Last modified on Tuesday August 03, 2004 at 8:10 PM EDT
To define Helen Iswolsky's significant impact is a rather difficult task and especially within the prescribed time limit! For my part, when I think of her, my memories span the three distinct periods when I came into close contact with her.
The first takes me back to a hot day in July of 1947 when, as a young man in my late twenties, emigrating from Paris to the United States, I stepped directly from my Liberty transport, to land—so to speak—right on her doorstep in New York. My wife's uncle, a long-time friend of Helen and her family, was also her neighbor in a modest rooming-house located at 120 East 76th Street. This converted brownstone became my haven as well.
In that boiling hot summer when I was deprived of even elementary facilities, the only relief was provided by Helen's sense of humor and her providential ice-cooler, which she eventually let me share, and which in my capacity of absent-minded week-end custodian, I invariably allowed to flood her floor.
At first, I was so preoccupied with my daily mundane problems of finding a job and adapting myself to this new existence, that I had little opportunity to take advantage of the informal visits of such prominent thinkers as Jacques Maritain, Jean Daniélou, and the exiled Russian statesman, Alexander Kerensky. These and others were entertained by Helen in a haphazard manner on a shaky card table, at which many a talk about the THIRD HOUR took place.
Helen's cheerful and always good-natured ways
helped make the transition less brutal for me at this stage of my life through the humor,
the wit, the warmth, and the entrain with which she made the best of our camp-like
life together in this third-floor walk-up. She also shared news from abroad and marvelled
at the earthly preoccupations of the formidable Berdyaev, who as I recall from his letters
to her, addressed himself to requesting basic foodstuffs such as flour, sugar, buckwheat
groats, shortening, and the like from our land of plenty
. To post-war
Europeans America could be no less than bountiful and overflowing with whatever they
craved in Clamart.
In this close and familiar circle I first took part in the causeries so dear to Helen's heart, and that exemplified her highly intellectual and cultural upbringing which she conveyed in her structure of the THIRD HOUR.
The next moment which flashes vividly through my mind now was our "month in the country" spent together in Connecticut in the early '60's, in a small country house among the woods where I took refuge in order to write my doctoral dissertation on Constantine Leont'ev. There we held endless discussions on Vladimir Soloviev and organized expeditions to visit her friend, Mother Assumpta, at the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in nearby Woodbury.
Yet, among all the recollections of times spent with Helen, the most lasting and meaningful memories of my almost 30 year-long friendship with her relate to that period, too short, alas, when she lived in Cold Spring, New York where she founded the St. Benedict and St. Sergius Ecumenical Center. Because I find this to be the culmination of her life-long efforts, and because to me this ecumenical center seems to have been the natural outcome and continuation of the THIRD HOUR movement, I should like to address myself more specifically to this aspect of Helen's activities.
She did not choose the names of St. Benedict and St. Sergius at random to symbolize her intentions; somehow she put herself and her endeavor under the patronage of these two saints who, although far apart in time and space, pursued their quest in a similar spirit during the most critical moments in the life of their respective countries and eras. Both eschewed all theological or dogmatic problems or quarrels. From the depths of time, they would seem to have blessed Helen's worthy strivings for religious unity.
She had already started on her mission in Europe. Then, and even now, the term "ecumenical" was interpreted in some circles as suggesting something bordering on the illegal, as some kind of religious dilettantism, libertinism, or at best, religious syncretism. To be a partisan of the ecumenical movement was (and in some instances still is) construed as being a reformer, a radical, an extremist, in any case a liberal.
But let me say that in truth the situation is
quite the reverse; I submit that it means rather to be a retrograde, a conservative. In
fact, the ecumenical movement appeals and reverts to the past, to the single, undivided
Christian faith and the unrestricted jurisdictional freedom which, in times of yore, the
Holy Apostles preached throughout the world to men of good will. With this in mind, I wish
to propose for your meditation Paul Ricæur's profound observation that hope and
reminiscence are one and the same
.
The ecumenical problem rests on the question of whether or not this original Christian faith has been replaced in some manner by Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant jurisdictions. Indeed, each one of these confessions affirms itself to be the representative of true Christianity and cannot do otherwise.
And this is of course right. However, in the economy of human assessments, three cannot replace one, they can only share in it. And for that reason, at least at present, the ecumenical spirit cannot be integrated de facto into the external organization of the Churches although it overflows and transcends their boundaries. Thus, at least for now, it seems that ecumenism is possible only among individuals—its has already been illustrated by the meeting between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras in 1964.
Such spiritual encounters can take place when the anguish and the grief over the theological and jurisdictional separations become so acute in the human soul to supersede the comforting feeling that one's own religious denomination is the only channel which contains the Truth leading to personal salvation.
Helen Iswolsky was born Russian Orthodox but became Catholic. However, she never ceased to belong to the truly Russian spiritual culture. As a Catholic she continued to propagate the Christian teachings of Khomiakov, Dostoevsky, Soloviev, and Nicholas Fedorov. Herein she is unique for she remained deeply and spiritually Russian and Catholic at the same time. She also never indulged in any religious polemics; on the contrary, she unremittingly advocated religious non-proselytism.
She leaves us an outstanding example of a profoundly devoted Christian who achieved within herself the coveted religious harmony and so became one of those of whom it has been said:
Blessed are the pure in heart; for they will see God
.