The wife of Ov, a quite healthy and prominent woman, who already had three or four children, was pregnant again and was preparing to become the mother of the next child. And suddenly something happened. The woman felt bad, the temperature rose to forty, complete impotence and pains unknown to her until then had tormented her unbearably for many days. Of course, the best doctors and obstetric luminaries of Moscow were summoned, of which, as you know, there has never been a shortage of Pirogov clinics in the city. We also sent a telegram to Father John in Kronstadt... In the evening of the same day, a brief dispatch came from Kronstadt: "I am leaving by courier, I pray to the Lord. John Sergiev." Father John of Kronstadt had already known the Olov family well before and had visited their house during his travels through Moscow. And, summoned by the telegram, the next day, about noon, he entered the Ovs' apartment on Myasnitskaya Street, in which by this time a whole crowd of relatives and acquaintances had gathered, obediently and reverently waiting in the large drawing room adjacent to the room where the sick woman lay. "Where's Lisa?" Fr. John asked, entering the living room with his usual hurried gait. "Take me to her, and all of you stay here and don't make any noise." Father John entered the dying woman's bedroom and closed the heavy doors tightly behind him. Minutes dragged on - long, hard, which at the end formed a whole half an hour. The living room, where a crowd of relatives had gathered, was as quiet as a tombstone. And suddenly the doors leading to the bedroom opened wide with a bang. In the doorway stood a gray-haired elder in a pastoral cassock, with an old stole over it, with a sparse, disheveled gray beard, with an unusual face, red from the prayerful strain he had experienced, and large drops of sweat. And suddenly, words that seemed terrible, coming from another world, almost thundered. "It pleased the Lord God to work a miracle! Father John said. "It was a pleasure to work a miracle and resurrect the dead fruit!" Lisa will give birth to a boy..." "Nothing can be understood! - said one of the professors who came to the patient for an operation, two hours after Father John's departure for Kronstadt. - The fetus is alive. The child is moving, the temperature has dropped to 36.8. I don't understand anything, I don't understand anything... I asserted, and now assert, that the fetus was dead and that blood poisoning had begun long ago." Other luminaries of science could not understand anything either, whose carriages now and then rolled up to the entrance. That same night, Mrs. Ova safely and quickly gave birth to a perfectly healthy boy, whom I met many times later at T.'s in Karetno-Sadovaya Street in the uniform of a pupil of the Katkovsky Lyceum. Evgeny Vadimov

***

Letter from Prince Lev Alexandrovich Begildeev (Sofia, Russian Invalids' Home)

"Reverent before the blessed memory of the late Fr. John of Kronstadt, I consider it my sacred duty, in testimony to the great power of his prayer, to report the following. This was in 1900. I was a young officer of the 19th Artillery Brigade, located in the city of Vinnitsa, Podolsk province, and lived there with my mother and sister. In January or February of this year, I fell ill first with typhoid fever, and then with relapsing fever. My situation was very difficult. The doctors, having exhausted all the means at their disposal, lost all hope. Then my mother, at my request, sent a telegram to Fr. John, asking for his prayers. After that, I lost consciousness; My situation was so hopeless that my mother, who loved me dearly, did not want to see me dying, and went into another room. The doctor, having prescribed an injection of camphor to maintain the activity of the heart, left for some time. I had with me my sister, who was always at my bedside, and one of my comrades in the brigade, who was on duty during my illness in turns. My sister claims that I soon stopped breathing, my pulse stopped, and I lay as if dead, but she persistently continued to give the injections prescribed by the doctor. After a while, she noticed signs of life in me: I began to breathe and a pulse appeared. I began to come to life. This moment, according to our assumptions, coincided with the moment Fr. John received the telegram. After that, I slowly began to recover and recovered. I, my sister and mother (now deceased) firmly believed that by the power of Fr. John's prayer I was resurrected, while others believed that I was healed." I gave this letter of Prince L. A. Begildeev to be read by the ordinary professor of the University of Belgrade in the Department of Pathology, Doctor of Medicine Dmitry Mitrofanovich Tikhomirov. At the same time, I asked him the question: "Could the injections of camphor bring the prince back to life?" To this the professor replied to me: "After two typhus, after the cessation of brain activity, after the cessation of breathing and pulse, the injections of camphor could not bring the prince back to life. Here, undoubtedly, was the miracle of Fr. John of Kronstadt." (Sursky I. K. "Father John of Kronstadt". Moscow, 1994)

