Schema-monk Sisoes of Valaam passed away on this day in 1931. The future Schema-monk Sisoes (baptismal name Semen Teplenev) was born on January 28, 1855, into a peasant family in Yaroslavl Region. Growing up, he worked as a shopkeeper’s assistant and thereby acquired a love for honest labor. He entered Valaam Monastery on September 9, 1886, became a novice on November 28, 1890, and was tonsured a monk with the name Serafim on June 11, 1893. After serving as an ecclesiarch, he settled in the wilderness near Konevskii Skete, pursuing the ascetic life, and on July 15, 1901, he was tonsured into the Great Schema and given the name of Sisoes. He had a reputation for austerity and severity amongst the brethren. Despite not being ordained to holy orders, he served as a spiritual guide to large numbers of monastics and laity, continuing the Valaam tradition of eldership. He passed away on February 22/March 7, 1931. The following account is reproduced from the Valaam Paterikon published by St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood in Platina, CA in 1998. While the portrait of Elder Sisoes in it is perhaps more hagiographic than realistic, it is an exemplar of the spirit of the “Old Valaam” that he appears to have embodied: “[Elder Sisoes] was born in 1855 and arrived on Valaam during the abbacy of Damascene and having become fully absorbed by the spirit of that monastic general, Elder Sisoes (Seraphim before the schema) became an elder, directing monks’ souls in the art of unseen warfare, so that long lines of monks would wait at his door for counsel. “For fifty years he lived in Valaam and its various sketes as well as in the merochia in St Petersburg and Moscow. He ended his life as a staunch defender of the Church Calendar and hesychastic way of life so typical of the monks of Valaam. Elder Sisoes had as disciples among others, Monk Justinian, who left brief biographical data on his elder, claimed that Elder Sisoes was a possessor of the unceasing Jesus Prayer which would automatically murmur in his heart, accompanied by an abundance of tears. “He would sweetly whisper, ‘Jesus, have mercy,’ and everything around him would be transformed as he lay in the infirmary with other schema monks who, dressed in their cowls and with their arms crossed, waited on the Lord’s grace, for their souls to be pulled out of them, so they could fly straight to heaven.” Source:
Rev. Sergii Tretiakov. Valaamskie svetilʹniki dukha. XX vek. [Valaam's Spiritual Luminaries of the Twentienth Century] (Moscow: Sretensky Monastery Press, 2015). |
