What the world’s “invisible” women have taught me about holiness

Honor is a woman of grace. When I first met her, I was struck by something almost regal in her calm, composed countenance amidst the chaos and uncertainty surrounding her. It was as if she carried a presence of prayer within her. When I came into contact with her, it seemed I also became a prayer, a prayer that filled me with light. 

Honor is an Eritrean Orthodox Christian. At the time of our meeting, she was also a refugee. She and her husband, who I later learned was an Orthodox priest, traveled with their children through incredibly dangerous odds to flee an even greater danger behind them. Rejected for asylum by one European country at the end of that journey, they then continued moving on to the next. Their children were gorgeous and wonderful and yet the chaos of their lives could cause them to be a little wild. In living side-by-side in the same house for over a month, I sometimes saw Honor exhausted and frustrated and downright weary with it all. Yet she always kept her calm and grounded presence, the dignity of her love. She and her husband held on to a firm and unshaken hope in the existence of goodness, and I, who often seemed to be clawing my way out of despair, was in awe. 

Honor showed me the fruit of a life of prayer and trust - something you cannot conjure instantly, but you must build day by day. It was the fruit of a steady and quiet love that erupted spontaneously into joy. It was the presence of sorrow and sadness and yet a light deep within them all. 

I found myself desperately wishing that Honor could become my full-time neighbor. Yet Honor was one of the world’s “invisible” women, women full of incredible depth and wisdom which no country seemed to want. The senselessness of it all felt like living in an upside-down world. 

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I have spent the last two years writing many biographies of saints, both ancient and recent. Yet when I meet people like Honor, I also have to acknowledge that some of the holiest people I have known have names the world will never hear. 

Over the years, my teachers in the faith have been many: radical saints such as St. Maria of Paris, grandmothers in rural Tanzania, monastic sisters tucked away on storm-tossed Greek islands, mothers fleeing with their children from war or persecution. Nearly all of them have one thing in common: they experienced migration. At risk of death or in the hope of a better life, they left the country of their birth and took the dangerous journey to a new land, where they did not know the language and faced great economic disadvantage, even exploitation. Yet their lives held something different than mine. These holy men and women transformed suffering into something lasting by the alchemy of their love and courage. In leaving, they made the whole world their monastery - and by doing so took the world into themselves and gave it back to us, transformed and healed. 

In 2021, I spent three months living among mothers fleeing war in a house of hospitality named after St. Maria Skobtsova. I have continued to visit the home and wrestle with the ongoing witness of her life and its intersection with my own. Each time I am there, I feel a deep need to bear witness to the precious beauty happening there, which is passing the ignorant world by. It is important to note here that humans fleeing war, violence, or other injustices deserve our compassion whether or not they are remarkably holy. Yet in spending time with women like Honor, I instinctively sensed they had so much to teach me, a young American just beginning to encounter grief. I wanted to know: How did they channel this suffering into something lasting? In the midst of so much death, how do we love something into undying? 

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It is hard to convey what it means to see families following the Orthodox fasts and feasts in a simple tent encampment; what celebrating Pascha becomes when all you have is a dirt field and one wooden cross mounted on a chain link fence; or what it’s like to watch women bake ambasha bread to celebrate Orthodox feasts and pull their treasured icons and psalm books from their bags, carried hundreds of miles and fiercely protected when everything else was lost or sold. The spiritual lives of these women, men, and children have been forged by something our Orthodox ancestors would understand. It is they who can help us remember all that we may have lost or forgotten along the way. 

Dr. Aram Sarkisian reminds us, “Though the church’s demographics have certainly changed over the past century, Orthodoxy flourished in the United States during the early 1900s as a church built by, and for, immigrants.” He goes on to remind us that many of our ancestors likely required significant assistance from others to make this immigration possible. Our history, like the history of many of the saints (as well as the tales of migration throughout the Scriptures), is one of crossing borders.

This was brought home to me even more clearly in recent weeks, as I worked on a research project in conjunction with Axia Women, gathering the histories of both men and women who fled their homes and countries and are glorified as saints in the Orthodox Church. I encountered women such as St. Dymphna, forced to flee to Belgium in the seventh century; St. Hermione from the first century, who was driven from her native home in Palestine due to persecution; St. Paisius of the Holy Mountain and his mentor St. Arsenios, whose entire village was forced to become refugees in Greece; St. Thekla the Protomartyr, who made her way to Turkey after people sought her life in Rome; Saint Ephrem the Syrian, the venerated writer of hymns forced to flee Persia; Empress Theodora, forced into exile in the thirteenth century; St. Theosebia the Deaconess, who accompanied her brother Gregory of Nyssa in his exile and forced wandering; and St. Macrina the Elder, her grandmother, who spent more than six years in hiding during the persecutions of the third century.  So far, we have identified over one hundred saints, both women and men, who were banished, driven out of their countries, or fled for their lives - not to mention the many bishops, hieromonks, elders, and theologians who are honored even if not glorified. 

