5 Lessons in Resistance from Mother Maria Skobtsova.
There once was a nun who refused to be tamed.
She was a twice-divorced, twice almost-executed, chain-smoking, anarchist Orthodox nun who smuggled Jews out of WW2 Paris–and died in solidarity with them.
And lately, through the cracks of my shattered heart, Mother Maria has been showing me what it looks like to resist fascism with a fierce, maternal heart.
If she was able to be a beacon of hope in the midst of hell, then it must be possible for me, too.
Here are five lessons I’ve learned from this maverick matriarch, lifted from her own playbook for resistance. (Number 4 gets me every time.)
But first - who was she?
Meet Mother Maria Skobtsova
Born in 1891 Russia, Mother Maria (born Elizaveta ‘Liza’ Pilenko) spent her prime years in the hotbed of the Bolshevik revolution. An atheist, poet, and political activist, Liza immersed herself in the intellectual world of St. Petersburg. However, their revolutionary ideas didn’t go far enough for this young idealist. She didn’t want to just discuss social change–she wanted to make it happen.
She found an active dedication to the poor in the unlikeliest of places: the Gospels. She converted to Orthodoxy and became the first woman to attend seminary in St. Petersburg.
Meanwhile, the revolutionaries were gaining power. Through a series of events, Liza was installed as the mayor of her town. (As a 27 year old woman! In 1918 Russia!) Violence and catastrophe was all around them. As she tried to maintain the city’s infrastructure, the White Army arrived. She was arrested for collaborating with the enemy and put on trial to be executed.
In court, standing before her accusers, she boldly defended her own case, declaring: “My loyalty was not to any imagined government, but to those whose need of justice was greatest, the people. Red or White, my position is the same—I will act for justice and for the relief of suffering. I will try to love my neighbor.”
By some miracle, her life was spared. She knew she needed to get her family out of Russia.
1. Transform Grief Into Love
Together with her husband, mother, and children, Liza fled to Georgia, Turkey, Yugoslavia, and finally France. After all the horrors they had survived, Liza’s tipping point came with the illness of her young daughter, Nastia. After spending weeks by her hospital bed, Nastia died. Liza was absolutely devastated.
Later, she would try to put the experience into words. Loss, she wrote,
"throws open the gates into eternity, while the whole of natural existence loses its stability and its coherence. Yesterday's laws are abolished, desires fade, meaninglessness displaces meaning, and a different, albeit incomprehensible Meaning, causes wings to sprout on one's back…
Before the dark pit of the grave, everything must be reexamined."
As she reexamined her own life, Liza's heart opened in a new way. Rather than allowing grief to paralyze her, she sank to the bottom and there found a new identity. After her daughter’s burial, Liza became "aware of a new and special, broad and all-embracing motherhood." She felt she saw a "new road before me and a new meaning in life, to be a mother for all, for all who need maternal care, assistance, or protection."
Haltingly and imperfectly, Liza grew into this new identity. She began to seek out those most ostracized by French society–people with addictions, mental illness, or the thousands of emigrèes looking for a safe haven.
Her tender, maternal heart soon became known throughout Paris. People lined the streets just to talk to her, eager to find this woman who would make them feel heard. She welcomed each person as if they were her own child. Not only did she invite them into her growing community house, but each night she ventured out—under bridges, into brothels—to find the most vulnerable and offer them refuge from the harshness of the world.
Reflect:
Liza’s grief became the foundation for her life’s work. It was fueled by love for those most in need. When faced with tragedy, we too can find deeper purpose by letting our pain awaken our compassion. How might you let your sorrow spark love and action in your own life?
2. Everyone is an Icon
Eventually, the local bishop heard of Liza’s social work and suggested she found a new sort of monastery. By this time, she had been separated from her second husband for years. The bishop facilitated their divorce and within weeks Liza made her profession as a nun, taking the name Maria.
