The Treasure That You Were To Me
Life of a true Redemptoristine adapted from that by Rev. Mother Beatrix, O.SS.R.

“Oh, how good He is, the Good God, for having given us a heart and the ability to suffer…
For it is only in suffering that love becomes as strong as death”

[Mother Monica Maria Polanska, O.S.B.M.]

Two extraordinary women. Abbess Monica, O.S.B.M. and her daughter Ivanna, later Sr M. Augustine of Divine Charity, O.SS.R. Mother Monica would have the rare privilege of receiving also the monastic vows of her widowed mother. After establishing her Greek Catholic order in the United States she was to die in exile in Siberia. At the Monastery of St Alphonsus in Malines, where she entered the cloister on 23 June, 1924, Ivanna more or less took the place by storm. With a nature more exuberant than generous, she stood out from the other Belgian nuns. In giving her a religious name her Superiors deemed it appropriate that the new Monica ought to have her Augustine.              In order to wear the symbolic red tunic and blue scapular Ivanna had to trample on her heart by abandoning her mother, her homeland; substituting the splendour of the oriental rite for the simpler Latin rite, the Ukrainian for the French language; transplanting herself into an unfamiliar neighbourhood and adapting herself to a different mentality. Mother Monica would describe this as: “…death to all that you have left behind, your dreams and desires… He has taken you somewhere far away so that your sacrifice can be complete.”

On 8 September 1961, a nun was dying behind the grill of her cloister, far away from her home country. She had neither sought glory nor well being. Her life consisted of one holocaust after another all freely accepted and offered in particular for the Silent Church and for her beloved homeland, Ukraine.

Even from her childhood, God had been preparing Ivanna for the ultimate sacrifice of self with trials and heart-breaks. “[The] Good God has always taken me by the heart” she used to say, omitting the definite article which does not exist in her mother tongue.

A child of the Eastern Catholic Church, Ivanna Polanska was the daughter and granddaughter of priests. She was brought forth into the world at Husiatyn, in Galicia, on 7 July 1905. Her mother, Maria Teodorowicz, also came from a very Christian family whose members were almost all consecrated to God. Maria herself took the habit with the Basilian sisters when her husband died.

The so much desired birth of Ivanna was preceded by much grief. Married at the age of 15 or 16, Maria Teodorowicz was told by the doctors that she would never be able to have children. She defied their predictions by giving birth to a boy and, later, a girl. But they only lived for a few months. When Ivanna was announced the doctors then predicted that the child would not survive. The young Mrs Polanska besought Heaven to allow her to keep the child for at least a few years, enough time to raise the child up for God. Much later, the mother would write to her daughter in the cloister: “ If your mother had been able, like other mothers, to deliver children easily into the world, she might not have prayed with the same fervour, and might not have offered you to the Good God from the time before your birth.”

Ivanna survived, but she was not spared the suffering of ill health throughout her childhood, thus making life for Mrs Polanska a state of perpetual anxiety. It was part of the Divine plan that this anguish should encourage her to turn to the Lord and have recourse to Him continuously. For the world fascinated the wife of Fr Ambrose Polansky. “You were the leaven of my soul” she wrote also to Ivanna, “Your childhood illnesses were for me a school of very hard trials which, however, I did not want to end nor have Jesus take you back. I preferred to suffer a hundred times more with you than to be deprived of the treasure that you were to me. The more sick you were, the more dear you became to me.”

One day, the sight of her very weary husband put the idea in her mind that death might snatch him away from her. Her heart beating furiously, Maria Polanska went to the Church. What would become of her without her dear companion, as much venerated as loved? As always, she had a savage desire for happiness and sought it no less savagely. Before the tabernacle, she suddenly received an interior light on what was the true, immutable happiness, and she understood that it was not be found where she had thought it to be, but in God alone. “Jesus,” she promised, “my happiness will be in following you.” She never could think of any other explanation as to why at that moment the memory of her child was completely removed from her mind than that God wanted her for himself and that He knew she would not even have the courage to imagine a separation. He put a blindfold over her eyes.

