(+) The Oil from Tomb of Saint John Maximovitch – The Wonderworker. Indeed! 
What can science, technology and modern theories of being, teach us about "something from nothing?"
January 1999.
Yet this very means “something from nothing” is given us by TRUTH, demonstrated by TRUTH in his many "signs and wonders" when He walked among us and continues to this day in the countless miracles of healing and restoration. "Only God can restore a conscience turned to dust." This is the mystery of the ineffable God to whom we owe our very being, HE who created "something from nothing." Is it any wonder that this wonderful reality of creative energy would be witnessed in Oil from the Tomb of Saint John Maximovitch – the Wonderworker?
A Russian Orthodox priest's wife sent Father Symeon a small vial of oil from St John's Tomb. The year was 1996. As difficult as it is to accept or for most to believe that Oil carried with it a wonderful and special blessing from St John, and has produced many miracles of healing and help, too numerous to thoroughly recount without writing a book.
Here are only a few examples:
A struggling young Satanist (we will call him Brandt W.) who was seeking deliverance from demonic possession and trying to come to God. Over many months we systematically exorcised him as he prayed the Hours and worked on his catechism. This young man had become so sickened by demonic possession that he tried to sacrifice his own infant son, burning him severely on a cook stove to gain favor with Satan. The child survived and the man was convicted for his crime. He had wealthy parents and they succeeded getting a much too light sentence for him. Because of the nature of his crime he had spent four years in solitary confinement, by legal agreement in protective confinement, as he would not have lasted a day in the general population, so hated was he.
Those years of silence had allowed him to come to the realization of his crimes and he came to us with the desperate plead, “Father, I’m going to be released next year and I know if I am not delivered from this torment I’m going to hurt someone else or kill them!” It was a sincere desperate plea.
I want to paint a picture of how powerfully possessed he was. He could not be taken from his cell, except by "certified emergency response team" of six officers and it took six to handle him and he was a small young man. He was kept in an isolated corner cell, the cell next to him unoccupied and of no use because any inmate placed there would quickly go mad. I was allowed to speak with him only through the food tray opening in his cell door. There was a constant mumbling, almost like chanting aural noise in his room, that would become quite angry when I arrived. On our first meeting I asked him, why don't you turn on the light so I can see you. He said, "Two hundred watt bulbs are burning. If you stoop down lower you ought to be able to see the one in the back of the cell." I did as he instructed and I could barely make out the bulb through a mass of black fog. "They won't let me read anything but the Satanic bible" he said. "How are you going to be able to read what I give you?" He had already worked it out with the guards. They would leave the food tray door open for periods each day so he could read by the light from outside.
After several months of twice-weekly prayer with him, which included layer by layer exorcism, in August of 1997, Father Symeon along with Father David Monroe (CEC) anointed Brandt’s forehead with the sign of the Cross, with the words, "Satan, you will not dare torment the man whose forehead has received the sign of the cross." I was called away, but my deacon visited each week. Three weeks later, to our great surprise that cross was still visible on his forehead. The cross was clean looking and shiny, the rest of his face looked dusty, as if death were already at work upon his skin. And three months later when that precious young man was baptized in the Chapel at Hays State Prison, the cross was still visible! Following Baptism and Christmation something wonderful happened. When we plunged him into the water for the third time, that Cross disappeared! Not because it lost its Glory, rather because all the dustiness of his countenance was swallowed up in radiance, and the rest of Brandt’s face took on the same beautiful radiance as the Cross.
Two “accidental witnesses” to this miracle of systematic exorcism and Brandt's baptism, two very cynical prison guards came secretly and asked to be anointed with the same oil. They requested prayer for needs and asked for blessings. One was a known agnostic who had earlier scoffed at Father Symeon’s work with Brandt and others. She said, “These guys make a fool of you. You think you know them, but you don’t. You don’t know how they are when you are not around. They put on a show for you, and the whole thing is silly since the state pays you for this spiritual charade.” She was an embittered closeted lesbian. Knowing that St John, himself, would never have hesitated to grant such a blessing to a non-Christian, and seeing the sudden change and faith engendered, Father Symeon also did not hesitate, but anointed her and began teaching her the true Gospel.
A Wiccan Inmate, a former Deputy Sheriff, turned Satanist, was anointed with Saint John's Oil in November 1998, and was instantly healed of a major heart defect. This inmate (Perry B. we will call him) was convicted of despicable crimes of abuse, crimes engendered under the influence of Wiccanism as he in his words, "Explored the dark side seeking more Satanic power. He had taken the roll of Wizard, painted a huge pentagram on the floor of his “sanctuary room” upon which both adults and children would be horribly victimized. The despicable acts were of the same psychology as those previously expressed by Brandt, he sought more power.
