Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Hello, everyone. I’m here in the studio, St. Raphael Studio in Emmaus, today, with my friend, Fr. Nicholas Palis.

Fr. Nicholas is a priest of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, and he’s just recently retired from serving as the pastor of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral here in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Bethlehem is just 15 minutes from where we’re sitting right now, so it’s pretty close. So we’ve known each other for a number of years, because I’ve lived here in the Lehigh Valley for 15 years. And the reason that Fr. Nicholas is with me in the studio today is because God has blessed him in his life to meet a number of actual real canonized saints, and some other holy people that maybe will be canonized someday, if God wills; who knows? So that’s why he’s here, is to tell us some stories. God willing, it will be beneficial to all of you.

Father, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself so we have some background for how it is you had these encounters.

Fr. Nicholas Palis: Okay. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I am very honored to be here on Ancient Faith Radio that benefits so many people. I was born in upstate New York of immigrant parents from Greece. My mom came here when she was in high school; my dad jumped ship and then came when he was about 30 years old. And so I was raised in upstate New York, mainly Rochester, New York.

And then after high school, I went to Hellenic College, which is part of our seminary, Holy Cross, in Brookline, [Massachusetts]. Both when I was a kid and afterwards at the seminary, I would read a lot about saints. And I kind of had a strong desire to want to meet saints, because I read about saints who were in the fourth century and so forth, but I’m kind of like a doubting Thomas and needed to see it for myself. So after Hellenic College, I went— Instead of going to the theological school there, after four years, in other words, I went to the University of Thessalonica, which at the time did not recognize Hellenic College, so it was like starting from scratch.

Fr. Andrew: Oh wow.

Fr. Nicholas: But I didn’t mind it, because I enjoyed being in Greece. When I would be in Greece and hear about a saintly person, I would try and meet them. Probably one of the most influential ones in my life is Fr. Paisios the Athonite, whom probably a lot of you have heard about. He already had a reputation of being very holy when I was a student in Thessalonica, so myself and another seminarian from Holy Cross went to Mount Athos, and I was determined to meet him, which at the time was not really easy, because the monks were trying to help Fr. Paisios retain his privacy, and he didn’t need to be bothered by Greek-American seminarians or anyone else. [Laughter] So a lot of the monks I was asking at Stavronikita Monastery, which at the time was the closest monastery to his hut, would not really agree to take us to where his hut was. I didn’t know where it was. Finally I found an Australian monk who said, “I know what you’re going through. We don’t have monasteries in Australia either.” At the time, it’s not like we had a lot of monasteries in the States. And so he says, “I’ll show you.”

He takes a bag of—I don’t know if it’s walnuts or something, and a box of something else, and we’re talking, and on the way he’s telling us, “Read the lives of the saints, because the lives of the saints open up a whole new world. It’s like a baby in the mother’s womb and the baby is scared to come out, but you say there is light out there and there is air out there and there is all this stuff.” So anyway, we get to Fr. Paisios’s hut, and he says, “You two hide in the bushes.” I said, “Okay.” [Laughter] So we go hide in the bushes, and he shouts, “Elder Paisios! I brought you some walnuts” or whatever it was. And Fr. Paisios starts walking towards the fence. Normally what would happen is you would ring a bell, and Fr. Paisios would hear the bell; he would look from his balcony to see if he wanted you to come in, and then if he did he would let a key slide down this wire, you would take the key, unlock the fence, and go in. But in this case, probably out of respect for the monk, he was walking toward the monk. When he gets up to the fence and he’s ready to open it, he waves to us to come out of the bushes, we pop out of the bushes, and he says, “Fr. Paisios, I brought you two good Greek-American seminarians!” So he was stuck with us, and he said, “Glory to God who brought us two good Greek-American seminarians.” So we went in, talked to him for maybe an hour, and I had a lot of questions for him, and he gave really beautiful answers. I could tell you some of the things he said—I don’t know if you want—

Fr. Andrew: Sure. Before we— I know that’s the stuff that everybody wants to hear. We’ll get to that. We’ll get to that, everybody. Don’t worry. Yeah, so it’s interesting to me. I’ve heard stories from a number of people who have met saints, and often the encounter is not like in a book, typically, although it depends on which books you read, I think, probably, too. [Laughter]

I wanted to ask, before we get into some of these specifics, what is a saint? I mean, we talk about saints in the Church all the time. Most Christians believe in saints. And you mention we know about saints from the fourth century and so forth. They often seem very distant, glorious figures that are not— somehow not real, somehow not 3D. So what is a saint exactly?

Fr. Nicholas: Okay, well, I think the word “saint” comes from the word that means separated, but it’s like a person consecrated or separated to God. But experientially, how I felt meeting Fr. Paisios and others is that it’s a person flooded with the grace of the Holy Spirit, who’s full of love and humility, and just seeing them, you sense their presence, that it’s flooded with grace. And you feel just very joyous and peaceful just being around them because they radiate so much love and kindness and joy and peace. I don’t know if that’s so much of a theological answer as an experiential one, but…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. That very much then leads me to the next thing that I would ask, which is: Why does God bring saints into our world? Why not just let everybody kind of do it the normal, ordinary way? [Laughter] Why are there these people?

Fr. Nicholas: To me, it makes Christ and the life of the Church very tangible. I mean, a lot of times people think of God as being, I don’t know, out there somewhere, but you meet a saint, and he kind of makes God believable, tangible. And it’s like the Acts of the Apostles extended into eternity, to use the phrase of St. Justin Popović. Or like the Gospel commandments implemented to a very great degree in a person’s life. So I think Fr. Paisios, with his life, has helped many people come closer to God, just because, through him, they see that God is real.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, so take us back to that hut.

Fr. Nicholas: So we go in, he sits. He treats us to Turkish delights, and he used a can. It’s not like he had plates or something, and he would have water in this can. I asked him questions like: “Tell us about humility.” And he says, “Love and humility are like two brothers tightly hugging each other. Where you find the one, you’ll find the other.” And I asked him about pride, and he said that— He gave a beautiful example, that he said there was a girl during the occupation, when people were starving in Greece, and she managed to find a piece of bread but had no marmalade, no jelly. So she was letting the snot run down her nose onto the bread—

Fr. Andrew: Aagh!

Fr. Nicholas: —and she was pretending it was jelly. And he says she was eating it, but it wasn’t jelly; it’s snot, no pun intended. [Laughter] That’s what pride is. We think it’s sweet, but it’snot.

Fr. Andrew: Whoa!

Fr. Nicholas: That was like—it really grips you. So then I asked him about ecumenism, and he said, “The best ecumenism is if the Orthodox can live the best Orthodox life they live, and the Roman Catholics to live the best life they can live. Maybe then we can do something.” And he gave the example of a Greek fellow and an Italian fellow walking up to Mount Sinai. There’s 3,000 steps going up. On the way, everything was brotherhood, love, joy, peace; everything was hunky-dory. When they get to the top, there’s a little Bedouin kid, and he’s begging for food. And the Greek said, “That’s how you Italians had us during the war when Mussolini attacked and we were starving.” And he says the Italian guy was defending Mussolini because that’s what was in his heart, and the Greek guy was defending Metaxas, who was the Greek dictator at the time, because that’s who was in his heart. And so he says they walked down the mountain mad at each other, because the one had Mussolini in his heart and the other had Metaxas in his heart.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Nicholas: So what I got from that is that if we want to discuss theology, we need to do it with people who don’t have passions, that then you can really discuss theology, but otherwise it’s just like the passions coming out, is what I got from that. And I liked his answer a lot.

I’m trying to think about what else I asked him about. When I asked him about humility, he said, “Glory to God that God didn’t make me a donkey! Because if he made me a donkey, then I would be having heavy loads on my back all my life, and then when I would get old and useless they would stick me in a pit and no one would come to see me and I would smell, and I would have a horrible life. But, glory to God, he made me a human being and he didn’t make me a donkey!” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I’ve heard from multiple people that he had quite the sense of humor.

Fr. Nicholas: He did. He had a great sense of humor. I remember the one time the students from the Athoniada School, which is the high school for students who want to become priests or monks, and it’s on Mount Athos, they jump the fence to get in. And we were sitting outside on tree stumps, because that’s what he used for chairs. Fr. Paisios says, “How did you get in? Did you jump the fence?” They said, “Yeah!” He says, “Just for that, take two Turkish delights.” [Laughter]

And so then he said we shouldn’t compare each other to one another; we need to compare ourselves to the saints or to Christ, because if we compare ourselves to each other, we’ll either become proud if we think we’re better off, or we’ll be depressed if we think we’re worse off. But we need to compare ourselves to Christ and the saints because then that’s a good mirror for us. Because some people say, “I don’t go to the bouzoukia; I go to vigils. I’m holy!” He says but we shouldn’t be comparing ourselves to one another; we should be comparing ourselves with Christ and the saints. I like that a lot, too.

Now, towards the end of our discussion, I had two envelopes to give him, one with money and names and the other with names. A Greek-American monk had said, “Don’t give him money. He doesn’t take money from anyone.” But I had written, like, 200 names, and I thought, “He’s going to do a lot of work to pray for all these people. I need to give him something.” So just in case, I had two envelopes. I knew which were which, but from the outside they look the same. So I hand him the first envelope that didn’t have money; he takes it no problem. I go to hand him the second one; he says, “Oh, Nikolaki”—little Nicholas—“you’ll forgive me, but I don’t take money from anyone.” I almost fell over, because how does he know what’s in which envelope, right? And I’m insisting, “Father, Father, take it; take it.” And he says, “No, I have a rule. I don’t take money from anyone. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I don’t take money from anyone. And last year when Fr. Arsenios visited me”— Now, I had read the life of St. Arsenios that Fr. Paisios wrote; Fr. Arsenios was Fr. Paisios’s godfather, and he died in 1924. Because I had read the book already, I knew that, and Fr. Paisios was talking about it like they meet for coffee or something!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I bet they did!

