The struggle that we all experience to move this particular mountain is because pride itself hinders us from trusting in God alone to fight for us and our laziness in applying ourselves to the struggle to put God absolutely first in our lives. In Orthodoxy, therefore, our will must be tamed, our lust for autonomy against God’s rule broken. Ascesis, or self renunciation is a discipline that God the Potter can use to resoften the clay so that the resistant aspects of our lives can be remoulded into the divinely shaped humanity which is Christ.

Sometimes God puts before us practical examples of otherwise impossible living … just to show that it can be done; true holiness can be achieved and is the call to all the baptised. Of course, such outstanding examples of sanctity are not to be slavishly followed in the detail. Each person is different and has widely raging temperaments and graces. Nonetheless we venerate the truly outstanding friends of God to inspire us in our own particular journeys and in their fellowship and prayers we truly can make progress. Such a person of exceptional holiness and a saint of our own time was St. John Maximovitch Bishop of Shanghai, and subsequently Archbishop of San Francisco whose feast we celebrate today. Let us for a moment consider the life of this remarkable man and what he can show us of practical holiness.

This brightly-shining Saint of our own day was born in Russia in 1896. In 1921 his family fled the Russian Revolution to Serbia, where he became a monk and was ordained a priest. From the time of his entry into monastic life he adopted a severely ascetical way of life: for the rest of his life he never slept in a bed, sleeping only briefly in a chair or prostrated before the icons. He ate one meal a day, in the evening. Teaching seminarians in Serbia, he instructed them each day to devote six hours to divine services, six hours to prayer (not including the divine services!), six hours to good works, and six hours to rest (these six hours obviously included eating and bathing as well as sleeping). Whether his seminarians followed his counsels we do not know, but he himself not only followed but exceeded them.
In 1934  he was made Bishop of Shanghai (in the Russian Church Abroad), where he served not only the Russian emigre community but also a number of native Chinese Orthodox; from time to time he served the Divine Liturgy in Chinese. When the Communists took power in China, he laboured tirelessly to evacuate his flock to safety, first to the Philippines, then to various western countries including the United States. He served as Bishop in Paris and Brussels, then, in 1962 was made Archbishop of San Francisco. Throughout his life as monk and hierarch he was revered (and sometimes condemned) for his ascetical labours and unceasing intercessions. During his life and ever since, numerous miraculous healings of all manner of afflictions have been accomplished through his prayers. Once, in Shanghai, a caretaker, investigating strange noises in the cathedral after midnight, discovered Bishop John standing in the belltower, looking down on the city and praying for the people. Years later, when he visited Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York, the priest responsible for hosting him found the saint walking through the halls of the monastery, standing outside the door of each room and praying for the monk or seminarian sleeping within. When the Archbishop had prayed outside each room, he returned to the beginning of his circuit and began praying again; and so he spent the entire night.

Even as Archbishop, he lived in near-absolute poverty. His appearance was striking: His cassock was made of blue Chinese "peasant cloth," crudely decorated with crosses stitched by orphans who had been in his care in Shanghai. His Bishop's "mitre" was often a cloth cap to which he had glued paper icons. Even in the United States, even while serving the Divine Liturgy (which he did every day), he went barefoot in all seasons. (Eventually, after he was hospitalized with an infected foot, his Metropolitan ordered him to wear shoes; thereafter, he wore sandals). Needless to say, he was an embarrassment to those who like their bishops to make a more worldly appearance, but among his various flocks throughout the world, there were always those who recognized him as a Saint in his own lifetime.

Following his repose in 1966, a steady stream of healings and other miracles was accomplished through his intercessions, and in 1996 he was glorified as a Saint of the Church. His incorrupt and wonder-working relics can be venerated at his cathedral in San Francisco. At St John's funeral, the eulogist told his mourners (and all of us): because Archbishop John was able to live the spirituality of the Orthodox Church so fully, even in modern, western, urban society, we are without excuse.

So here, in the life of this remarkable man, we have outstanding, even impossible holiness. Inevitably we might all be tempted towards gloom. How can holiness be a practical possibility for me? Well, in one sense it can’t. None of us is John Maximovitch. But, God is God for each and all and we certainly do believe as Orthodox that each and every baptised Christian has both a calling and an opportunity to walk in the path that God has assigned. Who knows what God can achieve in our lives if we truly put him first and seek to do his will, if we receive Him as Love and serve him as a lover? What mountaineer looks behind him and says: "Gosh did I really do that?!" We have even less reason to boast and much more reason to have confidence, for our trust is in Him the All-Holy who works holiness in all his members, in us, in you and me.