Perry B had attended quite a few liturgies and we knew something was happening with him. He had arrived first to demonically torment another Satanist who had come to Christ. We had to start sanctifying (exorcising) the Chapel before Liturgy, literally surrounding the space with Holy Angels. From then on, when Perry arrived, he could not last more than ten minutes before Holy Angels forced him to leave. He quickly realized he was powerless during the Liturgy and could not torment his victim. On top of that, a congenital heart defect became much worse and he was scheduled for open heart surgery as soon as it could be arranged.
One day he arrived and asked, “Would Christ heal someone of a physical ailment, even if the person wasn’t a Christian and didn’t want to be a Christian?” I said, “Perry, it is upon the field of faith where the Orthodox Christian and Christ meet both non-Orthodox Christians and pagans alike. Do you believe you will be healed?” He said, “Yes, if you will just pray for me.” I said, “I will pray and God will restore your heart to perfect health, but you must know that from that moment on every heartbeat will torment you, because it will be a witness against you. Every healthy breath you take will be a testimony of the power of the true God and the powerlessness of your fantasy earth religion.” Perry was instantly healed. The prison doctor and subsequent tests at Floyd Medical Center in Rome, Georgia documented his healing. His heart beat and blood work became absolutely normal for the first time in his life and his “defective valve” is working perfectly.
A Strange and Wonderful Sign:
The most amazing quality concerning St John's blessing is that this Oil has continued for three years to renew itself! Upwards of five-hundred people including many who have been chrismated have been anointed with this one single, tiny vial of oil by my own hand! But that is not nearly the complete story.
How the miracle began: About six months after receiving the oil, Father Symeon misplaced the oil, accidentally leaving it in the inside pocket of his favorite sport jacket. Until that time he had suspected nothing out of the ordinary about the oil. He needed the oil that day so he quickly searched and discovered the vial in the pocket. He said candidly, “I almost cursed when I saw that the vial had leaked all over my jacket lining.” He instinctively turned the cap to see how loose it was. When he did oil spewed out of the container and covered his hands. Still he didn’t understand what was happening but later that day it became obvious as the tiny vial continued to leak oil. The vial had to be placed into a larger container and later when that container threatened to overflow it was placed in yet a larger jar. The contents of the containers have been emptied several times, given to the fellow clergy, used for anointing of the sick and for chrismations. Yet each time the tiny vial replenishes itself. We do not know why we have been blessed with this witness of "loaves and fishes" displayed in blessing oil, but we witness its reality and are humbled by the blessing. +++
When we met Saint John the Wonderworker:
When Father Symeon was a boy, son of Assembly of God parents, St John blessed him under the most unlikely of circumstances. He testified to it in a letter saying:
The Holy Spirit's presence in Orthodoxy is a powerful and wonderful thing. I was blessed to be "accidentally" exposed to an Orthodox Saint as a child, only for a moment. It was a two-minute conversation, when riding my bike one Sunday afternoon. I stopped to rest on the curb next to a church. It was in the mid-nineteen-fifties. A frighteningly "huge" man (at my age he was huge) with a pronounced limp, dressed in black robes and eyes so bright and alive he scared me and confused me because I saw unquestioned love in them, knelt down with some difficulty and introduced himself and asked my name. My bike lay on its side because it didn’t have a kickstand. I can see his hand today as clearly as that day as Saint John absentmindedly touched to spokes and set the wheel in motion. That’s what I had been doing before he arrived, spinning the wheel. I have shared with only a few people what he said to me. I knew nothing of Orthodoxy, yet when I came to Orthodoxy his words took on such a wonderful blessing of confirmation.
We give the Synergistic Power of the Holy Spirit so little credit. We talk about it a lot, but we give it so little trust and we rely on our own will, our own reasoning, on canonical legalism, theories of the nature of the Church and we kill ourselves trying to create the reign of God upon the earth, if we are sincere. God’s reign is not of our making but the realty of history’s story whether we grasp it, and acknowledge it or not. It was almost Forty Years later when I learned who that man was, and when I met him again I met him in an ICON, discovering he is called St John the Wonderworker. Those eyes made such an impression! Forty years later their memory is a wonderful blessing!
