{"id":10008,"date":"2015-09-18T11:49:05","date_gmt":"2015-09-18T15:49:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=10008"},"modified":"2015-09-18T11:49:05","modified_gmt":"2015-09-18T15:49:05","slug":"an-unlikely-nun-every-snake-person-should-meet-joel-j-miller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2015\/09\/an-unlikely-nun-every-snake-person-should-meet-joel-j-miller.html","title":{"rendered":"“An Unlikely Nun Every Snake Person Should Meet”: Joel J. Miller"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

on Mother Maria Skobtsova, and I STILL don\u2019t have a tag for Orthodox Christianity, sorry!!<\/p>\n

\u2026For a nun, Maria\u2019s story is more than a little unconventional. At Bishop Anthony Bloom\u2019s first encounter with her, Maria sat at a cafe table with a beer. She was often seen shambling around the Paris market in her tattered habit, cigarette perched on her lip, haggling for deals. And she kept company with the lowest of the low.<\/p>\n

That was her calling. Twice divorced, she knew the meaning of God\u2019s mercy and desired only to share it with as many as she could muster. The number was not small.<\/p>\n

Her backstory is the stuff of Russian novels. Born into a wealthy family in 1891, her father died when she was young, and the shock of the loss drove her to renounce her faith. Mixing with smart and fashionable of St. Petersburg, she published poetry, married a Bolshevik, and distressed over the state of the city\u2019s beleaguered poor. But idealism couldn\u2019t save her marriage, which ended in 1913.<\/p>\n

The following year she moved to her family\u2019s estate on the coast of the Black Sea with her daughter, Gaiana. Headstrong and independent, Maria was politically active and eventually became mayor of the town of Anapa as a single mom. She also rediscovered her faith, which informed her activism. \u201c[T]he Christian,\u201d she said, \u201cis called to social work.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

more<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

on Mother Maria Skobtsova, and I STILL don\u2019t have a tag for Orthodox Christianity, sorry!! \u2026For a nun, Maria\u2019s story is more than a little unconventional. At Bishop Anthony Bloom\u2019s first encounter with her, Maria sat at a cafe table with a beer. She was often seen shambling around the Paris market in her tattered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[259,263,11,29,531,86,44,69],"class_list":["post-10008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mackerel-snapping","tag-a-cloud-of-witnesses","tag-brass-monkery-that-funky-monkery","tag-his-banner-over-me-was-love","tag-marriage-2","tag-mother-maria-skobtsova","tag-the-dark-continent-europe-in-the-twentieth-century","tag-the-russian-soul","tag-weird-saints"],"yoast_head":"\n"An Unlikely Nun Every Snake Person Should Meet": Joel J. 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