Nun Mary (Marie Madeleine Le Beller) at her skete There are meetings and destinies in life that you want to share with others—even after much time has passed. One of the most memorable events in my life was my brief yet extremely vivid acquaintance with a modern hermitess of Mt. Sinai. Her destiny brought together the deepest falls and insights, which made her path something akin to Biblical revelations and narratives about the Lives of ancient saints. At the same time, the seething events of the last century and the temptations typical for modern times have left their mark on her. And in the life of this Orthodox Frenchwoman there were meetings and living contacts with ascetics, whom today many of us venerate as newly canonized great saints of our time and who are part of the grace-filled history of the Church of the twentieth century. Therefore, in her story amazing aspects not just of biographies, but of genuine Lives of saints are revealed. And what is even more surprising to me is that she managed not only to come into contact with modern sanctity; her life became a reflection of the spiritual paths of some saints of the first century of Christianity. And first of all, of course, I mean her patron-saint—St. Mary Magdalene Equal-to-the-Apostles.
Those who have at least some knowledge of Western European Renaissance painting must have seen a widespread depiction of St. Mary Magdalene in the desert. El Greco, Titian, Tintoretto, Rubens, Rembrandt and many others depicted her on their canvases as a penitent sinner against an austere, wild landscape, often with an opened book of the Holy Scriptures in front of her and a bare human skull lying nearby—as a symbol of the corruptibility and transience of human life. Several historical circumstances influenced the emergence and widespread dissemination of this story. One of them was the miraculous uncovering of the saint’s relics in the south of France in the underground crypt of the church of the small town of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume on December 12, 1279. A magnificent Gothic basilica was built on this site and is still a place of pilgrimage and veneration of St. Mary Magdalene.
The Western version of her Life claims that after the preaching of the Risen Christ in Rome, where she preached the Gospel even to Emperor Tiberius, the saint entrusted her future life to the Divine Providence, going with her companion Celidonius, who was born blind, on a boat without sails and oars. Tradition has it that their boat arrived where the town of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer now stands, a little west of Marseille (at that time called Massilia). So they ended up in the south of Gaul and set about evangelizing there. The bishop of the new Church was St. Mary’s disciple, Maximin, after whom the city was named where he and his mentor, who lived in the desert mountains to the south, were buried. There in the commune of Nans-les-Pins pilgrims are still shown a cave in the foothills of the Maritime Alps, where Mary Magdalene struggled and died and where a small Benedictine monastery is now situated. Thanks to this, Mary Magdalene became a highly venerated saint in France and throughout Western Europe as their patroness who brought and spread Christianity in this hitherto unknown corner of the Roman Empire.
The era of the Crusades contributed to the growing perception of her more as penitent hermitess than equal-to-the-Apostles preacher. Once in the Middle East, crusaders learned about the existence of many previously unknown saints. One of them was St. Mary of Egypt, the greatest example of selfless repentance of a sinner who for many years retired to a wild desolate desert in order to find God in it. The images of the two Marys, Magdalene and Mary of Egypt, merged into one in the minds of the crusaders, thanks to which a companion of the Savior and His disciples, from whom the Lord cast out seven demons, turned not so much into a witness of the Resurrection and a missionary as a penitent sinner. This is how she began to be portrayed in church sermons, and then depicted on numerous canvases by painters. Thus, the penitent Magdalene of Europe began to exist in the minds of Western Christians in a manner increasingly distant from her original Gospel life.
But 2000 years after the life of the real Mary from the Galilean town of Migdal, France paid a historical tribute to her by sending its own Mary Magdalene of sorts to the Orthodox East. She traveled in exactly the opposite direction of the Magdalene of Western biographies and legends. In her spiritual quest, the Lord brought her first to Palestine, where the story of the real Magdalene began. And then her path lay even further—to the Sinai desert where for many years she offered genuine repentance (and not that imagined by painters) with the blessing and under the spiritual guidance of two great ascetics of modern Orthodoxy. There, in the Skete of St. John of the Ladder, the Orthodox Frenchwoman found her earthly abode and resting place, becoming the anchoress (hermitess) Mary Magdalene. We will try to the best of our knowledge to tell readers about her amazing journey.
Childhood and youth
Marie Madeleine Le Beller was born in Versailles near Paris on November 27, 1946 and was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church in honor of St. Mary Magdalene—one of the most venerated saints in France. Her childhood, which was spent in a small quiet post-war town, once famous for the splendid residence of the French kings, was marked by purity and a sincere faith. Little Marie Madeleine loved Christ with a child’s heart not yet clouded by passions, loved church and worship. When she was very young, she came to the church even when it was closed. She liked to peep inside, if only through a window—the empty church attracted her with its mystery hidden in it. During services that their religious family attended together, her heart was often touched. Tears involuntarily appeared in her eyes, which she tried to conceal from her loved ones, explaining them by dust or the wind. Her older brother would notice his sister crying almost every time. Why does the little girl weep?