Two weeks later, Fr Ambrose Polansky died, leaving his 20 year old widow devastated. In an attempt to escape the great distress that threatened to ruin her health, Maria Polanska took up sport and tried to occupy herself with all sorts of work. But it was in vain. The wound in her heart did not heal. Our Lord pursued her relentlessly until she gave in. For certain people, these words of the Lord, “If you wish to be my disciple, take up thy cross and follow me” carry a sense of incredible demands being made. God alone knows how to make saints. He alone knows the best and most sure path for each individual to follow.

Now is the hour

The day before she entered the order of St Basil, she washed and changed  Ivanna into her nightclothes for the last time that evening, put her to bed, and tucked her in, and then knelt down at the foot of her bed. “Why are you crying, my little mother?” asked the little girl. At three o’clock in the morning, the widow, fearing the temptation that might result if her daughter were to wake up again, drew herself away and confided her treasure to her parents who would from henceforth care for Ivanna.

It was a thorn that tortured her daughter for a long time before she eventually came to accept, understand and admire her mother’s decision to enter the convent. It was not really until she became a nun herself that she would come to understand the fullness of this maternal love, still intact; that she would also come to realise the sublimeness of her mother’s heart, torn in the flesh and yet at the same time consumed in the Divine fire.

She would later make this reflection: “If mother had not become a nun, I would never have had the courage to leave her. I loved her too much.”

“There was little chance of you giving yourself to Jesus, if left to your own nature. The world had a powerful hold on you; it was hanging on to you confident of an eventual victory over you,” Mother Monica said from experience. Remembering her own impetuous search for personal happiness, she saw the same traits and aspirations in her daughter.

“If I am going to enter the convent,” said Ivanna, “it must be far away so that I can be detached from everything. Otherwise, I will not do it.”

Human love would manifest itself in the person of a young man from her neighbourhood, a serious practising Christian. But Christ would take her away from him.

Through the Redemptorists established in the Ukraine, she discovered the Redemptoristines, an order dedicated to prayer and penance. She made this her firm choice. Thus she would fulfill her longing to be “detached from everything”

Reliving that separation after many years, this mother, whose Ivannna was the “complement of all her life”, would enable the soul of her daughter to turn her supreme act of renunciation into a hymn of thanksgiving: “Oh, how good He is, the Good God, for having given us a heart and the ability to suffer!”

A Redemptoristine

Ivanna had now left all things, even more than others. There remained that which was hardest of all: to deny oneself. While we all have to face this challenge, in her case, given her nature, this meant her giving up much more than the others. For there were frequent outbursts of the “me” in her. But her offering to God was without regret. As she was determined to be instructed by God—one regularly saw her with a large bible under her arm—as she was to destroy the “me” in anything that became noticeable as a defect, she succeeded in transforming her monastic life into a continuous martyrdom.

The beautiful name of Sr Mary Augustine of Divine Charity was to be realised in its full sense.

“When I get to Heaven,” she would say, “I don’ t want to be the cause of any embarrassment for my mother.”

And what about her mother?

With nothing being allowed to pass through the impermeable iron curtain, there was a complete absence of any news, only uncertainty and anguish for her. Through the most unlikely of channels she managed to find out about the imprisonment of Mother Monica. Her filial heart suffered an indescribable and profound torture, while on the outside she continued to behave normally. Her desire to sacrifice herself for the persecuted Church, particularly for the brethren of her own race, grew.

Through the same channels, several months after the event, news reached her from Siberia about the death of her venerable mother, on 25 December 1952. From a few details she was able to imagine the Calvary that her mother went through. A mere photo taken of a picture painted by a co-detainee while in prison, revealed to her an aged Mother Monica, stripped of her religious habit, with an indefinable expression on her face and an untranslatable smile on her lips. The martyrdom of her mother now consummated, the daughter would rediscover her in God through prayer, as well as in the letters religiously guarded and re-read, trying ever harder to live her vocation more fully in relation to the work of Redemption.

Then an illness that she had been harbouring for years brought her down. During her more difficult and painful moments, she used to take pleasure in saying: “Good God, knows well (what He is doing)!”

On the feast of Our Lady’s Nativity, 1961, at about 6.30 in the evening, surrounded by her sisters in religion, she calmly and peacefully acquiesced to the eternal summons. †

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