Now, because of the wonderful way in which St John has blessed the OSJ - He has healed, he has given guidance, he has reached even to those caught in pagan religions for a witness of God's power of healing, he has given us courage, and was faithful to us as a true Hierarch, even when "living" Hierarchs failed us, we are willing to say that at that "chance" meeting seeing the love with which a young boy held Christ and quickly witnessed his own faith, St John simply blessed us saying, "Butch Robinson, you will come to me." And indeed come to him we have, in Jesus Christ's Life, the SOMA, the Body, which True Christians share, for the Glory of God. +++
2009 UPDATE:
Father Symeon: In 2008 I visited our OSJ Brother (whom we will call, John C.) in a Georgia State prison on a sweltering hot summer day. The prison was quite a distance, so the night before I had traveled there and taken a cheap hotel room. As the groaning old window AC unit struggled to overcome the heat in the room, I inventoried for security reasons, everything I would be taking into the prison. It had been months since I had taken any real notice of the tiny vial of oil from St. John’s tomb. I noticed a little wistfully that the container was about half-empty. I chuckled to myself and suddenly felt the Holy Spirit’s presence. I said aloud, “Half empty or half full? Am I an optimist or a pessimist?” Frankly I was sharing a little humor with Saint John. That evening I spent it praying the Hours, and remembering the miracles of wonder God had allowed those special years at Hays Prison, not least among them the blessing of Saint John’s oil. Looking at the half-empty vial I had thought, “Even miracles of blessing have a place, a time, assuming that time was coming to an end. Even though their expression, wonders are temporal and temporary their substance is eternal, I silently thought. I knew that when I used the last drop of that oil, in reality nothing would be lost, it would simply be that which was.
It was a great blessing to see John C. after a number of years. Almost a decade has elapse since we had shared prayers at an altar. The camp chaplain was kind enough to schedule time in the Chapel for us. After prayers we had time to sit and talk. Brother John asked me if I still had the oil from Saint John’s tomb. He was hoping I had the oil with me. He asked to be anointed. As I was getting it out of my case he asked if the oil was still reproducing itself. I answered that I hadn’t really noticed, until the night before. As odd as this may seem – me not knowing – it is the result of thirteen years of the oil just being there.
From the start the oil reproducing itself had been a mixed blessing. In what I can only name as spiritual pride it insulted me that I was saddled with this inconvenient “physical sign.” “Especially me” I had thought at the time. After all, I was the one who even as a child perceived the fake healing slight-of-hands of revival charlatans. “I” had perceived the group hypnosis methods used by many revivalists. Thinking I was finished with such charlatanism when I found Orthodoxy, I was given a body blow when I attended a Vespers service at a local Orthodox church and realized that the myrrh flowing Icon greatly venerated (at the time) was the work of a charlatan priest who was its caretaker. The motions of the magician were too obvious and a few rightly place words and in time the hoax was exposed, the former magician died in a homosexual brothel and the "Ikon" disappeared into the ether, never to be "re-discovered." Yet here I was, with a tiny vial of oil that would not empty.
Initially I was sent the oil to anoint my natural brother who was suffering from a rare form of Leukemia, which was not treatable by bone marrow transplant. I didn’t use the oil for that purpose because I knew my brother would not be open to the idea. But some months later I told him about the miracle that was happening in our chapel with the oil. He reacted like I thought he would. After asking a few simple questions as to how I suspected this was happening he concluded in the gentlest tone saying, “Butch, someone is making a fool of you. I would have to be present and have the room monitored by every means possible and know that no one could have gotten to the vial to fill it before I would begin to entertain the idea of something from nothing.” I said, “But Bubba, that’s exactly it. It IS something from nothing.” It wasn’t until he was near death some months later, that I arrived anointed him with the oil and the next day the doctors could not understand what was happening. Suddenly he was strong and they could not find the genetic marker that said he had Leukemia. Six weeks later he arrived at my home on his motorcycle looking and acting strong. He had not ridden his motorcycle for years because of weakness. It happened that I had the vial sitting next to me on a table between us. He lifted the vial, held it up to the light carefully turning it back and forth. He asked, “Butch, have you thought about having this chemically analyzed?”
I said, “Don, do you realize how silly that question is. It’s oil. What do you think the chemists would find except oil? What could they possibly tell us about something from nothing?”
He said, “Maybe the plastic is leaching some chemical that is causing the oil to expand?” He had no idea how silly that thought was since the volume of oil the vial produced was many times the volume of matter contained in the plastic of the tiny vial.
I said, “But you see, it has expanded many hundreds of times its original size with no effect on it, as it still remains oil?” Don remained Leukemia free for ten months, but went each month “to let them draw blood – just to be on the safe side.” Four or five years later (I've lost count) he reposed of the disease, but literally upon his death bed in a fog of Glory, the air literally luminous, and having been granted his desire to live long enough to see his children grown and on their own.
After these years I’ve come to realize my own resistance to the oil lies in vestiges of my former iconoclasm. I remember the time that the thought that Christ’s body and blood was actually upon the altar seemed ridiculous, sacrilegious and even superstitious to me. In fact it seemed idolatrous, which is of course the position of the iconoclasts. When the oil began to reproduce I was too proud to believe that it had a lesson to teach ME. After all I was ABOVE that sort of thing. I was bothered by the miracle rather than blessed by it. It was rather a curse in that I was placed under the heading of “suspected of slight of hand” and “charlatanism.” I was acutely aware of God’s constant and abiding presence, why did I have to be saddled with this “sign” of his presence and creative energy? That was my attitude. I saw often the real miracles of healing, the real living signs of his presence and creative energy. Why this oddity, this reproducing vial of oil? I could have written books about the myriad examples of the miracles of His Presence in ordinary everyday life most people denied or ignored or were blind to. Yet here was this thing, this oil overflowing making a mess! My natural brother was given six years of life because of God’s mercy through Saint John’s oil. Even still the “sign” was offensive to me, as I am so full of pride.