“Why are you crying again, Marie? What is the matter?” he asked.
“The wind is blowing, and that’s why I’m crying!” his sister answered.
But the next day her brother noticed her tears again:
“Why are you crying? There is no wind today!”
“Dust got into my eyes.”
I still remember Nun Mary’s voice, conveying the intonation of her brother:
“So is it dust or wind?” recalls Nun Silouana, to whom Mother Mary told this story from her happy childhood. “He would ask with a smile, and Marie would cry with tender emotion and love for Christ.”
In those years, she and her older brother liked to play church, where he was a “priest”, and his younger sister was his zealous “parishioner”. They used carrots for “Communion”. Cut into round pieces, they looked like Roman Catholic wafers. However, sometimes carrots were quite large, so Marie Madeleine had to “consume” them in large quantities (it’s exactly what priests have to do with the remainder of the Body of Christ).
At the age of eighteen, Marie Madeleine, who was distinguished by her excellent academic ability, entered the famous Sorbonne where she studied linguistics. Studying there gave her among other things the knowledge of several foreign languages, which was very useful later. But it also caused dramatic spiritual changes, which she very bitterly regretted afterwards. Her student years at the Sorbonne coincided with revolutionary movements and events that were sweeping the entire Western world. In a powerful stream of anti-war and anti–government protests, the “sexual revolution”, the “psychedelic revolution”, the “Summer of Love”, thousands of rock festivals in Woodstock and on the Isle of Wight—under the slogan “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll”, the generation of children of the post-war “baby boom” were destroying the universal values of their parents that seemed boring and outdated to them. Beatniks and “flower children” (hippies), “new leftists” and “neo-Marxists”, pacifists and anarchists, as well as many other social movements of varying degrees of radical thought were creating a new ideological landscape of counter-culture, which was (desperately and without regard to the former authorities) fighting for human minds and a place in the sun. And students were one of the main driving forces in these processes; many of them could hardly stay away from the general mental ferment.
In France these revolutionary events were called the “Red Spring,” because they peaked in May 1968. Here they reached such a scale that they led to the resignation of the Government of General Charles de Gaulle, who with a strong hand had led the war-ravaged country to prosperity and order. But now the established order turned out to be the rioters’ main enemy. Their slogan was the call, “Il est interdit d’interdire” (“It is forbidden to forbid”), and this abolished any established social norms. The writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) became one of the symbols of that “Red May”. Despite the fact that he belonged to an older generation, for the rebellious youth he was “one of their own”, embodying the abolition of all the prohibitions against which they were fighting. Sartre fought against Nazism during the Second World War (although he did it in the “intellectual underground” rather than in the “Resistance”), was a consistent representative of pacifists and “leftists,” and even refused the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature as expressing the tastes of the “bourgeois Establishment”. Moreover, for many years he had an openly free relationship with his like-minded philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and even experimented with psychedelic drugs to expand his consciousness. For the young intellectual Marie Madeleine, as for many representatives of her generation, Sartre became a mentor and teacher of life, along with another famous French author and philosopher, Albert Camus (1913–1960).
And though the views of these two influential thinkers often differed on many issues in their lives and works, they were absolutely unanimous in one thing: their rejection of religion in general and Christianity in particular. Therefore, their philosophical school is commonly referred to as atheistic “existentialism”. For Sartre it was expressed in the idea that only the individual himself is responsible in this world for his life, without having the right to shift it to God, the higher powers, fate or anything else. Camus regarded the whole world as absurd, causing people to have such philosophical reactions as suicide or rebellion—that is, rejection of the meaninglessness of existence (in the broadest sense of the word). This thinker regarded resorting to religion as one of man’s possible responses to the absurdity around him and a departure from reality, an attempt to hide from it among false hopes and illusions. Camus called his novel The Plague an “anti-Christian work”, and in his philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, he openly denied Christian values, although he considered religion, after suicide, the best of the wrong human choices.
It is obvious that without these famous philosophers’ influential justifications for the need to abandon Christianity, the “prohibition of prohibitions” would have been impossible. This movement was able to removing all obstacles on the way to that coveted freedom, to which the young French rebels of the late 1960s aspired. Marie Madeleine, convinced by the writings of her idols Camus and Sartre, thus abandoned her former purely childish faith and memories of her experience of God, which had once touched her heart. But now freedom in all its manifestations was available to her, and she plunged into it headlong, together with all her peers. Thus began years of her fruitless spiritual search and service to all kinds of sins on the wave of the permissiveness that washed over the crowds of revolutionary youth, like the oriflamme over regiments of their militant ancestors.1
Spiritual rebirth
After graduating from the Sorbonne, Marie Madeleine worked there as a teacher. Years of outwardly quite prosperous life flew by, but there was deep darkness behind its successful facade. Alluring freedom turned into utter the loneliness of a person who had lost Divine harmony, an endless torment of the spirit, and a prison for the soul. Many years later she said of this period: “It would have been better for me if I had been in a dark prison for eighteen years instead of living for so many years without faith in Christ.” In her heart of hearts there was still an ideal image of the Savior, which she had renounced under the influence of contemporary thinkers, and she continued to seek Him intuitively. She hoped to find His features in her future life partner, and that’s why she never married. She tried to find a substitute for Christian virtues in good deeds and idealistic care for her neighbors. But without genuine inner faith in God, all this remained vanity and anguish.
