AS WE HAVE OFTEN MENTIONED in previous years, July falls neatly between the Apostles Fast and the Dormition Fast, and yet within it there are no special fastdays (other than the regular Wednesdays and Fridays we keep throughout the year) and there are no Great Feasts in this month. It is a kind of mid-Summer lull, but it is also a month made resplendent with a host of celebrations of some of the most beloved saints of the Church Year, and particularly some of the most beloved Saints of Russia.

Let us just relate the lives of some of the Saints, whose feastdays fall in the month of July.

Saint Boisil of Melrose (7th / 20th) was greatly esteemed for his learning. Of his earlier life we know little except that perhaps he was spiritually formed in the Irish monastic tradition. He became a monk and served as a priest at Melrose, and, when St Eata left to lead the community at Lindisfarne, St Boisil succeeded him as abbot. It was he who received the great St Cuthbert into the monastic brotherhood. When Cuthbert first arrived at the monastery and was alighting from his horse, St Boisil pointed him out as a future luminary of the Church. SubsequentlySt Boisil became his Elder, and Cuthbert was with him when the saint died. Foreknowing his impending demise, the Elder told his disciple that there remained only seven days, but Cuthbert misunderstood him and thought that he was speaking of some project that they had to complete in that time. He asked the Elder, “What shall we read then?” - and St Boisil suggested St John’s Gospel. At the end of the week, St Boisil surrendered his soul into the hands of his Lord. In bidding farewell to St Cuthbert, he foretold to him that he would be consecrated as Bishop of Lindisfarne, and it was this prophesy of the saint which later persuaded him to yield to the entreaties of King Egfrid and the hierarchs who begged him to accept this ministry much against his own wishes. Saint Boisil, who died in A.D. 664, also helped to direct another saint, Egbert of Iona. Egbert, who lived a little later than Boisil, was living in Ireland and was much interested in the mission in Germany and was minded to join the other English missionaries there. However, after his death St Boisil appeared to him in a vision, and directed him rather to go to Iona. There he spent the last thirteen years of his life and was instrumental in bringing the fathers there to accept the correct paschalion. Thus the spiritual counsels of this father had very far reaching effects in the history of the Christian mission in this country, bringing Iona into line with the catholic tradition and setting one of the greatest luminaries of the Faith in the North of the country on a lampstand so that he illumined the peoples of his day and has illumined countless others through the ages to our very own days.