Fr. Nicholas: And Father is saying, “When Fr. Arsenios visited me last year, he told me, ‘I bless you, because, like me, you don’t take money from anyone.’ ” Fr. Paisios tried to model his life a lot after his godfather, St. Arsenios the Cappadocian. So anyway, he says, “Take the money and give it to a poor child.” So I thought, “Boy, he’s clairvoyant, he’s unmercenary, and he sees saints like we see each other.” And that was my first visit with Fr. Paisios.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Nicholas: It really strengthened my faith a lot. So when I would go to Mount Athos afterwards, I would try and visit him. In the process, I both experienced a number of things and heard a lot of neat stories about him.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I mean, that’s… Yeah, I— As you know, about six years ago, I got to go to Mount Athos one time. And there the other pilgrims I was with, we had a conversation with a certain monk at a little keli near Karyes, and it became clear as we were having conversations that he knew what people— the things that they were not saying. And it wasn’t just like good guesses either. And the reason why we knew this was because— I mean, we had a feeling during the conversation, but then later on a couple of the pilgrims were really kind of shaken almost, and one actually broke down crying. I said, “Why? Why are you so sad?” And he said, “Because he answered the things I was thinking and not what I said.” Because during the conversation sometimes his responses seemed like non-sequiturs. Like: “Why did he say that when the guy just asked this?” But later on we found out that he heard what they were saying in their hearts, and instead answered that.

One of the things that struck me, and maybe you can comment on this, is there was no, like… There weren’t glowing lights, or— [Laughter] There was nothing spectacular about it at all. It all seemed very ordinary, and yet there was this realization that came, especially in our case, later, like: “Wait a minute. Something happened that was not normal.” But it didn’t feel weird or eerie or— I don’t know. You’ve now met multiple saints in your life. Does it mostly feel ordinary in the moment?

Fr. Nicholas: Yeah, in the moment you feel a lot of grace, because for them all this is natural, like we breathe and we don’t think about it, and they’re clairvoyant and they have foreknowledge, and for them it’s a natural thing almost like breathing would be for us.

Fr. Andrew: So it’s not like they sit there and concentrate: “Okay, okay, I’m getting a word from God right now.”

Fr. Nicholas: No, it’s very natural.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, very different from people you see on TV.

Fr. Nicholas: Yeah, no, quite the opposite. In fact, that kind of reminds me that Fr. Paisios would heal many people. I know many cases of people that I knew that he healed, like when I was in Greece, there were five people that I knew that he healed of cancer.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Nicholas: And he wouldn’t say, “I’ll pray for you to be healed.” He would say, “Go to St. Nektarios and go to this miracle-working icon of the Virgin Mary, and pray, and they’ll heal you.” And in the meantime, he would do—even though one lung had been removed surgically, one and a half, actually—and he would do thousands of prostrations to pray for people at night, nevertheless.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Nicholas: And then when they would go back to him, healed, he would say, “Oh! Thank the Virgin Mary and thank St. Nektarios!” And he would deflect all the attention off of himself onto the pilgrimages, because he didn’t want to be glorified. It’s quite the opposite of people on TV, where they’re straining and, I don’t know, you see sweat coming down their forehead and they’re praying up a storm and so forth, but all the attention is on them. And with Fr. Paisios, quite the opposite. He did not want attention. I think once when someone put his picture in the newspaper with a little caption, a religious newspaper, when he found out about it, he was just sick from being horrified that he was being glorified. He didn’t like that at all.

I remember once when he met Fr. Ephraim of Philotheou, who offered him to go in a truck to the monastery, and Fr. Paisios said, “No, I’ll walk.” Anyway, but you couldn’t tell who rushed down fast enough to get the other’s blessing, even though Fr. Paisios was not a priest, but still both of them bowed to each other to like— And they were just so humble, that it was just like: Who could be humble first? [Laughter] And then when we got to the other monastery—and the jeep is the fastest way to get there; I went with Fr. Ephraim with the jeep—Fr. Paisios was already there!

Fr. Andrew: Wow! [Laughter]

Fr. Nicholas: And when I ask, okay, how did he get there, well, he flew. And because saints like St. Maximus the Hut-dweller, the Hut-burner, and others, they would fly from place to place, Fr. Paisios could do the same thing.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Yeah, but no one saw him flying. He was just there.

Fr. Nicholas: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: There was not a spectacle at all. Yeah. Now, I know you’ve met— I mean, I could— If you want to talk more about St. Paisios, please, but I know that you’ve also met some other actually canonized saints as well. I don’t know, just— The floor is yours, Father, please.

Fr. Nicholas: Let me say just one more thing about Fr. Paisios.

Fr. Andrew: Whatever you want to say.

Fr. Nicholas: Let me say one more thing about Fr. Paisios. The one time I went with a Protestant pastor, for whom I was translating, and this was really interesting. His wife wanted to become Orthodox; the Protestant pastor didn’t want to hear anything about this. So some friends of his and we took him to Fr. Paisios. And in the discussion, the Protestant pastor was saying things like: “I don’t believe in relics. Bones are just bones.” And Fr. Paisios says, “Well, if bones are just bones, how come yesterday when they brought a deaf— a girl— They brought a boy who had a deaf and dumb demon, and he couldn’t speak or hear—and I’m not a priest; I’m just a monk—and I went and got the finger of St. Arsenius.” Or he said “Fr. Arsenius.” I don’t remember if he’d been canonized yet or not. “And when I went to bring the finger, the possessed boy is screaming, ‘It’s going to burn me! It’s going to burn me!’ ” And he says, “And I did the cross with the finger of St. Arsenius over the boy, and he was healed. So if bones are just bones, how did that happen?”

And I loved this response, because it was very experiential. It wasn’t some high-fallutin’ theology. And when the Protestant pastor asked him about the Jesus Prayer, saying that “Isn’t it just very selfish, you’re just saying, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me’ all the time? What about everybody else?” And Fr. Paisios said that “I figure I’m the least person in the world”—and he really believed it—“and so when I say the Jesus Prayer, God goes through the whole world first, and then he gets to me last. So every time I say the Jesus Prayer, it includes the whole world.”

So I really liked his response to the pastor, who ended up, I think, later on, becoming— Right before we left, I think Fr. Paisios told the guy; he says, “I’m not saying this with pride; I’m saying it with humility and love, but I feel bad for you Protestants because we have the Virgin Mary as our mother, but you’re like spiritual orphans; you don’t have her as a mother.” And that didn’t really affect him at that time, but six months later, this Protestant pastor tells his friend with whom we went to Mount Athos, “You know, I’m feeling like an orphan?” And his friend reminded him of what Fr. Paisios said six months before, and then it hit him. So what Fr. Paisios said then hit him six months later, and he ended up becoming Orthodox.

Fr. Andrew: You know, the thing that strikes me in your descriptions of him and of what he said and the way he responded is it’s almost like a kid in some ways.

Fr. Nicholas: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Like what you said about the relic. “Well, if that’s not real, then look at this!” [Laughter] There’s just such a total guilelessness, an innocence. If I were confronted with questions or whatever like that, I would think about what I would say and try to come up with a good argument and so forth—that’s the way my mind works—but he just immediately— It’s like saying, “How you can you say the sky is not blue? Look! Look, the sky is blue!” You know, because he could always see the sky. It was just always apparent to him. And I love how he didn’t use his knowledge as a way to lord it over anyone else.

Fr. Nicholas: No, it was with much love and humility and pain of soul. It wasn’t pompous or proud or anything.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. That’s just beautiful all on its own. Okay, so tell me some more stories.

Fr. Nicholas: I’ve got some other ones. All right. So I met Elder Geramis Mikragiannanitis, the Hymnographer, on a couple of occasions. To give you a background, he came to Mount Athos at a young age, ended up at a hermitage. His spiritual father ended up leaving to go into the world when the calendar issue broke out in the 1920s, and so he remained alone at a very young age, but he stuck through it. It’s not easy to be alone. And God gave him a gift of hymnography to the point where he wrote over 2,000 services—

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Nicholas: —which consist of 48 volumes of 800 pages each—

Fr. Andrew: Wow!

Fr. Nicholas: —which he wrote by hand, and he never had to make one correction.

Fr. Andrew: Oh my goodness.

Fr. Nicholas: And it’s not like these days where you have computers and all this stuff. So he wrote everything by hand. When they’d ask him, “Father, how can you do that and not make a single mistake?” And he said, “Well, it’s not me writing it; it’s the Holy Spirit.” And he said he had such a wealth of theology in him that it’s almost like he wouldn’t have the time to express it. From what I found out from spiritual children of his, a lot of times when he would write a service, he would pray to a saint, the saint would appear, he would ask him questions, then he would proceed to write the service.

Some friends of mine tricked him into admitting that he had seen Christ. They said, “Father, what does Christ look like?” And so he starts describing. And they said, “Oh, so you saw Christ?” And then he was trying to undo what he said somehow, but by that time he had been tricked into it.

