Mother Maria Skobtsova, Philosopher, Poet, Nun on the Streets

Chapter excerpted from the book Sisters in Wisdom, all rights reserved Historical and Philosophical Background of the Early Socialist Movement Rare is that soul, which having faith, accepts the most deadly peril and suffering, beholding in them something divine. Suffering was to become, in Mother Marias life, bound up with both a visceral awareness of her own vulnerability and with the human brokenness which was the ground in which she found herself. She was born in a turbulent era and her short and poignant life would end in martyrdom. Because Marias life in Russia was intimately bound to the destiny of the Russian soul prior to the revolution, it is important to understand the historical milieu from which she emerged. During the latter part of the 18th century, it was becoming apparent to much of the Russian public that serfdom was not compatible with Russias claim to being either a civilized country or a powerful state. Yet the monarchy, under both Alexander I and Nicholas I, held an agonizing fear of losing the support of the 100,000 serf-owing dvoriane, on whom it relied to staff the government and command the armed forces. Emancipation of the serfs under Alexander II in 1861 did not solve the deeper problems affecting the economic, social, and political structure of the nation. The new legislation had not freed many of the peasants from external constraints or great debt; and many peasants were free but landless. In 1881, Alexander II was assassinated and social unrest continued to grow. In addition, the population of Russia doubled by the end of the 19 th century. In 1858 Russia had 68 million inhabitants; in 1897, 125 million (1). The combined pressure of social and economic burdens and an uncontrollable population created a situation in which it was nearly impossible for the Russian peasant to support himself through agriculture. The revolutionary intelligentsia were filled with a generous indignation at the plight of the peasant, but they were often as far removed from peasant life as was the bureaucracy. Tolstoys Anna Karenina describes the suspicion and gulf of incomprehension that existed between the peasants and their often well-meaning landlords. Alexander II was succeeded by a reactionary Alexander III and the government became severely repressive. Behind the new tzar stood his tutor, Constantine Pobedonostser, soon to be head of the Holy Synod and one of the most powerful men in the nation. In his, A History of Russia, John Lawrence describes him as gaunt, tight-lipped, high-principled and not inhumane, Pobedonostser despaired of humanity. He saw clearly the forces of chaos growing among the younger generation, and he believed that nothing could restrain the evil propensities of man except the strongest government. (2) In 1894, Alexander III died and his son Nicholas II, the last emperor of Russia, succeeded him. Intelligentsia was a term that became widely used in Russia in the middle of the 19 th century. James Billington notes that, Moderate liberals, romantic Slavophiles, and rationalistic Westernizers no less than revolutionaries all seized on the term. (3) For the

most part, the intelligentsia arose from a discrepancy between social status and social function generated by the failure of the imperial state to create a workable civil society. Although most of the intelligentsia were educated, the term came to include not just people who had completed a higher education, but who held a particular ideological attitude. The tendency to turn philosophical idealism into materialism and abstract philosophy into praxis typified the second half of the century. A prevailing concern of philosophers in the early 19 th century was that Russia lagged behind European culture and intellectual life because serfdom degraded the whole of society. How, the question was posed, is serfdom compatible with respect for the dignity of individual human beings? As many of these Russian thinkers became aware of the depth and breadth of European philosophy, they realized that their first priority of spreading enlightenment in Russia was to oust the autocracy and propagate a liberal education. Many of the writers and thinkers like Peter Chaadaev, Alexander Herzen and Vissarion Belinsky, were anti-tsarist and early socialist pioneers. Influenced by Hegel, Herzen believed that history moves in a three-stage progression: from medieval Catholicism to philosophic Protestantism to a New Christianity which was more humanistic and renovative, and which was to take place in Russia. It was Hegel who captured the minds of the Russian philosophers of the 1830s and 1840s. These were the first generation of philosophers to theorize in pre-Marxist terms about the future of Russia. From German metaphysical theory they felt a calling to motivate Russia to move from tsarism toward a better life. During the period that Western views were taking hold in Russia, a quite different philosophy was emerging, known as the Slavophile movement. Although the Slavophile view of history was tinged with the dualism of German romanticism, it tended to stress a pietistic glorification of Russia, which would be regenerated from within. Initially Slavophiles sought to organize around the idea of conciliarity, which denotes a special kind of unity, allowing for maximum freedom; but members of such sobor are bound together by the principle of unity. Sobornost or conciliarity was the idea which made Russian philosophy and knowledge possible. Ideally, it was believed, this intuitive Russian knowledge arises not from struggle or confrontation but through a coming together. Reflecting the Orthodox belief that through theosis humans enter a sort of cognitive love, the individual becomes one with that which she encounters or perceives. Ideally, the most perfect form of sobornost was the Church: The Church is called one, holy, sobornyibecause she belongs to the whole world.because she hallows all humanity and all the earthbecause her essence consists in the harmony and unity of the Spirit. (4) This idea of sobornost was to become an important force in Mother Marias life. However, the tight bond between Church and state in Russia had emerged after Peter the Greats abolition of the Patriarchate in 1721, which made the Orthodox Church in Russia largely subordinate to the state, and it was increasingly becoming the object of great criticism. The Holy Synod was viewed as uncanonical, since it breached the principle of sobornost and subordinated the Russian Church to secular power.

