Book Description
From the widow Tuchkova, hermit Anastasiia and peasant Matrona Naumova, to the aristocratic Aleksandra Shmakova and the Abbess Taisiia, each of these diverse women craved and created environments that combined monastic solitude with a community of like-minded women. "Rich and poor, middle-aged and young...out of the pain at the loss of a cherished husband and child, or the boredom of aristocratic social life, or the shattering power of a mystic vision, or the simple but incorrigible habit of giving shelter for the night to the homeless", each woman answered the "jarring, life-disturbing call to abandon oneself to God". Meehan shows the sources and qualities of their holiness, how each woman represented a particular aspect of Orthodox spirituality, and how aspects of women's religious ideals, including community, service, and reconciliation, marked the religious communities they founded. In studying their lives we see virtures embodies, dark undersides redeemed, and the daily struggle of community life. "I have called these women holy", Meehan writes, "holy in the ordinary sense of the word, meaning people leading devout and godly lives dedicated to the service of God. None of them is considered an official saint of the church...But these women were held up in their time as exemplars of the holy life, models of holiness deserving of imitation. And their stories speak to us even today, for as John Coleman has said of saints, 'they invite us to conceptuzlize our lives in terms other than mastery, usefulness, autonomy, and control.' These women believed, and shock us into believing, in a world in which virture has meaning".