When I went to see him, I had wanted to see Fr. Ephraim of Katounakia. When I was in Greece, St. Paisios and now St. Ephraim of Katounakia, who were still alive then, had the reputation of being the two most well-known hermits on Mount Athos. There were others who wouldn’t be so well-known, but… And I knew that Fr. Ephraim would not allow people to see them unless he got a notification from God that he should open up to them. He was much more reclusive than Fr. Paisios, and he would tell his spiritual children—he had four or five underlings—that if you let anyone in without my blessing, you’re going to have to do 400 prostrations. [Laughter] So they would go to great lengths to keep everybody out, and I knew it.

So I asked Fr. Gerasimos. I said, “Fr. Gerasimos, I want to see Fr. Ephraim, and he doesn’t let people in easily.” He says, “That’s okay. It’s your effort that counts and your zeal” and so forth, and I wasn’t satisfied with that. I said, “Fr. Gerasimos, I want to see Fr. Ephraim”; I said it a second time. He says a similar answer he gave me. And I said a third time, “Fr. Gerasimos, I want to see Fr. Ephraim, and I know he doesn’t open up easily.” And he says, “Okay, go, and God will provide.” The minute he said that I thought, “Okay, now we’re good.” So I start walking from his hut. It’s about ten minutes from his hut to where St. Ephraim of Katounakia’s hut was. And it starts raining, and it’s pouring cats and dogs, and I’m happy about it.

So by the time we get there, it’s really pouring rain, and I thought, “They’re not going to let us— They’re not going to be able to let us stay out, right?” So the underling opens up the door and says, “Don’t you have somewhere else to go? Because we don’t use any heat up here.” And they’re high up in the mountains. And I’m lying through my teeth and saying, “No.” [Laughter] And he’s saying, “Isn’t there anyone else around here where you can go?” And I’m saying, “No.” And he’s asking me all these questions, and I’m denying everything. So finally he lets us in, and we got to see Fr. Ephraim.

Another time, when we saw Fr. Ephraim, it was a doctor of his and four or five people, and each person was studying a different thing. When we saw Fr. Ephraim of Katounakia, whose face just glowed, and when he looked at you, you had the feeling he was looking at you, through you, and beyond you all at the same time, he told each one of us what we’ll do. He goes to me: “You’ll be a priest.” He goes to the next person: “You’re going to be a lawyer. You’re going to be a doctor.” And there was a fellow there who was a deacon, named Dn. John. And he says, “And you’re going to be—” He told him privately that he would be a priest named John and maybe, I don’t know if he told him he would become a bishop, because he became a bishop with the same name.

But after we met Fr. Ephraim, the deacon comes up and says, “I’m really puzzled, because Fr. Ephraim said that I’d become a priest with the name John, but usually celibate priests, when they’re ordained, their name gets changed.” And it turns out that when he was ordained in Thessalonica, the bishop, Panteleimon II, said, “I normally change the name of the deacons that are celibate, but I have a special love for St. John, so I’m not changing your name.” So he ended up being Fr. John—he was the chancellor of Thessalonica for a while—and then Bishop John of Langadas, who reposed now.

And then some of the advice Fr. Ephraim gave, of course, was to do the Jesus Prayer. He loved people. He was a disciple of St. Joseph the Hesychast. He encouraged and he told the following story to show the power of the Jesus Prayer, the “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.” He said he wanted— A certain monk wanted to show the power of the Jesus Prayer, so he gave him a straw basket to someone and filled it with water. He said, “I want you to go to such-and-such place, and I want you to say the Jesus Prayer non-stop.” And the guy was wondering, “How is this water going to stay in this straw basket?” Normally it would leak through, right? So as long as he was saying the Jesus Prayer, the water stayed. On the way, he meets a monk, and they start up a conversation. When they start up the conversation, the water leaked through.

And so Fr. Ephraim had a very hard life because his own spiritual father— Well, his own— The person who was in charge of the hut, Fr. Nikiphoros, was very stern and was also in the schismatic Old Calendar group at the time. But out of obedience, Fr. Ephraim never left, even though the Elder Joseph had received notification that they should go under the patriarchate. So anyway, but he stayed, and Fr. Nikiphoros would tell him, “Go down to the seashore and get me a fistful of sand.” Now, it’s an hour walk down and an hour walk back up. He’d bring it back up, and he says, “Now go put it back down where you found it.”

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Nicholas: And stuff like that, but Fr. Ephraim was utterly obedient, even though the elder was rather harsh, for lack of a better word. When his spiritual father, when Fr. Nikiphoros reposed, Fr. Ephraim prayed and saw that he was not in the foretaste of the kingdom of heaven, and he prayed up a storm to literally pray his spiritual father out of the foretaste of hell into the foretaste of heaven.

Fr. Andrew: Oh wow.

Fr. Nicholas: And that’s not the norm; that’s like an exception to the rule, that you have a saintly person praying for you. So I wouldn’t bank on it. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And just in case anyone listening might be a little bit confused, the Fr. Ephraim you’re talking about is Fr. Ephraim of Katounakia, not to be confused with Fr. Ephraim of Philotheou, who came here to America.

Fr. Nicholas: Correct.

Fr. Andrew: And Fr. Ephraim of Katounakia, he is a canonized saint as well?

Fr. Nicholas: Yes, he is.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so for anyone’s who’s keeping track, we have at least two canonized saints we’ve talked about so far.

Fr. Nicholas: [Laughter] Three!

Fr. Andrew: Three, oh, yeah, yeah.

Fr. Nicholas: Because Fr. Gerasimos is also canonized.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay. St. Gerasimos— Tell me the last name again?

Fr. Nicholas: Mikragiannanitis. It’s not his last name, but it’s “of Small St. Anne’s.”

Fr. Andrew: Oh, of Little St. Anne’s.

Fr. Nicholas: At one point, they needed to send— Fr. Gerasimos needed to send some people to get something. There were no people, so he sent his horse, and he whispered in the horse’s ear, gave him directions, and the horse went to the other hut and brought back what it was.

Fr. Andrew: Amazing. Amazing.

Fr. Nicholas: But that just shows how holy he was. And a lot of the services, I forgot to say, they rhyme also. So it’s not enough that he wrote 2,000 services, but a lot of them also rhyme.

Fr. Andrew: That’s good poetry. Because I know not all liturgical poetry, even in Greek, rhymes. A lot of it just doesn’t. Yeah.

Fr. Nicholas: And then at one point there was a group going from Fr. Gerasimos’s hut to Fr. Ephraim of Katounakia’s hut, and Archbishop Ezekiel, formerly the archbishop of Australia, asked me to stay back and help him out with something he needed. And I was kind of disappointed, because I really wanted to go to Fr. Ephraim, but I stayed, and the archbishop could tell that I was sad that I didn’t get to go see Fr. Ephraim, and says, “I’ll tell you a story about Fr. Ephraim, since you were kind enough to stay and help me.” He says: I went and saw Fr. Ephraim of Katounakia, and I told him that I would be doing a vigil at Vatopedi Monastery and for him to come, and he said, “Okay, I’ll be there.” A couple months later, he comes, he does the vigil; Fr. Ephraim doesn’t show up. Afterwards when Archbishop Ezekiel, who is very well-respected by the monks, saw Fr. Ephraim of Katounakia, he said, “I apologize for not being able to go there. I wasn’t able to go, but I asked God to open up the heavens, and I saw the whole vigil from my hut.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Livestreaming the old-fashioned way! [Laughter] Wow!

Fr. Nicholas: And I had heard that— Fr. Paisios, when he would talk about some of his nuns that are clairvoyant, he would say, “She has radar,” or “She has television,” and so he would use that, and he would say that a lot of the things that we find in the technical world or even in the animal world, like the fact that flies can fly, for example, the saints have them and they can do them spiritually. [Laughter]

I remember being with Fr. Paisios, and all of a sudden he stops, and he says, “Oh, the nuns just started doing their vespers now.” And he could see them from where he was on Mount Athos, that they had started the vespers. And he just knew.

Fr. Andrew: And where were the nuns?

Fr. Nicholas: The nuns were at Souroti.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right, that’s near—

Fr. Nicholas: Which is the place that he’s now buried, but that he helped get founded, outside of Thessalonica. But he was on Mount Athos!

And then another time I saw Fr. Ephraim greet this professor from the theological school, and the professor thanked him because he and his wife for many years had not been able to have children, and they asked Fr. Ephraim to pray, and now they have twins. And Fr. Ephraim said, “Yeah, I prayed for you to have children, and God blessed it.” And so Fr. Paisios, when he heard stuff like that, he would joke and say, “Some people accuse monks of taking people out of the world, but certain monks put people back into the world!” [Laughter]

And then there was a captain that Fr. Ephraim knew, and he knew that this captain of the boats there had not gone to confession in years, and it was very hard to get this guy to go to confession. So while they were on one of the boat trips, Fr. Ephraim said, “You know, I have a problem with lying,” and the captain says, “Oh, I have that problem, too!” And Fr. Ephraim says, “Oh, I also have this problem with envy,” and the guy says, “Oh, I have that problem, too!” And by the time he was through, without the guy realizing it, he had confessed the guy! [Laughter] Because he was clairvoyant, so he did it.



And then I was good friends with a publisher in Greece, named Stylianos Kemendzezidis, who had a tape recorder and wanted to tape Fr. Ephraim of Katounakia, who rarely would come out of his hut. He had the tape recorder in a bag, but he had the microphone that he was clicking in his hand, and he kept clicking it on and off. Fr. Ephraim says, “What do you have in there?” And the publisher doesn’t want to say. He says, “You’ve got something in there and it’s doing something to me.” And he says, “Well, Elder, it’s a tape recorder.” And he says, “Yeah, but what’s it doing? It’s doing something to me.” He says, “Well, Elder, it’s taking your voice.” And when he’s describing this to the monks at Simonopetra, he’s saying, “You know, it really was taking my voice!” Now you have to realize that he’s been up in the mountains for many years, so he’s not really aware of a lot of things going on in the world on a—

Fr. Andrew: Technology.