Both the Slavophiles and the Westernizers can be characterized as reactionary, i.e., against a neighboring (European) civilization which perceived itself as superior. Herzen, for all his flirtations with the West, believed that Russia, because it was still undeveloped, had the capacity to synthesize the best of the West and create a new social form, hitherto unknown in Europe or anywhere else in the world. This new social form Russian socialismsoon split into two camps, the Populists, who were more ethnic and who looked to the revolutionary potentialities of the peasant masses (scouted as politically imbecile by many of their contemporaries); and the Marxists, (who later formed the Social Democratic Workers Party) who stressed the integration of peasants and the proletariat into an international movement. Populism hoped to establish a better Russia but its romantic and alternative lifestyle was akin to Slavophile communalism and the simple Christian community preached by Lev Tolstoy. (5) Unfortunately, the Populists lacked success as a reform movement because peaceful campaigning yielded only frustrated results, despite the idealism of its activists. Marxism offered political organization, coupled with the expectation of historical inevitability. Their vision of history was impersonal and objective, stressing the scientific positivism of Comte, but eventually hardening into the Marxist vision of Hegelian progress, which would wreak such havoc on Russian soil. But then, the last beacon of utopian hope was born: the Silver Age, and with it came the advent of a new era in Russian art and creativity, a movement in which Maria would flourish before, like a light, the last flicker of hope would be extinguished for individual creative consciousness in the motherland. Marias Early Life and Poetry Born Elizabeth Yuriseva Pilenko in 1891, Maria was known to her family as Liza. Her father, Yury, was the public prosecutor in the Baltic town of Riga. He moved his family to Anapa, to manage a large estate he inherited on the death of his father. Outside the gates of their estate was an ancient burial ground where Liza and her brother liked to play. They moved again when Liza was 13, when her father became director of the famed Botonical Gardens near Yalta. As a child of 7 or 8, she asked her parents if she could travel with the pilgrims who perpetually trekked to monasteries and holy sites in their search for God. From an early age, she seemed to have a pre-occupation with death and even predicted to her perplexed parents that she would die by burning. Her mother, Sophia, attributed these strange presentiments to the unusual incident which occurred when she was baptized: while being immersed, she choked on water and came very close to drowning. Whatever the cause, she once confessed to a friend, Konstantin Mockulsky, that death had always held an inexplicable preoccupation for her. I wrote poems and dreamt of death. When I was young, I always wanted to die. (6) Lizas father had a strong, but gentle nature, and was known for his generosity. Liza adored him passionately. And although death was something that Liza spoke freely and matter-of-factly about during much of her childhood, when her own father died prematurely when she was only 14, Liza was so devastated that she hurled words of

apostasy into the universe in her unbearable grief. She reasoned: Poor world in which there is no God, in which death has dominionpoor me, who has suddenly grown adult since I have uncovered the adult secret that there is no God, and that the world is ridden with grief, evil and injustice. So ended childhood. (7) After her fathers death, her mother moved the family to St. Petersburg, where, in the chilly fogs of this northern city, Liza first witnessed the unjust poverty pervasive in the dank, dirty side streets of Russias great cultural city. Identifying with the poorest and uneducated, she soon found herself in school by day and giving evening classes to illiterate workers at night. It was in St. Petersburg that her artistic and literary gifts began to flourish. The years of social unrest which culminated in the Revolution of 1917 saw her publish her first two volumes of poetry. She moved in the rarified world of the Russian artists and intelligentsia, where she met, among others, the famous Alexander Blok, Alexei Tolstoy, and Nikolai Berdiaev (with whom she would have a long colleagueship in Paris.) She was drawn to the symbolism of Bloks poetry which seemed to perceive the spiritual reality behind the physical. For himself, Blok, forever in search of the Eternal Feminine, found something soothing in Liza. Perhaps it was her strong maternal nature. They shared a mystical affinity which pivoted around the themes of suffering, meaninglessness and death. They wrote each other several poems; he described her as so vital so beautiful yet so tormented speaking only of sad things thinking of death loving no one and scornful of your own beauty (8) She wrote, even as a child, and her passion for poetry was goaded by Konstantin Balmont, an early Russian symbolist; later she found herself swept up in the symbolist movement. She began to gravitate toward the revolutionary Social Democrats and, at age 18, married a university student, Dimitri Kuzmin-Karavaiev, who was a member of Lenins group called the Bolskeviks. At the same time, although she still claimed to be an atheist, she was fascinated by religion, and enrolled in the Ecclesiastical Academy, where she studied theology (the first Russian woman to do so) and eventually regained her faith. However, it was while she was praying at the holy shrine of the Mother of God, Joy of All Who Sorrow, the wonder-working icon which consoled so many of the Russian sorrowful, where the strength of her faith was renewed. Suddenly everything became clear to her: Jesus is over all. Unique and expiating everything! (9) She wrote: Will I listen to quiet prayers? Your hands knocked on the window, You came to me, bright Mother From the starry and blessed distance (10)

Much of the work produced by the early Symbolist school was steeped in the atmosphere of mysticism and radical messianism. They were the God-seekers. In addition, the Russian intelligensia was, by the end of the 19th century, not only pre-occupied with its own intellectual development but deeply concerned with that of society at large, and by the 1890s to be an intelligent meant as much as to be a revolutionary. (11) When Liza published her poetry collection called The Road, it was part of a genre that was flourishing of its own volition. For the mystical symbolists, poetry was a vision of other worlds, almost a form of prophecy, and this often seems to be the case with Marias poetry. The poem entitled Yes fate I believe in you seems to presage her future vocation to be a mother of many: And I will continue along this wide grain field I was called in life to be a shearer To reap with my hasty hand The harvest of earthly hearts. (12) In her poem, Long-Borrow Princess, she seems to be reminiscing about the burial mounds of her youth, now connected to the bloody revolution surrounding her: I stood upon the heights and saw the valley Where once I galloped with my caravan. They reaped more men than wheat upon that cornfield, Think of your bride, friend sleeping in the mound! (13) In time, Liza began to comprehend the scale of the catastrophe facing Russia, and she became more disenchanted with the dreams of the intelligentsia, which appeared to her increasingly theoretical, impractical and vacuous. As she beheld the reality of destroyed villages, massive dislocation, terror, hunger and chaos, the Revolutionary grail began to fade. She wrote: Am I with Christ? Or am I among irresponsible words which I begin to feel are a sacrilege, an offenceI must fly away. Liberate myself. But this is not so easy. (14) And yet her friendship with Blok remained: Petersburg was no moreAway with culture, the rusty smogphilosophy! But I kept there one hostage, a man symbolic of the terrible world, a point of contact with its whole torment maybe its only tormented justificationAlexander Blok. (15) She intuited the cloud that would descend on her mother country in her poem, My dearest mother, I love your ashes: My dearest mother, I love your ashes You were princess of the kurgans I am losing my life in the midst of enemies I am full of murky poison. Bless me with your hand, I am screaming, I am crying at the funeral feast (16)

