news to
her father, apply to her local bishop and then travel to Rome to ask Pope Leo
XIII himself to fulfil her wishes. She won the day, and on April 19th, 1888,
Thérèse did indeed enter Carmel when only fifteen years old.
She had already received many graces but in her humility, saw herself as least
of all, a mere toy for the Child Jesus to play with, a little insignificant flower
by comparison with God’s saints, the lilies and roses. But in her simplicity
12

and innocence she was granted an immediate perception of the essence of
sanctity – the perfect fulfilment of the divine will in response to a vision of
God’s burning love. Thérèse stretched towards this directly and absolutely,
without distraction or delay.
The secrets of her life have come down to us in her famous l’Histoire d’une
Âme (Story of a Soul), which Thérèse wrote at the request of her superiors, as
well as in her poems and letters. Her outward life appeared unremarkable but
her inner trials were costly indeed. At the age of 24 she died of tuberculosis.
The sacrifice was complete.
For one who has thus been apprehended by the burning fire of divine love
there can in fact be no option but to respond to Love with love – love for God,
for all mankind, for the whole of creation. Such all-embracing love is a sure
mark of sanctity. St Thérèse of Lisieux is no exception.
It would be a grave mistake to think that Christianity is world-denying,
or, more especially, that a vocation to the enclosed religious life involves a
disparagement of the human and the natural. Rather it is a concentration of
all the powers of body, mind and spirit on the one thing needful and so opens
up the human person to the wholeness of reality.
From early childhood Thérèse knew and loved God with all her heart and
soul and revelled in the beauty of his creation. Such love spilled over to
all with whom she had contact. In all this she was being prepared for her
Carmelite vocation and she is in direct line with the life and teaching of St
John of the Cross. But Thérèse and John alike went directly towards God, and
the very speed of that journey entailed a discipline and asceticism that to
unaccustomed eyes could seem like a disparagement of created things and
of natural human affections. By paradox, however, they show us the infinite
worth of all that God has made. A proper detachment teaches us to value
God’s creation as a manifestation of his glory, to use and not abuse it, and to
accept ourselves and one another with reverence and respect as sharers in it.
Thérèse is manifestly a poet and an artist, as she herself admits in her
writings, and which they themselves illustrate only too well. Imagery
from nature, insights into human behaviour, humorous anecdotes abound,
despite, in the Story of a Soul, the restrictions of style necessarily imposed in
an autobiography written by a religious under obedience to her superiors.
To the end of her short life, Thérèse was positive and outgoing, keeping
secret the inner trials which go to the making of a saint. Her love of beauty
and of people will come to express itself, but always in the last analysis with
reference to God, their creator, source and goal.
13

As a child of no more than six or seven, Thérèse was already discovering in
her own delightful way the majesty of God in creation while also sensing
that anything less than him was only second best:
On the way home (on Sunday evenings) I would look up at the stars that
shone so quietly, and the sight took me out of myself. In particular there
was a string of golden beads, which seemed, to my great delight, to be in the
form of the letter T. I used to show it to Papa and tell him that my name was
written in heaven; then, determined that I wasn’t going to waste any more
time looking at an ugly thing like the earth, I would ask him to steer me
along and walk with my head well in the air, not looking where I was going
– I could gaze for ever at that starry vault! 1
A year or two later Thérése caught her first sight of the sea:
I couldn’t take my eyes off it, its vastness, the ceaseless roaring of the waves,
spoke to me of the greatness and the power of God… I made a resolve that
I would always think of our Lord watching me, and travel straight on in his
line of vision till I came safe to the shore of my heavenly country. 2
But she also remembered on the same occasion hearing a lady and gentleman
ask her father if the pretty little girl was his daughter! Thérèse enjoyed the
compliment since she didn’t think she was pretty at all.
By the age of thirteen Thérèse felt herself to have grown up. She recalls some
of the moving times she and her sister Céline (four years her senior) spent
together. Both shared a deep love for God and of the natural world. Once
again it is the night sky that Thérèse remembers:
Those were wonderful conversations we had, every evening, upstairs in the
room with a view. Our eyes were lost in distance, as we watched the pale
moon rising slowly above the height of the trees. Those silvery rays she cast
on a sleeping world, the stars shining bright in the blue vault above us, the
fleecy clouds floating by in the evening wind ˗ how everything conspired to
turn our thoughts towards heaven! 3
We might be inclined to think that this preoccupation by Thérèse with the
beauties of nature was something of a pious exaggeration, a reading back
into the past of artificial sentiments self-consciously acquired later in
the cloister. But this is hardly so. There is a natural freshness and poetic
beauty about her writing, which somehow rings true. This is especially so
when she describes her journey to Italy. Her over-riding objective was to
gain permission from the Pope to enter Carmel at fourteen. But this did not
prevent her from drinking in all she saw. We can feel her intense excitement
as she crosses Switzerland by train.
1
Story of a Soul, St Therese of Lisieux Chapter VI Collins Fontana tr. Ronald Knox 1960
2
ibid., Chapter VII
3
ibid. Chapter XVI
14

Rome was our goal, but there were plenty of experiences on the way there.
Switzerland, where the mountain-tops are lost in cloud, with its graceful
pattern of water-falls, its deep valleys where the ferns grow so high and the
heather shows so red!... I was all eyes as I stood there, breathless at the
carriage door. I wished I could have been on both sides of the compartment
at once, so different was the scenery when you turned to look in the other
direction. 4
All the same her eyes were set upon the future and her vocation:
‘Later on’, I thought, ‘when the testing time comes, I shall be shut up within
the four walls of Carmel, and my outlook will be restricted to a small corner
of (the) starry sky. Very well, then, I shall be able to remember the sights I’m
looking at now, and that will give me courage.’ 5
No doubt that was how it was, though monastic enclosure proved to be no
obstacle to the development of her imaginative and creative powers. Not
only did she write poetry and paint pictures but over and over again in the
Story of a Soul, Thérèse uses imagery from the world of nature to illustrate
her thought, often in a light-hearted and humorous way. For instance, in
trying to explain that she didn’t care a scrap if other people stole her thunder
by claiming her ideas as their own, she puts it like this:
To suppose that this 'thought' belongs to me would be to make the same
mistake as the donkey carrying the relics, which imagined that all the
reverence shewn to the Saints was meant for its own benefit! 6
Or again, there is the delightful picture of the novices who had been put
under her care as a lot of playful sheep getting into mischief:
Of course they (the novices) think I’m terribly strict with them, these lambs
of your flock. If they read what I am writing now, they would say: “That’s
all very well, but she doesn’t seem to mind it much, running about after us
and lecturing us”. Oh dear, the spots I have had to point out on those white
fleeces, the wool that gets caught in wayside hedges for me to retrieve!
Never mind; let them say what they will, at the bottom of their hearts they
know that I really do love them. 7
There is a teasing, bantering tone about it all and one can well imagine the
affection in which Thérèse would have been held by her charges, and the
gratitude they must have felt, despite the heavy demands a saint in the
making would have made on them.
4
ibid, Chap XIX
5
ibid, Chap XIX
6
ibid, Chap XXXV
7
ibid, Chap XXXVI
15

Clearly, then, Thérèse shows that essential gaiety, that joyfulness which is
one of the most significant marks of sanctity. Here too she is at one with
her great predecessor in the Carmelite tradition, John of the Cross. But an
outward lightness of touch in those close to God usually veils from those
on the outside looking on, an inner costliness. In our own times, we have
discovered with amazement that another namesake, Blessed Mother Teresa
of Calcutta, suffered intense spiritual darkness and seeming lack of faith
interiorly, while in Christ’s name spending her whole self in the service of the
poor and destitute, and in cheerfulness of demeanour. Thérèse openly tells
us of such trials too, and thus verifies for us both the reality of her sanctity
but also her shared human frailty.
The ‘little way’ of spiritual childhood was no mere pious observance.
Community life offers boundless opportunities for patience and acts of
genuine love, despite feelings of repugnances. Self-discipline, practised in
simple ways, is part of the web and thrum of such daily life, schooling the
monastic for even greater trials.
I tried my best to do good on a small scale… all I could do was to take such
opportunities of denying myself as came to me without the asking; that
meant mortifying pride, a much more valuable discipline than any kind of
bodily discomfort…. 8
Beneath all this, however, lay the deeper interior trials inevitable for those
on the path to sanctity.
In addition, one might have thought that the life of prayer would come easily
to Thérèse, for in the conducive atmosphere of the cloister she had already
tasted something of union with God. However, she had also reached out
to embrace suffering and so was taken at her word. Any kind of spiritual
consolation whatsoever was ultimately, denied her. Everything had to be
done by faith rather than by feeling – and even this Thérèse accepted. She
describes her profession retreat as follows:
It brought no consolation with it, only complete dryness and almost a sense
of dereliction. Once more our Lord was asleep on the boat; how few souls
there are who let him have his sleep out!… for my own part I am content to
leave him undisturbed… Anyhow, my profession retreat, like all the retreats
I’ve made since, was a time of great dryness. 9
Similarly, her reception of Holy Communion, unlike her first one, brought no
consolation either and spiritual reading left her unmoved:
8
ibid, Chap XXVI
9
ibid, Chap XXVI
16

Don’t think of me as buoyed up on a tide of spiritual consolation; my only
consolation is to have none on this side of the grave. As for instruction,
our Lord bestows that on me in some hidden way, without ever making
his voice heard. I don’t get it from books, because I can’t follow what I
read nowadays; only now and again, after a long interval of stupidity and
dryness, a sentence I’ve read at the end of my prayer will stay with me…. 10
It was the same with the Rosary, with the Offices in choir and with any
help she might have had from those guiding her. Yet all this was only the
background to more costly interior trials. On the eve of her profession, for
example, she had severe doubts about her vocation: ‘I saw life at Carmel as a
desirable thing yet the devil gave me the clear impression it was not for me…
darkness everywhere.’
Then came that fatal Maundy Thursday when Thérèse began to spit blood.
She knew she had not long to live. This filled her with immense supernatural
joy, but by the end of Eastertide came the reaction, the last great spiritual
darkness, the testing of her faith – ‘To appreciate the darkness of this tunnel
you have to have been through it’, she wrote. Even thoughts of heaven became
impossible and the darkness itself taunted her: ‘It’s all a dream this talk of
a heavenly country…. Alright, go on longing for death! But death will make
nonsense of your hopes…’
It is claimed that in her last illness, Thérèse asked to have her medication
taken from her, lest she be tempted to put an end to things. With awe we
contemplate the immense courage manifested in this Gethsemane-like
experience, the last great temptation resisted, since in our time so many cry
out for euthanasia as a basic human right.
But to conclude on a quite different note: Thérèse speaks elsewhere with an
equally contemporary voice. We may ask whether there is a latent feminism
in her comments about the treatment of women in Italy? There is humour
certainly:
I still can’t understand why it is so easy for a woman to get excommunicated
in Italy! All the time people seemed to be saying: “No, you mustn’t go here,
you mustn’t go there, you’ll be excommunicated.” There is no respect for us
poor wretched women anywhere. And yet you’ll find the love of God much
more common among women than among men, and the women during the
Passion showed much more courage than the Apostles… I suppose our Lord
lets us share the neglect he himself chose for his lot on earth. In heaven,
where the last shall be first, we shall know more about what God thinks. 11
10
ibid, Chap XXX
11
ibid, Chap XXII
17

