Homily for the Commemoration of Saint Xenia of Petersburgh
By Fr. Daniel Sysoev
By Fr. Daniel Sysoev
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit!
I congratulate you all on the feast in honor of our beloved Saint Xenia of Petersburg! Even in Soviet times it was completely impossible to stop the stream of pilgrims to the grave of Blessed Xenia. The very phenomenon of Saint Xenia is remarkable: it is, of course, an example of how a person can serve God when it seems that life itself is entirely unfavorable to this. She lived in the eighteenth century, in the terrible post-Petrine era of widespread apostasy from God; in this respect even the nineteenth century was more pious. The eighteenth century was an age of debauchery and the degradation of Russian society (especially the upper classes), when such things were not only concealed but even flaunted.
It was in this time that the family of Andrei Fyodorovich and his wife Xenia lived. They were quite young: Andrei Fyodorovich was thirty years old, Xenia twenty-six. He held the rank of lieutenant colonel and was also a singer, singing with a magnificent tenor in the choir of the palace church (in the Winter Palace). Everything seemed to be going piously enough, but during one ball organized by Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, Andrei Fyodorovich was made very drunk; he went off to a female singer, and when he was walking away from her along the street, he was struck by a carriage.