In a collection The Road (Doroga) written approximately 1912-1914, she returns to the theme she is a companion to, You told me about death: And greedily will I listen to his words I will feel with all of my scarlet blood, That in front of me lies the earth - my native mother. And that a prayer is the road along the harvest. (17) Michael Plekon, who has written much about Mother Maria, has said The Bolshevik Revolution was for her, as for Fr. Bulgakov and Berdyaev, and many others, a tragedy but also a true liberation. It forced Russian Christians to reject the support of monarchy and fashion a new democratic and pluralistic social order. Here she clashed profoundly with the conservative monarchist Russians of both the Synod as well as those in Paris who adhered to the Moscow patriarchate despite state manipulation of the church. (18) In her comparison of early and contemporary martyrdom, Liza saw around her a broken people in a broken Church. The blood of martyrs flowered once on this infertile earth. A hungry lion licked their wounds And they went forward to their torture freely As by Gods grace shall we as well. (19) Her first marriage, which was impulsive, did not last long and they separated in 1912. The next year, her first daughter, Gaiana (named after mother earth) was born. In Doroga (1916) she recorded the voice of a solitary figure trying to discern her true calling: Not for me the sanguine dream Of clever husband, life of normal bride. A dark cross weighs my shoulder down, My way grows straighter stride by stride (20) At the onset of World War I she returned with Gaiana to her family estate in Anapa, where she had spent so many happy years with her brother, who had recently died in the civil war. There she was elected mayor, opened up a medical center for refugees, protected the town from bandits, and spoke up against Bolsheviks, whom she perceived as abusive. Nevertheless, because she was a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary party, when the Whites regained power in 1918, she was arrested and faced execution as a Bolshevik collaborator. In 1919 she successfully defended herself at her own trial, and won the attention of Daniel Skobtsov, an important government figure who was acting as judge. They married a few months later. Because Daniel was a White, when the tide turned again for the Bolsheviks, the Skobtsovs, with many thousands of their compatriots, left Russia. Liza was again pregnant and her son Yuri was born when the

family reached Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. A year later they traveled to Istanbul and Yugoslavia, where Liza gave birth to a third child, Anastasia. It was a bleak and unsettling period in their lives. Daniel was unable to find suitable work, and the family was often on the edge of hunger and sickness. In 1923, they arrived in Paris, where thousands of Russians had fled, and there they found lodging with some friends. In 1926 the whole family contacted a serious flu, from which Anastasia (Nastia) never recovered. Later she was diagnosed with meningitis. She died at only 4 years of age and for Liza, it was a dagger far exceeding the loss of her father or her brother. She wrote: At Nastias side I feel that my soul has meandered down back alleys all my life. And now I want an authentic and purified road, not out of faith in life, but in order to justify, understand and accept death (21) It seemed that Liza had come to understand that suffering itself is a choice: it is the place where one either encounters or turns away from God. She must have realized that the death of her daughter was the greatest challenge of her faith. It would be so simple to slide back into desperation (she later wrote) where the whole of natural existence has lost its stability and its coherence[and] meaninglessness has displaced meaning (22) Instead, she perceived that what was being revealed to her at that time was not only the mortality of all creation [but] simultaneouslythe life-giving, fiery, all-penetrating and all-consuming Comforter, the Spirit. (23) She also began to glimpse her calling toward an expansive motherhood, in which she should be a mother for all, for all who need maternal care, assistance or protection. (24). But this calling, she understood, would elicit a radical renunciation: And I am convinced that anyone who has shared this experience of eternity, if only once;who has perceived the One who precedes him, if only once: such a person will find it hard to deviate from this path; to him all comforts will appears ephemeral, all treasures valueless, all companions superfluous (25) She began to feel a deeper vocation. Her marriage to Daniel unraveled soon afterward. Liza becomes Mother Maria In 1932, six years after her daughter Anastasias death, and despite the fact that she had two children and two ex-husbands, she managed to overcome all obstacles and fulfill a dream she had been nurturing of becoming a nun in the world. She had little inclination toward the contemplative life or the normal routine of Daily Office. Her only goal was to offer herself to those in the desert of human suffering; in particular, to the catastrophe of the unwanted Russian migrs surrounding her in Paris. Now Mother Maria, she strove to find value in service alone, discerning that God was nudging her to move beyond her own pain in order to witness and attend to the suffering of others.

It is believed that her oldest daughter, Gaiana, entered boarding school during this time. Her son, Yuri, contacted tuberculosis and spent time in a sanatorium, where his mother visited him frequently. Eventually he would support her in her work in Paris, becoming one of her greatest allies. Between 1916 and 1936 she published little poetry but many articles for the YMCA press. She wrote about the great Russian thinkers and published a book on the lives of the saints. Together with Mother Maria, many of the intelligentsia who emigrated to France formed a unique diaspora that laid the foundation of what was to become a dynamic and integrated Russian Orthodox community. Mother Marias attitude about the Russian Church and society were reflected in many of her scribbled writings, which were later collected and recorded by Sergei Hackel. (26 ) She wrote: We have no enormous cathedrals, no encrusted gospels or monastery walls [so] we must deny ourselves any stylizations or aesthetic reformulations[and] must scrupulously distinguish Orthodoxy from all its dcor and its costumes. In some sense we are called to early Christianity. (27) The number of refugees fleeing Russia at the time was more than 1,160,000. By 1924, there were approximately 400,000 in France. They were often crowded into the poorest areas of the city and many no doubt developed a nostalgia for their homeland. Mother Maria formed the Orthodox Action group, which engaged in re-settlement work among the migrs, primarily through the provision of hostels and a soup kitchen. Her spiritual father, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, became the dean of St. Sergius Theological Academy and Nikolai Berdyaev founded the Religious-Philosophical Academy, in part, to awaken the religious spirit and to further religious education among the younger Russian generation. (28) One of the objectives of such programs was the promotion of the otserkvlenie or churchification of life and also the ozhivlenie or enlivining of the church. In other words, its purpose was a Christianization of life. (29) Out of this movement emerged meetings and conferences attended by clergy, intellectuals and youth leaders, where a wider ecumenical movement was born. The fellowship of St. Sergius and St. Albans, under the direction of Marias close friend, Sergius Bulgakov, formed bridges between the Anglican and Orthodox churches. The YMCA, which was then a very Protestant Christian organization, gave concrete form to the needs of Russian migrs to publish. Many of the intellectuals and writers of the Russia Abroad movement that were colleagues of Mother Maria, including Father Bulgakov, George Florovsky, Nicholas Zernov, Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Nikolai Berdiaev, had found Paris to be a welcoming new home. The most characteristic form the Russian intelligentsia took during this period was called the kruzhok and it was alive in the emigration, as intellectuals and young students came together and formed discussion groups at the YMCA.(30) These groups of young people, together with the elders to whom they turned for spiritual direction, eventually served as the seedbed for the Russian Christian Student Movement (RCSM). The RCSM was established in 1923 and helped organize life in the migr community where, now beyond the reach of persecution so prevalent in the growing Bolshevik terror, it was

