The life of St John of Kronstadt
Though married, he and his wife chose to live as brother and sister rather than as an ordinary couple, and he gave the whole of that freed devotion to his parish and, above all, to the poor who crowded the harbor district near his church, many of them in genuine desperation. He built a House of Industry to give the destitute work, food, and shelter rather than mere almsgiving, and he gave away money so constantly and so freely that keeping any of it for himself seemed never to occur to him.
Reports of healing and of an unusual gift for reading people's hidden troubles spread around him during his own lifetime, until more such accounts came to be told of him than of nearly any other Russian saint in memory. He kept a spiritual diary through much of his ministry, later published as My Life in Christ, which has continued to be read as a devotional guide long after his death. John reposed on the twentieth of December, 1908, at the age of eighty, and some sixty thousand people are said to have come to his funeral, a measure of how deeply his city had come to depend on him.