I was also reminded of the countless fathers and mothers of our faith from the Old and New Testament who encountered forced migration, including Moses, Joseph, Esther, Ruth, Naomi, Habakkuk, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and of course the Theotokos and the Holy Family. 

By highlighting our Orthodox history in this way, I in no way want to suggest that we only look to accept refugees who are Christian, or that we should be looking to migration merely for what we can receive by it. Technically, we should be rejoicing at the opportunity to show love and hospitality even to our enemies, much less our fellow believers. But the truth remains that the Orthodox Church across the world can indeed draw on its histories, as Sarkisian writes, “to speak credibly to the anxieties of migration, the human toll of detention and deportation, and the negative implications of immigration restrictions, entry quotas, and normalized xenophobia.” We can look within the histories of our own congregations, as well as to our brothers and sisters fleeing violence around the world, to remind us of what we may have lost. 

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If I could plant one seed in the soul of the world, it would be awe at the profound beauty of those I have met on the other side of horror. Through friendships with women like Honor, I have seen how the acts of beauty and attention, the quiet love we offer each other in the midst of darkness, can heal our vision of a fractured world and make us whole again. These women have taught me that we participate in bringing the icon of God present in each of us into the light, together transforming from an icon of Christ in his sufferings into an icon of life and resurrection.

John Anthony McGuckin wrote: “As the icon symbolizes the manner in which material things can serve as powerful doorways to the divine presence, so too all creation is graced with the marks of the Creator’s energy. Thus, in Orthodoxy’s spiritual sense there can never be a purely ‘secular thing’: all created things, especially human beings, are created as iconic mysteries of grace with a hidden power and potential to shine in the transfiguration of Christ’s holiness and light.” (The Eastern Orthodox Church: A New History)

St. Maria Skobtsova was thinking something similar when she wrote, “in communing with the world in the person of each individual human being, we know that we are communing with the image of God…and, contemplating that image, we touch the Archetype — we commune with God.”

I thought of these words as I walked upstairs the night one three-year-old boy returned from a stay at the hospital for pneumonia. His mother had put him to bed and now stood in the hallway in front of an icon of Christ, her forehead pressed against it, her lips moving in silent prayer. In an instant, it carried the weight of a mother’s love - her hard work to survive and the heavy burden she carried, pressed up against the body of Christ in trust and supplication. I wished I could convey the pure dignity and holiness of that moment to all those who hear the word migrant, and are afraid of what it might mean. 

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I, like most others, know that immigration and migration is a complex topic, a hornet’s nest of political culpability, global economic patterns, and detailed policy, all boiled down in the life-or-death experiences of those who are caught up in its tangle. In our current moment, I simply want Orthodox Christians to remember that we can advocate for humane, vetted, legal pathways for immigration and still care about the plight of families in need of safety. I want us to stop for a moment and honestly consider: what are we missing out on by closing down these legal pathways for entry? 

The international nonprofit World Relief estimates that across the United States, 30,000 of the 100,000 refugees resettled this past year were Christians fleeing persecution. In the Orthodox Church, we remember saints every day of the week who were exiled, impoverished, and endangered, who perhaps even came from the very countries from which these same situations occur today. We remember saints who have endured shipwrecks, crossed deserts, watched their children die, and emerged deepened by it. Could it be that in our rush to protect ourselves from chaos, we are missing the incredible opportunity before us to welcome women like Honor into our churches and communities, women who have endured these very same trials? In our haste to wall ourselves off from danger, could we be rejecting our greatest teachers, the invisible ones who are deeply and tenderly close to the heart of God? 

Women like Honor are one of the reasons I am an Orthodox Christian today. It was their witness, along with the witness of saints who also endured suffering and crossed borders, that proved to me that the resurrection of death, this alchemy of love, could channel suffering into something undying, something I could hang my life upon. 

(Honor’s name has been changed to protect her identity)

Author: Jenna Funkhouser