granted freedom of speech. The Russia Abroad movement also argued for the resistance to Hitlers expansion, which posed a threat both to Russia and to Western democracies; and they were some of the most vocal voices condemning the aggressive policies of Facist and Nazi regimes, including anti-Semitism. The major philosophical concerns of the migr movement continued to be the importance of the individual personality as creator of true cultural values and the integration of the material and spiritual dimension of life. The intelligensia were very much interested in coming to grips with the social question of their age: humanistic socialism. While many philosophically analyzed it from different perspectives, Mother Maria turned to the practical problems of tending for the needy. After Maria had opened up two hostels, she rented a large dilapidated house which first served as a sanatorium for migrs with tuberculosis and later as a home for the elderly. She herself lived in quiet poverty most of the time, inviting others to her hostel, while she slept in a tiny space under the stairs. With Fr. Lev Gillet (31) she provided the unwanted homeless, the depressed, and lonely with a warm meal, a meeting place, a network of support, and a place to worship. She saw in them not unruly beggars and vagrants but fellow wayfarers in Christ. The whole world became her church and she saw the face of Christ in everyone she met: Christian, Jew, or those uncommitted to a religious affiliation. Her ecumenical outlook was expressed in her Types of Religious Life, where Maria invites us to extend the concept of liturgy into life itself, not just a ritual reserved for Sundays. This understanding is built on her need to see the sacrament of brother/sister within her daily life on the streets. (32) Fr. Plekons commentary on this is that Mother Marias vision, one shared by so many in our time, is not just of the cosmic expanse of the Liturgy, that the prayer of the church encompasses the entire world. She also recognizes the implications of this. It is not so much that secular or profane life and activity are somehow sanctified, baptized or blessed by the church and the individual Christian. Rather, a more ancient and biblical realization is recovered, namely, that all of creation is holyTeilhard de Chardin also achieved this cosmic visionwhich unites us.not only in the communion of saints but also with all the creatures of the Lord...(33) As a nun living in the world Maria was nonetheless dedicated to the community Sacraments. In an environment where Orthodox Christians found themselves misplaced, Mother Maria made part of her hostel into a church, made vestments, and embroidered icons. At her house at the Rue de Lourmel she made the stained glass windows for the church services, following the medieval tradition. Many came to her for free funerals and Maria embroidered the names of all the misplaced deceased on a large piece of cloth. Together with Berdiaev and others, Mother Maria was instrumental in initiating the somewhat controversial journal Novyi Grad (the New City,) the goal of which was to affirm the Christian values of freedom and justice, and reconcile the principles of nationality and universality. They were often accused of infusing the current social and

political struggles into Orthodoxy. Although it held much potential, the YMCA Russian work came to a halt in 1940 with the German occupation of France, although after the war the RSCM took over some of the principle YMCAs enterprises. Through the RSCM she could attend to the huge number of migrs working in inhumane conditions in steel factories or mines. Through Orthodox Action she and her close colleague Fedor Pianov were able to secure desperately needed funds for the Commission of Refugees of the League of Nations. Much support also came from Anglican sources, and the relationship between the Anglicans and Orthodox drew extremely close together during the migr movement, especially with the founding of St. Sergius and St. Albans. After she became a nun, Mother Maria raised many eyebrows by spending more time on the streets than busy with her prayers, either begging for food leftovers at any market she could find or fraternizing with vagrants and outcasts of all kinds. She clearly defined her goal when she wrote: Open your gates to homeless thieves, let the outside world sweep in to demolish your magnificent liturgical system, abase yourself, empty yourself [and] accept the vow of poverty in all its devastating severity (34) One of the Paris intelligentsia describes meeting her: I met her in many different places. She was large, red-cheeked, very Russian, with a nearsighted smile and equable demeanor, as if she were outside our conflicts, our noise and agitations. Yet she herself moved quite a bit, made noise with her heavy boots and long dark skirts, slurped tea and argued. (35) The rebel in her was alive and well, and she was often considered too left-wing to be a representative of the religious life. Sergei Hackel has proposed that because of the bitter criticism of her during her lifetime, the role of deaconess might have suited her better than the vocation of a nun. (36) When she opened her second shelter, she joyously proclaimed: At present, I am feeding twenty-five; there Ill be able to feed a hundred. At times I just feel as if God is taking me by the scruff of the neck and forcing me to do His will. (37) She wrote that these migrs were trapped in institutions simply because they suffered from depression, shock, or the inability to speak the language. Probably in the whole emigration none are more abandoned than those who are committed in the madhouses, she wrote (38) and she tried repeatedly to re-integrate them into the community, or sometimes she would just go and listen to their problems. She once told a colleague that human spiritual intercourse was the theme of her very life. When Gaiana was old enough she came to help her mother in the soup kitchen and to attend the university in Paris. Not long afterwards, however, she dealt a devastating blow to Maria when she announced that she had fallen in love with a soviet student at Sorbonne and wanted to return with him to Russia. Initially Maria pleaded, then relented, seeing her own deep love for Russia reflected now in her daughter. When Gaiana excitedly told her that Maria should join the movement, returning to the Soviet Union herself, she only replied wryly, I will wait until I can return in my nuns habit. (39)