Fr. Nicholas: Technology and what-not. But anyway, so Fr. Ephraim says, “What does it do?” And the publisher is trying to avoid explaining to the elder what it does. So he says, “Well, you put a cassette it in it, and you play it the one way; you turn it around and you play it the other way.” And he says, “But that’s doing something to me. What’s it doing?” He says, “Well, Elder, it’s taking your voice.” And he says, “And it really was taking my voice,” when he’s describing this. So he says, “Give me that!” And he says, “Elder, that’s expensive!” He says, “Oh, okay, you can have the tape recorder, but if you dare play the cassette for anyone else other than you, I’ll stop praying for you.”

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Nicholas: Now, we might think that’s an empty threat: Okay, he stops praying. But what it means is, clairvoyantly: “I’ll know if you do that and I’ll stop praying for you.”

And then I had another friend, whose name was also Nicholas, and he was Cypriot. And in Cyprus, after high school, all the kids have to go into the army. So this guy wanted to be a priest, so he didn’t want to fall into premarital relations because it’s an impediment to the priesthood. But he was very [virile], and the girls were always after the poor guy. Fr. Ephraim would say, “I have to do ten prayer ropes every day for you, just to keep you out of trouble!” [Laughter]

So anyway, when he’s in the army, his buddies want to go to a house of ill repute, and he’s being tempted. So he starts screaming, “Fr. Ephraim, if God exists, I need to see you right now! I’m losing my faith!” And so Fr. Ephraim appears in the army barracks. His face is looking at him very sternly, and he doesn’t go. When he goes back to Mount Athos to see Fr. Ephraim, the first thing he says is: “Did I or didn’t I come?” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow!

Fr. Nicholas: And then he told the same fellow, “You’re going to get married. You’re going to have a boy. You’re going to name him Ephraim, and I’m going to baptize the child.” He says, “Father, how do you know?” He says, “I went into her womb and I looked,” is what he says. Now, he wasn’t even married yet, this type of thing wasn’t even… [Laughter]

And then when the earthquake in Thessalonica happened in [1978], I got to Thessalonica in 1978; I got there right after the earthquake. One apartment building fell, and it was during the day, so the kids were all at school, so the kids didn’t get hurt. So Fr. Ephraim said, “Days before, I saw an earthquake was going to happen, and I started begging Christ to save the people, and Christ was saying, ‘These people aren’t repenting. Stop praying.’ And I kept praying.” Then the Elder said, “At least save the children,” and God said, “Okay, I’ll save the children.” And so the children were at school; they weren’t hurt. But Fr. Ephraim said—and it kind of reminded me of—was it Moses or Abraham who chiseled God down to five people to save—

Fr. Andrew: Abraham, yeah.

Fr. Nicholas: Abraham. So it kind of reminded me of the same thing. When Fr. Ephraim went to Thessalonica for medical reasons— Originally, he didn’t want to go, because they have the attitude that the monks on Mount Athos have the Virgin Mary as their doctor so they don’t need to go into the world. But they said, “St. Nektarios went to the hospital, so who are you not to go?” [Laughter] So by doing that, they convinced him to go, because he didn’t think, “Well, now I’m better than St. Nektarios,” so he went.

Now, Fr. Athanasios of Simonopetra was next to him, and this woman walks by, and Fr. Ephraim says, “Hi, Maria. How are you doing?” And Fr. Athanasios who knew he was up in the mountains for years says, “Father, do you know Maria?” He says, “No.” He says, “Well, how’d you know her name?” He says, “What, you think for nothing I’ve been sitting up in the mountains for all those years?” [Laughter]

So then they proceed to do a blood transfusion, and Fr. Ephraim complained. He said, “The person whose blood you gave me doesn’t take Communion frequently, and I can’t do my Jesus Prayer.”

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Nicholas: “Next time, find someone who communes frequently and give me their blood.” So they didn’t tell him, but the next time they got blood from a deacon who takes Communion frequently, and they gave him the second blood transfusion. He says, “That person takes Communion frequently. I can pray now.”

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Nicholas: And I’m thinking, “That’s just blood. Imagine if that would be a heart transplant or something. It would be unthinkable to someone at that state.” So much for Fr. Ephraim of Katounakia.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Before now, really, I had almost heard nothing about him.

Fr. Nicholas: Yeah, he’s a great saint and had much boldness in his prayer. When Fr. Ephraim was talking— Fr. Ephraim of Philotheou, later of Arizona, was talking to Fr. Ephraim of Katounakia, the hermit, about Gerontissa Makrina, Abbess Makrina, who was the abbess at Volos—many of her disciples became abbesses in monasteries in this country—he was praising her up and down. And Fr. Ephraim said, “Ah, you’re just praising her because she’s your spiritual daughter.” Anyway, after Fr. Ephraim left—Fr. Ephraim later of Arizona left—Fr. Ephraim of Katounakia, the hermit—just so people hear—prayed to see what Gerontissa was like. In his prayer, it was revealed that she’s like a pillar of fire whose prayer goes straight to heaven and that she’s so holy that he used an analogy, just like the Virgin Mary was holier than all the people of her age, to use an analogy, Gerontissa Makrina was much holier than the women of her time. So the next time, when Fr. Ephraim came back, he says, “You know, you weren’t praising Gerontissa Makrina because she’s your spiritual daughter; she really is like you were saying.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Nicholas: And there’s a book out in English about Gerontissa Makrina. I think it’s called Words of the Heart. It’s very good.

And then, let’s see—

Fr. Andrew: Listen, I wish you could see. He has pages of notes in front of him! [Laughter]

Fr. Nicholas: Yeah, I have these to remind me of things.

Fr. Andrew: No, it’s— I mean, it’s beautiful. It just shows the gifts that God gives.

Fr. Nicholas: Yeah, thank God. So do you want to hear about others, or—? I don’t know what our time frame is here.

Fr. Andrew: Absolutely. No, no, absolutely. My afternoon is yours.

Fr. Nicholas: All right. So another one who had a strong influence on me or was very helpful to me, I should say, was Elder Porphyrios, whom I had the pleasure of meeting three times.

Fr. Andrew: And he’s another one that’s been canonized now, too.

Fr. Nicholas: Yes. And so he was— At the time, he was founding a monastery outside of Athens, and I met a spiritual daughter of his at Essex, England, when I visited Fr. Sophrony’s monastery. She was telling me a lot about him. Periodically I would visit her in Athens, and then I would go— Through her I met Fr. Porphyrios and a disciple of his named Fr. Ananias Koustenis. Anyway, when I went to see Fr. Porphyrios— And I should say that my own spiritual father considered that I was in such a wretched state that he said, “You need to go see Fr. Porphyrios,” so he actually sent me to see Fr. Porphyrios. I don’t want anyone to think that I’m anything special, because I went to see these holy people. It’s probably because I was in such a wretched state that God provided, but in any case—

So I go to see Fr. Porphyrios, and the first time I’m meeting him, he’s outside, there’s a group of people, and he’s talking very sternly to someone. I’m taken aback, because normally you don’t expect some holy elder to be being really stern with someone. And it turns out he was talking to a possessed person, and so that’s why he was talking very sternly: he was talking to the demon, not to the person.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, to the demon.

Fr. Nicholas: But it took me a little while to figure that out, so at first I was taken aback. So after that conversation, this dad has a son, and he comes up to Fr. Porphyrios, and he says, “Kiss the priest’s hand. Kiss the priest’s hand.” And Fr. Porphyrios says, “Why don’t you kiss the priest’s hand?” to the dad.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! [Laughter]

Fr. Nicholas: And then he proceeds to tell a story about how we should not pressure people, but pray for them. And he tells the story—you may have heard it before—that he went to the island of Evia, which he would go there just to change the pace and sometimes the weather helped his health there, and he went to this village where he was pretty well-known. And he walked outside this guy’s house, and there was a fellow who had not set foot in church in 20 years, but he was hospitable. Said to Father, “If you don’t have any place to stay tonight, you can stay at my house tonight.” Fr. Porphyrios says, “Okay.” It’s a Saturday night. Sunday morning, Fr. Porphyrios gets up and says, “You know, I’m a priest, so I’m going to church,” as if only priests go to church! [Laughter]

When the other people in the village see him come out, they start saying, “Father! He hasn’t gone to church in 20 years! Tell him to go to church!” He says, “No, I’m not going to tell him anything.” “We’ll tell him to go to church.” “Don’t you dare say anything! If you do, I’m going to leave the village.” They didn’t want him to leave, so they didn’t, but they kept pestering Fr. Porphyrios that he needs to do something. So when they get to church, Fr. Porphyrios says, “Here’s what we’re going to do. For 20 minutes before we start the orthros, the matins, we’re going to do the Jesus Prayer for that fellow.” So out loud they were saying, “Lord Jesus Christ, enlighten your servant, George,” or whatever his name was.

They do that, then they proceed to start the matins and the Liturgy. Now in the villages, in the churches, they have megaphones, so the whole neighborhood can hear the service. And it turns out that this chanter, who was a really good chanter, happened to stop by and goes up to the chanter’s stand, and he chants. The guy whose house was near the church could hear the service. He was wondering whom was this beautiful chanting coming from, so he gets curious. He goes into the church, he stands near the chanter’s stand with his arms folded, and everyone is just dumbfounded that he went to church. [Laughter]

When the guy left, Fr. Porphyrios says, “See, if you had done it your way, you would have had a much worse result.” And the idea, what I get from that is that we should pray for people and not pressure them.

