02 — Monasticism in the World

The heart of Mother Maria’s originality: her tonsure in 1932 under Metropolitan Evlogy without any intention of entering a cloister, and her invention of a monasticism whose “cell” was the city and whose asceticism was the service of the destitute. This section covers the tonsure and its radical vision, and the house on the rue de Lourmel where she embodied it.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Paris émigré)

Mother Maria took the monastic habit but refused the monastic enclosure, insisting that in the conditions of the emigration — and, she came to think, in the conditions of the modern world as such — the authentic form of the monastic vocation was not withdrawal but a total availability to human need. This section presents that vision and the concrete institution, the hostel and canteen at 77 rue de Lourmel, in which she lived it out.

Section Contents

• The Nun Who Would Not Stay in the Cloister — the canonical dissolution of her marriage, the tonsure of 1932 under Metropolitan Evlogy, the name Maria, and her deliberate, argued rejection of the enclosed cloister in favor of a “monasticism in the world”
• The House on the Rue de Lourmel — the hostels she ran, above all 77 rue de Lourmel: the canteen, the beds, the chapel in the garage, and the sheltering of destitute émigrés

See Also

• The Sacrament of the Brother/Sister — the theology behind the worldly monasticism
• Sheltering Jews Under the Nazis — what the open house became under the occupation
• The Contested Saint — Methodology — how the unenclosed, unconventional monasticism figures in the reservations