Yes it’s real.

Yes it’s back.

Yes it’s here to stay.

I am what I am.

I’m not what I was.

I am what I will be.

I am what God intends me to be by His grace in an ongoing battle against sin.

Talking about the long hiatus and the way forward.

Sainthood is something often thought of as far in the past, captured only in the confines of books and starting at us through the frames of icons.

Saint Anthony the Great feels like a superhero at times, Saint George reads like a fairytale, and Saint John the Apostle attained a level of bear-perfection most cannot truly fathom.

Yet a Saint with no shoes walked the streets of Belgrade, Shanghai, Paris, Brussels, and San Francisco with no shoes, performing miracles of healing and clairvoyance through a life of asceticism that can only be understood as superhuman.

Saint John Maximovitch came from a novel Russian family, attended military school and law school, abandoned the world after the events of the Bolshevik Revolution, and was tonsured a monk at seminary in Belgrade.

His duty to Christ would see him leave no student or orphan left behind under the watch of his care making sure every last person in his flock was fed both literally and spiritually as well as educated to the highest standard.

He crossed battlefields in Shanghai to visit the sick, he secured asylum for Orthodox refugees to America, and served as both Archbishop of Western Europe and Western America before his repose in Seattle in 1966.

To this day, the cathedral he has built in San Francisco feels like a fortress of Heaven, pouring this palpable grade in the Northwest corner of San Francisco, a city that is in desperate need of God’s Grace.

His remains remain in tact, having not decomposed after nearly sixty years since his passing.

Letters asking for his intercession have seen the quick curing of cancer and other grave diseases, as if he his still caring for all of us, his beloved flock.

Words could be spoken in praise of him for hours and still would not do his life a justice.

The Blood & Rain Podcast

Episode 94

Saint John of San Francisco

Enjoy.

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