January: Day 25: Teaching 2: Saint Gregory the Theologian

January: Day 25: Teaching 2:
Saint Gregory the Theologian
 
(Children Are the Support of Their Parents)

By Archpriest Grigory Dyachenko

I. In the life of Saint Gregory the Theologian, so called for his writings about God the Word, the Savior of the world, and about the Holy Spirit, whose memory we celebrate today, there is one trait of his noble character that is especially instructive for us: his filial love and devotion to his parents. It is this that we recall on this day.

The Lord endowed the great hierarch Saint Gregory with great natural gifts: the gift of eloquence in him was extraordinary. Because of this gift, when Gregory was only twenty-one years old, he was left as an instructor of rhetoric in the very city of Athens where he had received his final education. A great and glorious future lay before Gregory, both in the secular sphere and in the spiritual one; he was invited everywhere to occupy one chair or another. But his love for his aged parents was so great that he once and for all refused all flattering offers, once and for all he resolved to live in Nazianzus until the death of his parents and to help his father there in his episcopal and household labors.

His close friend Saint Basil also repeatedly invited Gregory to his beautiful retreat on the river Iris, for joint holy labors that were a necessity and a delight to their kindred souls; but Gregory the Theologian declined this as well because of filial duty. “I confess,” wrote Saint Gregory himself to his friend Basil in response to his invitation to the life of seclusion, “I did not keep my word, to unite my life with yours in a school of new philosophy; I did not keep the promise given already in Athens, where friendship fused our souls into one. But I failed to fulfill my promise not by my own will: the law of friendship must give way to the law of filial love.”

Later, having visited Saint Basil for a short time and then returned to Nazianzus, Saint Gregory said to his flock: “What brought me back to you, first, was my attachment to you, and second, my own concern, my own task — the gray hair and weakness of my parents, who suffer more over me than over their own years. For them, to be a staff in old age, a support in weakness, constituted the first vow I made, which I am fulfilling to the best of my ability, so that I resolved even to abandon philosophy itself — the dearest thing of all to me.” In one of his spiritual writings Saint Gregory wrote: “In serving my parents, I thought to fulfill what is pleasing to You, my King Christ; for You grant mortals children, that they may have help in them, and by them, as by a staff, support their trembling limbs.”

And what labors he did not bear in Nazianzus out of love for his parents, despite the fact that these occupations were very much against his inclination! With sorrow he described in one of his letters to Saint Basil his busy and burdensome household duties in his parents’ home. According to his words, there he had to supervise the work of servants, pay taxes, defend property rights before corrupt judges, argue with extortionate tax collectors, and so on and so forth; and all this, with a heavy heart, he patiently carried out as a loving son for his beloved parents, until their very death.

II. Here, parents, you have an enviable example of the care you ought to receive from your children; and here, children, you have an instructive model of what you should be toward your parents — what love, what attention, and what care you should surround your aged parents with in their infirmities. I repeat to you, children, once more the beautiful words of the great hierarch that I cited above: “You grant, O Lord, to mortals children, that they may have help in them, and by them, as by a staff, support their trembling limbs.”

III. Therefore, children, firmly imprint these most significant and exceedingly beneficial words — especially in our present times, so difficult for parents — the words of the great hierarch, words sealed by his holy life. Amen. 

 

Source: A Complete Annual Cycle of Short Teachings, Composed for Each Day of the Year. Translated by John Sanidopoulos.