"An Undivided Life"

Moni is at a different, somewhat further stage of life than I am — and I benefit from it greatly. But not everyone at this stage in life automatically holds the wisdom she has. Yes, she turned sixty this year. I hope she will count this portrait as a small gift.

She has been and still is a kind of older sister to me, a spiritual mother who stood beside me as a matter of course in the hardest seasons of my life, and who does so to this day. One of the most faithful people I have met.

Sometimes I watch her put together a sandwich, cook, or tend her plants. The devotion and the originality she brings to it — that is art. Every small thing she does carries that devotion.

I can only explain her wisdom to myself this way: with the experiences she has had, and with what she holds on to — her faith — she has most likely received this wisdom rather than produced it.

If there is a heaven, and I believe there is, then I hope to live near her there.

Moni has known me since I was sixteen or seventeen. She still remembers exactly how she saw me back then — sitting on the stairs.

That is no exception. She takes an interest in people, and more than that: she sees them.

In the Beginning

…there was a great deal of work. In the house, in the fields. A child trusted with much becomes either enduring or exhausted. She calls it a life between challenge and overload.

When a person lives alone and has no children, some will wonder: and love? There was love, a story from her teenage years, with every good condition in place. It came apart.

What remained fits no social template — and yet it cannot be overlooked.

And then there is that rare phenomenon: a person who does not age. A childlike freshness, right up close to the present, and wise nonetheless. Perhaps it is the hunger for life that never quite gets satisfied.

Roots

As life would have it, she went to a Christian festival — common back then; I am not sure anything like it still exists in that form. There she made the decision to live with God. A decision of the heart, in the middle of her studies.

She had learned early how to carry responsibility. So it followed naturally that her first Christian community formed in her student room. Moni draws people. Perhaps relationships matter to her most.

Life is full of valleys and mountaintops. Around her fourth semester came the dark night of the soul.¹ She speaks of prayers from that time — prayers that form deep roots. Looking back, she grew out of it. The roots held firmer.

You only have to watch Moni walk once to understand why it is this verse.

Transformation

For thirty years Moni has worked at a pharmaceutical company in the Black Forest, where she also lives. I visit her now and then. Her position is not a small one; at the moment she leads the digital transformation.

At first she thought it did not suit her at all. She is a chemical engineer and had done a great deal of project work. But transformation is precisely what her life is about.

And who else loves the differences between people this much? Seeing the individual, even inside a group — that is her strength. Staying professional even when there is a personal level is demanding. Moni can do it. The same at work as at home. No difference.

There is an old formula for this, fifteen hundred years old: ora et labora. Pray and work. It never meant alternating between two states, first the one and then the other as a balance. It meant a single rhythm in which both belong to the same thing.

Moni would not pin that phrase on herself. She does not live in a monastery but in a company, in a project plan, in a house where she has her own apartment and is still never quite alone. But that is exactly what she does. The verse that gives her strength and the Monday morning meeting do not sit in separate drawers.

Stillness

And yet it would be too easy to stop at the work. For Moni the ora is not only an attitude running through everything else. It is also a place of its own.

With a life this active — road bike, projects, dancing, mountains, a house community — you might assume the quiet arrives on its own. Out of exhaustion. She seeks it. Deliberately.

She does go to the monastery after all. Not for the walls and not for the order, but to spend time with the Creator. A few days when nothing else gets in between.

And there is the smaller place she has daily: her terrace, her plants. The same ones I so like watching her with. None of it can be hurried. You cannot make a plant grow faster by trying harder. You can only be there when it happens.

There she expects something. Not duty, not routine — encounter. That, I believe, is the difference. Moni does not pray in order to get something right. She prays because she counts on an answer.

And she is a woman of prayer. Not someone who prays when nothing else helps, but someone who brings everything there: the projects, the conflicts, the people who tell her what they are carrying.

For the one she brings it to, nothing is impossible. She does not put it that way. She quotes a psalm, the same one again and again.

Mountains. Not going around them, not climbing them, not hauling them away — melting. And not because anyone tried hard enough. They melt at the presence of the LORD, not at the presence of our effort.

That is the point that matters to her. She brings something there. She does not bring it about herself. Whoever believes that does not have to carry everything alone — and can still hope for everything.

Perhaps that explains the endurance. Whoever only works grows weary in the end. Of those who wait, it is said they will not.

Eye to Eye

Moni lives in a house, in her own apartment. Below her a young family with four children. Both at once: a room of her own, and a kind of community all the same. They come and go as they like.

When we have no time for a three-hour phone call, short glimpses arrive by WhatsApp. I remember her delight when she was out with the gang of boys from downstairs, singing "Abenteuerland" with them.² The children are her friends, and she counts herself rich.

There is another side as well. Refugee camps in the Middle East, dental aid missions — not once, but regularly, over many years. She speaks of women who are all sixty — because there is no age there.

I find that remarkable. Many people have no capacity to be there for others. Moni does it with all her passion.

Four L's

Not long ago Moni learned something from a hundred-year-old. Four words, all starting with the same letter. She took them on and has been dancing through life with them ever since. They are her orientation for whatever unknown is still coming.

• Leaping After her hip surgery she can bound over mountains again. Hallelujaaa. Plus the road bike, and dancing — with her, not discipline but pleasure.
• Learning Discovering new things is such fun and keeps the synapses moving.
• Laughing With people of every age.
• Loving "There is still plenty of room above — but I am training."

You can smile at how simple that sounds. But someone who has made it to a hundred did not mean it as a slogan. He meant it as a result. And Moni is the kind of person who does not find such a thing merely nice, but takes it along.

She is full of gratitude. Moni has met people whose lives are genuinely hard and unjust. Her own she calls soo good. And she lives in the moment, as fully as she can: every encounter counts — with the children from the house, between one and a half and seven, or in an exchange with a colleague about leadership. Be encouraging and seeing the good. Then the impossible becomes possible.

Which brings me back to the devotion in small things, the one I mentioned at the beginning. I do not believe this is a technique anyone trains into themselves. It is a gift — something she does not produce inside herself, but that passes through her.

You can tell by this: she does not only have joy, she radiates it. The first would work on its own. The second would not. Only someone who receives can radiate. Like the moon. It gives no light of its own — it is lit, and then it lights a night that would otherwise have none.

And it starts at the bottom. Anyone who cannot delight in a blossom opening, or in a sentence from a four-year-old, would have nothing to pass on. Whoever can does not need much for a day to turn out well — and whoever cannot will not be satisfied by the large things either.

Perhaps that is why the two belong together with her: the stillness in which she receives, and the joy that goes out from her.

Afterword

Over the years, Moni has grown wider.

What moves me about her is not the sum of her stations — the work in the fields, the student room, the company, the camps in the Middle East. It is that through all of it the same person remained. One who counts on God, on people, on the good. One who gives hope in a dark hour, because she has walked through dark hours herself. And where she has not, she carries a great gift of empathy.

The labora came first with her, long before anyone asked her for it. The ora came later, as a decision. And at some point there was no saying where the one leaves off.

I think that is what you sense with her, ahead of any single thing: the undividedness. No area where different rules apply. No version for work and another for private life. There is only the one life — and she lives it whole.