John the New Chozebite

Holy Venerable John the New Chozebite, called in the world Elias and known as John Jacob or John the Romanian (1913 to 1960), struggled in the middle of the twentieth century in the Holy Land, at the monastery of Saint George the Chozebite. His incorrupt relics lie in the monastery church, in a glass shrine. The Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints on 20 June 1992 and set his commemoration on 5 August, the day of his repose.

Childhood and calling

He was born in Romania, in a family of deeply believing peasants, and at Baptism he received the name Elias. He was an orphan early: his mother died when he was only six months old, and his father perished three years later, in the First World War. He was raised by his grandmother Maria, a pious woman. When he was eleven, his grandmother fell asleep, and the boy lived in his uncle's family, where he had to endure many troubles. From childhood he learned the hidden life of prayer and complete trust in God. Once, at Holy Pascha, the boy was weeping bitterly at his grandmother's grave and heard a voice from the icon of the Saviour: "Do not weep, My child, and do not grieve, for I am with you, the Risen Christ." The image of the Saviour seemed to come alive and smile. From this heavenly comfort the child's soul was filled with unspeakable peace.

At twenty he resolved to give himself wholly to the service of the Lord and came to the Neamț monastery, where Venerable Paisius Velichkovsky (1722 to 1794) had once struggled, to the north-⁠west of the town of Târgu Neamț. At Pascha of 1936 he was tonsured a monk with the name John. In the autumn of the same year, with the blessing of Metropolitan Nicodemus of Moldavia, he left for the Holy Land. At Jerusalem he met two monks from Neamț, Claudie and Damaschin, who after the pilgrimage returned to Romania, while Father John, after some difficulties, was received into the lavra of Saint Sabbas the Sanctified.

In the Holy Land

He learned Greek and began to translate spiritual books into Romanian. He amazed everyone by his ascetic labours. He kept the obedience of sacristan, that is, he tended the lamps in two churches and four chapels, was assistant to the steward and cared for the sick. In those times the Arab revolt had begun in Palestine (1936 to 1939). Once, returning from a journey, he came upon some Arabs lying in ambush, who wanted to kill the steward of the monastery, the hieromonk Paul, because he had refused to give them food from the monastery's table. Thinking that Father Paul was approaching, they fell on Father John; a young Arab wanted to strike him on the head with a shaft, but was stopped when they saw that it was another man. Learning that he cared for the sick of the monastery, the Arabs began to bring their wounded to him, and the peace of the monastery was disturbed. Father John, exhausted, suffered from his kidneys, from unsuitable food and from the harsh climate, and decided to go into the desert for rest and stillness, with the blessing of his confessor, Father Sabbas.

In 1939, with another Romanian brother, he went to the Judean desert. They spent two weeks in a cave at Qumran, then moved to a cave at Calomena, a kilometre east of the monastery of Saint Gerasimus. The cave was very damp, and water was brought from the monastery. The Romanian brother could not bear it and left, and in his place came an old Romanian monk, Ioanichie, who did not leave him until his death. They stayed in the cave a year and a half. It seems that from the bad water Father John fell ill with dysentery and suffered from it for eighteen months. By 5 August he had finished the translation of the Akathist of the Dormition of the Mother of God; on the same day he later passed to the Lord.

In the Second World War the Romanians, as allies of Hitler, were arrested by the English in Palestine and shut up in a camp, with Germans and Italians. Because he knew foreign languages, Father John, though very ill, was kept in the camp longer than others, nine months. After release he returned to the lavra of Saint Sabbas. On the feast of Saint Theodosius he went to the monastery founded by him, near the lavra. Ioanichie prayed warmly at the relics of the saint and was healed by the venerable one's gift. On returning, Father John resumed his obediences, though weakened and suffering from the weight of the climate, but there was no one else to bear them.

