By Katherine Kelaidis

As I wrote last year, “Advent” as such really isn’t a thing in the Eastern Christian tradition. That being said, in my mind, and all through my life The Holiday Season ™ began on November 9th, with the feast of St. Nektarios of Aegina. In 2021, Serbian filmmaker  Yelena Popovic wrote and directed a biopic of this popular 20th-century saint. These are my reflections on the film and a saint who feels like a family friend.

I am five years old and I am wearing a plaid pink skirt and a pink Lady and the Tramp t-shirt. My unruly curls pulled back with a Sleeping Beauty tiara headband purchased at Disneyland the day before. I sit on a wooden pew at the St. Nektarios National Shrine in Covina, California, a Greek Orthodox church in Los Angeles County which houses some of the relics of St. Nektarios of Aegina. My maternal grandfather, my beloved Pappou George, is kneeling beside me. His whispered prayers are just audible over the drone of Byzantine chanting playing from a tape-recorder  over the loudspeaker.  A few weeks before, in a small doctor’s office at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Denver, Colorado, he had been told that my grandmother was dying. She is fifty-nine years old and what began as some lost keys a few years before has been revealed to be early onset Alzeheimer’s Disease.

My grandfather has come to the St. Nektarios Shrine to ask for the holy man’s help. We will leave the shrine with a wooden icon of the Panagia (the Virgin Mary) and a small silver medallion  bearing the image of the saint. The medallion will be pinned to my grandmother’s pillow when she draws her last breath less than thirty-six months later. Twenty years after that, it will find its way into her husband’s coffin, draped across the stefana (the crowns used in Eastern Christian weddings) from their wedding.  The icon hangs on the wall above me as I write this.

Pappou’s grandmother, the woman who raised him after his mother’s death when he was nine, had known the saint when she was a young girl, having run away to the women’s monastery he founded. Her father sent her step-brothers to go get her back.  A short time later, she ran away again from that unhappy home, this time with the man who would become her husband, a worker hired to help bring in her father’s olive harvest. While the idea of a romantic escape with the help might seem like a good idea to a 14 year old girl, it is a story that does not often turn out well in the real world. Leaving her father’s olive groves and her cruel step-brothers did not, I fear,  translate into a necessarily happy life for the young girl that everyone I know still calls “Yiayia Georgelas” even sixty years after her death. Thirteen children were born over two decades, with seldom more than eight months between pregnancies. Her husband lost his right leg in the mines and two daughters died  before their twenty-fifth birthdays, including my great-grandmother, Yiayia Georgelas’s first-born. A daughter of some privilege, she spent most of her life in grueling poverty, kept from returning home by the knowledge that her father or brothers or even an uncle or male cousin, would surely kill her should he ever lay eyes on her again, a necessary shedding of blood to restore the honor she had stolen from them.

In the face of this reality, alone without family or safety, Yiayia Georgelas turned to her faith. Her father in this world would never forgive her, would never look at her again, but our Father in Heaven was all-forgiving. He would have her back in his house, welcome her back again and again to His table, a Father who loved His children more than His honor .The saints she called on day and night were sisters and brothers,  and her casual familiarity in prayer won the chastisement of more than one village priest.  And there was none with whom she was more familiar, more easy in the manner that she spoke, than Nektarios of Aegina, her beloved geronda. She was certain that she would have known happiness had she only been permitted to stay with him and her equally beloved blind abbess, Xenia the Nun.

Like so many women from her time and place, Yiayia Georgelas  never lived a day in which she was not under the authority of some man or another.  By her reckoning, Metropolitan Nektarios was the only one of those men who was kind, who favored gentleness, who did not raise his voice or his hand.  Asking for his intercessions and venerating him long before his official canonization, Agios Nektarios was the image of the Father God for whom Yiayia Georgelas longed. As a consequence, for me and  everyone in my grandfather’s sprawling maternal clan, St. Nektarios was an ever present figure, a patron and member of the family. “Ask Agios Nektarios,” my mother and aunts and grandfather would offer, whenever I worried about a chemistry test or music competition. Agios Nektarios would help. No problem was too big or small to bring to him.

I tell you all this, because it is not without a significant amount of baggage that I arrived at watching Man of God, the 2021 film about St. Nektarios (expertly portrayed by Aris Servetalis), written and directed by Serbian film maker Yelena Popovic, which was likely helpful (as baggage like this so seldom is), because the film does little to provide narrative context for its audience. Beginning in media res, as the popular Metropolitan Nektarios is being driven from the Patriarchate of Alexandria by jealous colleagues, the film depicts the last thirty years of St. Nektarios’s life through beautiful cinematography, uneven dialogue, and a disjointed narrative that would doubtlessly be difficult to follow for those not already familiar with the story.

All of this is explicable, if not forgivable, however, if one takes the view that Man of God is meant as a visual modern hagiographic text, not a Hollywood biopic. As common in hagiography, Popovic does not allow her characters sufficient complexity to seem human as individuals, but she does manage to raise issues common to the human condition, or at the very least, issues of ecclesiastical importance.

