In Praise of Holy Women

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