The skete on the Jordan and the Wadi Qelt

Later Archimandrite Victorin, head of the Romanian Church at Jerusalem, who knew him from Neamț, wrote without asking him to the Romanian patriarch Nicodemus to arrange with the patriarch of Jerusalem Timothy I that he be ordained hieromonk for the Romanian skete of Saint John the Baptist in Jordan. Father John had twice before refused ordination as deacon, once at the Turnu monastery and once at Neamț. Now, to find the rest he desired, he agreed. On 13 May 1947 he was ordained hierodeacon by Bishop Irinarch, and on 14 September of the same year hieromonk and appointed hegumen. After the ordination Victorin delayed sending him to Jordan, and Father John said that he did not want to stay at Jerusalem and wished to return to the lavra of Saint Sabbas. In December 1948 Victorin sent him to Jordan, accompanied by the schemamonk Ioanichie, without food and without any help. The house in which they were to live had two small rooms, full of mud because of the flooding of a tributary of the Jordan; the church was roofed with broken tiles, and grass grew on the floor. They made a stove of three barrels, plastering them with mud, which served them also as a bed. A Romanian brother from Jericho brought them bread from his own portion and made a small shack of wood found in the garden.

Once Archimandrite Victorin came to the monastery with a rich man from America, who wanted to help the skete with money. When they sat at table, Victorin invited to the table the driver, a Muslim Arab, and Father John got up from the table. The American was angered and gave nothing, but Father John thought it better to be "poor, but pure". He served the Liturgy, confessed, gave communion and spoke words of comfort and encouragement to pilgrims. He often worked in the small garden. At night he went out on the bank of the Jordan and prayed there until dawn. Sometimes he withdrew for a few days into the desert. He fasted, prayed and made many prostrations. He did not cease to write verses about the beauty of the places where he struggled; some have since been translated into Russian.

In February 1948 the Romanian patriarch Nicodemus (Munteanu) died, and by custom for forty days all the patriarchs had to serve memorial services. When the turn of the patriarch of Jerusalem came, Victorin called Father John to take part, but he refused, because the departed had persecuted the supporters of the true calendar (the old style), and Father John did not wish to serve with priests who did not follow this ancient tradition. Moreover, he never gave communion to the unconfessed or the unrepentant. This angered Archimandrite Victorin, who on his return from a journey to Lebanon brought the former abbot back to the monastery in Jordan. Then Father John and Father Ioanichie moved to the Wadi Qelt, to the cave skete of Saint Anne (a kilometre and a half from the monastery of Saint George the Chozebite, farther down the stream), where, according to tradition, the mother of the Mother of God struggled at the end of her life. In November 1952 he moved to the monastery of Saint George the Chozebite, where he stayed a year, until the monk Paul came from Cyprus, who agreed to go with him to the skete of Saint Anne. Paul helped him put doors and windows in the small cave, where in spite of the daytime heat he spent his last seven and a half years, hardly setting foot in the monastery or at Jericho.

The cave above the stream

In summer the heat reached forty degrees. Father John suffered from rheumatism and changed day and night his flannel shirts, soaked with sweat. His food was rusks and, more rarely, the bread brought by the Romanian brother from Jericho. He bore hunger, cold, heat, thirst, illness and all the troubles from the devil. He lived in poverty, to be rewarded in the other life. The entrance of the cave was seven metres above the water, almost over the small chapel of the skete, and one could climb up only by a five-⁠metre ladder, which the saint lowered when needed. In the cave there were three rooms. The first, of twelve square metres, had a niche cut in the wall, which served as an altar, where he prayed constantly. Here he rested, on a mat spread on a board, translated from Greek into Romanian, wrote verses and sang spiritual hymns, having a very beautiful and pleasant voice. The style of his writings, accessible, was pervaded by the spirit of humility and meekness, so that those who read them shed tears, however heavy their hearts. Through a hole in the wall one entered the second room, of six square metres, where the hermit ate a little. The third was the "cave of the departed", where lay the relics of those who had struggled there before. He ate once a day, in the evening, and slept three or four hours a night. Sometimes, on great feasts, he served at the church of Saint George the Chozebite: he came down from the cave by the ladder, went to the monastery for the all-⁠night vigil, then took part in the Liturgy and communed, ate at the common table and returned to the cave. His friend, the monk Paul, struggled not far off, in a small chapel, where they served the Holy Liturgy. His disciple Ioanichie, who lived in a neighbouring cave, he received; the disciple climbed to him by a ladder woven of ropes, which the father then drew up, cutting the way to other visitors. He suffered from the Arabs, who threw stones into the cave to drive him out, but the elder understood that the devil urged them on and bore it with humility and love.

