St. Maria is that girl

This book will convict any Christian, whether Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox to live life in service to God. Most modern writers only have words to share but St Maria lived the life of a true servant. As a monastic, she didn’t escape the world to seek salvation but rather plunged herself into its depths, putting on Christ all the way to the end as she earned a martyrs crown.

“The more we go out into the world, the more we give ourselves to the world, the less we are of the world, because what is of the world does not give itself to the world”

“In communing with the world in the person of each individual human being, we know that we are communing with the image of God, and, contemplating that image, we touch the Archetype — we commune with God”

After the Nazis took Paris and persecution of the Jews began, she stood with them, was sent to the camps, and perished in Ravensbruck.

Mother Maria is fantastically modern, relevant, articulate, wonderful, and accessible. This book says a lot about what Christianity should look like, concretely, and how our priorities -- both ecclesial and personal -- should play out. It doesn't even need its historical Russian context to make sense, which is a blessing. Anyway, you should read this.

In reading this book, I was reminded again and again of Nietzsche's remark: "I am no man, I am dynamite.” I found myself thinking, "Oh my god... Mother Maria was no (mere) woman. She was dynamite!"

Mother Maria knew at the most profound level what it meant to see Christ in her neighbors. Its implication and call seized her (not as two separate acts, the perception containing already a summon to live differently) and provided her with a really extraordinary sense of unity and intensity that I found so admirable and healing. Here is an individual whose heart and mind had turned to flame!

In reading a book like this, I find it most necessary to take her at her words. She wrote that she saw Christ in the drunkard, the debaucherous, and the murderer. Though I do not share in her vision and can only imagine and desire to participate in it, I believe her words: The glory of the maker and the sustainer of the universe, his majestic freedom and transcendent beauty seen on the face of every neighbor! This was a vision that bound her more deeply to both her God and her neighbor as every encounter with the presence of Jesus in her neighbor reminded her of God's humility, His "emptiness." To be a Christian is to call Jesus "lord and savior." But why? What moves us? What moved her? For Mother Maria, it was the humility, the lowliness of Jesus...

I spent most of my adult life grieving over my life's apparent meaninglessness. I did not know what my life was for. I wonder now, without blaming myself, about my culpability in all this. The "meaning of life" stares at me every time I encountered a neighbor, and I did not know it ("God is here but I did not know it.").

Mother Maria wrote simply about her transformed vision and the awe it inspired:

"The way to God lies through love of people. At the Last judgement I shall not be asked whether I was successful in my ascetic exercises, nor how many bows and prostrations I made. Instead I shall be asked, Did I feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the prisoners. That is all I shall be asked. About every poor, hungry and imprisoned person the Savior says "I": "I was hungry, and thirsty, I was sick and in prison." To think that he puts an equal sign between himself and anyone in need... I always knew it, but now it has somehow penetrated to my sinews. It fills me with awe."

And its costly implications:

"Worldly people are essentially separated from the world by an impenetrable wall. However much they give themselves to the joys of the world, whatever bustle they live in, there is always an impassable abyss in their consciousness: “I” and the world, which serves me, amuses me, grieves me, wearies me, and so on. The more egoistic a man is, that is, the more he belongs to the world, the more alienated he is from the authentic life of the world, the more the world is some sort of inanimate comfort for him, or some sort of inanimate torture, to which his uniquely animate “I” is opposed…

When hermits wove mats and fashioned clay pots, it was a job. When we peel potatoes, mend underwear, do the accounts, ride the subway, that is also a job. But when the monks of old, by way of obedience, buried the dead, looked after lepers, preached to fallen women, denounced the unrighteous life, gave alms—that was not a job. And when we act in our modern life, visiting the sick, feeding the unemployed, teaching children, keeping company with all kinds of human grief and failure, dealing with drunkards, criminals, madmen, the dejected, the gone-to-seed, with all the spiritual leprosy of our life, it is not a job and not only a tribute to obedience that has its limits within our chief endeavor—it is that very inner endeavor itself, an inseparable part of our main task. The more we go out into the world, the more we give ourselves to the world, the less we are of the world, because what is of the world does not give itself to the world…

In His worldly obedience He emptied Himself, and His emptying is the only example for our path. God who became a child, God who fled into Egypt to escape Herod, God who sought friends and disciples in this world, God who wept from the depths of His Spirit over Lazarus, who denounced the pharisees, who spoke of the fate of Jerusalem, who drove out demons, healed the sick, raised the dead, who finally, and most importantly, gave His Flesh and Blood as food for the world, lifted up His Body on the cross between the two thieves—when and at what moment did His example teach us about inner walls that separate us from the world? He was in the world with all His Godmanhood, not with some secondary properties. He did not keep Himself, He gave Himself without stint. “This is my Body, which is broken for you”—that is, given without stint. “This is my Blood, which is shed for you”—shed to the end. In the sacrament of the eucharist, Christ gave himself, His God-man’s Body, to the world, or rather, He united the world with Himself in the communion with his God-man’s Body. He made it into Godmanhood. And it would sound almost blasphemous if He had wanted to isolate some inner, deep Christ who remained alien to this God-man’s sacrifice. Christ’s love does not know how to measure and divide, does not know how to spare itself. Neither did Christ teach the apostles to be sparing and cautious in love—and He could not have taught them that, because He included them in the communion of the eucharistic sacrifice, made them into the Body of Christ—and thereby gave them up to be immolated for the world. Here we need only learn and draw conclusions. It might be said paradoxically that in the sense of giving Himself to the world, Christ was the most worldly of all the sons of Adam. But we already know that what is of the world does not give itself to the world."

These words leave me in a place of terrible clarity with no excuses.

The first half of the book was without a doubt 5 stars, but the back half was not quite as easy of a read. Overall really loved reading about the life of St. Maria of Paris.

Very erudite lady. Such precision clarity of thought in her essays. Particularly liked her essay on "Types of religious life". She writes about the importace of various types such as "Ritualist", "Aesthetic, "Ascetic" and she clarifies and recaptures "Evangelical" into it's proper meaning, not "the current evangelical sectarianism which has extracted only a selected list of moral precepts from the Gospel, added to this its own distorted and impoverished doctrine of salvation - about being "born again" - spiced this up with hatred of the Church, nd then proclaiming this peculiar hodgepodge as a true understanding of Christ's Gospel teaching" but rather, the desire "to "Christify" all of life".

A wonderful Saint, whose biography I hope also to read some day.