The Life
Saint Nektarios is the great wonderworker of modern Greece. He died in 1920. Photographs exist of him — a small old bishop in a black cassock, with a long white beard and the gentlest eyes you have ever seen. As a child in Thrace he was so poor he wrote a letter to Christ asking for shoes; a sympathetic stranger read the letter and sent him money. He became a teacher, then a monk, then a priest, then a young Metropolitan in Egypt. The Patriarch of Alexandria loved him at first. Then jealous clergy turned the Patriarch against him. Without a trial or a charge, Nektarios was deposed and exiled. He spent the rest of his life slandered, ignored, and despised — first as a homeless preacher in Athens, then as a teacher, finally as the spiritual father of a small women’s monastery on the island of Aegina. He bore every injustice without complaint. He died of cancer in a hospital bed reserved for the poor. The moment he died a paralytic in the next bed was healed. The miracles have not stopped since. He is the patron of those suffering from cancer.
Anastasios was sent from his poor Thracian village to Constantinople at the age of fourteen to find work. He had nothing. He walked to the harbor and asked the captain of a boat to take him. The captain told him to walk away. The captain gave the order to start the engines but nothing happened; the engines refused to turn over. After several attempts the captain looked up and saw the boy still standing on the dock. He took pity. He told the boy to come aboard. The engines started immediately. In Constantinople Anastasios worked for a tobacco merchant who paid him almost nothing. He went barefoot in ragged clothes. He saw the merchant getting many letters every day and decided he wanted to write one too. But to whom? He had no friends. There was no mail to his village. So he wrote a letter to Jesus Christ. My little Christ, he wrote, I do not have an apron or shoes. You send them to me. You know how much I love you. He addressed it to the Lord Jesus Christ in Heaven. On his way to mail it he ran into a shopkeeper from across the street who offered to mail it for him. The shopkeeper read the address, opened the letter, was deeply moved, and sent the boy money anonymously. Saint Nektarios always remembered: God had answered his letter.
Nektarios was consecrated Metropolitan of Pentapolis at the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas in Cairo on January 15, 1889. He was forty-two years old. The people loved him. He preached well, lived simply, gave away whatever he had to the poor, and embodied for everyone he met the gentleness of an authentic shepherd. His success made other clergy jealous. They started spreading rumors. They told the elderly Patriarch Sophronios that Nektarios was secretly plotting to become Patriarch himself. None of it was true. The Patriarch, troubled by the slanders, removed Nektarios from his see on May 3, 1890 — just sixteen months after his consecration. There was no trial. There were no specific charges. There was just an ambiguous letter saying he had been removed for reasons known to the Patriarchate, which fueled rumors and made his rehabilitation impossible. In July, Sophronios commanded him to leave Egypt entirely. Nektarios said nothing in his own defense. He simply gathered his few belongings and sailed to Greece. He was forty-three years old, dishonored, with no income, no position, and a reputation poisoned in Athens before he even arrived.
After his deposition Saint Nektarios spent fifteen years in Greece doing whatever work the Church would let him do. He preached as a simple parish preacher in poor districts. He directed the Rizarios Ecclesiastical School in Athens, training future priests. He wrote dozens of theological books. He composed Agni Parthene, the famous hymn to the Theotokos that begins O Pure Virgin. But the city life and the politics of the Greek Church wore on him. He longed for monastic silence. In 1904 some pious women asked him to help them found a women’s monastery on the small island of Aegina. He found an abandoned old monastery on the island, started rebuilding it with his own hands, and consecrated it to the Holy Trinity. He moved there permanently in 1908 when he was sixty-two. He spent the last twelve years of his life there. He worked alongside the nuns in the gardens. He carried stones for the buildings. He heard confessions from people who came from all over Greece. He told his nuns: I am building a lighthouse for you, and God will put a light in it that will shine forth to the world. They thought he meant the building. He meant himself. After he was buried at the convent, the lighthouse turned on. Pilgrims have not stopped coming since.