As a newly minted monastic, Mother Maria knew she wanted to “live the life of paupers and tramps”—a very different lifestyle from the typical Orthodox monastery. Instead of retreating into a life of prayer, she opened house after house of hospitality.
Her work revolved around a single belief: “each person is the very icon of God incarnate in the world.” She meant this quite literally. For Orthodox Christians, icons are venerated as a sort of window into eternity, into the Mystery of mysteries.
Mother Maria wondered why we don’t turn that same veneration to the humans around us.
God is incarnate in each person, she wrote. And we need to
“accept this awesome revelation of God unconditionally, to venerate the image of God in [our] brother. Only when [we] understand that, will yet another mystery be revealed to [us] -- one that will demand [our] most dedicated efforts… [We] will perceive that the divine image is veiled, distorted and disfigured by the power of evil... And [we] will want to engage in battle with the devil for the sake of the divine image."
In other words: the suffering of a refugee, a queer person, a single mom working three jobs–should compel us to offer our “most dedicated efforts,” for each person reveals the face of the suffering Christ.
Now the extent to which she reverenced the image of God in every person would raise many an eyebrow in Orthodox circles. As her community grew, she was known to attend liturgy the least, and when she did, would frequently arrive late or leave early as soon as a guest came knocking at the door.
But Mother Maria had no patience for performative religion. "Piety, piety, but where is the love that moves mountains?" While people were concerned with their personal prayer life, Christ went hungry and abused in the streets.
“Social endeavors should be just as much of a liturgy as any communion,” she wrote.
Reflect:
Every human is an icon of God. A window into the Holy of Holies. For Mother Maria, this mystery tied together the Incarnation.
In her words: “It is necessary to understand that Christianity demands of us not only the mysticism of communion with God, but also the mysticism of communion with people.”
How can we live in the fruitful tension of the both/and?
Both contemplative and active
Both ritual and solidarity
Both practice and organize
Both human and divine
3. Oppression is a Call to Solidarity
In 1942, the Nazis mandated Jews to wear the Star of David. Throughout Europe, many Christians looked the other way. The law didn’t apply to them, so therefore it wasn’t a Christian problem, right?
Mother Maria had no time for such terrible theology. “There is no such thing as a Christian problem,” she shot back. “Don’t you realize that the battle is being waged against Christianity? If we were true Christians, we would all wear the star. The age of confessors has arrived.”
There is no neutrality in the face of grave injustice. As the adage goes, all that it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.
Reflect:
How might we join in solidarity with those who are most impacted by the new cascade of policies? Our actions might not be grandiose. It could be as simple as taking an unhoused person to lunch, or checking in with your refugee center to see what they need most.
Because what is a Christian if not seeing yourself in the most vulnerable?
4. Enough Talk. Act.
As a teenager, Liza became enamored with the revolutionary spirit. As a poet and blossoming intellectual, she joined philosophers and artists in talking late into the night, dreaming of a new world.
However, it didn’t take her long to grow tired of ideas.
"My spirit longed to engage in heroic feats, even to perish, to combat the injustice of the world," she recalled. She didn’t see her intellectual friends taking action; their thirst for justice seemed satiated by all their ethereal plans they laid in the wee hours of the morning.
Thus, when the Nazi occupation began, Mother Maria wasted no time in doing what she knew how to do.
When the mass arrests began, she organized a fundraiser to support the spouses and children of those left behind. Then they created escape routes to southern France.
When Jews started coming round asking for falsified baptismal certificates, the answer was always yes.
When 13,000 Jews were arrested and detained in a sports stadium for five days before they were sent to Auschwitz, she worked with sanitation workers to smuggle out children in trash bins.
And when Gestapo officers began knocking on her monastery door looking for Jews, she would simply show them an icon of the Mother of God.
Reflect:
Mother Maria acted together with others. Like us, she wasn’t always sure of the best way to help. But she connected with the vulnerable, loved them like a mother, and responded to their needs.
