Blessed Basil, Fool for Christ, Wonderworker of Moscow (+1557)
Blessed Basil, Fool for Christ, was born in 1468 in the village of Yelokhovo near Moscow. When the boy grew up, his parents apprenticed him to a master to learn shoemaking. Once, when the saint was sixteen, a merchant came into the workshop and ordered boots. Basil burst into tears: the merchant will not even have time to put the boots on, he will die. A few days later his prophecy came true. After this the blessed one went to Moscow and took up the labour of foolishness. In the scorching heat of summer and the bitter frost of winter he went about half-naked. His behaviour was strange: now he would overturn a tray of bread rolls, now he would knock over a jug full of kvass. The angry sellers shouted at him and beat him, and then it would turn out that the rolls had been badly baked and the kvass unfit to drink. Gradually it became clear to everyone that blessed Basil was a man of God, an exposer of injustice.
Once a merchant decided to build a church in Moscow, but he could not bring his plan to completion: the vaults collapsed three times. Troubled, he went for advice to the holy fool, who was sitting in a poor hut rocking an empty cradle. “Whom art thou rocking?” he asked. “I am paying my own mother the unpaid debt for my birth and upbringing,” was the answer. Only then did the merchant remember that he had driven his mother out of his house, and it became clear to him why he could not finish the building. He returned to Moscow, took his mother back into his house, and brought his good work to completion.
Above all the blessed one helped those who needed help more than others but were ashamed to ask for alms. Once he gave a rich gift from the tsar to a foreign merchant who had lost everything and had not eaten a morsel for three days, but could not beg for charity because he wore good clothes. Out of love for his neighbour the Lord’s chosen one even went into taverns, seeking the seeds of goodness even in people utterly ruined. Many noticed that when blessed Basil passed houses where people drank and made merry senselessly, he kissed their corners, while he threw stones at the houses of the pious. When asked to explain this behaviour, the saint answered that at the houses where people carouse unrestrainedly stand sorrowful angels, grieving over the lawlessness of men. I beg them with tears to pray for the conversion of the sinners. But in the houses of the God-fearing the demons have no place: they stand outside, and I drive them away.
Saint Basil died on 2 August 1557. Among those who accompanied his coffin to the grave prepared at the church of the Holy Trinity was Ivan the Terrible himself. In 1554 the church of the Protection of the Mother of God was built over the blessed one’s grave. In 1558 the saint was canonised and his relics uncovered.