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The next year, in June of 1936, she received a short curt letter from her son-in-law announcing that Gaiana had died, purportedly from thyphus. The shock was devastating and Maria was inconsolable. The priest who was with her at the time describes her initial disbelief: I shall never forget that painful momentShe rushed out into the street without a word, runningonly much later did she return, astonishingly pacified. (40) She later said that it was a period of utmost spiritual desolation for her. One of her poems at that time recorded her grief: Uproot from my exhausted heart all earthly hope, elation, fear, Whatever feeds or fills me. And leave the anguish in command. (41) In her poem, I scrape my scabs with pottery shards, she identifies with Job: I scrape my scabs with pottery shards I sit on the mound of ashes, like Job. My naked limbs are covered with lesions But this is nothing.Thats my daughter in a grave My friends, weve got an account to settle with the Pre-eternal One. But he is merciful even in his wrath. So be it that he cursed Eve, And ordered her to carry life in her womb,-But now he takes that life away. (42) And yet somehow she began to intuit that: The King of Glory is getting closer To bless his servant by suffering. (43) The publication in 1937 of more than 80 new poems came as a surprise to many and it is clear that the tragedy of Gaianas death was the catalyst of much poetic catharsis during these years. She saw the hostel as a metaphor for the mysterious Visitor of Mt.: 25: 1-13: Spirit, intensify the struggle at this time Quiet: a knock. Soon time for day to break. My icon lamp is lit, the wick well primed with oil. My guest is at the door. A vast wind in his wake. (44) She threw herself into her work, sleeping so little that one person who worked with her at the time remarked, she does not know the meaning of cold, she goes without food or sleep for 23 hours at a time, she ignores illness and tirednessknows no fear and hates any form of comfort. (45)

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After working in the hostel canteen all day she would visit the local insane asylum or trudge over to the sanatorium. At night she went out into the streets of Paris darkest slums to encourage whomever she could find to come to her hostel. Fr. Lev Gillet recalls her once saying, I would like to swaddle them and rock them to sleep. (46) During the period she was visiting Russian mental patients, she published an article alerting the migr community to the large number of fellow Russians who had ended their Diaspora in the local asylum and she wrote: I hear their intermittent laughter-tears and their demented speech. Though overwhelmed by bitter grief I want to give my life for each. (47) Suffering and the Mother of God After the Nazi occupation of Paris, Mother Maria became involved with the Jewish resistance movement, first smuggling food to those already in camps, and then hiding them in her own residence. She forged documents, cared for orphans, re-located families, and took many personal risks. She remained steadfast through threats of adversity and great personal danger. What was characteristic of the Jewish people to Maria was its selfdefinition: Everything may change, external forms may disappear, lands may be taken away, but the personality of the people remains, for God created it immortal and eternal. (48) Even in Russia, when Maria was a member of the Social Revolutionaries, many of her colleagues were Jews. What was important for those promoting the Revolution was the promise of a new social order, not its ethnic make-up. Maria believed that the Church should reach out and support the Jewish people and also the Nazi resistance movement, not only because it was supportive of human dignity; but she knew full well that messianic Nazism was a threat to all, including her own Russian people, and the Jews were but the first victims. One of the purposes of Orthodox Action in her understanding was to align, protect, and support the Jews in any way possible, including issuing fake baptisms, which she and Fr. Pianov were sometimes viciously criticized for. Philosophically, Marias insight into the Jewish problem may have also have been eschatological: The Cross of Golgotha is laid upon the shoulders of all Israel. And this Cross lays down an obligation, she said, simply but affirmatively. (49) In her understanding, it was this obligation which should become the catalyst to transform the fear and misunderstanding of many of her own fellow Russians into the sacrificial love for all humanity which Christ himself had done. The sacrificial love of ones neighbor was Marias imitation of Christ, what she even called, at times, her personal Golgotha. She once wrote: Christ did not know measure in His love for peoplein the sense that He teaches us by His example not of a measured limit in love, but rather an absolute and immeasurable

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surrendering away of oneself, by definition a laying down of ones soul for others. (50) As Michael Plekon has well expressed it, the whole world became for Maria her Church, and every single individual an image of God for her. Mother Maria was radical because of a piety that made asceticism secondary to charity. (51) For suffering is the leaven that is shared by all of us. She saw all persecuted victims in the concentration camps, whether Jewish or Russian, as crucified with Christ in the person of his saints. (52) Part of Marias theological task was to respond to the call of Christ: Do this in remembrance of me, in those martyred around her, and to recognize the voice of Christ anew in their voices. Just as Jesus asked his disciples to love one another as he had loved them, to be for one another what he was for them, so also those suffering and dying continue to hand over their own lives as a legacy. The certainty of a death freely given for another becomes a heritage entrusted to the survivors. She saw in them an opportunity to relate to the suffering of Christ and thereby be strengthened: because the Son of God suffered, there remains a hope of humanizing our own suffering. In Marias growing understanding, Christ continues to die in those suffering and dying around ushis death is not over. If we ignore the dying of Jesus in the present, we deny the Passion itself. During that time she wrote an article called the Mysticism of Human Communication, where she said, I think that the fullest understanding of Christs giving himself to the world, creating the one Body of Christis contained in the Orthodox idea of sobornost.In communing with the world in the person of each individualwe commune with God. (53) The idea that she developed in that essay is that if we really believe that the Lamb of God is offered as a sacrifice for the whole worldwhich is what the Liturgy statesthen, being in communion with the sacrificial Body, we ourselves become offered in sacrifice. (54) This participation in Christs suffering is nowhere more evident than in the person of the Mother of God. Maria believes, with her spiritual Father, Sergius Bulgakov, (55) that the Theotokos plays a special part in the mysticism of divinehumanity. Through the mysterious Wisdom (Sophia) of God divinity and humanity have penetrated each other. And the greatest human sensitivity to suffering was the portal through which the God-man came into the worldHis Blessed Mother. Maria explains: In the glory of the Mother of God is revealed the glory of creation, and the glory namely is of all the whole creation, sincesuch an attitude towards the Mother of God defines not only faith in the deification-theosis of mankind, but also faith in the deificationtheosis of all the whole world, the cosmos, the earth. (56) Elsewhere she says, It is precisely on this path of God-Motherhood that we must seek the justification and substantiation of our hopes, (57) and following Bulgakov, she states explicitly, She is the point of conjunction of both creaturely and non-creaturely nature. (58) In one of her meditations on the Mother of God, Maria speaks of the misuse of the symbol of the cross-like sword, which adorned many of the graves in a military cemetery she had visited, reflecting how the combination of the cross and sword is often used to justify the violence of war. But, she insists, the cross and sword should most properly be a symbol of passive suffering, for the sword deals a blow, it pierces the soul,