Among Saint Nektarios’s many books and counsels, one of the most luminous teachings is also one of the simplest. Seek God daily, he wrote. But seek him in your heart, not outside it. We tend to look for God everywhere except where he actually dwells. We look in dramatic experiences. We look in books. We look in arguments. We look in beautiful churches and elaborate liturgies. None of these is wrong, but none of them is the actual place where God dwells in the believer. God dwells in the heart. The whole spiritual life is the patient work of clearing the noise out of the heart, becoming silent inside, paying attention to the small movements of grace that the Holy Spirit makes in us, and slowly recognizing the divine Presence that has been there all along. Saint Nektarios said this with his life as much as with his words. After everything that had happened to him, he was the living proof that God can be found in the heart of a soul that keeps seeking him patiently, even when nothing in the external circumstances looks like grace at all.
When the Patriarch deposed him without a trial, when the slanders against him reached Athens before he himself arrived there, when he was reduced to homelessness and begging the Minister of Religion for any kind of position, Saint Nektarios’s only response was the Beatitude. He took the Lord’s words from the Sermon on the Mount and made them his entire defense. He did not just quote it. He lived it. He refused to attack the Patriarch who had deposed him. He refused to answer the slanderers in their own coin. He refused to seek vindication from anyone but the Lord. He simply continued to do whatever work he could find, to pray, to write, to serve. The Lord vindicated him eventually — through the cancer healings that began the moment he died and have continued for a hundred years. Saint Nektarios is the proof that the Beatitude is true. The reviled, persecuted, slandered soul who keeps loving the Lord is genuinely blessed, and the Lord himself is the one who eventually demonstrates the blessing.
When Saint Paul prayed three times for the Lord to remove his thorn in the flesh, the Lord refused, but answered him with this sentence: my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Saint Paul accepted this. He stopped asking for the thorn to be removed. Instead he learned to glory in the weakness, because the weakness was the place where the Lord’s power was operating most clearly. Saint Nektarios lived by this verse. After his deposition, after the years of poverty and rejection, after the cancer that took his life slowly and painfully, after the unjust accusations that continued to follow him even at the end — he never asked for the suffering to be removed. He simply continued in it, trusting that the Lord’s grace was operating exactly through the weakness. And the Lord’s grace did operate. Through the weakness. Saint Nektarios in his physical suffering at the end of his life was being made into the saint whose relics would heal cancer in thousands of other people for a hundred years afterward.
In September 1920 the nun Euphemia brought Saint Nektarios to the Aretaieion Hospital in Athens. He was suffering terribly from prostate cancer. The hospital was a charity facility for the poor. The intern asked the nun for the patient’s name. She said he was the Most Reverend Metropolitan of Pentapolis. The intern laughed and told her to stop joking. They put him in a ward reserved for the indigent. He stayed there for fifty days, suffering with patience that edified everyone who visited. He gave up his soul on the evening of November 8, 1920. The very moment of his death, a nurse came to prepare his body for transport back to Aegina. As she removed his sweater, she absentmindedly placed it on the next bed where a paralytic was lying. The paralytic immediately stood up healthy and began praising God. That was the first miracle. There have been thousands more since. His body remained incorrupt for over twenty years. When his relics were transferred in 1953 they emitted a beautiful fragrance that has continued to the present day. He was officially recognized as a saint by the Ecumenical Patriarchate on April 20, 1961. His tomb at the Holy Trinity Convent on Aegina is one of the great pilgrimage destinations of the Orthodox world. Saint Nektarios is the patron of those suffering from cancer.
Saint Nektarios matters to every Orthodox Christian today because he shows us that the Lord can vindicate any soul that trusts him patiently. Nektarios was deposed unjustly. He was slandered. He was rejected. He was reduced to poverty. He died of cancer in a charity hospital ward where the intern would not even believe he was a bishop. By every worldly measure his life was a failure. He never got his episcopal see back. His name was never officially cleared during his lifetime. The slanders that destroyed his ministry were never publicly retracted. He went to his grave with his reputation still in tatters. And then the Lord turned the lights on. The miracles started immediately. They have not stopped in over a hundred years. The Patriarchate of Alexandria itself eventually had to formally apologize for what had been done to him — seventy-eight years too late, but eventually. Saint Nektarios is a friend to every Orthodox Christian who has ever been treated unjustly and patiently endured it. The Lord sees. The Lord remembers. The Lord vindicates in his own time and in his own way. Trust the pattern that Saint Nektarios trusted.