Lucian of Aleksandrov

The Venerable Lucian of Aleksandrov (about 1610-1655) was the founder of the Hermitage of the Nativity of the Mother of God by Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, in the Pereslavl-⁠Zalessky region. He was born at Galich of devout parents, Dimitri and Barbara, who, having no children, vowed to become monks if the Lord gave them a son. The child was named Hilarion at Baptism.

The calling

At eight, Hilarion went into the wilderness with his father, who was tonsured Dionysius, and learned from him Scripture and prayer. His mother gave her wealth to the poor and died a nun. After his father's death Hilarion passed through the monasteries of Mologa and near Uglich, but left each time, because men's praise seemed to him a danger. In 1640 a divine revelation sent him to Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, where he found, among forests and marshes, an abandoned church of the Nativity of the Mother of God with a wonderworking icon. He made a cell beside it. The hieromonk Theodosius, sent by the Mother of God, tonsured him with the name Lucian, when he was nearly thirty.

Trials

The brethren who gathered around him restored the church, but the neighbouring inhabitants scattered them, stole the timber prepared for a new church, and denounced Lucian to the patriarch for "impure life". He lived under guard at the Chudov monastery in Moscow, where he bore the heaviest obediences without complaint. In 1646 the patriarch ordained him hieromonk and sent him as builder to the monastery at Kholmogory, but part of the brethren would not accept the communal rule he was establishing. Without imposing himself by force, he returned to the church of the Nativity. The inhabitants rose again, and Lucian went back to Chudov. With the blessing of the tsar Alexis Mikhailovich and Patriarch Joseph he left again for the Sloboda and, helped by Moscow merchants, built cells and churches; the charter founding the monastery is dated 28 August (10 September) 1650.

Works and end

He served daily and never celebrated the Liturgy without tears. The nuns of the Sloboda asked him to be their shepherd, and he built them a convent of the Dormition for twenty sisters, consecrated in 1654 with a procession of the icon of the Nativity; the procession has been held every year since between the two monasteries. He had not yet reached fifty, but looked old from his labours. Feeling death near, he asked to be taken to the church of the Nativity, prayed long before the icon and died on the grass, on 8 September 1655, the patronal feast, and was buried beside the church.

His life was written in the early eighteenth century, with eleven miracles; the chapel over his grave, built in 1771, was destroyed in 1926, but the relics remained untouched. Found in 1992 after the monastery was reopened, they rest in the church of the Theophany. He is commemorated on 6 July, in the new style, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vladimir.