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which passively receives it. According to the Gospel (Luke 2: 35)the cross of the Son of man, accepted voluntarily, becomes a two-edged sword that pierces the soul of the Mother. (59) For the Theotokos willingly accepts the sword as it is plunged into her heart, as it was in Marias. Thus the Christian imitates not only Christ, the God-Man, but his mother, who is also a symbol of the archetype of the Church. In a poem entitled, The God News. It isthe Sword, she writes: Bearing the Good News. It isthe sword. It isthe hail and plague in peaceful fields. It isa fiery and fearsome angel Who sounds the ancient alarms. (60) Much later, when her dreams of a new Russia had all but shattered, she still saw a promise in the cross, juxtaposed with the hammer. By the name of Christ, by the cross of Christ, the hammer and the sickle can be given their authentic meaning; by the cross labor can be sanctified and blessedIt is clear to everybody that we must seek a path to free, purposeful, expedient labor, that we must take the world as a sort of garden that it is incumbent upon us to cultivate. (61) Mother Maria explains how Russian consciousness has always associated the Mother of God not only with the human mother standing at the foot of the cross, but as the Queen of Heaven. She is the Mother of all that lives,the living and personal incarnation of the Church, as the human body of Christ. The veil of the Mother of God protects the world and she is also the moist mother earth. (62) Catriona Kelly notes that in the set of poems in the Riga List, (numbers 89-93), the Virgin Mother appears as a winged woman, pattern of self-sacrifice to be imitated by those on earth, symbol of creativity served by human bees, Queen of heavenand eagle saving the new-born from the mountain-tops. (63) This, then, takes on even deeper significance when returning to the image of the sword and the cross, for the earth is Golgotha with the cross set up on it, piercing itred with bloodis it not a mothers heart pierced by a sword? The Theotokos is now the Mother of the Church, and as such, she continues to co-suffer with each human soul, ason Golgotha. (64) In her poem entitled, I wont keep anything, she says, Desolate is the dead firmament And the dead earth is desolate And eternally the Mother gives away Her Son to eternal Golgotha. (65) The ecclesiology of Eastern Christianity does not find itself, as the Churches in the West, struggling with the concept of Mary as co-redeemer. (66) Indeed, this attribution is found in many of the early church Fathers. Maria notes that, He bears the sins of the world she collaborates with him, so co-participates, she co-feels, co-experiences. His flesh is crucifiedshe is co-crucified. Let us not measure the degree of suffering on Golgotha.

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Its measure is given to usthese two torments are equally measureless. (67) The difference is that the Sons suffering is voluntary and active; the Mothers is passive, but willingly accepted. On Golgotha, she becomes the handmaid of her Sons suffering, and as her heart is pierced, so is the heart of mother-earth, for the rocks split, the earth cracked open, the curtain of the temple was torn in two. (68) It is because Mother Maria could see the Theotokos in this way that she could finally make meaning of the suffering of losing, not one or two, but finally all three of her children. It was the God-motherly part of her human soul which then wanted to adopt the whole world, for all their crosses, and sorrows, and deaths became double-edged swords piercing her own heart. She has proclaimed her identity with Job, but it is with a dignified acceptance and grace that she now identifies with Jacob: At night you will overtake me in battle And you will break my ribs But I wont let you go until you bless me My good adversary. (69) This unification of the Mother and the Sons willing acceptance of suffering is reflected in their word of assent: Thy will be done and Be it done to me according to your word. Perhaps this was the image which Mother Maria was ruminating on when she embroidered her last icon, which was the Mother and Infant, with the marks of crucifixion already imprinted in Christs baby hands and feet. The Mother of God could not even pray that she might avoid the bitter chalice of her own path. She could only consign herself to accept the Golgotha of her Son. (70) The Sacrifice Mother Maria continued to write poems and articles, using the venues provided by the journals published by the YMCA press. The group of migrs principally associated with the Orthodox Russian intelligentsia played a very important role in the construction of an alternative national-popular reality. For Maria, in particular, the RSCM, for which she was the traveling secretary, gave her the opportunity to witness the economic and spiritual wretchedness in which many of the migrs lived, and it spurned her to provide sympathetic and non-judgmental care whenever she could. She once wrote: I searched for thinkers and prophets, who wait by the ladder of heavenand I found people who were restless, orphaned, poor, drunk, despairing, uselesshomeless, naked, lacking bread. (71) Sergei Hackel describes her overall poetry as characterized by integrity and anguish, but also with a pietysuperceded by faith. (72) Her task is to quench the suffering of the world in my own self. (73) She asks for angelic might, and oration of the prophet In every deed be my rod and guide, my unsetting sun from the East. (74)

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She has little need for the ultimate answers to the many questions she had for God in her youth. Rather, as she nears her own fateful end she almost seems reconciled: At the bottom [of my soul] is a nothing but a black-orange coal, She must be low, to be quiet for a bit. But you branded my heart with Your pre-eternal fire, With the stamp of a death-giving baptism. (75) Although she did not attend as many intellectual events as in the more ideological era of her youth, (she had no time!) she did make appearances on occasion to lecture about the most pressing things on her mind. When the German forces were moving swiftly through the country, she reminded her audience that, yes, they lived in critical times, but time and history can be defeated by a gust into eternity by a religious deed. Time is a horizontal line, the religious flight upward a vertical one. Their meeting is a crossthe Cross is Liberation. (76) All of the Orthodox in Paris were deeply concerned during the German invasion of Russia, yet Maria held hope that her country would successfully resist the Nazis. It became apparent that there were numerous Jewish groups in Paris who needed help escaping; thus her hostel was a logical stopping off place. Maria said, if the Germans come looking for the Jews, Ill show them an icon of the Mother of God. (77) She smuggled food for them and hid them while she found new clothing. For on June 3, 1942, all Jews were ordered to wear the yellow Star of David, with the inscription identifying them. This so appalled Maria that she published a poem which undoubtedly helped to seal her fate: Two triangles, a star, The shield of King David, our forefather This is election, not offence The great path and not an evil Thou art persecuted again, O Israel But what can human ill will mean to thee, Thee, who hast heard the thunder from Sinai? (78) Soon, her largest hostel at Lourmel was so overcrowded, refugees were sleeping on floors in every room, including the entrance hall. Jews would be given shelter until they could be farmed out someplace safer. After mass arrests, where 7 thousand people were interred at the famous sports stadium, Vel d Hiv, she smuggled children in and out in a dustbin. Her son Yuri was as fearless as she was reckless, thinking always of those around him who were in such desperate need. It became increasingly evident that they were under suspicion; indeed, there were probably spies at the Lourmel hostel. In her poetry, Maria hints that she suspects that the end might be drawing near. But she never slackened her pace. I am your message. Like a torch, toss me into the night. So that everyone will see, suddenly know,

