The Monastery of St. Sabbas

The central desert years: from about 1938 John Jacob spent some eight years at the Great Lavra of St. Sabbas (Mar Saba) in the gorge of the Kidron, the fifth-century foundation of St. Sabbas the Sanctified and the mother-house of Palestinian lavriotic monasticism. There he lived the full ascetic and liturgical life of the Lavra, served in its library and hospitality, and was ordained deacon and priest in Jerusalem in 1947.

Tradition: Romanian Orthodox (20th-c. hermit of the Judean desert; glorified 1992)

Mar Saba in the Kidron

The Great Lavra of St. Sabbas — Mar Saba to the Arabic-speaking world — hangs on the cliffs of the Kidron gorge in the Judean desert, a few hours’ walk southeast of Bethlehem toward the Dead Sea. Founded in 483 by St. Sabbas the Sanctified (439–532), it became the greatest and most influential of the desert monasteries of Palestine, the school of a lavriotic monasticism that combined the coenobitic common life of the core with the semi-eremitic life of the surrounding cells, and the cradle of a liturgical tradition (the Sabbaite Typikon) that shaped Byzantine and later Orthodox worship (Patrich, Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism, Dumbarton Oaks, 1995; and, for the founder and the house, St. Sabbas the Sanctified). Almost alone among the ancient desert lavras, Mar Saba has been continuously inhabited from its foundation to the present — so that when John Jacob entered it around 1938, he was joining a community with fourteen unbroken centuries of monastic life behind it, living in the same caves and cells as the desert Fathers whose lives he had read (Patrich, Sabas, 1995, on the Lavra’s continuity; synodal Life, Viața Sfântului Cuvios Ioan Iacob de la Neamț).

The choice of Mar Saba was thus, for a Romanian monk of the Neamț tradition, a deliberate entry into the deepest and most authentic stream of Orthodox desert monasticism. The hesychast prayer that Neamț had renewed in the eighteenth century (see St. Paisius Velichkovsky) had its ultimate roots in exactly this Palestinian and Sinaite desert; at Mar Saba John Jacob returned, as it were, to the source.

The Life He Lived There

The Romanian accounts give the years at St. Sabbas as about eight — commonly reckoned c. 1938–1946 — and describe them as the period of his fullest ascetic maturity within a great community (synodal Life; parohia-sf-ioan-iacob-hozevitul.ro, which gives “eight years in the Lavra of Saint Sava on the Kidron valley”). [Disputed: the exact span and endpoints of the St. Sabbas years vary in the devotional Lives, which reckon “eight years” against the surrounding chronology of a first desert period and the 1947 ordination and move to the Jordan; the collection reports the traditional “about eight years, c. 1938–1946” and treats the precise dates as approximate.] Within the Lavra he lived the demanding Sabbaite rhythm of long night vigils, the Jesus Prayer, fasting, and manual labor. The sources record that his learning and his gentleness found particular scope in two services characteristic of the house: care of the library and its books, fitting for a monk trained in the manuscript tradition of Neamț, and the labor of hospitality toward pilgrims and the sick, continuous with the medical service of his army years (synodal Life; Bălan, The Romanian Patericon). These are not the dramatic feats of legend but the ordinary Sabbaite offices, and it is in their faithful, hidden performance that the tradition locates his growth.

The desert itself was his chief teacher. The privation, the heat, the silence, and the sheer antiquity of the place — the caves of the Fathers, the tomb of St. Sabbas, the relics and memory of the great Palestinian ascetics — formed him in the classical mold. When, in the last decade of his life, he withdrew to the walled cave of St. Anne to die a hermit, he was carrying to its conclusion the pattern the Sabbaite tradition had taught him: the movement from the common life of the Lavra to the greater solitude of the cell.

Ordination in Jerusalem

The one precisely dated public event of the St. Sabbas period is his ordination, which the sources place at the very holiest site of Christendom. On 13 May 1947 John Jacob was ordained deacon at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and in the same year he was ordained priest at the Tomb of the Lord, by a Romanian hierarch named in the accounts as Bishop Irinarh (parohia-sf-ioan-iacob-hozevitul.ro, “Viața Sfântului Ioan Iacob Hozevitul”; Romanian Wikipedia, Ioan Iacob de la Neamț, which places the ordination to the priesthood “in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre”). That the Romanian monk was raised to the priesthood at the Holy Sepulchre itself is a detail the tradition treasures; it is also the credential that made possible the next stage of his life, for a priest was needed to serve the Romanian pilgrims and the Romanian hermitage by the Jordan, to which he was now called.

By the mid-1940s, then, John Jacob had become a hieromonk of the Judean desert, formed in the greatest of its monasteries, ordained at the Sepulchre, and ready — though his own deepest desire was for solitude — to be given a work of pastoral care. The move from the Lavra to the Romanian community by the Jordan, and thence to the final hermitage at Hozeva, is the subject of the next section.

See Also

• Pilgrim to Palestine — the pilgrimage and first desert years that brought him to the Lavra
• St. George Hozeva and the Romanian Community — the pastoral work that followed his ordination
• St. Sabbas the Sanctified — the founder of the Lavra and its tradition
• St. Paisius Velichkovsky — the Neamț renewal whose desert roots lay in this Palestinian tradition
• Orthodoxy: Monasticism — the lavriotic and eremitic tradition of the desert

References

• Viața Sfântului Cuvios Ioan Iacob de la Neamț (Hozevitul) — the Romanian synodal Life, in Viețile Sfinților for August. (The eight years at St. Sabbas; his services in the Lavra.)
• “Viața Sfântului Ioan Iacob Hozevitul.” parohia-sf-ioan-iacob-hozevitul.ro. (Eight years at St. Sabbas; ordination as deacon 13 May 1947 and priest in 1947 by Bishop Irinarh.)
• Patrich, Joseph. Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism: A Comparative Study in Eastern Monasticism, Fourth to Seventh Centuries. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995. (The Great Lavra, its lavriotic system, and its continuous occupation.)
• Bălan, Archimandrite Ioanichie. The Romanian Patericon. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. (His labors and character in the Lavra.)
• Ioan Iacob de la Neamț, Romanian Wikipedia — used as a locator (the ordination and its setting).