On June 15, the holy Orthodox Church commemorates our father among the saints, Abraham the Abbot. St. Abraham, who reposed in 477, was a person who was born near the Euphrates River. After deciding at an early age to pursue the monastic life, he was taken prisoner by pagans who kept him that way for five long years, yet, as his Life relates, to the saint’s great joy.

When eventually an angel freed him from his chains, he made his way to Auvergne in Gaul where he was to spend the rest of his life. He came upon a basilica of St. Cyricus of Antioch, where he would eventually repose. Although there are not a lot of mentions of miracles and things that he did, he was considered a very holy man. One particular miracle, which is a little striking to us today because of its very nature, was recorded. That was near the feast of the basilica, there were a swarm of pilgrims that were coming that year, and they had all prepared as much wine as possible to quench the thirst of all these pilgrims. But someone noticed the great flux that was coming in and told St. Abraham, “There is no way that we are going to be able to have enough wine for all of these people.”

So St. Abraham, in all earnestness and piety, went down to the cellar and prayed to the Lord, who then assured him, that no matter how many vessels of wine that they had, they would not run out. And in fact this proved to be true. After the feast was ended, all of the vessels were still found to be full, and they even had some that were left over.

Why this was recorded, well, we may very well question it. This is, after all, not a spectacular healing or something like that, but simply a gift of hospitality to the pilgrims that were at the basilica. Yet we must remember that in the monastic life, hospitality has always been considered something very, very important, very necessary in the life of a monastery. St. Abraham, who left his own Euphrates like Abraham of old, whom the Lord said, “Get thee and thy kindred out of this country, to a place where I will show you,” this St. Abraham himself, who did not go, as it is said, to Rome or Constantinople or Antioch or Alexandria or Milan; instead he went far off to the land of the Gauls. As he settled there and lived out his life in all piety and humility, word spread about what a saintly man he indeed was.

St. Abraham can serve as a model for piety and hospitality to all of us today, but his story doesn’t really end there. After his repose in 477, after many years had gone by and many wars had taken place, his remains were essentially forgotten. The basilica of St. Cyricus has only a few walls remaining today, yet that wasn’t the end of St. Abraham’s story, because in the 1600s his tomb was discovered again, and immediately there began to be all sorts of miracles and healings that were taking place there. By the late 1700s, his bones had been taken, and his skeleton found intact and moved to a different church where it remains today. So even after so many years, the memory and works and life and piety of St. Abraham the Abbot were brought to the fore again.

Let us not forget him, either, because so many of these saints—and many have been lost over the years, only to be recovered later on; and some that were not even known are made known to us by the will of God—one only has to think of Ss. Raphael, Nicholas, and Irene, in more contemporary terms, from back in the ‘60s—these saints are brought to us for a purpose. They are brought back to us for a purpose, because the Lord wants their memories venerated because he, as always, is glorified in his saints.