It was on heaven, of course, that Thérèse set her sights. Her love for her Lord
was boundless so that she ardently desired to fulfil all vocations at once.
Even Carmel itself didn’t seem enough sometimes:
I seem to have so many other vocations as well! I feel as if I were called to
be a fighter, a priest, an apostle, a doctor, a martyr…. 12
This could almost be the voice of modern women searching for recognition
and fulfilment. But Thérèse doesn’t rest there, she breaks through the male/
female divide to the realm of divine love – the vocation which includes and
transcends all others and is open to all. Perhaps here especially Thérèse, the
Carmelite nun at prayer in the heart of the church, will rain down a copious
shower of roses on us – the grace of discernment.
Sr Mary Michael CHC is a member of the Community of the Holy Cross, an Anglican Benedictine
order for women at Costock, in Leicestershire. She has written extensively on the saints and on the
monastic life.
12
ibid, Chap XXX
18

'LIFT UP YOUR HEARTS' –
THE SPIRITUAL FORMATION OF
NUN-ICONOGRAPHER SISTER JOANNA REITLINGER
WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO HER WALL PAINTINGS
'THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH'
CHRISTOPHER MARK
“Often, when doubts assail me while I am working – how
much longer shall I be able to continue? – I take comfort (at any
rate, I try to take comfort), in your words…that there remains work
on the most important Icon – one’s soul – and I try to switch over to that
work.…. [But] the mist hinders me. Only by God’s help!” (Sr Joanna, age 84,
to her spiritual director, Protopriest Alexander Men, 6 June, 1982) 1
On 31 May 1988, the 90-year old, deaf and blind, Russian woman who six
years earlier penned the above lines, died full of days and joie-de-vivre in a
wattle and daub hut in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. A great number of folk of all
ages and from all walks of life flocked to her funeral. All spoke warmly of
this almost legendary nun-iconographer who had brought faith, light and joy
into their lives with the small, personal icons she had painted in earnest and
had given away in abundance – ‘little candles,’ they were called – radiant,
iconographic glimpses of heaven that had brought them no little wonder,
and had sustained them in prayer over many difficult years.
Meanwhile, several thousand kilometres away, chief government
representatives of the United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR), who had
maintained (along with their predecessors) that religion was the ‘opiate
of the people,’ ironically, since Pascha (Russian Easter), had been ‘funding,
promoting, endorsing’ 2 and even actively participating in the millennial
celebrations of the conversion of the Rus to Christianity in 988 – a seminal
event for the Russian people. This principally religious memorial, unfolding
1
Sister Joanna [Reitlinger]/Fr Alexander Men/Fr Sergii Bulgakov, The Wise Sky: Sr Joanna
[Reitlinger]’s correspondence with Fr Alexander Men and Fr Sergii Bulgakov; quoted in
Yudina, Tatiana, Bearers of Unfading Light, (hereafter, BOUL), tr. Mike Whitton, Bluestone
Books, 2009, p 448; special thanks to Hélène Arjakovsky who rounded up all the Reitlinger
articles from RSCM Messenger for me; I gave them to Mike Whitton for translation; he
gave the translations to Tatiana Yudina who collated and significantly supplemented them
with additional texts and commentary. This article is heavily indebted to her book and his
translations for resource material.
2
cf. http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-18/soviet-union-celebrates-1000-years-ofchristianity.html
accessed 1 July 2017.
19

in St Petersburg (Leningrad, as it was called then; the city reclaimed its
original title in 1991), and also in Moscow (not to mention Ukraine and
elsewhere throughout Russia) – this religious memorial was to cap a series
of political events that had unintentionally and inadvertently led to a rapid
decline in communist Russia’s seventy-year experiment with atheism. Over
the course of the next thirty years, tens of millions of people would openly
profess their faith or come to faith 3 and thousands of churches and hundreds
of monasteries would be rebuilt or reopened. (By contrast, State celebrations
commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution
– March-November 1917 – would be restrained almost to the point of
indifference.) As church bells once more resounded across the nation, one
could easily imagine a faint smile crossing the lips of that old, Russian nun
interred in Tashkent, for she was no stranger to irony and paradox.
* * *
A propensity for paradox is commonplace among Christians; however, in the
case of Julia Nikolayevna Reitlinger, as she was known in the world, it was
virtually the norm. Indeed, this theme in her life was noted quite early by her
spiritual director, Father Sergius Bulgakov, who remarked in a letter dated
18 August 1931, about 11 years after their first encounter, that:
Your fate touches and moves me. In its extraordinary paradox and sacrifice
lies the seal of some kind of election. It is true, you do not always endure it.
[T]hen … I feel [your burden as] heavy and terrible, since like you, I too am
only human. Nonetheless, a life of sacrifice is most pleasing to God, not a
successful one. Lift up your hearts to the Lord! 4
Julia, who was born into an aristocratic family and was waited on by
nannies, governesses and servants for nearly twenty years, served as cook
and housekeeper for her spiritual teacher, S.N. Bulgakov and his family for
twenty-two years; she, who as a child was physically weak with breathing
problems, breathed in the spirit of Orthodoxy from her youth and lived to
90; she, who since adolescence increasingly wrestled with deafness, was
fluent in several languages, and taught them; she, who is often called ‘the
first woman iconographer,’ worked at a vocation that traditionally was the
exclusive domain of men 5 ; she, who after mastering traditional iconography,
3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Russian_Orthodox_Church; while those figures
might represent only 15% of the total population (http://www.pewforum.org/2017/11/08/
orthodox-christianity-in-the-21st-century/) this rapid resurgence is nevertheless remarkable if
not miraculous.
4
BOUL, 131. ‘Lift up your hearts to the Lord,’ from the Eucharistic Prayer in the Liturgy of St
John Chrysostom, but also to be found in most liturgies throughout the world.
5
Yazykova, I.K., Hidden and Triumphant: the underground struggle to save Russian iconography,
tr. Paul Genier, Paraclete Press, 2010, p 72. ‘Modernity came late to Russia…Be that as it may, women
now number among the most prominent of iconographers–both inside and outside Russia.’
20

forged a richly innovative, iconographic style aimed to ‘reduce the image to its
essentials,’ following precedents set by Andrei Rublev 6 and pre-14 th century
iconographers; she, who though intelligent, tall and handsome and a woman
of high standing, never married, becoming instead a nun, taking the name
Sister Joanna (after John the Baptist, Friend of the Bridegroom), and lived not
in a convent but in the world, under obedience in spite of her predilection
for independence; she, who identified as an artist, came to understand
iconography not only as an art form but also, more importantly, as theology
(another field reserved exclusively for men), and herself as a theologian;
she, who after a midlife crisis, disillusioned by a discrepancy between the
Christian ideal and its actual practice, left the church and paradoxically, if
not hypocritically, allowed herself, she writes enigmatically, to be ‘carried
away in a way that did not fit with either my age or my status’ 7 ; she, who had
devoted her life’s work to art, gave away her paints and brushes and took
up work decorating silk shawls at a far flung factory in Uzbekistan; she, who
then, in the twilight of her life, returned to the Church and under obedience
took up icon painting once again, turning out more icons during the next 15
years than she had in all the previous years of her life; she, who though in
dire need financially, never accepted payment for her icons 8 , but freely gave
them away to hundreds who requested them; she, who was forced into exile
by Russian atheists, returned to her motherland (actually to Uzbekistan, a
Russian satellite – another forced exile) and lived to see the first signs of
the downfall of the atheistic Russian government – the hidden life of Sister
Joanna [Reitlinger], whose Christian witness coincided with some of the
most turbulent religio-political events of the twentieth century might well
stand out in sharp relief as an example of perseverance towards holiness in
a world slow to discern the ‘signs of the times’.
* * *
What does Sr Joanna mean by referring to the soul as icon 9 and why is it
‘the most important icon’? In Greek, ‘icon’ means ‘image’. In the book of
Genesis, it states categorically (as well as mystically), that human beings
were created in the image and likeness of God:
‘Then God said: Let us make human beings in our image (eikona), after our
likeness. … God created humankind in his image (eikona); in the image
(eikona) of God he created them; male and female he created them.’ (Genesis
1:26-27).
6
Think of his ‘The Hospitality of Abraham,’ a complex image from Genesis 18 redacted to
three angels, in what has become known as the icon of the ‘The Holy Trinity’.
7
Sister Joanna [Reitlinger], Autobiography, originally in Vestnik RSCM, No 159, 1990, pp 84-
116; in BOUL, 330
8
Ibid, BOUL, 376
9
See excerpt at beginning of this article.
21

According to the traditional Christian interpretation, the image and likeness
of God in our original parents, rendered them loving, free and joyful, in
communion with God and each other, innocent, unashamed (sinless), and
(arguably – the fathers were by no means unanimous) immortal 10 ; and
God was well pleased. Throughout the creation process, God saw all he had
created was ‘good,’ but once human beings came into the picture, ‘everything
was very good,’ (Genesis 1:31). That is, until the Fall (Genesis 3), when the
image of God in these two ancestors underwent abrupt distortion. In The
Undistorted Image, a literary portrait of the spiritual elder, Saint Silouan, by
his disciple, Father Sophrony [Sakharov], Silouan’s ascetic struggles lead
to the restoration in him of the original image of God that was in Adam. In
referring to the soul as icon, Sister Joanna is speaking similarly – that ‘work’
of restoring that original image and likeness of God in herself; it is a ‘most
important work,’ she tells us, in the sense that it is urgent: if she does not
attend to it presently – ‘now’ (2 Corinthians 6:2b) – who will, and when?
The Fathers understood this restorative process to be a work of co-operation:
the soul is, as it were, in ‘training’ (ascesis), working together with God, who,
in effect, draws the regions of darkness in the soul, dissipated by the passions
and recurrent human self-will, back into a unity with himself for healing.
Because the soul, created in fellowship and communion with God, had been
negligent, distrustful, and disobedient (causing disfigurement in the soul),
by means of the opposite disposition – humble obedience, dispassion and
trust in God – the will of the soul is eventually realigned with God’s, and
restoration in the image and likeness of God begins.
How can we be certain that the ‘image of God’ is fundamental to our souls?
Metropolitan Kallistos, in a typically lucid talk for the Institute for Orthodox
Christian Studies (IOCS), Cambridge, in 2015 11 , lists seven reference points
for the existence of the image and likeness of God in human beings – attributes
that do not figure prominently in other animals: the soul, he says, is a) God
thirsty; b) Self aware; c) Freedom loving; d) Creative; e) Eucharistic; f) Social
and g) A Pilgrim. He goes on to stress that without God humankind cannot
become truly human:
The first and obvious indication that we are in the image of God is that God
is central to the human person [a nagging feature that does not go away
even if we wish it would]. We are created in fellowship and communion with
10
Theological axioms are not meant to be evidence-based history. They attempt to provide
a meta-narrative for why we are here, why we got to be the way we are and what we might
legitimately aim for as we become truly human over time. To say that humankind was created
immortal while obviously it is not currently the case, is merely a theological way of saying
how far we have strayed from what we are really meant to become.
11
Metro. Kallistos [Ware], http://pemptousia.com/video/metropolitan-kallistos-ware-on-whatdoes-it-mean-to-be-a-person-part-two/
22