The Resurrection of the Deceased through the Prayers of the Lay Elder Theodore Sokolov

Below is an excerpt from the biography of the righteous man of our days, compiled from the stories of friends and admirers of the lay elder Theodore (June †, 8/21, 1973) by Professor G. M. Prokhorov. In the year 1923 or 1924, Elder Theodore went to Siberia to buy eggs and butter. In the evening he was driving past a village. And he saw: a large crowd of people had gathered near the house. They said to him: "A lonely woman died here; and she has many children, and all of them are small." The elder asked to spend the night in this house. When all the people dispersed, he placed a cross on the chest of the deceased, which had been given to him by a certain God-lover who had walked to Jerusalem and from there brought this cross. Elder Theodore began to pray for the woman, and the Lord resurrected her. The elder helped her up and left this village at dawn. There are hundreds of written testimonies of healing through the prayers of the elder. The Lord healed so many people through the elder at once that it was simply impossible to record all the cases of healing. In addition, the communist authorities inflicted numerous oppressions on the elder and his admirers. ("Orthodox Miracles in the XX Century", Moscow, 1993)

On the Uncomplaining Endurance of Sorrows

At the beginning of the forties (XIX century - Ed.), in one of the southern provinces of Russia, Kharkov or Voronezh, I do not remember, the following remarkable event happened, about which at the same time a reliable person reported in writing to the late elder of the Optina Hermitage, Father Macarius. There lived a widow who belonged to the upper class by birth, but as a result of various circumstances had been brought to the most miserable and straitened situation, so that she and her two young daughters endured great need and sorrow, and, seeing no help from anywhere in her hopeless situation, she began to murmur first against people, then against God. In such a state of mind, she fell ill and died. After the death of their mother, the situation of the two orphans became even more unbearable. The eldest of them also could not help murmuring and also fell ill and died. The remaining youngest grieved excessively for the death of her mother and sister, and for her loneliness, as well as for her extremely helpless situation; And finally, she also fell seriously ill. Her acquaintances, who took part in it, seeing that her death was approaching, invited her to confess and commune of the Holy Mysteries, which she did; And then she bequeathed and asked everyone that, if she died, she would not be buried until the return of her beloved confessor, who at that time was absent by chance. Soon after this she died; but for the sake of fulfilling her request, they did not hurry with the funeral, waiting for the arrival of the said priest. Day after day passed, the confessor of the deceased, detained by some business, did not return, and meanwhile, to the general surprise of all, the body of the deceased was not in the least subject to decay, and she, although cold and breathless, looked more like a sleeping woman than a dead woman. Finally, only on the eighth day after her death, her confessor arrived and, having prepared for the service, wanted to bury her the next day, after her death it was already the ninth. During the funeral service, a relative of hers unexpectedly arrived, apparently from St. Petersburg, and, carefully examining the face of the woman lying in the coffin, resolutely said: "If you wish, bury her as you please; I will not allow her to be buried for any reason, because there are no signs of death in her." In fact, on the same day the woman lying in the tomb woke up, and when they began to ask her what had happened to her, she replied that she had really died and had seen the heavenly abodes full of ineffable beauty and joy. Then she saw terrible places of torture, and here she saw her sister and mother among the tortured. Then she heard a voice: "I sent them sorrows in their earthly life for their salvation; if they had endured everything with patience, humility and thanksgiving, then for enduring the short-term distress and need they would have been vouchsafed eternal consolation in the blessed dwellings which you have seen. But with their murmuring they spoiled everything; That's why they are suffering now. If you want to be with them, go and murmur." With these words, the deceased returned to life. ("Collection of Letters of the Optina Elder Hieroschemamonk Ambrose", Part I. Letters to the Laity, Moscow, 1995)

