John of Valaam

Saint John of Valaam (in the world Ivan Alekseyevich Alekseyev) was a schema-⁠abbot and confessor of the New Valamo Monastery in Finland, a Russian elder who spent nearly seventy years in monastic life. His letters of spiritual guidance, collected in the book “Christ in Our Midst: Letters from a Russian Monk”, have been translated into many languages. The Orthodox Church of Finland and the Ecumenical Patriarchate numbered him among the saints in 2018-2019.

Childhood

He was born on 14 February (according to other sources 26 February) 1873 in the village of Gubka near Likhoslavl in the Tver province, into a peasant family with two brothers and a sister. He studied at the parish school in the village of Ilyinskoye. He learned to read from a tailor who came to work on furs in their house. He recalled that he was not a very good pupil and that his sister learned the letters before him, but in the end he too learned to read and came to love reading, especially the lives of saints printed as small booklets.

With his parents he often went on pilgrimage to the Joseph-⁠Volokolamsk Monastery, and as a teenager also to the Nilov Hermitage on Lake Seliger. There the thought took root in him that he too would live in a monastery.

The hard school of the world

At thirteen he left home for Saint Petersburg, where he worked in his elder brother's tavern. There he saw the dark side of human nature in all its wretchedness. Much later he said that for a future spiritual guide there could have been no better place to learn the joys and sorrows of human life, especially people's anguish and anxiety. In Petersburg he bought many books.

The call to monastic life

At sixteen he went on pilgrimage to the monasteries of Konevets and Valaam on Lake Ladoga, and in 1889 he stayed at Valaam as a novice, working for four years at the skete of Saint Herman at Syuskyusalmi near Impilahti. Then he was conscripted and served four years in a rifle battalion. After visiting his parents he returned to Valaam in 1900, and from 28 May 1901 he remained in the monastery for good, first as a novice and then as a monk.

In 1907 he was received into the brotherhood, and in June 1910 he was tonsured a monk with the name Iakinf, after the Greek martyr Hyacinth. He served for two years at Valaam's dependency in Petersburg on the bank of the Neva, an obedience he found hard but accepted with submission. He then lived for three and a half years at the skete of Saint Elijah on an island in Ladoga with eight other monks.

As a reward he was sent to the skete of Saint John the Baptist, of which he had dreamed, known for its strict life of fasting and deep prayer. There he spent six years, working and praying, as helper and fellow intercessor of the hermits. He loved the stillness of the skete and the writings of the Holy Fathers, above all the Philokalia. Neither the independence of Finland nor the calendar controversy in the Finnish Church disturbed this place of prayer.

Abbot of Pechenga

On 19 October 1921, with the blessing of Archbishop Seraphim of Finland and Vyborg, Iakinf, a simple monk, was appointed abbot of the Monastery of Saint Tryphon of Pechenga (Petsamo), near the Arctic Ocean. Within a short time he was ordained deacon and priest, and he had only two weeks to prepare and learn the services.

He remained there for ten years without complaint. The brethren of Pechenga were hardworking but less educated than those of Valaam, and spiritual life was somewhat foreign to them: they missed services and did not know the spiritual writings. The abbot taught them to read and guided them, and he succeeded in changing these things.

In 1924 he went through a crisis. He had to rebuke the brethren: one monk had told him he should not keep a Sami man at the monastery, another had sworn during haymaking and told his confessor to be quiet, and the brethren regularly missed services and began sales and building projects without his blessing. Judging that his authority had been undermined and that he was unworthy to lead, he announced that he would return to Valaam, but all the brethren begged him to stay, and he stayed.

Return to Valaam

In October 1931 he asked to be released and returned to Valaam, where he received the great schema with the name John. He went back to his beloved skete of Saint John the Baptist. One summer he had as his helper there the young novice George, the future Archbishop Paul of Karelia and All Finland, who became his close friend.

The number of monks was declining, since Valaam was cut off from Russia and no new brethren came. From 1937 he spent the winters in the main monastery as assistant to the confessor. There he made lifelong friends, among them Jelena Armfelt from Helsinki, with whom he carried on an extensive correspondence.

Exile

During the Winter War Valaam was bombed. Father John sat calmly in his cell reading the Gospel, paying no attention to the shattered windows and the doors flung open by the blasts. In the hasty evacuation he took mainly spiritual books, and later regretted that he had not been able to take the two icons on his wall, one of them from his parents. Hieromonk Savva (Savinski), who led the evacuation, later said that Father John's quiet dignity had made his task much easier. The monks were taken first to the Vuoskoski school at Kannonkoski, where six of the elders died, and then to Papinniemi in Heinävesi, where New Valamo came into being.

Father John grew fond of the new home in exile and called longing for Ladoga “a temptation to sin”. At New Valamo he was an elder and guide to the few new novices and to those seeking spiritual help. He lived in a room at the eastern end of a large wooden building, where for thirty years hundreds of people knocked at the door saying the Jesus Prayer and entered when they heard “Amen”.

In 1947, after the death of Abbot Hariton, Father John was elected abbot, but the church administration did not confirm the election, since a schema-⁠monk could not head the monastery. From 1948, after the death of Schema-⁠abbot Ephraim, the last confessor of Old Valaam, he was the monastery's confessor until his death.

The letters

He kept up a lively correspondence with his spiritual children, and for many his letters were a great comfort in their trials. In the hard years after the war they sent him food, for which he was deeply grateful. One of them was the writer Tito Colliander, who described him in his book “The Dinner” (1975).

In the early 1950s Hieromonk Paul, editor of the magazine Aamun Koitto, translated some of the letters into Finnish and published them. They were so well received that in 1956 they appeared in Russian, duplicated from typed pages, under the title “Letters of a Valaam Elder”; he drew the cover himself. Readers welcomed the book, though at Valaam some received it coldly. It later appeared in Finnish (1976 and reprints), in English (1979 and 1980), in many Russian editions and in Armenian.

Repose

On 5 June 1958 the novice Andrei Peschkoff came to ask whether he needed anything from the shop. The elder sat quietly on his bed and did not answer; Hieromonk Gabriel found that he had reposed. Many of his spiritual children came to the funeral, among them Tito Colliander with his family, Klaudia Korelin and Jelena Armfelt. The service was celebrated by Archbishop Herman, the last funeral he performed.

Glorification

On the basis of the letters kept by Jelena Armfelt and the monastery archives, Abbot Panteleimon published his biography in 1985. In 2008 a memorial service was held at his grave on the fiftieth anniversary of his death. In March 2016 the Synod of the Orthodox Church of Finland proposed his canonisation, together with that of John Karhapää, and on 29 November 2018 the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate entered his name among the saints. His glorification was celebrated at New Valamo on 31 May and 1 June 2019. Chapels in his honour have been consecrated at Sevettijärvi and on the island of Hailuoto. He is commemorated on 5 June.