The veneration of saints is an important component of Orthodox doctrine. Saints are earthly people who have attained deification, a state of communion with God through penetration with divine energies, which is given to them as a reward for righteousness. Sharing all the hardships of temporal existence with people in earthly life, they became real, bodily carriers of qualities inherent in the other world. A saint, a righteous man is an earthly angel and a heavenly man. He unites the earthly Church and the Heavenly Church, clearly testifying to the efficacy of the divine principle in the world. Entering the Heavenly Church after death, he becomes a man of prayer and a patron of Christians who resort to his help. From the point of view of comprehension of the history of mankind, saints are historical figures who discovered for their time the paths of national religious vocation, which vividly characterize a particular historical epoch. The Russian historian G. P. Fedotov wrote that it is the national concept of holiness that contains the key to understanding the most complex and contradictory phenomena of Russian culture.

(Quoted from http://www.krugosvet.ru/enc/kultura_i_obrazovanie/religiya/RUSSKIE_SVYATIE.html)

Orthodoxy, Rus', Russia, saint, saint, venerable, martyr, hagiography, memory, saints ru Vladimir Schneider http://www.ccel.org/contrib/ru/xml/index.html OOo Writer, ExportToFB21, XML Spy, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 January 2012 www.saints.ru OOoFBTools-2012-1-12-8-52-17-552 2.0

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Russian saints

June–August

June 1

Dionysius Glushitsky, Venerable

The Monk Dionysius Glushitsky was born in the vicinity of Vologda in the first days of December 1362. In holy baptism he was named Demetrius. From a young age, Dimitri showed a desire for the monastic life. Leaving his parental home, he went to Lake Kubenskoye, located near Vologda. Here, on a rocky shore ("on a stone"), there was the Spaso-Kamenny Monastery, the history of which was later written in the XV century by the elder Paisius Yaroslavov. The abbot of the monastery at that time, in the period of its spiritual flourishing, was the Greek Dionysius, nicknamed the Athonite, who left Athos because of the turmoil around the Palamite disputes. Known for his piety and broad education, Dionysius of the Holy Mountain immediately saw in the young man a spiritually gifted person.

Having taken monastic vows with the name of Dionysius, the same as that of the hegumen (this happened around 1386-1387), the young monk completely renounced his will and completely devoted himself to the guidance of a wise spiritual mentor. In the monastery there was a strict cenobitic rule, which forbade the inhabitants to have any property. The monk Dionysius, exhausting his flesh with fasting, and strengthening his spirit with prayer, tried to perform the most difficult monastic work.