God. If we refuse that fellowship and communion we deny our true self. If
you affirm God, you affirm the human also. If you deny God, you deny the
human also. [For example] in the Soviet Union, you had a systematic denial
of God, but also, under Stalin, you had a systematic denial of the freedom
and dignity of the human being. It was not a coincidence that these two
things went together. Secularisation involves dehumanisation. The human
animal is a God thirsty animal and a human being without God is not human,
but subhuman… 12
We will now endeavour to put this seven-point scheme to work, using it as a
framework on which to hang certain events in Sister Joanna’s life. As Sister
Joanna herself wrote to one of her spiritual children later in life:
We often must do the thing we don’t want in the name of God…. We do not
always know what is good for us and what is evil, but we must always be the
prayer: ‘not mine, but thy will be done’…. You see, at times the most difficult
and most necessary thing is to do the very thing you do not want.’ 13
A life intent on holiness is the way of the Cross. Sister Joanna chose that way
in order to allow her humanness to be refined, indeed, redefined – divinised
into the original image and likeness of God. It is a ‘narrow way’ that brings
dozens of practical and spiritual rewards, of which we will review but seven.
God Thirsty
Julia Nikolayevna from an early age identified God with joy and her encounter
with joy was often derived from very simple things: ‘…[W]e grew up in an
atmosphere of joie-de-vivre, which pervaded our devotional life as well.’ 14 A
particularly vivid memory: Paschal night in St Petersburg, when ‘everything
was alive and trembling,’ the whole city was ‘charged with paschal joy’
while ‘peals of bells called back and forth [and] we [children] were ready to
exchange Easter kisses with every last beggar….’ 15
Prayer came naturally for Julia as it does for many children brought up in
observant families, but when plainly efficacious it was especially joyful. She
recalls her mother appealing to her daughters to pray for a neighbour’s little
boy who had been suddenly struck down by meningitis. His miraculous
recovery from an incurable disease convinced them that his healing was due
to their prayers. 16
12
Ibid
13
D.P. Baranov, ‘In Memory of the Nun Joanna (Julia Nikolayevna Reitlinger)’, RSCM Messenger
1990, No 159 II, 105–116; in BOUL, 466, 468.
14
Ibid, 14-15
15
Popova, op cit, p. 3-4 and Note 4 drawn from Reitlinger JN, Recollections. Manuscript.
Popova writes: ‘This variant was written at the request of a friend, N.A. Iofan (1932-2003). It
differs from the published variants (RSCM Messenger 1988, No 154 and 1994, No. 170) in its
elaboration and freer expression.’
16
BOUL, op cit, 17
23

For joy to be complete, however, it must be transmissible. But how? Later in
life, she writes:
I am always tormented by one thing: there are so many unhappy people
even among believers – but I am happy. How can I give them this happiness?
I try, but do not succeed…’ 17
As she refined her iconographic vision, however, a few people began to take
notice. In Paris, when she was commissioned to ‘decorate’ a church with wall
paintings, she featured Christ surrounded in adoration by angels and saints
in the heavenly sphere, presiding over the earthly church with multitudes,
their hands raised in prayer, and lots of animals: tigers, zebras, reptiles,
gazelles, antelopes and birds of many kinds, all quietly, with their upward
gazes, participating in the praise:
The priest of the church at Meudon, Fr Andrei Sergiyenko, spoke again
and again from the pulpit about the evil force that stands as a wall around
the hermitages of Mount Athos… But here Sister Joanna … has painted
the church with child-like joy: Christ [in glory], surrounded by jolly little
creatures, in order that the believers, [she said] ‘might rejoice like children
even while everything round about us is wretched and sad.’ She was
criticised for this breach of the canon’s strict provisions, but, little by little,
everyone understood that her philosophy was a life-asserting philosophy:
she was conquering despondency, which for a Christian is a great sin in the
sight of the Lord. 18
In spite of her physical handicaps, deafness and the onset of blindness, she
carried something of this joy wherever she went in the twilight of life. From
a comment from one of her spiritual children in memory of her visits to
Moscow:
Her deafness was not felt in conversations with her, so attentive was she
to each person with whom she spoke…. The chief feeling from meeting Julia
Nikolayevna was one of holiday joy. [The] meeting was festive and sparkling....
In her letters, Sister Joanna often speaks of building the Kingdom of Heaven
here on earth (as the Gospel says: the Kingdom of God is within you [Luke
17:21]). And she had experience of abiding in the Kingdom of Heaven; she
herself brought it to us, showed it to us, parting the veil. In spite of all her
disabilities and physical sufferings, some sort of joyful force issued from her.
She was the centre to which people gravitated, a centre of giving; she gave
living, gospel joy. 19
17
G.V. Popov, The Spiritual World and Icon Painting of the Nun Joanna [Reitlinger], Exhibition
Catalogue, 20 Sept-17 Oct 2000, Andrei Rublyev Museum, p 5
18
BOUL, 141; From Yu.N.Zavadovsky, Unknown Pages in the Oriental Studies of Our Country,
Moscow, 2004, p 37
19
Olga Erokhina, Sister Joanna; in BOUL, *
24

Sister Joanna’s God thirstiness could be quenched only by the source of her
delight – that abiding presence:
Only one thing is needful: to strive for unity with Christ, again and again,
and forever, and continually and everywhere in everything to seek to be one
with God; the rest will come by itself. 20
When the Soul is Self Aware, Freedom-loving and Creative
By self-awareness Metropolitan Kallistos is speaking of human beings who
have the ability for discriminating thought, consciously capable of making
moral choices between good and evil; human beings are equipped with
the aptitudes of reason (logos) and wisdom (sophia) which enable them to
work through weighty predicaments, which as often as not have far–ranging
consequences. On Freedom-loving: ‘…since God is free, we, each of us in
God’s image, are inherently free. God’s freedom is absolute; our freedom is
derived from sharing in God’s energies. The best Christian model of freedom
is the Mother of God who, having confronted fear, accepts by her Fiat 21
her vocation, not under compulsion, but freely. Freedom is always under
threat; it constantly has to be defended. It is tragic, requires self-sacrifice,
is cross-bearing. Many renounce freedom to ease their lot. When we reject
our freedom, we deny our humanness. If we deprive others their freedom,
we dehumanise them. Freedom opens out into creativity. Human beings,
in relation to God, are 'sub-creators' with God, having the ability to invent,
innovate, 'shape or reshape their environment' using both simple and
complex tools. 22
A sense of personal mortality likely honed Julia’s self-awareness. She
writes: ‘I clearly recall that the 'remembrance of death' was no stranger
to me from quite an early age.’ 23 So was tragedy. Julia’s eldest sister, while
away at boarding school, succumbed to scarlet fever at the age of fourteen
– ‘burnt up within two weeks’ for the lack of suitable medication. Julia was
quite young at the time. Expanding an earlier quote: ‘Olya’s death… coloured
[mother’s] whole life. But she did not cloud our childhood with the shadow
of her grief; we grew up in an atmosphere of joie-de-vivre, which pervaded
our devotional life as well’. 24
20
D.P. Baranov, ‘In Memory of the Nun Joanna (Julia Nikolayevna Reitlinger)’, RSCM Messenger
1990, No 159 II, 112
21
‘Be it unto me according to your word.’ (Luke 1:38)
22
Metropolitan Kallistos, op cit, see note 11. Creativity need not be artistic. Every self-denying
act that hastens the ‘new creation’ is creative. As we have seen from the first article on Julia
de Beausobre, even suffering becomes creative in proper contexts. As Nicholas Berdyaev
showed in his essay, ‘War and Eschatology’ (see Come to the Father, No 31, 2016) charitable
acts (feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and especially those acts leading to freedom:
emancipating anyone under the yoke of slavery) are creative acts, manifesting the ‘new
creation’.
23
Ibid, 15
24 -
See p 3, note *
25

Left to Right: Thousand upon thousands redeemed (detail); Seven Seals of God 's wrath: Bowls 1-4 to promote repentance
After attending an exhibition of mostly Old Believer icons, one reviewer’s
response: “Deadly, motionless... if it were not for Reitlinger’s icons”. A woman
iconographer, an elite member of the Russian art circle, commented: “You might
not agree with her, but you cannot reckon without her”.
Right to Left: The seer, John of Revelation, amidst the seven lamps and the seven stars; then the First Seal is broken.

Bowls 5-7 bring to an end the powers of this world. Silence in heaven for about half an hour. Rev 8:1 See p.31
‘...it seemed her icons were painted by the Spirit, in one breath – irrepressibly,
as if in a hurry, without painstaking attention to detail or evenness of line – yet
precisely, vulnerable to risk and in full trust of God.’ - Olga Erokhina
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; Souls of the Slain under the altar; the earthquake and heaven rolled up.

From her mother, ‘the nearest and dearest person,’ Julia learned the
importance of freedom that came from making one’s own choices: Her
mother, she says, was ‘a natural-born teacher’, who taught ‘by suggestion’:
… in spite of all her sacrificial love for us, there was a complete absence of
over-parenting, and from this came freedom. For instance, when she saw I
was being indecisive, she would not make up my mind for me, but left me
to it.... 25
But freedom always comes under threat. The revolution abruptly cut Joanna
off from her studies in art where she had been making rapid advancement.
Julia’s mother, even while living in St Petersburg and seeing the end in sight,
‘took the revolution like a Christian’. While the buzz among their neighbours
was fear of property loss, her mother instead resigned herself to nonpossessiveness:
‘we’ve enjoyed it, now let others enjoy it.’ 26 Then at the
height of the Civil War, Julia’s two next-eldest sisters died within days of each
other. They were en route to the war zone where they intended to volunteer
as sisters of charity but contracted typhus along the way. 27 As the Bolsheviks
closed in on Crimea, to where the Reitlingers had fled from St Petersburg,
her mother in spite of the best of medical care available also succumbed to
typhus.
There followed a narrow escape from Russia, a kind of external freedom, but
inwardly Julia was utterly distraught by the death of her mother – ‘My grief,
the greatest in my life, was boundless’ 28 – and she turned numb with inertia,
unable to decide or do anything, a condition that lasted for more than a year.
Her younger sister, Katya, had to arrange every detail of their escape.
Finally, in Poland, Julia wrote a ‘desperate’ letter to Fr Sergii, telling him she
would give up her art studies and asked for his blessing to enter a monastery;
she forgot to include her address. Amazingly, a reply arrived a year later in
Warsaw where Julia and her sister were living with their father as refugees;
it had been held up by a disruption in postal services: 29
Your thought, hardly spoken but previously felt, about the monastery,
does not surprise me, but it is either too soon, or not at all right. I have
no doubt that you belong to God, and no one can encroach upon you;
the ring of divine fervour surrounds you. But the external form of your
monasticism has not yet been found in creative terms, and you cannot
take it from without just as a form because those forms are not yours. 30
25
Sister Joanna, Autobiography, op cit; in BOUL, 13.
26
ibid, 26
27
bid, 30
28
Ibid, 34
29
Evidently, Fr Sergii found out her address in some unexplained fashion.
30
Ibid, 37
28

