Venerable Caves John Recluse Moses Of Kiev

This card combines the lives of two different but closely linked-by-tradition Kiev Caves venerables, which ideally warrants splitting into two separate cards. Venerable Moses the Hungarian served the right-believing Prince Boris; after his murder in 1015 he fled to Kiev but fell into Polish captivity, where a wealthy widow unsuccessfully tried to force him into marriage, subjecting him to torture and castration; after an uprising in Poland in which his tormentors perished, the saint came to the Kiev Caves Monastery, where he was tonsured by an Athonite hieromonk and was granted by God a special gift for combating carnal passions. He died in 1043. Venerable John, nicknamed the Long-Suffering, labored later, in the 12th century, also at the Kiev Caves Lavra, and became renowned for a thirty-year struggle against carnal passion: he took up the strictest seclusion, wore down his body with fasting, chains, and vigil, and during Great Lent buried himself in the ground up to his chest. When a demon frightened him with the apparition of a fiery serpent, on Paschal night, through the saint's prayer, lightning struck from the sky and smote the serpent, and the passion left the ascetic. According to his life, Venerable John helped another brother suffering from the same passion by applying to his body a bone from the relics of Venerable Moses — thus the lives of both saints became inseparably linked in the Paterikon. The memory of Venerable Moses is kept on July 26/August 8, and that of Venerable John on July 18/31.