St. Xenia of St. Petersburg

Xenia Grigorievna lived in St. Petersburg in the eighteenth century. She was married to Andrei Feodorovich, a man of the court who served as a singer, and she lived as other women of her station. When she was about twenty-six years old her husband died suddenly, without the preparation of confession and communion, and the grief of his unready death changed the whole course of her life.

From that day she sought not her own comfort but the salvation of his soul and her own. She gave away her house and her goods to the poor, put on her husband's clothing, and answered only to his name, saying that Andrei Feodorovich had not died but that Xenia was the one who was gone. Those who did not understand took her for mad, and she bore their mockery as a garment, taking up the hard and hidden path of the fool for Christ.

For some forty-five years she had no home, wandering the Petersburg Side by day and going out beyond the city to pray through the nights in the open fields, in the cold and the rain. The tradition recounts that when a church was being built at the Smolensk cemetery, the workers found that in the night their bricks had been carried up to the scaffolding, and learned at last that it was Xenia who bore them up, unseen.

God rewarded her hidden labor with the grace of foresight and of prayer that was heard. Mothers saw that when she took a sick child in her arms it was made well, and merchants that the shop she entered would prosper; she spoke words that were understood only afterward, warning of a death or sending someone in haste to a blessing they had not known was coming. The people of the city came to love and to seek the strange poor woman whom they had once derided.

She reposed at the beginning of the nineteenth century and was buried at the Smolensk cemetery, where so many had seen her at prayer. Pilgrims never ceased to come to her grave, and a chapel was raised over it that remains thronged to this day. The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad glorified her in 1978, and the Church in Russia in 1988. Her memory is kept on the twenty-fourth of January.