Fr. Andrew: That’s so hard! [Laughter]

Fr. Nicholas: I know, it takes a lot of patience. It’s not easy, especially parents. We want to pressure our kids to do this or that, and it’s a lot. It takes a lot of patience to just sit back and pray for them versus pestering them to do what you want them to do.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Usually they know already what you want them to do. [Laughter] Pray, not pressure. Pray, not pressure.

Fr. Nicholas: Yeah, I really like that. And he would tell people to do the supplication service to the Virgin Mary, to pray for your kids, especially teenagers, versus telling them things, that it’s better to talk to God a lot about your kids versus to talk a lot about God to your kids.

Fr. Andrew: I like that especially because it’s a chiasmus. [Laughter] Speak to God about your kids more than you speak to your kids about God. Yeah, beautiful. St. Porphyrios.

Fr. Nicholas: And then I had a friend, the friend that I would visit in Athens named Kassiani—she also became close with St. Sophrony of England—and she had a very dysfunctional family. When she— She was from the island of Kefalonia, and she and her sister, when they were teenagers, ran away from home and went to Athens. When they ran out of money—and chances are they would have become prostitutes or who knows what would have happened to them—Kassiani decides to go to the Church of St. Gerasimos, not that she was raised with religion, because she really wasn’t, but St. Gerasimos is the patron saint of Kefalonia, so the Kefalonians have a strong bond with St. Gerasimos. She went to complain to her compatriot about the situation, and in that church Fr. Porphyrios and his sister happened to be, because that’s where Fr. Porphyrios was the— you might say the chaplain of this church that belonged to a clinic in downtown Athens.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because he lived in the city, in the world.

Fr. Nicholas: He lived in the city, and that’s where he worked. And so Fr. Porphyrios’s sister sees Kassiani crying and goes up to her and says, “Oh, you need to meet the priest.” She says, “Oh, I have nothing to do with priests.” She says, “No, you need to meet this priest.” So she takes her to meet Fr. Porphyrios. Fr. Porphyrios looks at her and says, “No one has shown you what human love is, but God’s going to make up for it by showing you divine love.” So he takes her into his own home, and he has her, he’s raising her—she’s a teenager, but he’s raising her almost like you raise a little child. And she enrolls in a school for daycare center teachers, and when she would come home, Fr. Porphyrios would say, “The next day when you go to school, the teacher’s going to ask you this and this and this, and you’re going to answer this and this and this.” And he would look at her books and glance at them and say, “This theory is correct, but this one is not.” And he would just guide her like that.

When she would go to the school, the other kids knew that she wasn’t necessarily the sharpest tack on the wall, but she was able to answer everything. They couldn’t figure out how! [Laughter] So anyway, she finishes the school. Fr. Porphyrios gives her a blessing to go to England where she becomes close with St. Sophrony. She goes to London. When she would have a problem in London, she would take the picture of Fr. Porphyrios and say, “Papouli”—which is like “dear father”—“what do I do?” And she would hear a voice inside her, telling her what the answer was.

So one time, she takes the picture. She had some problems. She says, “Papouli, what do I do?” and she heard something, but she wasn’t sure if it was from Fr. Porphyrios. So she calls Fr. Porphyrios’s sister in Athens and says, “I need to talk to Fr. Porphyrios.” His sister, who was living kind of like a nun in the world—later on she became a nun—but she said, “Fr. Porphyrios is in the islands now. I don’t even know where he is.” Right after the sister closes the phone with Kassiani, Fr. Porphyrios calls from the island and says, “Call Kassiani and tell her to do what I told her to do yesterday.” [Laughter]

So Kassiani ended up founding a daycare center, which was the first daycare center both owned and run by a woman. There were daycare centers owned but not run by a woman, and vice-versa. And she would tell me a lot of things about Fr. Porphyrios that she experienced, being a spiritual child. At one point he took her to the forest, and they were just lying on the grass. He was telling her all about what her future life would be and the characteristics of her future husband. “When you get married, he’s going to be like this and this and this, and you’re going to have to watch about this and this and this.” Tell her everything, and he just knew!

And one time she said that she was walking with him in downtown Athens, which is not the greatest part of town, to put it lightly, and Fr. Porphyrios is stopping and he’s staring at something. And she’s saying, “Father, are you okay?” And he’s saying, “Don’t you see the light?” And she says, “Is something wrong with your eyes?” Now, here, Fr. Porphyrios is seeing the uncreated light in downtown Athens. She’s clueless. She didn’t even know that uncreated light existed; she found out years later. And he told her, “Because you’ve been utterly obedient to me, I could show you the uncreated light, but physically you’re in no shape to take it right now.”

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Nicholas: And it reminds me of St. Seraphim of Sarov with Motovilov.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! It’s fascinating that sometimes saints can show it to someone else, sort of an introduction to God, as it were, like: Here he is, by the way. But it’s interesting that he said, “Well, physically you’re not ready,” because it’s a physical experience, too. You actually see with your eyes.

Fr. Nicholas: And then, with me, when my spiritual father said, “You’re in such bad shape you need to go see Fr. Porphyrios,” and I went to see him. He asked me a couple questions; I answered. He said, “Okay, I’ll pray for you.” So three, four days later—at the time I was helping Kassiani at the daycare center, which was in a neighborhood above Athens, at Kareas—so I’m walking to the daycare center in the morning, and all of a sudden I feel— It felt like an electric current going through my body, and a light. And I could tell it was Fr. Porphyrios’s prayer. It was just so strong; you could feel it like an electric current, that’s how strong his prayer was.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Nicholas: And there’s even funny stories about that, where I think I may have mentioned it at a retirement banquet, but there’s—

Fr. Andrew: Tell the story!

Fr. Nicholas: There’s kind of a funny story where this spiritual child of Fr. Porphyios says, “I’m going on vacation.” Fr. Porphyrios says, “Okay, I’ll pray for you.” So at night when this guy would go to the hotel, he would feel the whole room shaking—the bed shaking, it’s like an earthquake. He’d shout, “Earthquake! Earthquake!” He couldn’t sleep. This would go on all night. In the morning he’d go down for breakfast and tell the people, “Did you feel the earthquake?” and they’d look at him like he was nuts. This happened three, four days. The guy couldn’t get any sleep. [Laughter] So he calls Fr. Porphyrios and he says, explains what was going on, and he says, “Oh, that’s my prayer. You’re feeling it so strongly. You’re feeling it like an earthquake.” He says, “Father! If you really want me to have a good vacation, can you stop praying for me?” he says. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow! That’s… Yeah. What do you say?

Fr. Nicholas: And Fr. Porphyrios would use the phone a lot. Even after his death, he’s known for calling people up on the phone. Six months, I think, after he died, this lady from Australia calls up, Fr. Porphyrios answers, answers her question or whatever, and says, “And, by the way, don’t call me again, because I’m in the heavens.” [Laughter] So she’s puzzled by this, so she calls back. One of the nuns answers; and [she] says, “I’d like to talk to Fr. Porphyrios.” She says, “Oh, I’m sorry. You didn’t hear, he passed away six months ago.” [Laughter] But he was known for using the phone more than any other elder. And when the spiritual children needed it, a lot of times he would call them before they would call him.

He was trying to found a convent outside of Athens, and he didn’t really have the money to build it. This lady came from Thessalonica whose son was ill—I think it was paralyzed—and the mother was grabbing his feet and screaming, “Heal my child! Heal my child!” and Fr. Porphyrios says, “Okay.” And she’s not hearing what he said, and she’s still screaming at him, until she finally realizes that he agreed to what she said. When she went back, the child had been healed. And she gave a lot of money for the convent to be built. [Laughter]

And there’s other stories. When you would see Fr. Porphyrios, he would take your pulse. If you would ask him what he was doing by taking your pulse, he’d say, “Oh, first I go through the endocrine system. Then I go through the hormone system.” He’s, like, X-raying all these different parts of the body, basically. And he would tell people exactly what was going on, and if he disagreed with the doctors, he was always right.

Fr. Andrew: Wow!

Fr. Nicholas: He only had a second-grade education, but God flooded him with so much grace that he had all these gifts. And he could do it at a distance, too. So there was a grandfather whose grandchild couldn’t swallow anything, and they were worried the kid was going to die. And so he goes from Athens to Fr. Porphyrios; this is about an hour’s distance. And he asked Fr. Porphyrios to pray. And he said, “Well, let me pray first,” and he prayed, and he said, “Oh, I can see, yeah, there’s something clogging up the throat, but it’s clearing up by Monday. It’s going to be cleared up; the child’s going to be okay.” Sure enough, he goes back to the doctors, told them the same thing.

And he was also known for healing a lot of cancer patients, even though he said cancer has flooded paradise with people. And the answer to it is very simple, but God’s not allowing people to find it, because cancer is filling paradise with people.

Fr. Andrew: Mm, because it helps people to repent.

Fr. Nicholas: Right. Basically, they say, “I’ve got cancer. Better take care of my soul,” and they get ready.

Fr. Andrew: That’s just upside-down from the way that we tend to think of it.

Fr. Nicholas: Mm-hm.

Fr. Andrew: You mentioned St. Sophrony a few times already, and my understanding is that you did meet him as well.

