The life of St Juliana of Lazarevskoye
She married George Ossorgin, a merchant of Murom, and rather than withdraw into monastic life as she might once have wished, she lived out an ascetic discipline within her own household and marriage instead, caring constantly for orphans, widows, and the sick around her even as she raised her own children. When famine struck the region in 1570, she took food meant for her own table and gave it away in secret rather than draw attention to her charity, and when an epidemic followed on the famine's heels, as it often did in that era, she gave herself over entirely to nursing those who had fallen ill. After her husband's death she distributed her own share of his estate to the poor, and in her later years intensified her own private discipline further still, sleeping only a couple of hours a night with her head resting on a bare board rather than a pillow. She died in 1604, remembered afterward as proof that the ascetic life the Church had long associated chiefly with monks and nuns could also be lived, quietly and without withdrawal from the world, inside an ordinary household.
