John of Kochetovka

Blessed John of Kochetovka (born Ivan Ivanovich Potashev, 1839 to 1886) was a fool for Christ in his native village of Kochetovka in the Penza province. The Russian Orthodox Church numbered him in 2018 among the locally venerated saints of the Penza Metropolis, the only local saint of that metropolis; this is not a canonization for the whole Church. According to the sources he is commemorated on 12 June (30 May Old Style), the day of his repose.

Childhood

He was born on 1 January 1839 in Kochetovka in the Nizhny Lomov district, to Ivan Ignatievich and Varvara Stepanovna, serfs of the landowner Ivan Mikhailovich Kuznetsov. Even in adolescence a special bent of soul was seen in him: he did not join the games of his peers and did not think of marriage. He tended the flock, sewed clothes, read the Book of Hours and the Psalter and went on pilgrimage to the churches and monasteries round about, reaching even the Kyiv Caves Lavra.

Folly for Christ

From a monk of the Lavra he received a blessing for the ascetic labour of folly for Christ, which he bore from the age of twenty-⁠six until his death. He lived as a beggar, without a dwelling, wandering through his native region, in forest and field, in every season. Several times villagers saw him in the forest living among wolves, which he fed from his hand.

As a fool for Christ he took on peculiar manners: he spoke in an unintelligible language, explaining it with gestures and expressions, swayed from side to side, spun on one foot, wore rags, with a heavy cross of several pounds on his chest and a heavy iron staff in his hand. Though his speech was not clear, people understood him well and drew near to him, because they saw his love and mercy for the deprived.

Besides Kochetovka he went to Golovinshchino, where on market days he went from house to house collecting alms. All that he received he gave to others. After the fire in Kochetovka on 12 August 1874 he collected more than seventy roubles at Golovinshchino and distributed them, before the feast of the Dormition, among those who had been burned out, so that almost every one of the one hundred and nine burned households received help from him. Many treasured his gifts: "Vanyusha of Kochetovka gave me this". People came to him from Penza, from the province and even from the northern capital, to be edified by his allusive words.

The gift of foresight and life in church

He had from God the gift of foresight and often foretold fires, trying to warn people. He foretold the fire of 1872 at Golovinshchino, pointing with his hand to the streets that were later burned.

On entering church he left his folly at the threshold. He was a model of piety for his fellow villagers, came often to the services, on feasts and on every Sunday prayed in the altar, sang in the choir with his fine voice and liked to give prosphora at the proskomide. At times, in his allusive speech, he rebuked those who prayed with wandering minds. At the Cherubic Hymn he would go out into a side chapel, strike his cheeks or fall on his face with his arms crossed under his head. He often received communion, confessing in his own language, which his spiritual father, Father Peter, understood, and who guided him from his first years of struggle to the end. Tradition says that at Kochetovka he met the future Saint John of Olenevka and foretold to the fourteen-⁠year-⁠old Ivan Kalinin that he would surpass him in ascetic labours and that God would glorify him.

Repose

He spent more than twenty years in folly for Christ and reposed on 12 June 1886. His spiritual father heard his confession and gave him communion before his death, served the funeral and laid him in the ground to the right of the altar of the church of the Archangel Michael. Before the revolution a slab with the inscription "Servant of God John" was placed on the grave, and it survives to this day.

Veneration

His veneration as a man of holy life never ceased, even in the time of Soviet persecution. In 1959 a report of the commissioner for the affairs of the Church named Kochetovka among the places of pilgrimage of the Penza region, where believers from Penza, Nizhny Novgorod and Mordovia came to the grave of Ivan Potashev and to the spring that bears his name, "Ivanushka's Spring". Miracles are spoken of at his relics, with written testimonies.

On 14 July 2018 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church decided to glorify him among the locally venerated saints of the Penza Metropolis, and on 6 October of that year, in the church of the Archangel Michael at Kochetovka, the services of canonization took place and his relics were found. In the night of 9 to 10 March 2019 a fire broke out in the church; the relics survived and were taken to the Transfiguration monastery in Penza. On 24 June 2019, on the eve of his commemoration day, they were brought back to Kochetovka, where they rest in a prayer house built provisionally until a new stone church is raised. The source speaks of the commemoration day as 25 June, which we cannot reconcile with 12 June, the day of his repose.