Fr. Nicholas: I met him a number of times, and that’s compliments of Dr. Christopher Veniamin who was my roommate in Thessalonica.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and my patristics professor at seminary.

Fr. Nicholas: We roomed for six years together. Thank God he put up with me. [Laughter] And so when he would go to England, a lot of times I would tag along, and so, through that, I got to meet Fr. Sophrony. I want to say one more thing about Fr. Porphyrios before we go on to Fr. Sophrony, if that’s okay.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, sure, of course.

Fr. Nicholas: There were cases both with Fr. Paisios and with Fr. Porphyrios where people would come from different countries and speak to them in— For example, with Fr. Paisios, there was a French person who came who had all kinds of problems, drugs and I don’t know what, and he was talking to Fr. [Paisios] in French, and Fr. [Paisios] was talking in Greek, and they were both hearing it in their own languages.

Fr. Andrew: Like at Pentecost.

Fr. Nicholas: And there was a Syrian monk who showed up who knew French, and he offered to translate for Fr. Paisios, and he says, “Well, I already talked to him.” And he says, “Well, how’d you talk to him?” And he says, “Well, we communicated.” And he goes and asks the French guy, and he says, “Well, I was speaking in French and he was hearing it in Greek, and vice-versa.”

So this type of thing happened both with Fr. Paisios and with Fr. Porphyrios. With Fr. Porphyrios, there was a lady who actually flew from Germany to talk to him, and he booted the translator out, and they spoke even though, like I said, Fr. Porphyrios had a second-grade education. He didn’t know German, but they communicated in the same way. It reminds me of Pentecost.

Anyhow, so you asked me about Fr. Sophrony. The impression I had about Fr. Sophrony is that he was a very noble person, almost like you’d see a nobleman. He had a lot of wisdom and theology. Fr. Theoklitos Dionysiatis, who was an eminent author on Athos, said that there’s a lot of elders who have the experience of holiness, but they can’t necessarily express it in very fine detail, and other ones who may have the other gift but don’t necessarily have the experience. Fr. Sophrony had both. In other words, he had the experience of seeing the uncreated light and I think at the end of his life he was seeing it constantly, but in any case (which is theosis), but he could also express it in very fine language.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because he was— I mean, he was quite an intellectual.

Fr. Nicholas: Yeah! Originally, he didn’t want to learn Greek, but he was on Athos at the Russian monastery for four months—four years. And his elder, Misael, told him, “You learn Greek, and if you’re harmed spiritually at all, I’ll take it on my soul.” And it’s as if the elder knew what would happen later on, because when he was in London in England— A lot of Cypriots are there, thousands of Cypriots; they would come to the monastery. So in any case, and Fr. Sophrony describes when he first started to learn Greek, that he felt his heart—his mind go out of his heart, come up to his brain, and onto the paper. And that’s when he realized that for four years his mind had been in his heart. Anyway, he ended up knowing French, English, Greek, and he knew Russian right off the bat.

Christopher told me the story that when— the first time his parents went to the monastery, on the way the tire blows and the dad is upset and screaming and whatever; the mom was calmer. And when they get to the monastery, Fr. Sophrony starts telling each one about their own personality and says, “Oh, your father was better than you are. You’re like this and this and this, but your father was like this and this and this,” never having met them before! [Laughter] So they ended up going every weekend to the monastery. And of course Dr. Veniamin had Fr. Sophrony as a spiritual father. And Fr. Sophrony managed to make this monastery in England, where both nuns and monks were there, but they lived very harmoniously.

Fr. Andrew: I went there last summer for a couple of days.

Fr. Nicholas: Oh, neat!

Fr. Andrew: And it really struck me as a unique place. It was interesting— I don’t know the right word, but as you said, there were monks and nuns together, sharing the life together, although monks live in one part and the nuns live in another part, but they do meals together and they do services together, and it works. It works for them.

Fr. Nicholas: And Fr. Sophrony would tell his disciples that he didn’t want them to tell miracles that he did, even though he did plenty of them. But I’m the type that likes that type of thing, so I would ask around. [Laughter] And I heard some interesting miracles. Fr. Sophrony preferred that people know about him by the quality of their prayer, and of course they’d do the Jesus Prayer there in the services, for matins and vespers, unless it’s like a major feast. Each person is doing it in their own language, as you probably saw.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, I heard. I mean, there was one time I went—it was in the morning—and most of the service was the Jesus Prayer being recited out loud in probably, I think, eight or nine different languages maybe I heard it.

Fr. Nicholas: Yeah. But like I said, I’m the type that likes miracles and things, so I started asking around. People told me some interesting miracles of his, which I’d like to share.

Fr. Andrew: Absolutely! I’m sure, God willing, he’ll forgive us. [Laughter] He knows we need it.

Fr. Nicholas: Hopefully now that he’s in heaven, foretaste of heaven, he’ll forgive me. So there was this fellow who was very pious, had four or five kids. One of their children had been born with Fr. Sophrony’s prayers, so they named her Sophronia. Like I said, they were very hospitable but very poor people. If you’d go to their house, Sophronia, she might have a candy bar, and if there were ten people in the house, she would cut off a little piece of the candy bar to offer to each person in the house; that’s how loving— Anyway, they also had a grandfather there at the house who would like to go hunting. Sometimes he would go to the monastery on Sundays and sometimes instead he would go hunting. So one Sunday the rest of the family goes there; the grandfather isn’t there. Father is talking around three in the afternoon, because they would spend the whole Sunday there at the monastery till the afternoon; they had a really nice program.

And so Fr. Sophrony says, “Is So-and-so hunting today?” And he says, “Oh, didn’t you hear? He’s bedridden; he can’t get out of bed. He’s sick.” And Fr. Sophrony says, “Oh, I didn’t know.” Anyway, the family goes back to the house; it’s an hour away from London. And when they get there, the grandfather is up and around; nothing’s the matter. He says, “I thought you were sick in bed and you couldn’t get up.” He says, “Around three o’clock in the afternoon”—which is the time they were talking—“Fr. Sophrony came into the window and said, ‘Get up,’ and he says, ‘I can’t get up; I can’t walk,’ and he says, ‘Oh, yes, you can.’ ” He gets him up, and they walk around, and then Fr. Sophrony disappears. And it was the same time that he was talking to the son that he’s also simultaneously in London, healing the grandfather.

Fr. Andrew: Bilocation…

Fr. Nicholas: Yeah. And I also saw a restaurant owner who told me the same thing. I don’t want to go into details there, but the restaurant owner was having some problem, and Fr. Sophrony appeared—and the restaurant is hours away from where the monastery is—and he told him what to do to solve the situation, and then disappeared.

And then while I was there I noticed that they would be— They were building a certain building while I was there at the monastery, and I stayed for six weeks the one time. And I would notice that from Monday to Thursday it wouldn’t rain, from Thursday to Sunday it would rain, and then when it would start building again, Monday to Thursday again it wouldn’t rain. England is known for having a lot of rain and so forth.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yes.

Fr. Nicholas: The first week I thought it’s coincidence, the second week I thought a lot of coincidence, and then this happened for four or five weeks in a row. Finally I couldn’t stand it, and I went up to Fr. Raphael, who’s now a hermit in Romania, but is a disciple of Fr. Sophrony, and I said, “I’m noticing this, that when you guys are building, it doesn’t rain; and then when you’re not building”—because on the weekends they would dedicate to dealing with all the people who would visit the monastery—“when you’re not building, it rains.” He says, “Yeah, that’s what happened when we were building the refectory also.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow. I mean, it’s beautiful that God cares even for what might seem like a mundane need. We often pray for big things, but, okay, can we have good weather so we can build this thing? And he said yes. [Laughter]

Fr. Nicholas: And there’s something interesting about Fr. Sophrony and the attitude there is that, let’s say you were suffering for something, and you went up and told one of them, the elders there, that “I’m going through this,” and they’d say, “Did you ever think of praying for all the other people in the world that are going through the same thing right now?” And you say, “No, I never thought of that.” He said, “Well, do it.” And so they had a very loving way of embracing the whole world, and I like that attitude.

Speaking of that, at one point Fr. Sophrony shows me—I mentioned this, I think, at the retirement banquet—he showed me an icon painted by Photis Kontoglou, who I think was a very saintly person, but he had a very ethnocentric attitude. So Fr. Sophrony said, “This person had the attitude that you can only be Orthodox if you’re Greek,” and Fr. Sophrony is laughing while he’s saying it. And I’m thinking, “Here’s this guy who’s seen the uncreated light, and he’s saying this guy is saying you can only be…” [Laughter]

And he went on to tell me that Orthodoxy will only survive in the West if all the Orthodox unite. If they don’t unite, they will not be able to withstand the oncoming pressures from the Antichrist and so forth. I believe strongly that all the Orthodox need to unite as much as possible, and I know that’s not been an easy task.

Fr. Andrew: Right. You know, if I can say so, I think what we’re doing today helps that, because how do we unite? Just like what St. Paisios said about talking to other, to non-Orthodox Christians, everyone needs to be as holy as they can be and then you can begin to work on stuff together. Hearing about the modern saints who were in our world and there’s many people living who met them, thanks be to God, gets us a little bit closer, I think, to that. Because I’ve— I mean, here in America we have, what, 12, 13, 14 jurisdictions? I’ve lost count now. [Laughter] But the sense of brotherhood and sisterhood that we have really comes to the front when we meet with the saints and we meet in prayer and all of that. Unity seems obvious at those moments, I think, if I can say so.