Her first responsibility, he tells her, is to devote herself to developing her
God-given talents, but not apart from prayer.
Study, follow your creative journey, and in it, create yourself, of course,
holding on to the cloak of Christ, persisting and hurrying with the thoughts
of your heart fixed on Him and in prayer to Him. I do not wish to prophesy
but I do believe I shall meet you again in this life, in something important
and decisive…. May Christ bless you and make you wise. 31
In typical Russian fashion then, Julia got up, ‘brushed herself off’; her inertia
disappeared, fortitude returned. The two sisters found safe passage to Prague
by means of influential friends. Julia secured a place in The Prague Academy
of Art and her sister at an architectural institute. Both applied themselves to
learning the Czech language.
In Prague, Julia researched the whole history of Russian art in depth and began
to take a keen interest in iconography. She learned the technique of ancient
iconography from a fellow pupil who had been trained by an Old Believer. 32
Technique, technique and only technique! No need for prayer! He initiated
me into all the secrets of this craft. …I did not imitate the icons of the Old
Believers much, only enough to learn. (I was dreaming of the icon as art
form; nonetheless, technique was essential). My first attempts, of course,
were unsuccessful…. 33
Fr Sergii, himself exiled from Russia in a purge against the intelligentsia,
arrived in Prague with his family and swiftly obtained a professorship at the
university. By this time, Julia’s proficiency in iconography had matured. Fr
Sergii saw that she was allowing herself to become a worthy instrument. He
records this in his diary:
Julia has finished her icons. The blue of the Theotokos’ cloak sings in my
heart; …I offered a service of prayer and thanksgiving for this marvel …
Lord, bless her, save and have mercy on her; give me the understanding and
strength to guide her … Everything is wonderful in life, and this blue has
been revealed through Sophia’s envoy. Maidenly shy greatness, prompted by
faith and love … the Most Pure Virgin with the Eternal Infant. The Saviour’s
face is the highest artistic achievement in an icon. This is an event … the first
real movement in the world … toward the internal regeneration of art in
worship and divine contemplation. I stand by this wonder in the making and
am struck dumb when I see what flowers of paradise are blossoming here. 34
31
Ibid.
32
Old Believers refused to ‘receive’ Czar Peter the Great’s 17 th Century innovation to westernize
the Russian Church; they adhered to the classical Church tradition, including iconography, at least
in its outward forms.
33
BOUL, op cit, 40
34
Ibid, BOUL, 39-40.
29

On the feast of Saint Sergius, Julia presented Fr Sergii with another icon of
the Mother of God of Tenderness of Seraphimo. A new kind of freedom was
dawning, opening up her creativity.
With this Tenderness icon, a new light has come into my home, a new grace,
new tenderness. I cannot look at this icon without trembling, my heart
melts, my soul crying out from my body [soars] to somewhere far and lofty.
It is a marvel. This wonderful girl is gifted with the grace of the Holy Spirit,
He acts through her... 35
We now jump ahead some twenty-one years. Julia has taken monastic
vows, having found a monastic ‘form’ suited to her personal circumstances,
and has received her Bishop’s blessing to live as a nun in the world, as a
servant-iconographer for God. She is now Sister Joanna. It is 1946. The war
is over but rationing is rife. She has been commissioned to paint a series of
wall paintings for the London chapel of the Fellowship of St Alban and St
Sergius on a theme of her choice. The ‘task is huge’ and there is a ‘paucity
of resources’. She dedicates this work to Fr Sergii who had died two years
previously. Her choice of theme: ‘The Mystery of the Church’.
Sister Joanna chooses, in her own terms, to ‘illustrate’ 36 symbolically
several as yet unexplored motifs from scripture, juxtaposing images from
Hebrew Scriptures with those of the New Testament: the Spirit of God at
the beginning hovering over the waters (Genesis 1:1) – and eons later, the
same Spirit would generate the Church; the Logos creating creatures of
sea, land and air (Genesis 1:3-25) – and the Author of life will become the
Bridegroom of the Church; the Holy Trinity ‘fashioning’ Eve from Adam’s
side (Genesis 2:18, 21-23) a scriptural ‘type’ for the Church born out of
Christ’s wounded side [see inside rear cover] – every scene is shown at the
climax of action. The effect is energetic, spirited, forceful, effectual and, as
a whole, spellbinding. One can almost ‘hear’ an accompanying soundtrack
– what Sister Joanna called the ‘music of the kingdom’ 37 – while our eyes
gaze simultaneously on the intermingling of history and revelations from
the eschaton: the Lamb of God being sacrificed for the salvation of the world
35
B. Popova, op cit, 17 -18.
36
Sister Joanna drew a sharp distinction between icons and illustrations (see, Sister Joanna,
Letters to Moscow Youth, (Letter to Zhenya, 1972), Vestnik RKD, no 159, 1990). Many of her socalled
icons, particularly not a few belonging to the family of ‘little candles’, were in fact ‘holy’
illustrations. Because they were symbolic images, they retained something of the quality of
an icon in that the symbol participates ontologically in its prototype – for example, with these
wall paintings, in the eschaton and in the apocalyptic imagery – first through the medium
of the artist’s prayer and expertise, and then through one’s own prayerful encounter with
the prototype. Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the apostles and the saints, or theophanies
– Annunciation, Baptism, Transfiguration, etc. – are never ‘illustrated’. Only proper icons are
suitable. Illustrations depict as yet unexplored themes from scripture and allow the artist
more freedom to ‘apocalypse’ (i.e., unveil) as yet ‘unseen’ mysteries.
37
BOUL, 488
30

– the seed of the Church; the Holy Spirit hovering over the Mother of God
and the Apostles in the upper room – the birth of the Church; the Bride of
Christ, the Jerusalem from above, the Holy City descending and hovering
over a ‘field’ of crosses – the culmination or ‘marriage’ of a Church that does
not forget but remembers. And again from the book of Revelation: the four
horsemen of the apocalypse and the ‘bowls of wrath’ poured onto the earth
after the opening of the seven seals and the 144,000 redeemed – all trials,
tribulation and sanctification of the Church that lives in the world but is not
of it. Like high-speed photographic images, some of this action seems to be
caught at a fraction of a second, but unlike the photographic images, the
action is not ‘frozen’, for these images combine all three temporal frames
of reference at once – past, present and future – confusing and suspending
time in a continuum of extra-temporality. All this is seemingly done ‘hastily’,
without much attention to detail since the images were to be viewed in the
flicker of candlelight, so that their forms and colours would vibrate gently,
almost imperceptibly, as though the persons depicted were living, breathing.
Later, an acquaintance of Sister Joanna upon encountering her work, wrote: ‘
…it seemed her icons were painted by the Spirit, in one breath – irrepressibly,
as if in a hurry, without painstaking attention to detail or evenness of line –
yet precisely, vulnerable to risk and in full trust of God.’ 38
Only two ‘traditional’ icons are included in the ensemble: the one of Christ
calling the Church to Unity (John 17), and the other of the Mother of God,
(see front cover) the ‘Throne’ of God without whose consent there would be
no Church – the ‘holy ground’ for whom the incarnate Godmanchild takes
off his sandals as did Moses who shed his footwear before the Burning Bush
(Exodus 3:5) – which itself is a ‘type’ of the Blessed Virgin, for she bore in her
womb the divine fire and, like the Burning Bush, was not consumed. While
the Western eye might see a portrait of mother and child, the trained eye
of the Eastern Church will contemplate the rich symbolism that amounts
to nothing less than an assured covenant of fellowship and communion
between heaven and earth.
On the subject of this icon, we can see a general principle – so vital in
Reitlinger’s work – the degree of interpersonal communion. She achieves
this, as do most accomplished iconographers, with the use of slightly
enlarged eyes, the coalescence of the nimbuses of the two subjects and the
priestly hand of the Godmanchild set in blessing over his mother’s heart.
Sister Joanna then uses the mother’s clothing to enfold the child protectively,
but at the same time the clothing opens out in the form of an upended
arch to ‘relate’ him to the viewer; in other words, she is protective but not
possessive. Hence, while the two do not make direct eye contact, they are
still in a limitless interpersonal exchange in which the viewer is invited to
38
Erokhina, Olga, About Sister Joanna, in The Wise Sky, op cit, 29; in BOUL, 469
31

partake. 39
With primary tools of pen, pencil, pigment powders, paint pots, paintbrushes and
cheap, imported plywood, Sister Joanna is not only attempting to ‘shape or reshape
the human conceptual world’ through images, but also is aiming to give us a new
(or renewed) vision of the
iconographic image itself,
focusing on the personal and
interpersonal, on energy as
well as form, on relationship
that is above emotion,
saturated by self-awareness
and intellect. These exterior
dualities mirror the
practised interior reality of
the artist: her soul as it were
In 1972, a certain art historian, V.A. Volkov
ostensibly ‘formed a very high opinion of the
wall paintings, surprising even himself with
his appraisal: “And this after Italy!”, he said
with a laugh.’ It appears Sister Joanna did not
receive much feedback, if any, on completing
her commission for the Fellowship, for she
adds, ‘I do not know what response it drew
locally’.
travels a two-way road, repudiating self-expression along one avenue and
thirsting for God along the other:
Creativity for me almost = [equals] seeking God’s will…. You detest
your self-importance, your work: those cold, soulless, lazy lines
that express nothing – you confess to your dilettantism…. [and]
by coming to hate what is ‘yours’, you love Him in yourself. You
do not trample His gift underfoot nihilistically and ‘satanically’,
but you obediently desire to develop it, and offer it back to Him. 40
Eucharistic
The best definition of man, his chief characteristic, that which makes him
to be himself is gratitude, thanksgiving. What distinguishes the human
being from every other animal is our privilege to bless God and to invoke
his blessing on other creatures and things. The human animal is a priestly
animal. We continually offer the world back to God, and in that act of offering
we become truly ourselves. 41
On 11 September 1935, Julia wholly and definitively offered herself to God,
by taking the monastic habit. ‘…[I]t was the happiest day of my life…at that
moment I was given the grace of such complete devotion to Christ that I have
not experienced otherwise either before or since.’ 42 In her diary entry for the
day, she writes, almost breathlessly:
Now I feel the apocalypse of Christ approaching. Be of good courage.
Believing in our time means believing in the apocalypse of Christ. My soul is
so suddenly lit up with clarity. Even so, ‘Come, Lord Jesus’. And if I love Christ
39
These wall paintings and icons are now on permanent loan from the Fellowship of St Alban
and St Sergius to St Anne’s Orthodox Christian Parish, Northampton, England
40
BOUL, 485
41
Metropolitan Kallistos, op cit, paraphrased
42
Autobiography, op.cit.in BOUL, 161
32