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What it is you want from humanity And what sort of servants you send out to gather the harvest. (79) On Feb. 8, 1943, her 23 year old son Yuri was arrested while she was away from home and she received a message that he would be held until she and Fr. Pianov presented themselves. They had been identified as the top two officers of Orthodox Action. Although she went immediately and hoped with an agonizing hope that they would free Yuri, it was not to be. Sadly, only a few days before Yuri had told his mother of his wish to join the priesthood. Both Yuri and Maria were sent to concentration camps. When she arrived at Ravensbrueck, she found 16,000 of other inmates stuffed into living quarters that should have accommodated four thousand. Despite the stench, the lice, the starvation, and the terror-filled drillswhere they had to stand for hours while being countedMaria is reported to have done everything in her power to be a light in the midst of the impending gloom. She organized lectures and discussion groups on anything that might help distract the attention of the women in her barrack, if only for a few moments. On Sundays she got out her small, well-worn New Testament, and preached a message of hope to whomever would listen. Yuri managed to smuggle out a letter to his grandmother, Sophia, that he had seen his mother once, a visit that must have been very precious to Maria, knowing that it would probably be their last. Marias spiritual father, Sergius Bulgakov, likewise received a smuggled note from her, where she admitted, My position is this. I submit completely to suffering, even to the sacrifice of my life. If I die, I shall see in this a Blessing from Above. (80) For her health was failing fast and reports of those who saw her were that, because she gave much of what little food she had away, she was rapidly becoming skin and bones. But even toward the end she managed to trade bread for enough colored thread to embroider her last icon. It is believed that Maria took the place of someone else in line for the crematorium. She died on Good Friday, March 30, 1945, and according to one eye-witness she went voluntarily to martyrdom, in order to help her companions to die. (81) Dorothy Soelle once said,If people experience their life as destined by fate, they are dealing with a mute God. (82) Marias God was not mute. Her losses, and the loneliness which came after them, were transformed by an awareness of the accessibility of her God, a closeness she tried to share with others. One Ravensbrueck prisoner remembers a comment Maria made to a woman who was frightfully staring at the chimney smoke from the camps newest crematorium. She compared the black smoke to the freedom of the soul: when they rise higher they turn into light cloudsin the same way, our souls, once they have torn themselves away from this sinful earth, move by means of an effortless unearthly flight into eternity. (83) Victor Frankl has observed that if meaning can be applied to suffering, it seems less unjust. (84) Maria had long since resolved the problem of theodicy; for her there was no question of how a just God can exist in the face of so much abominable cruelty and

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suffering. Through Christ, the transformation of this bitter root had led her into the understanding that God is present in heaven, in hell, in the heart of matter, in every human soul. Like the psalmist who had asked, Where can I flee from your presence? (Psalm 139), Maria had come to understand that it was nowhere. Long ago she had seen the uselessness of directing her bitterness toward the very One whose existence she sought to deny. She wrote, for if we cannot understand and justify [Him], we can no longer liveUnder the dome of our low, smoke-filled, cloudy sky, everything is given over to the absurd if we believe that death is just death. (85) Faith alone could supply her with any kind of meaningful answer, but, she said, not the kind of faith which consists in saying that God makes what is into what is notbut the faith which annihilates death.(86) She had grown to understand that earthly sufferings are but the birth-pangs of a new longed-for life which has been transfigured in Christ. She therefore cried out in her soul, Grow stronger, pulverize me, be unbearable, merciless and swift, because I wish to be born into eternity, because I already feel constricted in the sub-heavenly womb, because I want to go home (87) For Maria, the morality of suffering came not only from the purpose she assigned to it philosophically; the value and purpose of suffering emerged because of suffering itself. Suffering sharply polarizes the inside/outside view of the self; thus Maria was a mystic in the world, for she suffered in, with, and through those around her. And in this way, the activity of suffering, the mourning, the questioning, and the choice of surrender was synonymous with vitality. In embracing the Cross, in being attentive to its incomprehensible seriousness, life no longer held an absurd ugliness. The light is deadening Yet the heart feels winged No separation any more between the here and the there. Perished the conflicts which belong to time. The sacred hands which hold us are the Lords I heard the guard who said to me, Arise O soul: This is the judgment, the reward, the hour, the goal. (88) She saw the soft light of heaven beyond the form of this world, and hope was her lantern in the darkness. She remains a witness for us that, when one clings to hope, Christ picks up the yoke, and no burden is too heavy.

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End-Notes 1. Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Old Regime. N.Y.: Charles Scribner. 1974, p. 167 2. Lawrence, John. A History of Russia. N.Y.:Plume 1995 .p. 200. 3. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. N.Y.: Basic Books, 1980, p. 400. See also his, The Icon and the Ax: An Interpretative History of Russian Culture. Gloucester MA.: Peter Smith Publisher, 1994. 4. Khomiakov, Aleksei and Kireevsy, Ivan. On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader. Hudson, N.Y.: Lindisfarne Books. 1998. pp.33-34. 5. Chamberlain, Lesley. Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia. Overlook/Rookery. 2007. p. 68. 6. Ladouceur, Paul. The Experience and Understanding of Death in Saint Maria of
Paris, UK: Sobornost (28, 1), 2006. Reproduced on-line, no page number given.