Yeah, I got to visit the monastery there at Essex last year for a couple of days. I was really struck by the spirit of the place, and, like you said, the sense of embracing the whole world, because different monasteries have different personalities. I think those personalities definitely reflect their holy elders or eldresses who either founded it or governed it most recently or left their imprint, their personality: their spirit becomes the spirit of the place. So I felt like I got to know St. Sophrony a little bit by being with them. And I also— Listeners, you’ll have to forgive me; I haven’t released this yet. But I actually got to interview two of the sisters in his study, asking about him, for a little over an hour, just the two of them talking about him.

Fr. Nicholas: Oh wow. Neat!

Fr. Andrew: So be looking for that, everybody. You’re going to love it. Everybody’s going to love it, I think. I still feel a little teared up, just remembering that conversation, but right now it’s a little secret I hold that no one else has! [Laughter] But don’t worry! Don’t worry, everybody. I recorded it so that you could hear it.

I know you have a lot of other people on your list. One person I definitely want to ask about—and you’re welcome to talk about anybody you want to talk about, really, but one person I definitely want to ask about is someone that I only got to know a little bit, and that was a priest who was here in Lehigh Valley, who is known locally to most of the people as— They call him Fr. Kossis.

Fr. Nicholas: Okay, sure.

Fr. Andrew: So he was Fr. Nicholas Kossis, and towards the end of his life he was tonsured as a hieromonk and received the name Nikodimos or Nicodemus. I think next month is going to be the two-year anniversary of his departure.

Fr. Nicholas: It might be three; I don’t remember if it’s two or three.

Fr. Andrew: I think it’s two, actually. In fact, I have right here with me—

Fr. Nicholas: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: I have a little prayer card, because he loved Ss. Raphael, Nicholas, and Irini. Yeah, so it was April 12, 2022, is when he reposed.

Fr. Nicholas: ‘22, okay.

Fr. Andrew: And he’s buried at Holy Protection Monastery in Whitehaven, which is just about an hour from here.

Fr. Nicholas: Correct.

Fr. Andrew: I never really got a chance to know him. I had a few brief conversations with him. I couldn’t understand him very well; I’m not sure whether he understood me. [Laughter] But I heard things about him, and so… Tell us about him, Father.

Fr. Nicholas: So Fr. Kossis was my spiritual father here, and he was born on the island of Mytilene or Lesvos. His father died— His mother died in childbirth when he was very young, so he was raised by his father and by other relatives. Eventually, he goes to the military, he goes to Athens. He ends up getting married [to] Presbytera Maria, and working for the Greek government. At that time, he wasn’t against the Church or anything, but he wasn’t particularly close to the Church either. While he’s there, he hemorrhages to the point where the doctors told the wife that she needed to go get a casket. While he’s there in the hospital, he sees this light and hears a voice saying, “You’re not ready yet, and you’re going to serve me.”

So he sits up, and the doctors are dumbfounded because they expected he was going to die. They had him off in a corner, just basically leaving him to die. I think then they did another procedure to try and stop the hemorrhaging or something, and then his wife was saying that after— And for two or three days afterwards, he was asking his wife to dim the lights, because the light was so bright that he was seeing. She was saying, “There’s not a lot of light here,” but he was just seeing this light.

So after that he— And then this person shows up, this fellow shows up in the hospital and gives him a bible and then kind of disappears. He told him he needs to read it. I don’t know who that was or anything, but it seems to have been something divine, in any case. Then he proceeds to— His wife insisted that he see a priest for confession, which he didn’t really want to do, but she pushes it, and he sees a priest. He ends up getting a spiritual father who is a disciple of St. Porphyrios for 40-some years. After about four years, he decides he wants to become a priest. The only problem was that his wife wasn’t too excited about this idea. She didn’t marry someone who was going to become a priest. And so he convinces her to go to Canada, because there the priests don’t have to wear the cassock, and they can go to movies and live a more secular life, basically. [Laughter]

And so she agrees and they go to Canada, and he ends up working for a factory and he does such a good job that they want to make him a manager, but he says, “No, I want to go to the seminary.” So he leaves, even though they were offering him a really good job. And he goes to Holy Cross Seminary in Boston at the recommendation of the local bishop in Canada with whom he had become friends. He managed to do two years of studies in one year so that he was able to make the time lessened by half by doing that. Then he was kind of appalled at how secular the students were there, so at one point he complained to the bishop, who was also the dean, and the dean said, “Just for that, you need to live off-campus.” And this was becoming really hard for me also. I worked at night at a restaurant called the Pier 4, where there was a fellow who ran it who was from Mytilene. It’s a famous restaurant there in Boston.

So he would study during the day, go to classes, study, and then work at night at the restaurant. And he’s rather exhausted walking up the hill of the seminary every day. At one point he just kind of, in exasperation, says, “God, do something.” And the next day the dean gets transferred to another position, and then the new dean ends up letting him back on campus. He finishes the seminary and ends up in Aliquippa.

Fr. Andrew: That’s here in Pennsylvania.

Fr. Nicholas: In Pennsylvania. That was his first parish. He had only managed to do one Liturgy with Bishop Gerasimos of Avydou who was later the bishop of Pittsburgh, but at that time he was New Testament professor at the seminary. So when he did his first Liturgy in Aliquippa, he forgot to take the aer off his back after he went around, and the chanter said, “Father! You have to take that off your back!” But anyway, he’s there for 14 years. He holds the record for being the longest lasting priest in Aliquippa. He was there 12 years; he was there 14.

Many miracles occurred while he was there in Aliquippa, because, as I said, I was a priest many years after he was, and the people pretty much worshiped the ground he walked on. Some of the miracles are that when he would do a paraklesis to Ss. Nicholas, Raphael, and Irene, whom you mentioned, and St. Nektarios—he would combine the two—he had been— Even though it was stormy weather, Fr. Kossis managed to be at the canonization service of St. Nektarios on the island of Aegina. So anyway, while he would do the supplication service to St. Nektarios and Ss. Nicholas, Raphael, and Irene, St. Nektarios would appear in a window in the altar. Once the service would finish, the saint would disappear.

Bishop Gerasimos heard about this; he came to investigate. So before the service, Bishop Gerasimos is walking outside, looking at the window, and Fr. Kossis says, “What are you doing? The saint won’t appear until the service starts!” [Laughter] So anyway, sure enough the service starts, the saint appears; he finishes, the saint disappears. A lot of healings occurred; even people who had Stage IV cancer were healed, and things like that. Another time Christ appeared in the service, this type of thing.

But he also had problems in the parish, where, for example, at one point the Greeks, just like the Serbs, wanted to put a bar in the hall, and Fr. Kossis was not too excited about this prospect. And where they were having the meeting is attached to where the church is, the hall, in other words. Fr. Kossis says, “Let me go ask the Boss,” so he leaves the parish council meeting, goes and prays in front of the crucifix in the altar, comes back and says, “The Boss told me that we can’t do it, but if you don’t believe me, you go.” And he sends them, one by one, to go and stand in front of the cross and Christ and ask the Boss if they’re allowed to put a bar in the hall. So they all came back and said, “The Boss doesn’t want us to do it.” [Laughter]

Another time, they wanted to put a belly dancer for some New Year’s Eve dance or something. Fr. Kossis says, “I know how to shut the electricity. If you dare put the belly dancer, I’m going to stop the electricity.” So they ignored him, they got the belly dancer. In the middle of the dance hall, all of a sudden, everything goes black. So that was the end of the dance there.

Another time, someone was really upset with him—I don’t know why exactly—said that he was coming the next day to shoot him.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Nicholas: Fr. Kossis was excited about it! He said, “Oh, I get to be a martyr for Christ!” Presbytera wasn’t too happy about this prospect. [Laughter] So the next day, she’s telling him, “Don’t go out.” But he sees the guy coming; he goes out. He’s like: “Shoot here. Shoot here,” and he’s patting his chest. The guy puts the gun down and says, “Ach! I can’t do it,” and he leaves. [Laughter]

And he had a neat way of— People who gave him trouble, he would befriend them. He would spend more time with them and make them friends. My tendency would probably be to avoid the people that are hating me, but Fr. Kossis would do the opposite. In a period of three months, he would visit the whole parish. Maybe it was, I don’t know— When I got there it was 150 families, probably more in Fr. Kossis’s day. And sometimes he would visit them at really odd hours, like 11 o’clock at night, and he would drink a coffee and chat with them. He’d tell stories about people who didn’t even want him to come into the house for a house blessing. Fr. Kossis would tell them, “Okay, don’t treat me like a priest, but just like a friend. Let me come in and let’s have some coffee together.” By the end, he would befriend them and everything would be great.

And so he serves there for 14 years, and Father— Let’s see, Sedaris comes to Bethlehem, who had been in Ambridge, which is right across from Aliquippa. Fr. Kossis was good friends with Fr. Sedaris, Fr. Theodore. Fr. Theodore kept telling Fr. Kossis to come to Easton. Easton had recently had a scandal with the priest, so no— priests didn’t really want to go to Easton. The bishop, Bishop Maximos, was telling Fr. Kossis, “Why would you want to go there when everything is so well in Aliquippa?” Anyway, the bishop says, “Stay in Aliquippa.” Fr. Kossis sees a dream of the Virgin Mary, showing him the church in Easton on fire and telling him, “Why aren’t you coming to put the fire out?” So Fr. Kossis tells the bishop, “I saw this dream,” and Bishop Maximos says, “Okay, you need to go to Easton.”