Today, when we are tempted to scream into the void of social media or rage about policies–let’s not forget that acting and serving is what will bring about change.
How?
Consider:
Contacting your representative to share your discontent. They need to hear from you. (It concretely, statistically makes a difference.)
Asking local churches and charities who is organizing support for the families of people who have been deported
Donating to international relief organizations who are working to heal the gashes left by war
It is normal to feel overwhelmed. But Mother Maria’s life shows us that action doesn’t have to be grand to make a difference. Start with where your feet are planted, and listen to the needs around you.
5. Fortify Each Other in Community
In 1943, Mother Maria and her co-conspirators were arrested. She was sent to the camp at Ravensbruck, where she survived for two years before being killed.
To the very end, this anarchist nun was a blaze of love. Survivors recount how she was “full of good cheer” and became a mother to many, leading clandestine discussion groups and comforting her fellow prisoners.
“She took us under her wing,” said one, “and had an enormous influence on us all.”
One survivor, Sophia Novich, recalled:
“I once said to Mother Maria, that it was more than a question of my ceasing to feel anything whatsoever. My very thought processes were numbed and had ground to a halt.
‘No, no,’ Mother Maria responded, ‘Whatever you do, continue to think. In the conflict with doubt, cast your thought wider and deeper. Let it transcend the conditions and the limitations of this earth.’”
With maternal fierceness, she helped her fellow campmates keep their spirits alive even as their bodies wasted away. By anchoring their minds in conversation, she “provided an escape from the hell in which we lived. [She] allowed us to restore our depleted morale, [and] rekindled us, the flame of thought, which barely flickered beneath the heavy burden of horror.“
Even in the darkest hour, Mother Maria continued to radiate with defiant love. She helped others grasp their interior freedom–a place where no man could enter.
Reflect:Today, it is easy to succumb to the “shock and awe” of the daily headlines. However, we can’t afford to get lost in numbing bewilderment. The immensity of pain is much more likely to turn to trauma in our bodies when we try to process it alone. We need each other to lean on.
Our medicine, to receive and to be for one another, is grounded tenderness, steady conversation, and even the fortifying mercy of levity. Like Mother Maria.
Like a good Russian mother, Maria loved with a ferocity. The image of her turning away Nazi officers with a painting of the mother of God is emblazoned in my mind. It is an icon that reveals the meeting point of justice and mercy.
Perhaps what is most helpful about this image is that we can resist with love. I don’t know about you, but as much space as I give to my emotions (horror, rage, heartache)–sometimes I need a fierce mother to grab my face and say “This is what they want. To numb you with horror. But you have your mind. You have your heart. And you have a community of people who are hurting. Sink to the bottom and find your motherhood.
Now go. Love people back to their senses.”
While my heart and the world burns, Mother Maria shows me that that flame can be channeled into a passionate, active love.
Perhaps the deepest lesson is that love, even in its most rebellious form, is the fiercest form of resistance.
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Want to immerse yourself in Mother Maria’s fierce love? Join us for our upcoming mini retreat March 8. The world-renowned Rowan Williams will be teaching LIVE (did you know Mother Maria is his favorite modern saint??). It’s wildly affordable, and the recording will be made available afterwards.
If, like me, you need concrete anchors of hope during this year, this is a gathering you won’t want to miss.
Kelly Deutsch specializes in audacity. Big dreams, fierce desires, restless hearts. When seekers are hungry for unspeakably more, she offers the space to explore contemplative depths and figure out where they fit in the vast spiritual landscape. She speaks and writes about divine intimacy, emotional intelligence, John of the Cross, trauma-informed spiritual practice, and neuropsychology. Kelly offers spiritual direction, coaching, contemplative cohorts, and retreats. She is the bestselling author of Spiritual Wanderlust: The Field Guide to Deep Desire. When she isn’t exploring the interior life, you might find her wandering under Oregonian skies or devouring red curry.
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