FROM THE EDITORS

How can you say: "All holiness, pray to God for me!" so all the saints in heaven will cry out: "Lord, have mercy!" – and you will gain.

Venerable Nectarios of Optina

For a long time in Russia, it was believed that the Saints are our intercessors and petitioners before God. Turning to them with requests for healing, for deliverance from problems, or for finding peace in family life, we hope that through them our requests will reach God, and He will fulfill them.

The Orthodox Church venerates the saints as faithful servants, saints and friends of God; praises their feats and deeds, which they performed with the help of God's grace to the glory of God.

Lifting up a prayer to the saints, one involuntarily thinks, why did these people choose the hard, thorny and desolate path of selfless service to God and selfless help to people out of thousands of paths in life? And was this path easy?

From the lives of the saints we know that some of them, like Barbara the Great Martyress, fervently asked God to vouchsafe them the gift of helping people. Others saw spiritually, and having regained their sight, they understood that their path from that moment was to help people. About the third we cannot know anything for sure – almost no information has been preserved about them, but we know for sure that they – our intercessors – help us in our thoughts and deeds.

In this book, we will tell you about the saints whose worldly life was worthy of admiration and wonder, whose good deeds and selfless service to God allowed people to consider them saints and our intercessors before God even during their lifetime.

We will tell you about Xenia the Blessed and St. Panteleimon.

St. Xenia of St. Petersburg, one of the three patron saints of the city on the Neva, was canonized by the official Church only in 1988. But since the XVIII century - more than two hundred and fifty years - it has been helping and continues to help ordinary people: poor officials, widows and orphans, husbands and wives, young girls, lovers. They resorted to it and still do, praying for sick children, conscripts, husbands...

Xenia the Blessed's faith in the Lord was of such strength that the impossible does not exist. By her great humility, podvig of spiritual and bodily poverty, love for her neighbors and prayer, she earned the divine gift of clairvoyance. And she turned it for the benefit of people.

As well as St. Panteleimon, who has long been revered as the heavenly patron of the sick, doctors and soldiers. Having been baptized in his youth, he devoted his whole life to serving the sick, the poor and the poor. He was a skilled healer, but he began to be called the Healer after a dead child was resurrected through his prayer.

St. John of Kronstadt said: "Turn fervently to the prayers of the saints and believe in their sympathy and help, in their love and assistance for salvation..."

Xenia the Blessed