St. John's wort mostly blossoms around St. John's Day, June 24. And again the midday heat creates the best conditions to harvest the flowers with the highest content of red oil. Father Lazarus of the German Orthodox Trinity Monastery has picked baskets of blossoms in the vicinity of Buchhagen and put them in large preserving jars together with vegetable oil. As if the plant did not already have enough sun, these jars then had to stand in the sun for several weeks to extract the red oil. The result: deep red St. John's wort oil that can be used to care for the skin, including joints. Sparing use is appropriate for this precious remedy.

"It is like a lever. If I want to lift a heavy stone to put it into a wall, for example, I need a long lever. If I stand on the stone myself, I cannot lift it. But if I stand on some other solid ground and have a good lever, I can move any stone to where it needs to be." This image, with which Abbot John describes the relationship between the monastery and the world, between time and eternity, and the position of the monk in it, is taken entirely from life. Twenty years ago, a stone was also moved in the tranquil town of Buchhagen, namely the foundation stone of the German Orthodox Holy Trinity Monastery. It was just on October 3, 1990, when there began to create a place from which to move the lever. To do this, many stones had to be moved. It is amazing how Abbot John managed to realize his dream of a German Orthodox monastery. Years earlier, on Mount Athos, he had immersed himself in the stream of lore of Byzantine monastic and world culture, and from the depths and rapids of this 1,500-year-old body of water, he had brought as treasures all the skills a monk needs: Faith, fidelity and enthusiasm, singing, painting, building, tilling the garden, bringing in the harvest - and many more. Thus equipped, he could dare to ship all this to Germany, but not as an exotic museum, but as a living monastery, which knows itself committed to the oldest Christian cultural heritage.