However, the Lord did not forsake the woman who had abandoned Him, but He Himself sought out the lost soul that had once loved Him. He appeared to her in some way beyond the human mind, leaving no doubt about His existence. She never explained exactly what that Divine Revelation looked like, but it was an event of such spiritual power that it overturned all the ideas by which she had lived over the previous twenty years. Now she firmly knew that God exists, and she felt an enormous sense of guilt for her past apostasy. She confessed that at that time the blouse she wore was always soaked with tears of remorse that she constantly shed. It was impossible to continue her way of life in this state, and so Marie Madeleine quit her job and left Paris in order to understand what had happened to her and what she should do next. After giving up teaching she found a simple job in a secluded and quiet place—a boarding house for the elderly in the picturesque and uninhabited French Alps. Thus began the path that she followed in the footsteps of her patron-saint, Mary Magdalene, but in reverse order, if we follow the Western version of her Life. And if the saint indeed spent the final years of her life as an anchoress in the Alps of southern Gaul, for Marie Madeleine solitude amid them in search of knowledge of God was the very beginning, although back then she did not think about such coincidences between her own life and the path walked by her Heavenly patroness.
Thanks to what had happened to her, Marie Madeleine was now convinced of the truth of God’s existence. But this experience did not reveal to her where and how she ought to continue to seek opportunities for deeper knowledge of God and liberation from feelings of terrible guilt for her departure from the Light into the darkness of sins, unbelief and destructive passions. So she took to her Alpine seclusion a huge suitcase filled with spiritual books about a variety of faiths. Among them were the writings of Roman Catholic mystics like Juana Ines de la Cruz or Francis of Assisi, books on Sufism, Taoism and Zen Buddhism. She also took several Orthodox books, which made the strongest impression on her. She found the Life of St. Seraphim of Sarov especially close to her heart, and after reading it she was convinced that the Truth abides in Orthodoxy. Subsequently, St. Seraphim became her favorite saint, and his icon was always in her cell. Acquaintance with the book by Archimandrite (now Saint) Sophrony (Sakharov) entitled, Elder Silouan, became extremely important in her spiritual quest. Many things in the lives and teachings of Sts. Silouan and Sophrony were very much in tune with her own spiritual experience and searches.
Icon of the Mother of God
Thus, with her soul and mind, Marie Madeleine decided to embrace Orthodoxy and spend her future life in accordance with its traditions and teachings, guided by the saving images and instructions of its great saints. But how was it practically possible to do this, being in the remote French Alps? Where should she start? Where should she go? Who was she supposed to contact? But the Lord was already guiding her repentant and truth-seeking soul, sending her amazing help. Quite unexpectedly, her French friend, who became a Uniate priest of the Eastern rite, came to that same boarding house. It should be clarified here that the French Uniates are not the same as the notorious Greek Catholics in Western Ukraine or Belarus. If the latter appeared as a result of the forced conversion of their ancestors to the union with Rome imposed by the authorities, a Frenchman who embraces Uniatism is, as a rule, dissatisfied with the forms of Roman Catholic spirituality he was raised in. Not daring to break from the papacy completely, he nevertheless seeks a deeper and richer heritage in the teaching and liturgical traditions of the Eastern Churches—for example, the Syrian Melkites, who retained their connection with ancient Byzantine Orthodoxy, being formally subordinate to the Roman See. Most often, as the experience of twentieth-century conversions shows, Uniatism for such people is a step on their path to Orthodoxy.
Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) There was a very lively spiritual conversation between the Uniate priest and Marie Madeleine, during which she told him about her recent religious search and the literature she had read. Among other things, they discussed the book, Elder Silouan, which impressed Marie so much. At some point the priest asked her as if incidentally: “Do you know that the author of this book is still alive?” Since the book that Maria had read did not contain any detailed information about its author, she was very happy to learn that Fr. Sophrony, despite his very advanced age and illness, still received people flocking to him from across the globe. In that news a glimmer of hope appeared for her and a possible sign as to who would help her join Orthodoxy, and how to take the first important steps on this path. She warmly thanked the Uniate priest for revealing to her that Fr. Sophrony lived in the UK, where he had founded a monastery in Essex in honor of St. John the Baptist and where Marie Madeleine could travel to meet with him and ask for spiritual guidance regarding her future life.
To be continued…