and love beauty and wish to give it flesh – I pray to the Lord: may he send
this vision, for I believe it exists. I must see it as an artist and re-render it –
that means rushing in there – into the apocalypse – and somehow revealing
it because there is beauty in all its strength. 43
Sister Joanna is using the Greek word, apocalypsis, correctly here. It doesn’t
mean ‘catastrophe’, as popular culture would have it. Apocalypsis means an
‘uncovering’ or ‘unveiling’ of what heretofore lay hidden or unobserved. In
receiving the grace of vision directly from Christ, Sister Joanna is offering
to return it, not as she received it, but ‘re-rendered’, that is, ‘apocalypsed’,
iconographically, for the benefit of the church and the world at large. What
is ‘apocalypsed’? What is revealed? The human being as person. The person
as the image of God. Which, it would follow, might include God thirstiness,
self-awareness, freedom, etc., but no, iconographically, you ‘show, don't tell.’
You show, for example, personal and interpersonal; energy and substance;
the transcendence of time; the interrelationship between ideas, events, and
persons with the actions of the unseen God. The artist’s priestly vocation is
to make visible the invisible. Her images are ‘visibly audible’ and intricately
symbolic. As a symbolist, Sister Joanna symbolizes iconographically and
illustratively the wrath of God, the fear of God, the mercy of God. Believers
will see it, and many will marvel. Others will see only colours, lines, objects
and scenes, but will fail to be challenged either by the symbolism or the
mystery – unaware that these things interact with the very things they
represent. Underlying ‘The Mystery of the Church’, possibly Sister Joanna’s
magnum opus, is a visibly audible hymn of thanks and praise.
Social
We are in the image of God, the Holy Trinity as well as Christ, the divine Logos.
God is not just a unity, he is a union. Within the one God is a community
or communion of three persons loving one another, three persons in
interpersonal relationship. We humans, created in the image of the triune
God, are created for relationship. God is social, a society, if you will. We are
given as our supreme calling to love one another. Without mutual love there
can be no true confession of God as Trinity; without mutual love, we are not
truly personal. 44
Sister Joanna would insist, and I am sure Metropolitan Kallistos would
agree, that there can be no mutual love in the spiritual sense, without first
encountering this triune God, at least in the face of Jesus. Ongoing belief in
God takes us to the threshold of beholding God first-hand.
There is no religious life without an encounter with God, without, in some
way, seeing the face of God…. Everyone finds it by his own approach, in his
own language, within his very self. Or rather, he must come to recognise it
43
Sister Joanna [Reitlinger], Recollections See Popova op.cit. Note 15
44
Metropolitan Kallistos, op cit, paraphrased.
33

within himself, perceive this interior marvel within himself, but not make
claims about its permanence or intensity, brightness or clarity; in fact, not
make any claims at all. Rather one must sharpen one’s inward vision so as
to never pass by it again without seeing. This vision is given to some people
easily and frequently; to others little and rarely. The lives of the prophets are
specially marked out by these 'encounters'. 45
Without these encounters, without coming to recognise the ‘interior marvel’,
we are like tourists in a foreign country, accommodated whimsically by the
natives, but clueless. Without ‘the encounter’, the best we can do is copy
forms of pious behaviour and look the part. In times of war, love is tested,
making the need for ‘the encounter’ ever more urgent.
…But these days are nightmares. Firstly, it is painful for me to experience
the victory procession of the antichrist, that is Hitler (‘who is like unto the
beast’), and, of course, the psychology of the unyielding war (not for me,
glory to God, not for one minute). Second, I worry about the people who are
mine… Thirdly, the very things that are happening, the outpouring of lies,
faintheartedness, betrayal…history will take its course and the Kingdom of
God will appear, but now there is darkness over all the world.… 46
For the monastic who must, in isolation, find creative ways of fulfilling the
commandment to love, relationship becomes even more challenging. Would
that the monastic’s love be for ‘all’ – universal? To what extent can it also be
personal? Sister Joanna sees relationships as no less revealing of the divine
mystery than the visions she receives for iconography, even more so, because
they ‘apocalypse’ the person we and ‘the other’ are becoming. So delicate is
the art and science of relationship that it requires the hand of the ‘divine
artist’ to make them pure. She wrestles with this.
What a mystery human relationships are! How could a whole spiritual
[i.e., monastic] culture have been built on the flight of man from man!
Ontologically, man is not alone. Although in his standing before God there is
extreme loneliness! Man dies alone. But love in man is the revelation of God
in life, in people. Yes, what is ‘love’? It is the mystery of life. The mystery of
creation. 47
Father Sergii in a letter to her suggests that universal love is actually learned
through deepening personal love. By ‘deepening’, he means striving for
friendship at the core of all her relationships, for ‘the Church is friendship’.
This is exemplified by a number of his letters to her, in which he sometimes
greets her as, ‘My dear friend and daughter…’ or ends them with, ‘your father
and friend’. Father Sergii’s only proviso is never to let personal love become
45
Sister Joanna Reitlinger, Fragments of Recollection of Fr Sergii, Vestnik RKD, No 159, II, 1990,
50-83; in BOUL, 203
46
BOUL, 190
47
BOUL, 200
34

selfish.
Of course … [there is] always the danger of turning personal love into egoistic
love, the wide road to self-love (i.e., always expecting something in return),
– this is blindness of heart, not wisdom… Heroism in love [a readiness to
lay down one’s life for one’s friends] must be – and is! – characteristic of
monastics. 48
Sister Joanna finds she can purify friendship by relying steadfastly on ‘the
encounter’:
A monk is by definition doomed to tragic isolation – but perhaps this
isolation might also be his greatest fortune, and sometimes even a blessing.
Because in it he encounters the blessing of friendship with God. And through
that – freedom. And in this freedom in the Lord, everyone becomes a friend,
a relative. 49
Finally we note Sister Joanna had a wide body of relationships across the
ecumenical spectrum and maintained an extensive correspondence with
many of them either as ‘friend’ or ‘spiritual mother’. One spiritual child tells
us that during the course of a decade and a half, he received over 200 letters
from her, and when he failed to respond for one reason or another, she would
write a quick note asking after him. 50
In prayer, we live in the infinite spaciousness of God’s love. In prayer, our
diminishing existence is replenished. In prayer, we can love without end.
How weak our faith is! How fainthearted we pray! How often, in our hour
of temptation do we seek support and help from people, instead of turning
with all our heart to our only Friend – Christ! 51
Pilgrim
The Fathers were already by the 2 nd century beginning to make a distinction
between image and likeness. Accordingly, each of us receives the image at
birth, but the full perfection of God’s likeness will be conferred only at the
consummation of all things. Image is starting point, the initial equipment
that we are given; it might be obscured but never lost. The likeness signifies
our endpoint – holiness, deification, partaking in the divine life. 52
Several key events in Sister Joanna’s life stand out as manifestations of the
Holy Spirit, drawing her ever more urgently along the route of her pilgrimage;
all are pivotal and formative, all are important, but we have time for only
48
BOUL, 170; also in The Wise Sky, Moscow, 2002, p. 303
49
Ibid, 489
50
D.P. Baranov, op cit.
51
Sister Joanna, Spiritual Diary, op cit, BOUL, 482
52
Metropolitan Kallistos, op cit, paraphrased
35

one, the one that perhaps demonstrates something of the likeness of God to
which the soul aspires.
This incident, or, to be sure, series of incidents, begins on Whit Monday,
1944, the 26 th anniversary of Fr Sergii’s ordination. On this day, he has a final
stroke that forces him to take to his bed. And so a 40-day vigil begins for
Sister Joanna and three other spiritual daughters 53 of Fr Sergii, what Sister
Joanna calls ‘the sacrament of Fr Sergii’s death’.
We hardly slept, hardly ate, did not feel hunger and had no need to overcome
it. During those first days we did not divide up our turns of duty, but all
kept watch en masse, afraid of 'missing' something. It is difficult to put into
words the atmosphere that surrounded Fr Sergii and the experience we
received from it. But somehow it brought all that Fr Sergii had taught us by
the example of his life and all that he had said in his books to a harmonious
conclusion. It seemed as if without this new experience (new at least for us),
everything would have been incomplete, not sufficiently real….
Five years previously, Fr Sergii had suffered from a cancerous larynx. It was
surgically removed and he was then given a few months to live. He defied
all expectations even learning to speak again with an implanted tube as a
replacement for his throat. He still served the Eucharist though at a much
lower pitch, and sometimes only a whisper. He also wrote another couple
of books and several articles. Throughout the present illness, Fr Sergii’s lips
moved almost imperceptibly and his face continually changed; sometimes
he would appear old and sickly and at other times youthful and bright.
It was such an overflowing treasure, undeserved, and at no cost. At times it
seems to me as if that was the happiest time of my life. Why should that have
been? We must have been touching those things that the Lord has prepared
for those who love Him, that sweetness of the Holy Spirit, before which the
sweetness of this world fades away… 54
Thus, begins the ‘new’ experience. A few scholars have questioned the
veracity of what follows – suggesting that it might be due to the ‘imagination’
of the author, who after all was an innovative artist. Bear in mind, however,
not one, but four people were in attendance. All agreed to witnessing the
same thing. I quote at length to let the reader decide:
After 12 o’clock, all four of us were standing around Fr Sergii. His daughter
had left, and no one else had arrived. His face began not just to change, but
53
Four women, ‘Myrrh Bearers’, were: Mother Blandina, Mother Theodosia, Sister Joanna, and
E.N Osorgina who was charged with administering the doctor’s medical instructions.
54
Sister Joanna Reitlinger, Fragments, op cit; in BOUL, 211-212
36

to become altogether brighter, more joyful. The expressions of agonizing
intensity, which had been there a few moments earlier, completely gave
way to a childlike expression. I did not immediately notice this new
phenomenon on his face, this striking radiance. I turned to one of the others
standing there to share my impressions, when one of them said, 'Look,
look!' And so we were witnesses of an astonishing spectacle. Fr Sergii’s
face completely lit up: it was a pure, very real light. It is impossible to say
what the features of his face were like at that point, as it was pure light.
And at the same time, the light did not obscure or obliterate his face. This
phenomenon was so extraordinary and so joyous that we almost cried from
inner happiness. It lasted almost two hours as Mother Theodosia, who
had checked her watch, told us later. This took us by surprise because if
someone had told us it had lasted only a moment, we would have been just
as likely to agree to that. By all accounts, the light on Fr Sergii’s face then
gradually diminished. To us, it seemed much less noticeable in comparison
with how it had been. But there were people who were close to him and
sensitive who came in to see Fr Sergii and said, ‘Fr Sergii is shining.’ 55
Events similar to this are recorded in Scripture. Moses’ face ‘shone’ when he
returned from his forty day sojourn on top of Mount Sinai (Exodus 34:35).
In spiritual literature: N. Motovilov’s account of St Seraphim in the snow
when he observed in the Holy Spirit Seraphim’s face light up brilliantly;
Father Gilbert Shaw, observed by several Sisters of the Love of God, Oxford:
his face is said to have shone in the last hours of his life. There was also a
notable ‘after-effect’ in Sister Joanna’s experience as she concludes: ‘There
was such peace and joy among us in those days as people are probably given
to possess in the Kingdom of Heaven!’ 56
Strangely, Sister Joanna’s own death forty-four years later occurred on Whit
Tuesday, a day after the anniversary of Fr Sergii’s ordination. Some thought
of the coincidence of dates as a cosmic sign that the prayers of her former
mentor were still holding her in communion with her Lord. Her younger
sister, Katya, who cared for her in the last years of her life, standing watch
as it were over the ‘first woman iconographer’, unable to paint as she went
totally deaf and blind (so as to work exclusively on the ‘most important icon’),
wrote to their mutual friend, the one who had received over 200 letters from
Sister Joanna:
We buried my sister in a way we had never dreamt of. (Of course, Fr Sergii
helped, releasing her from her torment the day before (the day of his
ordination was Whit Monday!) She suffered only early in the morning, and
about one o’clock she settled down, shut her eyes and was half asleep….I sat
55
Ibid, 212-213
56
Ibid, 214
37