7. Hackel, Sergei. Pearl of Great Price: The Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova 18911945. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press. 1981, p. 76. 8. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v vosmi tomakh, quoted in, Pearl p. 83. 9. Smith, T. Stratton. The Rebel Nun. Springfield, Ill.: Templegate. 1965, p. 62. 10. Ermolaev, Natalia, Modernism, Motherhood and Mariology: The Poetry and Theology of Elizaveta Skobtsova, Columbia University dissertation, 2010. p. 39. I am grateful to Natalia for providing me with her translations of numerous of Mother Marias poems. 11. Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, pp.252-253. 12. Ermolaev, Natalie, trans. Poems of Mother Maria, The Russian Plain: poems, mystery-plays, prose, and autobiographical fiction, letters. Edited by A.N. Shustov. St. Petersburg.: Iskusstvo. 2001, # 16. 13. Kelly, Catriona. Ed., An Anthology of Russian Womens Writing. 1777-1992. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1994, p. 233. 14. Smith, Rebel, p. 51 15. ibid, p 58. 16. Ermolaev, Modernism, p. 26. 17. ibid., p.38. 18. Plekon, Fr. Michael. Mother Maria Skobtsova in, Teachings of Modern Christianity on Law, Politics and Human Nature. Ed. Frank Alexander and John Witte, Jr. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1994. p. 669. 19. Pearl, p. 95. 20. ibid., p. 96. 21. Pearl, p. 4. 22. Pearl, p. 5. 23. ibid. 24. Pearl, p. 16. 25. ibid., p. 6. 19

26. Hackel, Pearl; See also his, Mother Maria Skobtsova: Deaconess Manque? Eastern Churches Review, 1, (3), Spring, p. 264. 27. Pearl, pp. 72-73. 28. Davis, Donald. American YMCA and Russia Emigration, Sobornost 9, #1. 1987, p. 27. 29. Raeff, Marc. Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 19191939. Oxford.: Oxford University Press. 1990. p. 135. 30. ibid. 31. Fr. Lev Gillet, also known as A monk of the Eastern Church, is the author of many writings, including The Jesus Prayer. St Vladimirs Seminary Pr.. 1987. 32. Types of Religious Life is an essay in, Mother Maria Skobtsova: Essential Writings. Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books. 2002. 33. in Plekon, Michael. Hidden Holiness. University of Notre Dame Press. 2009. pp.101-02. 34. Craig, Mary. Six Modern Martyrs. N.Y.: Crossroad. 1984. p. 226. 35. Yanovsky, V.S. Elysian Fields: A Book of Memory. Translated by Isabella Yanovsky. .DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Ill. University Press. P. 157. 36. Hackel, Mother Maria Skobtsova: Deaconess Manquee, in Eastern Churches Review, 1, (B), 1967. Spring, p. 264. 37. Motchulsky, Constantin. Mere Marie Skobtsoff, Contacts, V. 29 No. 100, 1977, p 335, quoted in Ladeoceur, The Experience, # 6 above. 38. Rebel Nun, pp. 134. 39. ibid. p. 124. 40. Pearl, p. 7. 41. Stikhi, in Pearl, p. 6. 42. Ermolaev, Modernism, p. 184. 43. ibid. 44. Stikhi in Pearl, p. 33. 45. Pearl p. 51. 46. ibid., p. 52. 47. in Pearl, p. 60. 48. Benevitch, Grigori. The saving of the Jews: The Case of Mother Maria. Online article ; http://www.georgefox.edu/academics/undergrad/departments/socswk/ree/Benevitch_The%20Saving_Feb%202000.pdf No page number given. Original publication: Religion in Eastern Europe. 2000. v.XX N1 pp. 1-19. 49. ibid. 50. online article The Poor in Spirit trans by Fr. S Janos. No page number given. http://www.berdyaev.com/skobtsova/pauperes_spiritu.html 51. Plekon, Michael. The Sacrament of Brother/Sister. Saint Vladimirs Theological Quarterly. 49, #3 2005, pp. 313-34. 52. Benevitch, Saving, footnote # 38. 53. in, Mother Maria Skobtsova: Essential Writings. Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books. 2002. p. 79. 54. ibid., p 81. 55. see Bulgakov, Sergius. The Burning Bush: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2009.

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56. Skobtsova, Maria. Veneration of the Mother of God. Online article: http://www.berdyaev.com/skobtsova/veneratio_Bogomater.html 57. Essential, p. 67. 58. Skobtsova ,Veneration. 59. Essential, p. 67. 60. Ermolaev, Natalie, trans. The Russian Plain, #176. 61. Essential, pp. 86-87. 62. Essential, p. 67. 63. Kelly, Catriona. Writing an Orthodox Text: Religious Poetry by Russian Women, 1917-1940 in Poetics of the Text, ed Joe Andrews, Amsterdam: Rodopi. 1992. p. 168-69, # 17. 64. Essential pp. 67-69. 65. Ermolaev, Modernism, p. 196. 66. See my analysis of this problem in, Compton, M.Sophia. More Glorious than the Seraphim: Byzantine Homilies and Feasts in Honor of the Theotokos. Light and Light Publications, The Raphael Group. 2008, 2011. 67. Essential. p. 68. 68. ibid. 69. Ermolaev, Russian. # 134. 70. Skobtsova ,Veneration (online, no page given) 71. in Hackel, Sergei, What can we say to God? The Poetry of Mother Maria Skobtsova, in Sobornost 7, # 5, 1977. p.380. 72. ibid, p. 379. 73. ibid. 74. Ermolaev, Russian, # 133. 75. ibid, # 153 76. Rebel, p.145. 77. In Pearl, p. 115. 78. In Paldie Mordecai.,et al. In The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. KTAV Publishing House. 1993, p. 33. 79. Ermolaev, Modernism, p. 175. 80. Rebel, p. 244. 81. Craig, Six Modern Martyrs, p. 247. 82. Soelle, Dorothy, Suffering, trans., by E.R.Kalin. Phil: Fortress Press. 1975. p. 77. 83. Pearl, p. 134. 84. Fankl, Viktor. Mans Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press. 2006. 85. in Ladouceur, Paul. The Experience, 86. ibid. 87. in Pearl, p.135. 88. in, Hackel, What can we say to Godp 381.

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