An excerpt from the book entitled Podvig of Love (Moscow, 1999), written about brother Joseph by the Muscovite author Irina Pavlosiuk.
Because of his life as a monk in the world, a life bereft of acquisitiveness, a life of purity and obedience to the hierarchy, all called him “brother Joseph.” He approached everyone with that same radiant, child-like openness which comes only to those who have absolute hope and confidence in the will of God and who joyfully submit themselves to His will, who have that love in which there is no fear. He would say, “A believer need not live in fear…. A Christian’s entire life, from beginning to end, is in the hands of God, allowing him to live completely free.”
Brother Joseph’s open soul and kind heart, his life of fasting and prayer, turned him into a confessor of the teachings of Christ who shouldered the burden of responsibility for his neighbor. With great concern, he pondered the temptations and injustices of the contemporary world:
“Now I understood that, unfortunately, in our contemporary life, most people turn only to psychoanalysts and psychiatrists for solutions to their spiritual difficulties and conflicts. However, wherever the holy image of the Mother of God comes, even the most sceptically inclined, people who do not believe in spiritual therapy, feel a need for repentance and tearfully run to the Icon. They begin to understand how to be healed of their illnesses, for spiritual disease is the most dangerous of all. There is a plethora of specialist physicians who can effect healing of the body, but only very few healers of the soul, and as Ecclesiasticus says: “When the body suffers from disease, its soul is healed, but when the soul is hurt, who will heal the body?” So it is very important that our Icon always heals people of their spiritual diseases. Quite often, people seem to find themselves in a spiritual dead end, made worse by awful vices. People often tell me about such things, and my soul becomes troubled.…
…Now people spend an incredible amount of money on psychotherapy, but these psychiatrists do not free them from the passions, but rather direct them into even more awful vices. Today, very fer people seek true healing. Just today, someone told me that he had been completely unable to quit smoking, and that with a sincere prayer, he had appealed to the Mother of God. The next morning, he felt a revulsion toward tobacco, and since then cannot stand to even look at it….”