y her bedside, stroking her hands and head. About two o’clock I could feel
she was quite cold. I ran upstairs to fetch the nursing sister. She came and
said she had died. So her sufferings were over; her soul peacefully left her
body. The funeral was conducted as for the nun Joanna… Instead of weeping,
I rejoiced, because my sister had dreamed of dying and being buried in a
way that would cause no grief or fuss…a great many people came and joined
in the funeral services…. 57
Conclusion
In this brief survey, in which we have considered spiritual formation as
the re-acquisition of the image and likeness of God in the soul, we might
have arrived at yet another sublime paradox: that, generally speaking, in
our search to find out more fully who we are, our purpose and meaning in
life, we need to explore resolutely and develop inwardly the gift we have
incipiently, and in due process, become what we are, and not what we or
others dream we might be. The image of God is gift in us. We need to unpack
it. We then find (we Christians, at least), that the image in any case is not of
ourselves but of Christ, and yet through participating in his divine nature,
paradoxically we become uniquely ourselves in the likeness of God. For the
Christian, this very Christ-like uniqueness is tantamount to holiness.
Sister Joanna, after reviewing what she had written in her short spiritual
biography, 58 insisted her life was quite ordinary. ‘This is my whole biography,’
she writes, ‘remarkable for nothing except my remarkable teachers.’ 59
Perhaps then, the final paradox in her life was that those very teachers, some
outstanding theologians in her circle, regarded themselves not only as her
teachers but also her pupils. Bulgakov wrote in a long letter to Sister Joanna
on iconography: ‘Paints [in the hands of a true artist] are sophiological, and
as a consequence, they are 'ideas', alive with revelation. I understand this
abstractly, but you taught it to me. You are a real theologian, sophianic, and I
rejoice in you, my friend…. May the Lord bless you and keep you.’ 60
57
Letter to D.P. Baranov from Katarina Reitlinger, Sister Joanna’s sister, in BOUL, 468.
58
Entitled, Autobiography, op cit, cf note 7
59
BOUL, 469. ‘teachers’ (plural): For the last 17 years of her life Sister Joanna was under the
spiritual direction of the renowned Moscow priest, Fr Alexander Men, which is yet another
chapter, and another friendship, in her fascinating story. An extensive correspondence
between them (including more letters from Fr Sergii) has been published in Russian in
Umnoye nebo, (The Wise Sky), Moscow, 2002. Only excerpts seem to exist in English, including
in BOUL; a complete translation is yet to come to light. As far as I can tell, several translators
have started but none as yet have finished the task.
60
BOUL, 126; from The Wise Sky: ibid, in Russian, 495-496
38

EVELYN UNDERHILL ON ST PAUL THE MYSTIC
AND THE MONASTIC IDEAL
PHILIP GORSKI
The year of Grace 1654, Monday, 23 November…From about half past ten in the
evening until half past midnight, FIRE. ‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob.’
Not of philosophers or scholars. Certainty, Certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace. God of
Jesus Christ. Pascal, Memorial 1
Pascal, caught up in his two-hour ecstatic vision of the Fire, obtains like St Paul
from this abrupt illumination, an overwhelming revelation of personality – ‘not
the God of the philosophers and of scholars’ – and a certitude that demands the
total surrender of his heart, intellect and will. 2
Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) is commemorated in the Anglican calendar
on June 15 th . She was a pioneering female writer on Christian mysticism
and spirituality, a poet, pacifist, a greatly-in-demand leader of prayerretreats,
who was herself a 'mystic.’ 3 Her books sold in enormous numbers,
went into many editions and many of them, remarkably, remain in print.
She was the first woman to have her name accepted for the list of Oxford
University lecturers in 1921 4 , was made a Fellow of King’s College London
in 1928, was a participant in the early days of the Fellowship of St Alban
and St Sergius, and it was said of her, by her contemporary, the Bishop of St
Andrews, that ‘her erudition was almost frightening’. 5 She brought a new
readership to the lives of many female saints, and in particular to the lives
and writings of the English medieval mystics. Yet if one were to study for
a University Degree in Theology today, it is unlikely that her name would
appear upon the recommended reading lists. The reason for this is that she
is not regarded as ‘systematic’ but is viewed as a ‘gentlewoman amateur’, a
product of a vanished age and literary milieu; she is enthusiastic, subjective
(with a hint of the esoteric in some of her writings), a ‘populariser’, is poetic
1
Written on a piece of parchment sewn in Pascal’s clothing, discovered upon his death, and
thought to have been carried with him at all times.
2
Evelyn Underhill, The Mystic Way, A Psychological Study in Christian Origins, JM Dent, 1913.
3
For those who require definitions, Underhill once wrote,’The mystics, to give them their
short and familiar name, are men and women who insist they know for certain the presence
and activity of that which they call the Love of God’.
4
The kind of male academic and ecclesiastical attitudes Underhill had to deal with can be
ascertained from Margaret Cropper’s excellent biography, Evelyn Underhill, Longmans, 1958.
See also Dana Greene, Evelyn Underhill; Artist of The Infinite Life. DLT, 1991.
5
Her friend T.S Eliot wrote of her, ‘Her studies have the inspiration not primarily of the
scholar or the champion of forgotten genius, but of the consciousness of the grievous need of
the contemplative element in the modern world’, Greene, Artist of the Infinite Life, 2
39

and even romantic, and clearly speaks from her own profound personal
experience. In short, her unashamed warmth, her rapturous, even florid
eloquence, and the sheer joy that one encounters in Underhill’s writings are
today regarded with disdain in the rather homogenous world of corporate
academic publishing.
Underhill wrote a great deal – I will mention just four titles, ones I personally
regard as classics; Mysticism, The Mystic Way, Mystics of the Church and
Worship. 6 In this short essay I will focus upon Underhill’s view of St Paul as
a mystic. Although she was by no means the first to point out this quality
in St Paul, her portrayal is distinguished by a pointed eloquence as she
portrays a man whom she views as being far removed from the doctrinal
codifier and moralist that for many ecclesiastics and theologians Paul had
become – and too often still becomes. In The Mystics of the Church, Underhill
attaches some significance to the often overlooked fact that St Paul states in
Galatians that immediately after his conversion, he retired to the deserts of
Arabia, seemingly for a period of up to three years. 7 Paul’s conversion, the
original and unique ‘Damascene’ conversion, and his resultant blindness, is
described by Underhill as one of ‘violent upheaval and complete surrender’,
the consequence of which was that ‘the rest of his life was to be governed
by the wonder and awe of that experience’. 8 Yet as Underhill continues,
discussing the events that anticipate his retreat to the Desert,
The upheaval disclosed interior conflicts as well as aptitudes; the surrender
was that of an ardent neophyte, and not of a completed saint. It placed him
only at the beginning of the way. Therefore the statement in Galatians, that
without discussion with his fellow Christians, or even waiting to make the
acquaintance of the apostles, St Paul at once retreated into Arabia, carries
with it its own explanation. Perhaps in imitation of what he had heard of
Jesus, perhaps impelled only by a sense of his own need, he was driven into
the solitude of the wilderness to face the facts of his new life and discover
the will of God. Not till three years after his conversion does he make what
appears to be his first visit as a Christian to Jerusalem. 9
For Underhill these years must have been ones of inward struggle, selfconquest
and purgation, a process of a veritable death and rebirth to new
life in Christ, and she quotes from Romans a passage that could only have
originated in Paul’s own experience: ‘For if we have grown into him by a
6
The last of these, it should be noted, contains a remarkable and pioneering chapter on the
Eastern Christian liturgies, originally published in 1936.
7
Galatians 1:17-18 This is of course an enigmatic statement
8
Mystics of the Church, J Clarke & Co 1925, 40
9
idem. 40
40

death like his, we shall grow into him by a resurrection like his, knowing
as we do that our old self has been crucified with him in order to crush
the sinful body’. 10 And Underhill notes the accompaniment of ecstatic and
visionary experiences during his long apprenticeship, a period of 10 or 12
years following on his first visit to Jerusalem, in which he is inconspicuous,
something, as Underhill says, ‘often overlooked by those who are dazzled
by the dash and splendour of his missionary career.’ The most well-known
reference by Paul to this is 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 where he speaks of the
‘abundance of revelations’ culminating in an ineffable, ecstatic experience,
‘whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know’.
Underhill’s conclusion from this reading of St Paul is clear. ‘We must correct
the view which sees him mainly as a theologian and organizer by that
which recognizes in him a great contemplative’. Underhill pursues this view
repeatedly:
…many of his sayings, which supposed by academic critics to be statements
of doctrine, are often desperate attempts to describe or suggest his own
experience…Much of the difficulty of St Paul’s ‘doctrine’ comes from the fact
that he is not trying to invent a theology, but simply to find words which
shall represent to others this vivid truth –‘I live, yet not I…to live is Christ…
Christ in me.’ Behind his efforts to prove to recalcitrant hearers the logical
nature of the Christian case, we feel the pressure of that ‘overflowing grace
and free gift’ (Romans 5:17) which transcends argument, and must be
suggested rather than declared. 11
Underhill also discusses the meaning of this ‘grace’ for Paul. For him, it is not
a ‘theological abstraction’ but rather,
…an active inflowing energy, which makes possible man’s transition
from the natural to the spiritual state…Anyone who still supposes him to
be predominantly a legalist should consider how profoundly spiritual a
conception of Christianity underlies the opening paragraph of Romans, and
what a struggle to describe the actual but subtle facts of the inner life is to
be felt in its greatest passages, which often seek to suggest an experience
which is beyond the range of common speech. 12
For Underhill, then, Paul is the first of the great mystics of the Church, and
the originator of the great mystical tradition of Christianity. For her, the
importance of Paul’s epistles reside, ‘not only in their mystical greatness,
his unique power of describing the communion of the Christian soul with
Christ’, but also and indeed largely, in the fact that the persons St Paul was
10
Romans 6:5,6
11
Mystics of the Church 36
12
idem 48
41

