The aim of the Christian life according to saint Mary of Paris
R.V. Gronoff
the whole world. The duty of every Christian is to try to be a saint and
help others to be one as well. The task is not an easy one, and the Holy
Spirit acting in the Church of Christ helps us to understand how we can
achieve our aim.
The canonisation of saints at all times in history has been a great help
to Christians in their struggle to live according to Christ’s
commandments, in their yearning to save the world and themselves.
We can pray to the saints and ask them for their intercessions; we can
take their lives as an example and inspiration for our own life and we
can also benefit from their advice.
When those saints are part of recent history, their influence on us
tends to be stronger, because they are still living in the hearts and
minds of their disciples, and of those who knew them; their advice and
words and life are known to us through eyewitnesses and we feel a
special closeness to them.
This is the case for Saint Nectarius of Aegina, Saint Silouan of Mount
Athos and saint John of Kronstadt. Now the Holy martyr Mary (Skobtsov)
has “officially” joined those saints of the 20th century. Like most of
the saints canonised in the Orthodox Church, Holy Martyr Mary was
venerated and refered to as a Saint by the people of God years before
the Church canonised her.
She was a strong character and lead an untypical kind of monastic life
in the world.
She had found in the Gospel the priorities of her life (they can be
summarised in Mat 22, 34-401), and implemented them even if sometimes
they were not easily compatible with the quiet church life people were
used to. There has therefore been some debate on whether she had gone
too far away from what considered to be “Church tradition”.
However with her canonisation, every member of the Orthodox Church has
now received a confirmation that the path followed by Mother Mary was
indeed the path that we are looking for and don’t seem to find.
Thankfully for us, Mother Mary was a writer, so that we can take advice
directly from her. In a remarkable essay, “Types of religious lives” 2,
written in 1937, she describes several ways in which we can be misled
and stop following Christ without realising it, taking as priorities
things that have to remain secondary to Christ’s commandments. She
identifies at least four such paths of religious life, in all of which
we can well recognise common mistakes of ours.
The first wrong path she warns us against is when the church is visible
in the society mainly as part of a national culture, an institution more
obviously linked to the state than to the Gospel, when its clergy
becomes an elite that does not mix with the laity. If these tendencies
(which, as Mother Mary stated in 1937, cause an “intense atheism” 3),
can be summarized as nationalism, clericalism and compromise with
political power, we will have to say that we recognise them well enough
and would like to be cured of them. A second dangerous path is
ritualism, when the typikon and rubrics are prioritised above the News
of the Gospel, above pastoral needs and care, when “instead of the
living God, of Christ crucified and risen, we have (...) a new idol, a
new form of paganism, which is manifested in arguments over calendars,
rubrics, rules, prohibitions, when Sabbath triumphs over the Son of
man”. Here again, we have to recognise our own disease when we see that
today the question of Old or New style in Divine worship seems much more
important for us Orthodox than making sure the Gospel is read in Church
in a language people can understand.
A third tendency which she describes – as true today as it was in the
times of Mother Mary – is conservatism – the kind which blocks
creativity. Very often it is rooted in a scholarly education in academic
fields related to church life, such as iconography, hymnography and
theology. “For some, the comfortable piety of these custodians is a
temporary lullaby, others will be repelled by it, leaving a great chasm
between the Church and real life”. We still see today, how the word
“tradition” is used in reference to “what has been done in the Church
for generations”. In the name of this kind of “tradition”, we are only
allowed to and only want to do what we are used to, and we do not care
about trying to adapt to the needs of the world. Forgetting that we are
supposed to bring the world to Christ, we don’t even feel the need (or
we don’t dare to) to be creative in the way we convey the Gospel to the
world.
Asceticism, as a kind of spiritual Mother Mary considers distracts us
from our aim.
In imitating the life of monastics, we tend to think a lot of the
salvation of our own soul, and do not consider ourselves good enough to
try and save other people. Out of humility, we pray and try to live in
obedience, but we forget to truly love the neighbour; we consider love
as merely “a kind of pious exercise” and part of our effort to save
ourselves. We think, “How can I even think that I can give something to
the world, I, who am nothing, stained by original sin, corrupted by
personal vices and sins?”, and therefore we do not do anything for the
life of the world.
Fortunately, after pinpointing our mistakes, Holy Martyr Mary
proposes us guidelines for a way of life, according to the Gospel, that
has never stopped being present in the Church by the Holy Spirit.
Following this way, we should always remember that Christ gave us two
indissoluble commandments: to love God and to love our fellow man, and
that all will come from this.
All the erroneous tendencies of our church lives listed above have as a
common consequence a lack of care and love for our neighbour, and
therefore for God. If we lived constantly with this commandment of love
both for God and man, we would turn the world into church and we would
baptise the world. There would be no more talk among us about the
greatness of our national church, our “tradition”, our inability to save
the world, our “favourite liturgical language”, old or new style. No
one would even think of jurisdictional quarrels...
Holy Martyr Mary then goes further in saying that renunciation and self
denial are the consequences of the commandment. We know that when she
writes this, it is not just a matter of words. She herself went to the
extreme end of self denial, she did give herself totally to the poor,
sick and lonely, and as a result of her love for mankind she freely
walked to martyrdom.
So we can pray her to help us to follow her advice and take love for God
and man as our first priority. We can also ask her to show us the path
to a better witness of the church to the world. We know that she was a
woman with weaknesses, that she sometimes was thought untypical or
even shocking in her radical opinions, in her statement and
behaviours. We also know that in being consistent with the priority of
love, she found the way we are looking for. This helps us to carry on
hoping that we will manage to find the path, despite our own
weaknesses.
Her example should also help us to remember that if a person is
shocking, unusual or innovating in the Church, this person is not
necessarily outside the Church.
Nowadays there are people who serve the Church in a way that surprises
or shocks us because it did not exist a few decades ago, and does not
seem compatible with strict rules of national, clerical, ritual,
aesthetic, or ascetic way of life. And yet, those “strange” people might
be those whose example and teaching will be followed in the generations
to come – these persons might be the saints of our church. In the time
when Mother Mary lived, some people doubted she had found the right way,
and did not take her seriously and criticized her.
Let’s try not to be blind, but let us recognise where true priorities lie.
Let us overcome sterile disputes over “modernism” and “ritualism”, and
recognise
saints when we meet them.
Lydia Obolensky-D’Aloisio
1. “But when the Pharisees heard that He had silenced the Sadducees,
they gathered together. Then one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a
question, testing
Him, and saying, ‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?
Jesus said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your
heart, with all
your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great
commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as
yourself. On these
two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.’
2. The English translation of this text is to be found in: Sourozh,
nÆ74, 75, 76 (1998-99). In Russian: Vestnik RHD, 176, NÆ2-3 (1997).
3. All quotations are Mother Mary’s, from “Types of religious lives”,
taken from a book by Fr Michael Plekon, “Living Icons, persons of faith
in the eastern
Church”, University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana: 2002
http://www.syndesmos.org/en/publications/syndesmos_news/teyxh/17_1/