a royal monsatic

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Princess of God
By Bev. *****
She visited her first hospital at the age of seven, in 1916, ministering to Romanian soldiers wounded in the First World War. Her younger brother Mircea,
“the great love of my heart,” as she called him, died that November. By December Princess Ileana, who in the fullness of God's time would become Mother
Alexandra, was on the run from the Germans, trapped in a city with no food or fuel in the coldest winter in fifty years. Until 1918, her life was one of
hardship and deprivation which affected her health for the rest of her life.
Even after the war ended Ileana had more than her share of heartbreak. When she married, in 1931, her brother, King Carol II effectively exiled her from
her Romania. Her mother, her best friend and closest confidant, died in 1936, while Ileana was desperately trying to get to her side.
Even so, Ileana made a happy and loving home for her husband and their six children first in Sonnberg, Austria, and from 1943, in Romania, where she built
and worked in a hospital in Bran. In 1944, the Communists took power and made her life increasingly dangerous. Faced with the choice of exile or execution
at the end of 1948, Ileana left Romania, to eventually settle in Newton, Massachusetts in the United States of America with her six children. Her husband
returned to Austria and they divorced in 1954.
CLIMBING MOUNTAINS
With such a life of hardship and heartbreak, it would not be surprising if Ileana had turned her back on God. But the trials and tests she endured only
strengthened her faith, which had been confirmed at an early age. At seven, at the end of a phase of life she described “as a far-off dream of a story
I was once told,” she woke very early one morning. In the dawn light she saw her and her brother’s guardian angels and a group of angels surrounding her
brother’s bed. Entranced by the visitors, she approached her guardian, but he backed away, indicating that she couldn’t touch him. The other angels laughed
with delight at her excitement, and moments later vanished. Though the memory faded with time, it seemed to help her face the trials and heartbreak, to
use her troubles to draw closer to God.
Even her work with in the hospitals during WWII taught her lessons in faith. Watching soldiers suffer and die, sometimes over the course of months, she
said that “there were many . . . who gave to me something of the vision they were granted of a new heaven and a new earth.”
When denied permission to attend her mother’s memorial service, Ileana thought her heart would break. To have her King (and nephew) deny her permission
to attend the memorial of her closest friend and confidant was more than she thought she could bear. She climbed to the chapel in the mountain where her
mother’s heart lay, and there, while gazing out at the surrounding mountains, found that “Such things were there simply to be overcome; they were put in
our way for us to. . . mount one step higher until finally we attained the Mountain, the true reality of living.”
STRUGGLING UP THE SLOPES
It was a realization which allowed her to cling to her faith four years later, when she was exiled from Romania, and suffered a complete collapse. She couldn’t
pray – she was “as one dead inside.” She stood in her icon corner wordless and bereft. It was then she realized the power of the church for she could feel
the prayers of the faithful upholding her and saying for her what she couldn’t say for herself.
The monastic life had always attracted Ileana – she visited monasteries regularly in Romania and in Austria she dreamed of opening a monastery in the mountains.
When she immigrated to the US, she was a frequent visitor at an Episcopal convent in Boston – so frequent that the Abbess became her spiritual mother.

By 1961, when her children were grown, she entered an Orthodox monastery in France because there were no Romanian or English language women’s monasteries
in North America. It was the right choice as her eldest son Stefan noted: “She was more at peace than I’d seen her in a long time.”
Sister Ileana was tonsured a full monastic in 1967, and given the name Mother Alexandra. She returned to the US, to open a monastery in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania.
It was a time of great spiritual growth for her. Building the physical monastery was hard enough, but for almost twelve years there was Mother and one
or two others. Women came to see and test the monastic life, but Mother joked, “They comes and they goes, but mostly they goes.”
Until Mother Benedicta arrived in1978, that is. A fully professed monastic for over fifty years, the elder nun brought with her the monastic tradition.
The monastery grew for the next twelve years, until there were twelve nuns crowded into the cloister.
REACHING THE SUMMIT
In 1990, God blessed Mother Alexandra once again. The Communist regime in Romania fell, and the new government allowed her to visit the homeland she thought
she would never see again. She traveled to Romania that fall, where she was greeted with crowds of cheering Romanians. It was a crowning joy of her life
and she returned to the monastery with a new peace and serenity. Just weeks later, on the eve of her eighty-second birthday, she broke her hip. While in
hospital awaiting surgery, Mother suffered a heart attack that crippled a full third of her heart. Her family and her doctors made her as comfortable as
they could, but she was in agony. Her skin was so tender the oxygen mask cut like a knife, and the machines to assist her breathing and heartbeat tormented
her. One of the monastics commented that she “experienced the torture of her own Romanians . . . her suffering was no longer empathy and vicarious, but
real and experiential.” Her sister nuns prayed and sang molebens constantly. Finally, on January 21st, as her cell attendant prayed, “God is light, God
is with us,” Mother left the world to join the angels who had visited her so many years ago.
Bev. ***** is a young adult writer and has been Orthodox for about five years. She lives with her husband and son in Victoria, British Columbia Canada and
attends All Saints of Alaska OCA church. She has two books out with Conciliar: Keeper of the Light, an historical novel about St. Macrina the Elder, and
Royal Monastic, a biography of Princess Ileana, and a mainstream young adult novel, Feral, with Orca Book Publishers.
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