Toward the Endless Day: The Life of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel

Foreword

Fore word When I was attempting to become a Christian, one of the first witnesses to the Gospel whom I met was Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. Despite our long friendship and work together on numerous initiatives, I never had fully realized the breadth of her life and work until I read this biography. Olga Lossky, who comes from a great and noble line (her great-grandfather Vladimir Lossky was himself a brilliant theologian and the son of a remarkable religious philosopher), despite or perhaps because of her own youth, was able to evoke with incomparable tenderness and humor the complexity of Elisabeth—her person, life, and accomplishments. Olga offers us this biography, born from an ongoing dialogue with Elisabeth and based on the discovery and use of her voluminous correspondence and papers. Elisabeth Behr-Sigel appears in this biography as a modern saint of the Orthodox tradition, who, impassioned by God, became capable of witnessing here on earth the reality of the Resurrection and the Kingdom of Heaven. She confronted all the tragedies of the twentieth century, two world wars, and the weight of totalitarianism. In these encounters she never hesitated or wavered. In the face of one challenging situation after another, she was a woman with a fundamental vocation, responding to a call from God with complete faith. Through vii it all, she was a layperson. She was obliged to first teach German, then philosophy, in order to support her family. And in all of her positions she showed others how to live and to proclaim the Gospel, often in new, creative ways. In the editing and publication of the journal Contacts and in the development of the Orthodox Fraternity, she was engaged with a number of friends in efforts to assure the encounter of Christians of the East with those of the West while the Church in Russia was undergoing persecution. Her spirit of openness and dialogue played an enormous role in the development of this work, enabling Christian traditions to meet and enrich each other. Elisabeth was also a writer of great talent who enlivened a number of areas of theological work. Her first book dealt with the history of holiness in Russia, shaped by her attachment to that country’s spiritual tradition. Later, she dedicated herself to the place and condition of women in Christianity, even asking for and receiving, from the patriarch of Constantinople, the promise to restore the diaconate to women, a sacred office that had existed since the eleventh century but that needed to be renewed and adapted to the present day. All through her long life, this engagement of faith was sustained by a deep friendship with a French priest, Fr. Lev Gillet, who, under the pseudonym “a Monk of the Eastern Church,” wrote a number of admirable books on spirituality. Their experience, at once chaste but of extraordinary depth, revealed a common ascent toward the Kingdom of God, a path particularly relevant and welcome in the chaotic world in which we live. So here is the story of a vocation of true holiness , a holiness rooted in eternity, in the Orthodox community of western Europe, and one that underlines the promise of an ecumenism that is no longer mere discussion but true friendship. Olivier Clément viii Foreword ...