The Monk Job of Ushel'sk

Commemorated on August 5

The Monk Job of Ushel'sk was a monk of the Solovetsk monastery (his father was named Patrikii Mazovsky). On 10 November 1608 he was ordained to the dignity of priestmonk by the Novgorod metropolitan Isidor. In 1614 the Monk Job was sent to the Mezensk frontier, where at the confluence into the River Mezen' of the Rivers Ezeg and Vazhka he set up a chapel in honour of the Nativity of Christ. The first monks gathering to him lived at the homes of their own lay-kinsmen, so poor was the monastery. After tsar Mikhail Feodorovich (1613-1645) conferred lands with fishing rights, the monk built a church and monastic cells. On 5 August 1628, when all the brethren were off making hay, robbers attacked the monastery. After terrible tortures in their demands for him to open the monastery treasury, the robbers beheaded the Monk Job. Finding nothing at all, they fled. The brethren upon returning buried the body of the monkmartyr with honour. Local reverence of the Monk Job as a saint of God began soon after his death, because of numerous miracles (in the XVII Century about 50 such were known of). The first icon was written in 1658, and his vita-life in the 1660's. And about this time a chapel was built over the relics of the monk, and rebuilt afterwards by blessing of the Kholmogorsk archbishop Athanasii as a church in honour of the same-name saint Righteous Job the Much-Suffering (Comm. 6 May; and on this day the Church has established to also remember the Monk Job of Ushel'sk). On 3 November 1739 the relics of the Monk Job were witnessed to by archbishop Varsonophii, with in evidence the singing of a molieben to the saint. Thus there was made his glorification. The image of the Monk Job is written thus: "Similarly greyed, a beard like Alexander of Svirsk, in the garb of the monastic schemamonk, and in his hands a scroll upon which is written: "Fear not those murdering of the body, the soul they cannot kill"".