Brother John C. knew my “misgivings” my resistance to the miracle and gave me strong warnings back in the 1990s about my ingratitude. So here we were a decade later, and when I pulled the vial out of its case it was only half full. I saw disappointment on his face and tears well in his eyes. He sat quietly while I anointed him, but afterward he was unable to keep silent. He asked to look at the vial and I handed it to him. He looked sadly at it and handed it back to me. And as I placed it in the side pocket of my case he said with all the kindness he could muster, “Father Rob (what the inmates call me) I tried to warn you. Do you remember?” I acknowledged that I did. And even as he quoted everything he had said to me, I knew on one level he was absolutely right as I did not truly appreciate the miracle (of the oil itself) as he did or indeed as I should have. But in my defense there is also the fact that for me having witnessed many really great miracles of healing and deliverance, oil replenishing in a small vial wasn’t high on my list. It was a small miracle to me, a mere “sign”, which was not outweighed by the natural suspicion such a thing brings upon its caretaker. Surely wonderful miracles of healing and deliverance had been wrought through faith engendered in some by the oil, but still to me it was just a sign. What did Jesus mean when he said, “An evil generation seeks a sign”? I've NEVER sought a sign, never taken an extra step to "view a miracle." I could take some comfort in knowing to my core that I DID NOT seek this sign. I let Brother John C. lecture me pretty strongly for a moment. But suddenly it was all-different and I knew something for certain. Saint John’s faithfulness to our ministry was not a fluke or a temporary circumstance. I said, “John, what you say is true, but that’s not the point. It has never been about ME. But I’m going to teach you a lesson in faithfulness. It has been about God’s faithfulness in and through his saints, and the broken and loving heart of Saint John Maximovitch who has been so real and especially present to me and to you and to so many of the OSJ brothers and sisters. That faithfulness exists in eternity and it isn’t governed by my feelings about a mere sign.” I placed the case in front of him and instructed him to retrieve the vial. I KNEW what it would be. When we looked at the vial, it was full, completely full and tears welled in both our eyes. It was full to the rim. John in awe said in his best x-protestant way, “Oh my brother!” this time with more than a few tears. I could tell that it took will power to hand the "sacred object" back to its unworthy caretaker.
Friday, July 03, 2009: Yesterday evening as I prayed evening prayers I placed the vial on the table next to me. When I finished praying I had to wipe oil off the table.
Epilogue:
I pray God’s mercy that every ounce of iconoclasm is wrenched from my soul and my mindset. I know that the miracle of the oil for me was/is just this blessing, to pummel, crush and destroy every ounce of resistance to the reality of the sacramental nature of all of life – life lived unto HIM inside his unbounded creative energy. It is a process of making the profane, sacred; the unholy and fallen, holy; the broken and deformed whole and restored; the sick and tormented, healthy and at peace; the material imbued with the creative reality of His uncreated energies. All of the universe awaits this restoration, “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now”
This immediacy is so much a part of real Christianity – of Orthodoxy that it is the reason that the Orthodox pray with their eyes OPEN. They know there is NO separation between what they are seeing and the real, true and actual presence of the creator of all things.
Sadly, though lip service is paid to non-dualism in Evangelicalism, for the most part the “duality” remains and the reality is lost to those buried in the mythology of the material-only world and those who believe there is a chasm between what is material and what is spiritual. In that world, even those who are “spiritual” and “of faith” find a giant chasm between the material world and the spiritual. God has to be “reached” even coaxed, with much effort, as He is removed from the everyday things.
Contaminated by Gnosticism, treating the material on the one hand, as if it is God himself, and on the other hand as if matter is evil and an attack upon God, and so not realizing it, they cannot allow God’s creative energy to truly permeate all their life, their soul, their mind, their body, their home, their family, their food, their plants, their pets, their friends, the machines that serve them, their business, their governments and even their enemies. I’m not talking of some other-worldly spiritual existence – No rather, in this life, with eyes to see, God’s creative energy permeates the ordinary and this is perfectly “natural” in fact, TRULY natural as opposed to being “super-natural, i.e. removed from us. We remove ourselves in our disbelief, but HE is not removed from us even then. “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.” This is not a promise for some far off time and place, but a literal physical reality here and now.
+++
Father Symeon Elias (Robinson- Father Rob)
