Adrienne von Speyr a life on the edge of heaven

Some individuals seem to been endowed from early age with religious sensitivity. Adrienne was one. Her childhood years contained some religious visions. She had occasional visions of angels, and when she converted to Catholicism at the age of thirty eight she told her confessor Urs von Balthasar, himself an accomplished theologian, that in childhood she had seen a figure on the stair case whom she now recognized as St Ignatius Loyola, founder of the religious order to  which von Balthasar belonged, the Jesuits. At fifteen she had a vision of Mary, Jesus' mother, whom she described as the most beautiful person she had ever seen, an experience that would give her succour through many years.  From early on she showed an interest in Catholicism, which was strangely out of kilter with the Protestantism of her family, which increasingly dissatisfied her spiritually, though she was close to an aunt who was a prayerful Calvinist.

Yet she had difficulties with her mother, who was a cold character who favoured the elder daughter over the strange and very religious Adrienne.. but her relationship with her father was strong, and  he was a regular visitor to hospitals where  he introduced her to medicine, a career that she was later to take up. It was in these early years that she sensed that she had a talent for succouring the sick. But when she was fourteen her father died, which meant that entry to university was harder to afford. She carried in at school taking additional courses in business at her mother's behest, as her mother saw her as a businesswoman rather than a medic. During her school years her strong personality shone out. She was popular among the other pupils, but could be firm and assertive. She publicly berated a teacher for not being fair in his statements about Catholicism. By that age, late teens, her Catholic sympathies were beginning to stand out. 

Later on she accrued the money to attend university where she studied medicine. Besides being assertive about religious unfairness, she showed her mettle when a professor who had made a calamitous error that led to a patient's death tried to pin the blame on a young nurse. Outraged at the injustice, Adrienne organized a boycott of the man's lectures until he resigned. She could not stand injustice. She was critical of some of her medical colleagues, for she knew some to be dedicated doctors, whereas others she knew to be merely in medicine for  the money. Her strong personality was manifest when she decided to become a Catholic, and her Protestant family were not happy. That did not stop Adrienne. She spoke to the Jesuit priest Urs von Balthasar who began instruction in the Roman Catholic faith and in 1938  at the age of 36 she formally joined the Catholic church. She knew that she was in the place right for her. Balthasar took the young doctor under his wing. 

She also married for the first time.at the age of 27. It was less a union of sexual passion than a practical matter. She wanted children and he was a widower with two sons and needed a wife to look after them. She tried to have children of her own, but miscarried thrice. But when her husband died a few years later she was distraught, found it hard to pray and was troubled with thoughts of suicide. She later had another marriage, but apparently it was a sexless union. She till continued to care for the sons that she had taken on. They were devoted to the woman who had taken care of them.

Very spiritual people seem to be empowered by an energy that enables them to do extraordinary things. These are not usually oddities such as yogic flying, but hard and sustained work. She was extremely hard working and sometimes saw sixty to eighty patients in a day in her consulting rooms in Basel. If the patients were too poor to pay she gave her services for free. She had a strong sense of empathy for the less advantaged of society, even in her student years. When unmarried women who had had children were in the delivery room she was always respectful to them and sensitive to their dignity, whereas some other staff were not, and this was extended as a widespread, long-established pattern of behaviour covering all the patients  with whom she came into contact.

Adrienne had a deep conviction that she should treat the whole person from cradle to grave, and so she believed that she should accompany people in their final journey into death.  This meant that she stayed with dying patients when she could, never giving up on them till they made their journey. This indicates that she did not advocate euthanasia, as she saw every minute of life as valuable. Years later. in 1967, as she lay dying, she took a positive attitude to her own death, saying "It is a beautiful thing to die." Her pro-life stance was evident in her absolute refusal to do abortions, and she backed this up with working to help women find alternatives to this option.

Yet her life was not exempt from suffering, as she had been a sickly child, had had  three miscarriages, a heart  attack two years after qualifying as a doctor, and could not have children, and when her husband died after seven years of marriage she went though a spiritual  crisis, finding it hard to pray and she was disturbed by thoughts of suicide, but her faith and devotion to her stepsons and the help of priests, saw her through this dark night of the soul. She married again, but this was also a short lived period, as the next husband died too. She soldiered on, continuing to serve the children, the poor and the sick. Yet in 1945 she and her close friend and confessor Urs von Balthasar found it within their capacity to found a religious society, the society of St John, which they ran together, acting as joint superiors of this organization of lay people. She was already developing a close working relationship with Urs, and later when he found it necessary to leave the Jesuit order so that he could continue his work with Adrienne, which involved him in editing her spiritual writings and taking down what she wrote in religious trances, he moved in with Adrienne and her family, having a room in their house.