John the Much-⁠Suffering

Venerable John the Much-⁠Suffering (died 18 July 1160) was a monk of the Kyiv Caves Lavra, honoured as a helper in the struggle against the passion of fornication. He is commemorated (Old Style) on 18 July and on 28 September, in the Synaxis of the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves; the Ukrainian source gives the commemoration by the new calendar on 11 October and 31 July.

Life

He received tonsure in youth and, in spite of strict abstinence from food and drink, wearing chains and the labour of prayer, for three years was "tormented by lust". According to the Life, for some thirty years he tormented his body with fasting and chains, fighting carnal desire: he did not sleep at night, ate once in two or three days, sometimes once a week, and, shutting himself in the cave of Saint Anthony, he intensified his labours, wearing heavy iron chains on his body. Once he buried himself in the ground up to his shoulders, in the cave, and stayed so through all the Forty Days (the first forty days of Great Lent), after which he received deliverance from carnal passions. He died on 18 July 1160.

The relics

His relics, venerated as incorrupt, are in Anthony's Cave, today opposite the relics of the Venerable Martyr Moses the Hungarian. The venerable one was buried in the position in which he struggled in life, as the "Teratourgima" of Hieromonk Athanasius Kalnofoisky (1638) shows: "Saint John the wonderworker, the much-⁠suffering, buried in the ground up to the shoulders". Saint Peter Mogila, in his account of the miracles in the caves of the Lavra (1629 to 1631), recalls the Polish nobleman Jan Pigławski, who, in the Near Caves, mocked "Russian fables" and tried in vain to tear the head from the relics of Saint John; soon his shoulders and neck began to hurt, and the pain passed only after a prayer of repentance. The engineer and cartographer Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan in his "Description of Ukraine" (1650) wrote that there is shown a Saint John, visible to the waist, who is said to have prepared a tomb for himself, not lengthwise but in depth, and, taking leave of the brothers, descended into it, but by God's will could go in only halfway. In the early twentieth century the relics were placed in a shrine. In the shrine is a small opening from which a sweet fragrance comes, which only one who kneels perceives; it is said that one fallen into fornication does not perceive it.