St. Xenia of Petersburg

A fool for Christ in eighteenth century Petersburg. Widowed at twenty-six when her husband died without confession or communion, she gave away the house and everything in it, put on his uniform, answered to his name and not her own, and spent forty-five years in the streets of the city taking his repentance on herself. She was thought mad and then she was thought holy. She carried bricks by night to the builders of the church on the Smolensk cemetery, and people still write to her at the chapel over her grave. Glorified by the Russian Church in 1988. Feast: January 24.