addressing ‘included those capable of understanding the height, breadth and
depth of his utterances and of sharing his joy’. 13 In her volumes The Mystic
Way and Mystics of the Church, Underhill then moves from a discussion of St
Paul to a consideration of the earliest monastics of the Church as mystics.
As the external Church rose towards power and splendour, entered upon
war against heretics, built up her theological bulwarks and elaborated her
ceremonial cult, her manifold activities – the numerous and inevitable
compromises effected between the austere primitive spirit and the ‘world’
to which it supposed itself to be sent – obscured the ideals of these mystical
souls, these true citizens of the Kingdom of Reality, who constitute the
invisible Church. 14
One must remember that at the time Underhill was writing this, the very word
‘monastic’ was still regarded with much suspicion and even hostility across
much of the Anglican Church and across English Protestant Christianity in
general. 15 Underhill devotes considerable space to discussions of Anthony
the Great, Macarius the Great, Cassian, Augustine and Dionysius as mystics
and monastics. Her view of monasticism is that it is a definite response to
the acceptance (or capture) of the Church by the State, and its increasing
incorporation into the social system of the day. Underhill never loses sight
of the monastic ideal:
As time went on, and the primitive instinct for a new life and a total change
of outlook grew more rare, those in whom the mind of Christ appeared were
less and less able to adjust its stern demands to the counter claim of the
social system within which they found themselves; and which was tolerated,
if not accepted in theory, by the growing Church. More and more such spirits
felt the need for that life of poverty and detachment, that simple minded
concentration on Reality, that opportunity for self-simplification, which He
had proclaimed as the condition of a perfect fruition of eternal life…Hence,
from the 4 th Century onwards, a large proportion of those true mystics who
have never failed to leaven the Church are likely to be found in the monastic
system. 16
For Underhill, monasticism at its best represents a return to the primitive
Christian ideal:
It was a genuine offshoot from the parent stem; that official Church which
tended more and more…to turn on its own tracks, and adjust itself to this
13
Mystics of the Church, 54
14
The Mystic Way, 304
15
For an insight into the considerable obstacles faced by an aspiring Anglican monastic in the
early part of the 20 th Century, see William of Glasshampton; Friar, Monk, Solitary 1862-1937,
Geoffrey Curtis, SPCK, 1948
16
Mystic Way, op.cit. 305
42

world rather than cut its way through to the next…Its aim was the double
aim of the Christian mystic; a vital and permanent union with God, and
regeneration as the way thereto. Its emphasis was on life-changing and life
enhancement; and on penance and prayer – purification and communion –
as the only means by which this could be achieved. 17
This story, the story of the Church and also its monastics needing repeatedly
to renew and reform yet again, to escape the lure of wealth, power,
respectability and official approval, is as old as Christianity itself. Both in the
West and the East, there are countless examples of courageous groups and
individuals who sought to confront, or at least evade the fatal temptations of
complacency and self-satisfaction that the world remorselessly offers to the
unwary Christian. Like a sand-drift that steadily builds up and creeps into a
poorly kept house, smothering and finally burying it, the secular world will
remorselessly seek out those who aspire to a life of prayer and asceticism.
Possibly the most famous example here of one who escaped such a fate is, of
course, St Francis of Assisi. A perhaps lesser-known example is St Nil Sorski,
the medieval Russian hesychast who shunned entanglement with, and the
dangerous patronage of, the governmental and political establishment of
his day, and resolutely turned away from wealth, dogmatism, ritualism and
religious xenophobia and intolerance. 18
As with the poorer sketes and distant hermits of Mt Athos, far away from
the grandeur and fame of the palatial major monasteries, Sorski wished
only to live a life of poverty and prayer. Evelyn Underhill, although she came
from a country in which monasticism had been extinguished for over 350
years, and was only, with great difficulty, re-establishing itself, nevertheless
had an uncanny understanding of the significance both of the mystic and
the monastic in Christian history. She certainly understood the spiritual
significance of St Francis and would definitely have warmed to St Nil. And
although as a woman she would have been forbidden from visiting Mount
Athos, I suspect that if she had, she would have no doubt politely paid her
respects to the grand and illustrious monasteries, before seeking out those
remote sketes and hermitages, distinguished only by poverty and obscurity,
‘unknown to man but very well known to God.’
☨ ☨ ☨
17
ibid. 306
18
Although the tradition of St Nil and those influenced by him has certainly always been a minority
one in the Russian Church, it remains, even in present day circumstances, unextinguished.
43

Collect for Evelyn Underhill, June 15 th .
O God, Origin, Sustainer and End of all your creatures;
Grant that your Church, taught by your servant Evelyn Underhill,
guarded evermore by your power,
and guided by your Spirit into the light of truth,
may continually offer to you all glory and thanksgiving,
and attain with your saints to the blessed hope of everlasting life,
which you have promised by your Saviour Jesus Christ;
who with you and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, now and for ever. Amen
Psalm 37:3-6, 32-33
Lessons; Wisdom 7:24-8;1
1 Corinthians 4;1-5
John 4:19-24
Preface of the Dedication of a Church
Dr Philip Gorski is an Associate of CSWG. He is also a Visiting Researcher at the Institute for
Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge, and has written on Russian and English Literature and
Christian History and Spirituality
A HARSH AND DREADFUL LOVE:
DOROTHY DAY’S WITNESS TO THE GOSPEL
JIM FOREST
Early in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, a wealthy woman asks
Staretz [Elder] Zosima how she can really know that God exists. The Staretz
tells her that no explanation or argument can achieve this, only the practice
of ‘active love.’ He assures her that really there is no other way to know
God in reality rather than as an idea. The woman confesses that sometimes
she dreams about a life of loving service to others – she thinks perhaps she
will become a Sister of Mercy, live in holy poverty and serve the poor in the
humblest way. It seems to her such a wonderful thought. It makes tears
come to her eyes. But then it crosses her mind how ungrateful some of the
people she is serving are likely to be. They will probably complain that the
soup she is serving isn’t hot enough or that the bread isn’t fresh enough or
the bed is too hard and the covers too thin. She confesses to Staretz Zosima
that she couldn’t bear such ingratitude – and so her dreams about serving
others vanish, and once again she finds herself wondering if there really is a
God. To this the Staretz responds with the words, ‘Love in practice is a hard
and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.’
44

I mention this story to you because I doubt any figure in literature had more
importance to Dorothy Day than Father Zosima. How often I heard her
repeat the words, ‘Love in practice is a hard and dreadful thing compared
to love in dreams.’ It was partly through Dostoevsky that she, as a young
woman, formed her understanding of Christianity, seeing it not simply as
an institutional structure but as a way of life in which nothing was more
important than seeing Christ in others.
I have no doubt she was a saint, that is, someone who in a remarkable way
shows us what it means to follow Christ. Thanks to an initiative being taken
by the Archdiocese of New York, the possibility of formal canonization is
underway. The Vatican have given her the title, ‘servant of God, Dorothy
Day.’ Pope Francis, in a speech to the U.S. Congress, described her as one of
four Americans he especially admires. I think of her as a modern sister of St.
Francis of Assisi.
The link with St. Francis is close. They have in common an attraction to the
poor, which led them to live among them and to practice what Dorothy called
‘voluntary poverty.’ Like Francis, she formed a commitment to live out the
most radical teachings of Jesus, including the renunciation of violence.
Like Francis, she started a movement that could involve anyone, not only the
unmarried. The Catholic Worker movement she began in 1933 has led to the
foundation of houses of hospitality in many parts of the United States. The
newspaper she edited until her death in 1980, The Catholic Worker, has tens
of thousands of subscribers.
Dorothy was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 8, 1897. Her father
was a journalist and it was the profession nearly all of his children followed.
She was eight years old when her family moved into a six-room tenement flat
over a tavern on 37 th Street on the South Side, Chicago. It was a big step-down
for the Day family. They had been practically wiped out by the San Francisco
earthquake. The family had lost their house and John Day was without a job.
The curtains Dorothy’s mother Grace made from remnants were hung from
fishing rods. Fruit crates served as bookcases. Nail kegs became kitchen
stools. Dorothy was so ashamed of her home that, returning from school,
she would enter the door of a better, more impressive building so that her
classmates wouldn’t know the kind of circumstances she was living in. Her
mother suffered blinding headaches and went through several miscarriages.
Dorothy’s understanding of the shame people feel when they aren’t making
it, surely dates from this time.
45

It was in this period of her life that Dorothy began to find in the Catholic
Church, an institution despised by her father, something inspiring. Dorothy
would often recall later in life the impact of discovering a friend’s mother,
a woman named Mrs. Barrett, praying on her knees at the side of her bed.
Without dismay or embarrassment, she looked up at Dorothy, told her
where to find her daughter, and returned to her prayer. ‘I felt a burst of love
toward Mrs. Barrett that I have never forgotten, a feeling of gratitude and
happiness that warmed my heart,’ Dorothy wrote in her autobiography, The
Long Loneliness.
When John Day finally got the job of sports editor of a Chicago daily paper,
the Day family moved into a large and comfortable house on Webster Avenue
on the North Side. Dorothy need no longer be embarrassed by her domestic
circumstances.
The great events in Dorothy’s life at the Webster Avenue house often had
to do with books. Though her father was a man with many prejudices, he
was a reader and book lover, and this rubbed off on his eldest daughter.
In the library of the house, Dorothy first read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables
and Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and Little Dorritt, and many other books
that stirred her awareness of injustice in the world and also offered images
ofsanctity, books she would read again and again for the rest of her life.
Books remained Dorothy’s cherished companions throughout her life.
The book that had the most impact on her in her mid-teens was Upton
Sinclair’s The Jungle. Unlike books about social injustice by Dickens and
Hugo, here was a story set in the present, and not in Europe but Chicago, in
the area of the city’s stockyards and slaughter-houses. Sinclair’s hero was a
Lithuanian immigrant, the only member of his family not utterly destroyed by
squalor and injustice. He finally commits himself to struggle for a just social
order by joining the Socialist Party. Sinclair’s vivid description of filth and
violence in the meat industry so shocked its readers that the book is given
credit for Congressional passage of tough meat-inspection laws, although
what Sinclair had hoped for was to stimulate more profound social change.
‘I aimed at the public’s heart,’ he said, ‘and by accident hit it in the stomach.’
But he did reach Dorothy Day’s heart. She had responsibility for much of
the care of the newest addition to the family, her baby brother John Day,
and stirred by Sinclair’s novel, began to push his baby carriage further and
further southwest, not far from the parts of the city she had once been so
glad to leave behind. ‘I walked for miles, exploring interminable grey streets,
fascinating in their dreary sameness, past tavern after tavern, where I
envisioned such scenes as the Polish wedding party in Sinclair’s story.’
46

