I "met" Mother Alexandra in November of 2005 during a Google search. I turned up a few newspaper articles and the fascinating fact that this Orthodox monastic had been a real live princess: Princess Ileana of Romania.

As a closet romantic, I couldn’t resist learning more about a woman who had given up the glamorous, wealthy, and powerful life of a princess to willingly become a nun vowed to humility, poverty, and obedience. What faith she must have had to forsake the luxury and idleness of the aristocratic life in Romania! 

The more I read, both about her and by her, and the more I prayed for her intercession, the more my respect and awe grew for this woman, who, though a princess, had lived a life of hardship, deprivation, and devotion to duty.

Royalty, I learned, have very little choice in their lives. As the figureheads and living symbols of their country, their lives are public, and they are “at work” all the time, whether they like it or not. And often, they don’t. From this, Ileana learned the secret of making the best of a situation. 

When her brother informally exiled her from Romania after her marriage in 1931, she was devastated and poured out her pain to a friend in a long, impassioned letter, but in the very same month wrote about how happy she was in her new home. By the next month, she was looking forward with joy to the birth of her first child. While she took every opportunity to visit her beloved country, she still managed to make, for nine years, a warm, laughter-filled home for family and friends in Austria. I’ve had trouble all my life with taking the blows life deals out, and to have seen this woman not only take heartbreak and turn it to joy, but to be able to make other lives happier at the same time, made me ashamed of all the times I’d sulked about not getting my own way. 

As a woman of a certain age, whose body is beginning to show the inevitable signs of use and abuse, Mother Alexandra’s attitude toward her own health problems brought me up short more than once. We share back pain, but I know that mine will never be as debilitating as the pain she lived with for almost seventy years. She refused to discuss details of her health, stating it was “boring.” Late in life, she said, “The only part of me that doesn’t hurt is my artificial hip.” That was the extent of her conversation on her health. 

My back is suddenly not so bad. She’s also taught me to look at the relative scale of things. Yes, I’m getting old, and things hurt and are going wrong with my body. But I don’t have cancer, I don’t have lupus, I don’t have chronic fatigue, things that dear friends of mine struggle with daily. I am so blessed—both to be as healthy as I am, and to have learned from Mother Alexandra how to see that blessing.

I was astounded to read about her attitude toward the wounded Romanian soldiers she visited during World War II. She didn’t assume she was doing them a favor, or that they should be grateful for the time she spent with them—oh, no! She talked about what she learned from them, and how the ones who were dying showed her the reality of God and the way to move from life into God’s eternal truth. It underlines the lessons my father taught me as a child—that we can learn our whole lives long, and that no matter how powerful, talented, or intelligent we are, the most humble and lowly can still teach us.

Perhaps the greatest impact Princess Ileana made on me was in the way, to her, everyone was important. She was a princess and outranked almost everyone, but to her that didn’t matter. Before God, she and the person next to her were equal, and that was what counted. It was what made her choose the hands-on work—nursing on the ward, helping in the Red Cross canteen, sending small necessities and luxuries to people left behind in Romania and visiting the AIDS orphans there when she was 90. “It’s better to help one . . . than to say what we cannot do about a thousand,” she said, and that resonates with me. She taught me that really seeing and acknowledging someone—as not just a clerk, or a beggar, or a body walking by on the street, but a human being with cares and loves and passions—can mean more than all the money you can give to charity. 

It’s certainly a lesson her spiritual daughters have taken to heart and put into practice at the monastery she established. The mothers cherish their visitors. Each is unique, and it feels as if the mothers’ greatest delight, next to spending time in prayer and worship, is in cherishing every single visitor. They enfold each in a warm, gentle atmosphere of care and quiet joy. 

When I stayed there to do research, I had to change accommodations. But I wasn’t allowed to pick up my bags and take them to my new room. They insisted on doing that for me. I was to work, rest in the services, and absorb the peace of the monastery. Never have I had such freedom to just work and worship with no other cares. All my needs were taken care of and as many of my wants as I could bring myself to express to them. I tried not to impose, but the feeling was not of imposition, but of their joyful service to me, and through me, to God. They were ready to listen anytime I wanted to talk. 

But to get them to share their memories of Mother Alexandra and to talk about monasticism was almost impossible—even though they tried, they were uncomfortable focusing on themselves. Perhaps the most important legacy Mother Alexandra bequeathed them was that their entire purpose was to die to self, to live for Christ and the other, and by doing so, to fulfill the will of God. 

And ultimately, I think that was Mother Alexandra’s most valuable lesson for me: in spite of all the hardship, heartbreak, and loss she experienced in life, her faith kept her going. Her reliance on God and her trust in His will and love allowed her to focus on others. She expressed it best when talking about a severe disappointment she received in 1945: “Suddenly I understood that such things [her pain and disappointment] did not matter; that they were of no importance at all. Such things were there simply to be overcome . . . On each one we could mount one step higher until finally we attained the Mountain, the eternal reality of living.” 

Her realization in 1945 didn’t put a stop to pain and heartbreak in her life. Just three years later, in early 1948, she was offered the choice of being exiled or being executed. She chose exile, but it devastated her. She kept going, in a wooden, going-through-the-motions kind of way, but as she put it, inside, “she was as one dead.” In 1949 she suffered a complete mental and physical breakdown, and it took her years to rebuild herself. But her experience in 1945 at the foot of the mountain gave her the tools to pull herself together, stand up and keep going with humor, compassion, and love. Because she knew that God was in charge, that through the Church and the prayers of the faithful and her own strengths, God was looking after her, and His will would work out for her ultimate benefit. She knew it for herself, and she knew it for everyone else, too—even me. I only pray that I can learn to rest as totally in His will as she did.

Bev. Cooke is a Canadian author who researched and wrote a new biography on the life of Romanian Princess and American monastic Mother Alexandra, a fascinating historical figure and brilliant woman of God who founded the Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania. Royal Monastic: Princess Ileana of Romania (The Story of Mother Alexandra) is now available at the Conciliar Press website.

Reprinted from the Fall 2008 issue of The Handmaiden Journal