Repose and relics

Two weeks before his death he had a wonderful vision. In a deep blue sky he saw on his right a shining crown of date-⁠palm leaves, with the inscription "Blessed..." and other words which he could not make out. On the left were the words "Cursed..." and lightnings falling like arrows. On 4 August 1960, informed from on high of the approaching end, he received the Holy Mysteries and lay down. After an hour, raising his hand, he blessed in the form of a cross the four quarters of the world, saying: "Peace to all." The monk Joasaph, author of his life, tells that his temperature rose constantly, he grew weaker, without saying the meaning of the words of the vision. The schemamonk Ioanichie remembered that he put a wet cloth on the body burning with fever, and he made no sound of pain, but only thanked him in a pleasant voice. At dawn on Thursday, 5 August 1960, at the age of forty-⁠seven, Father John was called to eternal life.

Father John respected the canons of the Orthodox Church down to the smallest detail. Once he served the Liturgy in the monastery of Saint George the Chozebite on the day of Saint John the Baptist and refused Holy Communion to the wife of a priest from the village of Taybeh, because she had eaten meat the day before, at Theophany, when she should have kept a fast of at least three days. The abbot, probably her confessor, put on the epitrachelion and absolved the woman himself, and from then on Father John no longer served together with other priests. At the Liturgy he did not commemorate the names of priests of whom he had heard that they were Freemasons.

After his death he was buried in the "cave of the departed". In 1968 his disciple, the schemamonk Ioanichie, managed to print part of Father John's verse writings, in two volumes, under the title "Spiritual Food". After years Father John appeared in a dream to Ioanichie and told him that his grave must be opened. The abbot and the fathers decided to wait. A year passed, and in the end the abbot agreed that the cave be opened. It was the year 1980, twenty years after Father John's death. When the grave was opened, a miracle took place: the body was incorrupt and gave off a pleasant fragrance. His face was clean, with a black beard. Archimandrite Amphilochios, abbot of the monastery of Saint George the Chozebite, later recalled: "We expected to see only holy bones, but we smelled a wonderful fragrance. When we lifted the lid of the coffin, we saw Father John as if he were asleep; corruption had not touched his body, which was as at the moment of death. It was as if we had laid him there a few hours before, not even hours, just now; his appearance was without any change."

Patriarch Benedict of Jerusalem was informed and ordered the relics moved to the church of the monastery of Saint George the Chozebite. On 7 August 1980 the relics were laid in the monastery. The coffin was of poor quality, but there was no money for a new one. Then there came to the monastery from Australia the mother of the priest Charalampos, to whom in a dream an unknown man in monastic dress had ordered to gather money for the shrine of a saint with an incorrupt body. She had not been told who he was and where he was. She told the dream to others, but no one understood. Only in the monastery, seeing Father John, did she understand for whom the shrine was needed. With the money gathered in Australia the relics were placed in the church of Saint Stephen, beside the grave of Saint George the Chozebite (today they are in the main church of the Nativity of the Mother of God). When the relics were brought to the monastery, the abbot left for Greece for gifts to repair the road to the monastery. After his departure some Greek clergy of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem judged that it was not fitting to display in their church the relics of a man of another nationality and not yet glorified. They took counsel with the patriarch and decided that a commission should come and move them to another place. The local bishop did not wish to do this in the abbot's absence and awaited his return. In the meantime Patriarch Benedict, aged eighty-⁠eight, died, and all the members of the commission fell gravely ill. After that no one thought any more of moving the relics.

On 20 June 1992 the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church decided to number John the New Chozebite among the saints and to keep his day on 5 August, on which he passed to the Lord. The Azbyka page commemorates him on 14 October, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moldavia.