As would be typical of Dorothy for the rest of her life, she found a kind
of beauty in the midst of urban desolation. ‘There were tiny gardens and
vegetable patches in the yards. Often there were rows of corn, stunted but
still recognizable, a few tomato plants, and always the vegetables bordered
by flowers.’ Drab streets were transformed by pungent odors: geranium
and tomato plants, garlic, olive oil, roasting coffee, bread and rolls in bakery
ovens. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘was enough beauty to satisfy me.’
Only fifteen years old, she looked at the world with wide-open eyes
and a vulnerable heart many of us might envy. Pondering the lives of the
peopleliving in these hard-pressed neighborhoods, yet rich in so many ways,
she had a vivid sense of who she would become. ‘From that time on my life
was to be linked to theirs, their interests would be mine: I had received a call,
a vocation, a direction in life.’
An exceptionally bright student, she won a full scholarship to the University
of Illinois. She was delighted no longer to be living with her parents, but the
academic world held her attention only briefly. Long before she might have
received a degree, she abandoned her studies and moved to New York City
where, at the age of eighteen, she became a reporter for New York’s socialist
daily newspaper, The Call. At the time she was probably the youngest
working journalist on a New York paper, and also one of the very few woman
journalists writing about something other than social news or cake recipes.
A year later, she joined the editorial staff of Masses, a radical publication
silenced by the U.S. government following America’s entry into World
War I, for the publication was outspoken in its opposition to the war and
encouraged men to refuse to fight in it. Just after her nineteenth birthday,
Dorothy was jailed with other feminists who had gone to the White House to
protest the exclusion of women from political affairs.
The horror of war challenged her to do something more concrete about
suffering than simply to protest or write articles. Dorothy became a nurse
in a Brooklyn hospital, but a love affair with a fellow journalist she met at
that time led her back to Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan. The affair
ended with an abortion. This was the catastrophe of her life, an event still
causing her grief in her old age. Just after the war, she was briefly married
to a New York literary figure and went with him to Europe, where she wrote
her first book, an autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin, that centered
on the love affair that had led to her pregnancy and the abortion with which
it ended.
Back in the U.S., Dorothy joined the staff of The Liberator, a Communist
magazine in Chicago though Dorothy, always impatient with ideology, never
47

joined the Communist Party or committed herself to any other political
association or ideology. In fact, she never cast a vote in any election nor
encouraged anyone else to do so, as she was convinced that the only ‘vote’ of
significance was how she lived her life day by day. Also she simply couldn’t
imagine voting for someone whose views and priorities were so at variance
with her own.
In 1922, she was arrested and jailed again, this time in one of the government’s
‘anti-red’ raids. She went back to reporting work, first for a Chicago
newspaper, then one in New Orleans. In 1925 – her novel published and film
rights for the book sold to Hollywood – she returned to New York, where she
met a British botanist and intellectual disciple of Kropotkin and fell deeply
in love with him. The pregnancy that resulted from this relationship was the
turning point in her life.
That she should be carrying a child again seemed to her not only remarkable
but nothing less than a miracle. The abortion five years earlier left her
feeling guilty. She also sensed that her body had been damaged and that
shehad been made sterile. She believed that she could never conceive again.
Whether it was a miracle or not, I don’t know, but it certainly filled her with
an overwhelming sense of God’s mercy that was to remain with her for the
rest of her life.
She found that whenever she went walking, she was praying, and the prayers
were entirely of joy and gratitude. As the months passed, she decided she
wanted her child baptized in the Roman Catholic Church; and then she
realized she wanted to become a Catholic herself. To the man she lived
with, however, as to many radicals, the Catholic Church was one of the
world’s more oppressive structures, complicit in almost every evil for many
centuries. Dorothy saw it in quite a different way: for her it was the church
of the poor, a church with ancient roots reaching back to the beginning of
Christianity, a church free of the constraints of national borders. Arguments
flared, doors slammed. Their relationship disintegrated.
Dorothy’s daughter, Tamar, was baptized in July 1927 and Dorothy – now a
single parent – was herself at last baptized in December 1928. Then began
Dorothy’s long search for a vocation that could bridge her radical political
convictions with her new-found religious commitment.
In May 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, Dorothy produced the
first issue of The Catholic Worker. A remarkable French immigrant, Peter
Maurin, who looked like a good-for-nothing, but was actually a brilliant and
saintly man, proposed this step to her. The paper sold, and still sells, for a
penny a copy. Though there was much in it to interest intellectuals, the paper
was aimed at ordinary people, many of them out of work in that period.
48

Dorothy’s first editorial said The Catholic Worker would show its readers
that the Catholic Church is concerned not only with spiritual welfare but
material welfare. The paper caught on. Within a few months there were
thousands of readers.
What had been launched only as a newspaper quickly became a movement.
First in New York, then in other cities, Catholic Worker houses of hospitality
were formed. They were both places of welcome for homeless people and
centers for dialogue about community, the Gospel and the Church, but also
for what her collaborator Peter Maurin called a ‘green revolution’ – efforts
to inspire social change through entirely peaceful means.
While there were many people in the Catholic Church who supported the
initiatives she was taking – not only lay people but also priests and bishops
– you can image that others found her some kind of strange Protestant or
perhaps a Communist pretending to be a Christian.
Dorothy’s methods were also dismissed as ‘impractical’ because of her
non-institutional approach to hospitality for people who were living on the
street. A social worker visiting the Catholic Worker house in New York asked
Dorothy how long her guests were ‘allowed’ to stay. Dorothy answered, ‘We
let them stay forever. They live with us, they die with us and we give them a
Christian burial. We pray for them after they are dead. Once they are taken
in, they become members of the family. Or rather they always were members
of the family. They are our brothers and sisters in Christ.’
Perhaps all would have gone quite well between Dorothy and the Catholic
hierarchy in America had it not been for the stand she took in failing to
support Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War. Practically all Dorothy’s
friends, being people on the left, whole-heartedly supported the Republican
side, but Dorothy couldn’t support a force that was murdering priests and
nuns and destroying churches. Similarly she could not in any way support
the fascism that Franco represented, no matter how many bishops regarded
him as their hero and protector. In fact there was a still deeper problem
for Dorothy, for she could not imagine Christ blessing anyone to kill, or to
participate in war. She wrote essays about Jesus Christ, who had been born
in a society suffering military occupation by the Romans but had sent none
of his disciples to join the Zealots, the national group undertaking violent
resistance. He had responded mercifully to people on every side, even a
Roman centurion who sought his help. She recalled the witness of Christians
in the first three centuries, when it was regarded as far better to lay down
one’s own life than to shed anyone’s blood.
49

There had been no overtly pacifist movement in the Catholic Church for
centuries, until the Catholic Worker. Perhaps more than any Catholic since
St. Francis, Dorothy Day began a process within her church that put Jesus,
rather than the theologians of the just war, at the center of the church’s
social teaching.
Dorothy was often imprisoned as a result of her activity in peace, civil rights,
and labor demonstrations. In the 1950's year after year, she sat on a park
bench in front of New York’s City Hall while air-raid sirens were howling,
and everyone was required by law to take shelter in what was nothing other
than a mass dress-rehearsal for nuclear war. She was occasionally arrested
for other reasons as well when they were founding a labor movement, for
example with farm workers in California. One of my favorite photos of her,
taken in 1973, shows her holding the dress she wore the last time she was
a prisoner. All the women jailed with her signed their names on the rough
prison garment, making it a treasure to her.
At the center of Dorothy’s faith was her certainty that we are saved not
because we are clever or are often found in church buildings (though daily
Mass was part of the structure of her life) but because of our loving response
to ‘the least.’ The Catholic Worker way of life is to practice daily ‘the works
of mercy’ that Jesus speaks of in the 25 th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew:
feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, taking
in the homeless, caring for the sick, and being with prisoners. This same
teaching led Dorothy to oppose all those systems that cause suffering. ‘We
see that the works of mercy oppose the works of war,’ she said. She often
quoted St. John of the Cross: ‘Love is the measure by which we shall be
judged.’
Dorothy died November 29, 1980. It was a widely marked event in America,
not only noticed by Christians of every variety but by many people in other
religious traditions, or outside every religion. By then many regarded her as
one of Christianity’s great reformers and a modern saint, though Dorothy
herself had sometimes said, ‘Don’t call me a saint – I don’t want to be
dismissed so easily.’
After the funeral, an editor of The Catholic Worker was asked whether the
movement would be able to continue without its founder. ‘We have lost
Dorothy,’ Peggy Scherer said, ‘but we still have the gospel.’
The most extraordinary monuments to Dorothy Day are the many houses of
hospitality that stretch from Oakland to Amsterdam, places of welcome that
not only offer a caring response to the homeless and runaways but centers of
work for a non-violent society. We can say there is still a greater monument,
50

though much less tangible, and that is a renewed understanding of
Christianity. She was like a restorer of icons who, after removing layer upon
layer of paint left by various generations, comes to the deepest level and
finds an image painted by the hand of the Apostle Luke.
Dorothy thought the most important thing we can do is to try to find the
face of Christ in others, and not only those we find it easy to be with, but just
as importantly, those who make us nervous, frighten us, alarm us, or even
terrify us. 'Those who cannot see the face of Christ in the poor,' she used to
say, 'are atheists indeed.'
Her searching of faces for Christ’s presence – for Christ extended to those
who were, at least in a functional sense, her enemies – she always tried
to remember, that these were victims of the very structures they were in
charge of. She sometimes recalled the advice she had been given by a fellowprisoner
named Mary Ann, a prostitute, when Dorothy was in jail in Chicago
in the early twenties: 'You must hold your head high, and give them no clue
that you’re afraid of them or ready to beg them for anything, any favours
whatsoever. But you must see them for what they are – never forget that
they’re in jail too.' 'Love is the measure,' Dorothy said again and again,
quoting Saint John of the Cross.
Hers was a day-to-day way of the cross, and just as truly the way of the open
door. 'It is the living from day to day,' she said, 'taking no thought for the
morrow, seeing Christ in all who come to us, and trying literally to follow the
Gospel that has resulted in this work.'
Jim Forest is the author of many books including All Is Grace: a Biography of Dorothy Day (Orbis).
His most recent book is At Play in the Lions' Den: A Biography and Memoir of Daniel Berrigan
(Orbis)
☨ ☨ ☨
51

Above, from right to left: Spirit over the waters (Gen 1:1); Logos Creating
All Photos: Christopher Mark, with the exception of Christ, Church of St
Seraphim, Paris (inside front cover) © Monastic Trust: thetrust@cswg.org.uk
New for 2018-2019
M0NASTERY
Pick up at the Monastery to avoid
shipping costs – see below
£15.00 for half case
(6x1 litre bottles)
£29.00 for full case
(12x1 litre bottles)
APPLE
www.cswg.org.uk
JUICE
Delivery, please add:
£5.99 for half case
£9.99 for full case
Contact details: see back cover
Nota Bene: This year’s 1 litre bottles
contain 25% more juice than the
75 dL bottles in previous years. If sending
cheques, please make payable to CSWG

Creatures (Gen 1:3-25); Eve fashioned from Adam’s rib. (Gen 2:21-22)
‘Only one thing is needful: to strive for unity with Christ, again and again,
and forever, and continually and everywhere in everything to seek to be
one with God; the rest will come by itself.’ – Sister Joanna [Reitlinger]
Below: ‘Laud’s Blessing’: Chapel, Monastery of Christ the Saviour, Brighton-Hove (2002)

Left: ‘Angel of the
Nativity’, one of the
‘little candle icons,’
courtesy of Maria
Struve.
‘“Would that every
household have
at least one icon,”
she would say; so
she proceeded
to mass-produce
them. Working
rapidly, concentrating
intently,
she would lay out
the boards on a
table. If she hadn’t
sufficient tools,
she would use
her left hand as a
palette. Then she
would go down
the line, painting
yellow, yellow
yellow; then, red,
red, red; then,
blue, blue, blue….
When finished,
she gave them
away to whosoever
requested
one.‘
-Mdm Struve, pupil
of Sister Joanna,
from a personal
interview (2001)
Community of the Servants of the Will of God
Monastery of the Holy Trinity
Crawley Down Crawley RH10 4LH
Phone: +44 (0)1342 712074
Contact: guestmaster@cswg.org.uk
To help us keep the silence of the monastery please,
when making a booking, telephone
betweevn 9.30 am and 5.15 pm