Liberation from the tenacious embrace of death that has already come

Theodore G. Huene, a Russian, of the Lutheran faith, a resident of the city of Edmont in Canada, had been suffering from an acute stomach ulcer for many years, and no treatment brought him relief. On July 19, 1952, he began to suffer from internal bleeding. He was taken to the hospital, where, in view of the extreme danger to his life, he immediately underwent an operation. During this operation, the beating of his heart suddenly stopped, and he "died." However, after a massage of the heart, which lasted for a certain number of minutes, it began to beat again. His wife and children, who were waiting in the hospital for the result of the operation, were informed that the heart could not remain without beating for more than ten minutes: "But we do not know exactly how long your husband's heart remained without beating," the doctor said. " "Apparently, the period of death was longer than these ten minutes, since the oxygen supply to the brain had already been cut off; As a result, the process of brain decomposition had already begun with all the signs of death agony. Even if he had accidentally survived, his brain would have been damaged for the rest of his life." His wife, who at that time was Orthodox only in name, writes: "The next day he began to have convulsions; he was tied to his bed; Terrible agony ensued. He remained unconscious for more than a week. During this period, a friend of our family, Mrs. Varvara Girillovich, advised us to serve a pannikhida for Blessed Xenia, saying: "You'll see, in half an hour he will be better!" She gave me a vial with cotton wool inside; this vial once contained oil from the lamp over the grave of Blessed Xenia, and the cotton wool was once soaked in this oil. She told me to cross my husband's forehead and chest and then put the vial under his pillow. None of us knew at all who this Xenia was, but I immediately ordered a pannikhida in the church and already asked on my own behalf that a moleben be served before the Kursk Icon of the Mother of God, since I had heard that many had received help through prayers before this icon. Both services were immediately served. Half an hour later, my husband opened his eyes for the first time, said my name, and asked for "oil." I thought he was hungry and asked for food; but he said in a faint voice, "I feel better now." I then understood what he was asking for, and once again anointed him with cotton wool and crossed him, after which he fell asleep very soon. From that day on, his recovery began. When our daughter first saw him after he had finally regained consciousness, her father, beaming with joy, said to her, "I have seen angels; now I will live" - and he kept asking to be shown the "blue icon". After a while, when he had recovered a little, he told me that he felt that he was somewhere in the middle of the dark tunnels, trying his best to climb over the pipes in the deep ditches, where it was terribly cold. At the moment when he was about to fall into some dark pit, an old woman in man's clothes, in a short caftan and high boots, appeared to him above, on the surface of the earth. She took him by the hand and tried several times to get him out of there. Every time he felt himself falling into some swamp, she pulled him upwards and finally pulled him out of the dark pit into the light. There he saw what this woman was wearing, and also that she was dragging a sleigh behind her, on which lay the blue icon of the Mother of God. The woman approached some unfinished church and began to bring bricks on her sleigh to its scaffolding. "I offered her my help in this matter, but she replied that she had to do it herself," concluded Mr. Hunet, who knew absolutely nothing about Blessed Xenia. And only after the visit of Archimandrite Anthony (now Archbishop of San Francisco), who brought him a book with a description of the life of Blessed Xenia and with her image, he realized who she was, and exclaimed: "This is the same woman I saw!" His health was recovering with amazing speed. Mrs. Huene writes: "When we left the hospital, the head nurse was moved to tears: after all, no one in the hospital believed that my husband would survive! When I thanked the doctor, he said to me, "Don't thank me; it was Someone standing above me." And on August 26, on the day of the commemoration of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk and the departure of the feast of the Transfiguration, my husband was received into the bosom of the Holy Orthodox Church and since then he has been actively participating in its life, fulfilling the duties of assistant church warden." Relatively recently, Mr. Huene had the opportunity to see the original Kursk Icon of the Mother of God for the first time when he visited the Diocese of Edmont.

("Orthodox Miracles in the XX Century", Moscow, 1993)

With gratitude to Blessed Xenia

Recently we were visited by a pilgrim from Germany. A few years ago, his daughter was dying. For an hour the girl lay lifeless. The doctors pronounced their verdict: hopeless... And at this time he was fervently praying to Xenia. I didn't have time to ask how he knew about our intercessor... But, most importantly, the girl came back to life, and then recovered. His father vowed to enter the seminary. He came to us already as a deacon - to thank Blessed Xenia. ("Orthodox Miracles in the XX Century", Moscow, 1993)

"They have tormented Me with their sins"