As we near his celebration next week, on July 26th, I am posting the full service for St. Jacob Netsvetov, enlightener of the peoples of Alaska, below. It includes Vespers, Matins, and Liturgy material. You may either use the PDF below, which has pointed text to save you time in preparation, or, if you would like to remark it for your own musical needs, you may follow the link to the digital file, make a copy, and re-point the text as needed.
Initially, I could only find pieces of the service for St. Jacob of Alaska, so I compiled what I found and edited the language throughout the service to give it the same style and smoothing some of the phrasing to better fit the music. Only near the end of the process did I find what I think is the original service written for him, from 1995 at St. Tikhon’s Monastery, and considering he was canonized in 1994, it would make sense if it were the first service written for him.
If you have any questions or corrections, please feel free to contact me. I would love to continue to improve this resource for a more full and beautiful veneration of our beloved St. Jacob of Alaska.
Link for the Service for St. Jacob of Alaska (in Google Docs)
Service for St. Jacob of Alaska (PDF):
I did not realize, until trying to serve this liturgy and get readers all set up, that there is some awkwardness in the way this service is set up. I run into this kind of thing particularly with the services for American saints.
Issues:
* There is a magnification, which indicates a Vigil-ranked service, but there are only six stichera (awkwardly 4 and 2, instead of the normal 3 and 3 split) at Lord I Call. Plenty of services just repeat some, so I repeated the first stichera in each section.
* The epistle and gospel readings are weird: they both start and end in non-standard places. You would have to write in some kind of beginning phrase: the epistle is fairly simple to start, but the gospel needs a little more thought. Not something you want to attempt on the fly.
* a small thing: it does not list what canon verses to read during the Beatitudes, though that is always from Odes III and VI, but most services specifically list that.
My great grandfather Rev. Innokenty Lestenkof was baptized by St. Jacob in 1830 in Atka, AK.
His father and mother were married by St.Jacob.
And his father’s funeral was done by St. Jacob in 1838.
Thank you for sharing that. That was very early in St. Jacob’s time as a priest. He was influential in the lives of thousands of Alaskans, because of his tireless travelling to take care of villages all through the Aleutian Archipelago, in the Yukon Delta, inland up the Kuskokwim, and even down in Sitka near the end of his life. It is a beautiful thing to have a saint woven into your own family history.