So he leaves Aliquippa; he goes to Easton. And at first, when he first got there, people didn’t want to talk to him because they had had such a bad experience with the previous priest. But Fr. Kossis is a great people person, and so he kind of transformed the parish. Presbytera became a great presbytera: did the bulletin, ran the choir, and all kinds of stuff. And he turned his garage into a chapel of Ss. Nicholas, Raphael, and Irini, and had relics of the saints. He’s from Mytilene. A lot of times in the summer he would go to Mytilene and confess people and help with whatever the bishop there needed. And a lot of miracles happened through Ss. Nicholas, Raphael, and Irene. Many people were healed. Mind you, this is before the monasteries were being made.

Fr. Andrew: Here in America.

Fr. Nicholas: Here in America, at least in the Greek Archdiocese. And so where Fr. Kossis was was like a spiritual center where a lot of people were going to confession and so forth.

In any case, there’s a neat miracle in his life that I like a lot, is that when he was still in Aliquippa, they decided to go to Ocean City, Maryland, on vacation. Presbytera Maria tells Fr. Kossis, she tells him, “You make all the arrangements for the hotel and whatever.” They pack up. They have two children, a son and a daughter. They drive many hours from Aliquippa to Ocean City, Maryland. It’s late, the kids are whiny, they want to get something to eat, and Presbytera says, “What arrangements did you make?” He says, “Oh, I forgot to make arrangements.” [Laughter] So then Fr. Kossis says, “There’s a light in that store there. I’ll go ask them where I can find a hotel and someplace to eat.”

He knocks on the door, this person opens, has an accent and says, “Who are you?” Fr. Kossis says, “I’m Fr. Nicholas Kossis.” He says, “Oh, my wife’s been waiting for you for three nights. There’s a spread on the table. Tell your family to come in.”

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Nicholas: So it turns out this guy was Greek. Fr. Kossis didn’t know the guy from Adam; he just saw a light in that store. It turns out that the wife had been seeing a dream for three nights that the Virgin Mary was sending St. Nicholas to help her. She was trying to raise money to raise a church, the Greek Orthodox church, in Ocean City, Maryland, and needed someone to help her with it. So when she heard that his church is Dormition of the Theotokos, Kimissis tis Theotokou, and his name is Fr. Nicholas, she realized that this is what she’s been seeing. So they walk in, they have this spread on the table, they eat, they stayed. During the vacation, I think he was helping to raise money to build the church in Ocean City, Maryland! [Laughter]

Eventually, his presbytera passes away and he ends up becoming a monk, taking the name Nikodimos. I’m pretty sure he was also clairvoyant. I’ve experienced it because any time I had a problem in Aliquippa—and Aliquippa is nowhere near Easton—he would call up and say, “How are things going?” And I’d say, “Oh, I’m having a rough time with this and this,” and he’d say, “Don’t worry about it. I know people in Aliquippa. I’ll call them and it’ll be taken care of.” And that’s what would happen. And this would happen repeatedly. He would just have an uncanny way of knowing when I needed something.

After I was in Lancaster for six years, the bishop gave me a choice of going to three parishes in the Pittsburgh area, and Fr. Kossis said, “I want you to go to Aliquippa. They’ve had a lot of priests that have not lasted, and I want you to go there.” So I asked His Eminence, and he allowed me to go to Aliquippa, so I was there for 12 years.

But I heard a lot of interesting miracles about him. There was a person who, when Fr. Kossis was still in Aliquippa, had an accident at the steel mill at three in the morning. This fellow told his wife not to tell anybody about it, and Fr. Kossis shows up at the hospital at three in the morning. The guy starts shouting at his wife, saying, “I thought I told you not to tell anyone!” She says, “I didn’t tell anyone!” And so he asked Fr. Kossis; he says, “Oh, a little birdie told me.” [Laughter] And other similar things like that.

There was a lady who actually died at the hospital. The hospital’s only five minutes away from where the parish was. And Fr. Kossis hears that she’s dying. He rushes to the hospital. By the time he gets there, she’s dead. So he commands her to get up, and she resurrects, and he proceeds to confess her, give her Communion. She lived another three months, but she died prepared.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! Wow. [Exhalation]

Fr. Nicholas: Yeah, he helped many people. He’s transfigured many people’s lives through confession. He had a really great way of relating to people.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Nicholas: And he’s done a number of things after his death as well.

Fr. Andrew: Really? Can you share at least one? You can anonymize it however you need.

Fr. Nicholas: Well, there was a spiritual child who build a huge store in Philadelphia. After he builds it and everything, he goes and the people there are telling him that he doesn’t have the zoning permit for it so he can’t do it. The thing is already built, and he’s freaking out, and he prays to Fr. Kossis to do something. This fellow goes off to the side, prays to Fr. Kossis, comes back, and then when he comes back they said, “Oh, we were wrong. It’s not like that.” And they gave him the zoning, and it was the opposite of what they’d told him just previously. That’s just one that stands out, but there’s been others.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Is there anyone else that you’d like to share about that we haven’t heard of? [Laughter] I know you probably have a hundred more stories.

Fr. Nicholas: Okay, there’s plenty more, but I’d like to mention something about Fr. Eustathios Giannakidis who was a married priest in a village near Drama, which is in northern Greece, and at first he was in Asia Minor, and he was a teacher, a school teacher, but the Muslims around there respected him as being a very holy person even before he was a priest. At one point they came up to him and said, “Our daughter is sick. We want you to read prayers and she’ll become well.” He’s saying, “I’m not a priest. I can’t read prayers, and I can’t do it.” And they said, “We don’t care what you are and what you’re not. You’re going to read prayers and she’ll become well.” So he proceeds. He says, “What could I do? I took the life of St. Marina. I read the life of St. Marina, and the girl was healed.”

So he ends up becoming a spiritual child of St. George Karslides, who’s a canonized saint who was known for his asceticism and clairvoyance and so forth. And his mom tells him and his brother, both of whom became priests later on, that: we’re not leaving Georgia. At this time they were in Georgia, and Fr. St. George Karslides, his feet had been ruined because the Communists had him in a prison where they had months on the ground, so his feet were in water for months. So their mom says, “I’m not going to Greece unless you take Fr. George with you.” So they were kind of forced to take St. George Karslides with them from Georgia to Greece. There’s thousands of Greeks in Georgia. There are 17 villages that are Greek, Pontian speaking, in Georgia.

Anyway, so he ends up going to Greece and ends up becoming Fr. Eustathios, ends up becoming a married priest in a village outside of Drama, marries a woman named Olga, has nine children. One son of his is a priest, a daughter is a nun, and two grandsons are priests. Now, he’s a simple village priest, and I got to meet him. When you go to meet him and you go to confession to him, afterwards he would ask you the names of all the members of your family. He wouldn’t just pray for you, but for anyone in your whole family as well. He must have had thousands of names that he prayed for.

In the meantime, he also was clairvoyant. We would corner the presvytera in the kitchen, and she’d tell us miracles that her husband was doing. He’d know what she was doing and would say, “What was she telling you in there again!” [Laughter] And so, anyway, the wife needed to have an operation, but these people were so pious that they could not bear the thought that someone would undress them to do an operation, so she asked, “How do they do the operation?” They said, “Oh, they put you to sleep, they take your clothes off…” She says, “I’m a presvytera. They can’t do that!” So she prays to St. Panteleimon, St. John the Theologian; the two saints come and do the operation on her. And she was telling me with her Pontian accent that “I still have the scars from the operation that the saints did.” In the meantime, she wanted to be able to read the Gospel. She couldn’t read, but she prayed to the Virgin Mary who appeared to her and showed her all the letters in golden letters in the sky and taught her how to read so she could read the Gospel.

Fr. Andrew: Wow!

Fr. Nicholas: So after I went to confession to him and they had supper for us, Fr. Eustathios was not eating anything, but he was saying, “Instead of watching television, you should read the lives of the saints.” And he proceeded to tell us the life of St. Catherine.

When he died, a rose plant grew out of the one side of his tomb, and a basil plant from the other side. And when Protestants came to the village to do mission work, and some people went from the village, he says, “Did they talk at all about the feast of the Virgin Mary that’s coming up?” They said, “No.” He said, “Did they have the talk in a church?” They said, “No.” So he realized right away what was going on. He said, “Tell the people in the village that if any of them goes there to that talk again, their bodies will not dissolve when they die.”

Fr. Andrew: Ooh.

Fr. Nicholas: That was enough to stop the missionary work of the Protestants in the village.

Anyway, when Fr. Eustathios wanted to venerate the skull of St. Eustathios, whose skull is at the Church of St. Athanasios in downtown Thessalonica, they brought the skull. He was too old to travel, so they brought the skull of St. Eustathios from Thessalonica to his village a couple hours away. And then I guess the two saints were really happy to see each other, because as they were driving, the fragrance out of the skull is becoming stronger and stronger and stronger, because I guess the two Eustathioses were really happy to see each other. Anyway, I just thought I’d like to mention about Father— He’s not canonized yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, down the road, he gets canonized.

Fr. Andrew: He was a parish priest in a village.

Fr. Nicholas: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: I think we sometimes have— And understandably, but sometimes have this stereotype in our heads that all the saints of our days are all monastics. But it’s just not true. There’s some that are not even clergy, that— Like you mentioned his wife: she’s talking to heaven!

Fr. Nicholas: Sure!

Fr. Andrew: Being taught to read by the Lord. Father, thank you so much for coming here today.

Fr. Nicholas: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Fr. Andrew: I hope we can have some more conversations in the future about some of these.

Fr. Nicholas: I’ll look forward to it.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you.

Fr. Nicholas: God bless you in your work with Ancient Faith.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you.