Because at the heart of St. Nektarios’s life, and consequently Man of God,  is a central question: What are we to do when the institutional Church itself is acting in opposition to holiness?

Because no matter how you tell St. Nektarios’s story, it is difficult to avoid the fact that the most persistent opposition he faced, his most constant adversary, was his brother bishops. Man of God does briefly attempt to make Christos (played by Christos Loulis), the atheist president of Rizarios Seminary in Athens, where the saint served as dean, the central opponent of the film’s second act. This completely fictional character is a poor adversary, mainly yelling occasionally when he thinks too many of the students want to become priests or when St. Nektarios spends too much money helping a sick scholarship student. In a film of fairly shallow characters, Christos is particularly empty and seems only to exist so that the audience doesn’t get the idea that only clerics are out to slander St. Nektarios.

Except that is sort of the truth. Metropolitan Nektarios was beloved by his people, from the people (both Christian and Muslim) on the streets of Cairo to the scholarship students at Rizarios Seminary to  the young girls, like Yiayia Georgelas, who sought sanctuary in his monastery. He proclaimed the gospel to these people and told them the truest thing that can be told to anyone: You are loved infinitely by God without condition or exception.  It was his love of the marginalized and the powerless, and of the just plain ordinary and his willingness to declare upon them God’s love, that was and is the clearest evidence of his holiness. The unseen people loved him, because he saw them, because he took time to look at them and hear them. And it is in this way that he is most like the Christ he sought to emulate.  And it was also this love that made him dangerous to the institution of the Church, because the hierarchy of the Church understood the power of love and feared that it undermined their own power, which was born of something else.

This tension between the disruptiveness of Christ-like love and the demands of an institution as hierarchical and imperial as the Church (be it Orthodox, Catholic, or Anglican) is a paradox at the heart of what it means to be a Christian who chooses to remain a part of the ancient, apostolic, and by extension, imperial Christian traditions. It is a tension American Evangelical Protestants should have to recon with as well, if they are being honest about who they are and what they are in the context of the American Empire. This reflections means accepting that sometimes, maybe most of the time, holiness, true holiness, is not in the best interest of the Church, while simultaneously believing that this institution, for all its faults, is the vehicle by which holiness comes among us.

In part, I can believe this to be true, because I see how and when holiness corrects the Church, how the Church responds and changes by its witness to the Holy Spirit. There is a tendency among the Orthodox to take pride in the idea of an “unchanging Church.” For ethnic Orthodox Christians, the idea that “we got it right all along” appeals to a nationalistic pride, while converts often come to Orthodoxy looking for the 1st-century Church and believing they have found it completely intact. Even a cursory examination of history reveals them to be wrong. We have an unchanging God in the sense that God is faithful and that  God will never leave us (I can, after all,  think of a dozen instances in the Hebrew Scripture where God changes his mind),  but not an unchanging Church. Human institutions, even divinely instituted, change and when we are lucky they transform in the direction of holiness; they bend to the will of God.

And that is very much what has happened since the repose of St. Nektarios of Aegina. Canonized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1961, ini 1998, the Patriarchate of Alexandria issued the following apology:

Alexandria 15th September 1998

The Holy Spirit has enlightened the gathered members of the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Alexandria and all Africa, under the leadership of H.B. Petros VII, Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and all Africa, more than a century since Saint Nektarios, the great Teacher and Father of the Holy Eastern Orthodox Church was expelled from the Church of Alexandria, to reach the following decision:

Taking into account the resolution of the Church to rank Saint Nektarios amongst the saints because of his innumerable miracles and his acceptance within the religious conscience of Orthodox Christians throughout the world, we appeal to the mercy of the ever-charitable God.

We hereby restore the ecclesiastical order of the Saint of our Century, Saint Nektarios, and grant to him all due credits and honours. We beseech Saint Nektarios to forgive both us, unworthy as we are, and our predecessors, our brothers of the Throne of Alexandria, for opposition to the Saint and for all which, due to human weakness or error, our Holy Father, Bishop of Pentapolis, Saint Nektarios, suffered.

PETROS VII, By the Grace of God

Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and All Africa.

This apology buoys my faith in an institution that disappoints me again and again, because it reminds me once again that when we sin against one another “due to human weakness or error,” we can beg one another’s forgiveness and trust in “the mercy of the ever-charitable God.”

But this lesson is only present in the life of St. Nektarios if we accept that the Church and her clerics can make such an easy, unforced error. And Man of God, it would seem to me, cannot bring itself to admit this simple truth. This makes even the film’s hagiographic aims fall short. This is not to say Man of God is not worthy of the $8.99 to stream it on Amazon Prime. It most certainly is, if for no other reason, than the truly wild experience of seeing Orthodox clerics and liturgy in a movie not about vampires. But it is a missed opportunity. Man of God could have been so much more.

Not long after my grandfather and I left St. Nektarios’s Shrine, my grandmother no longer recognized me. She could not recall my name, even though it is her own. She could not recognize any of her children or her sisters or her beloved cocker spaniel, Buffy.  The home where she had lived since the late 1950s was quickly a foreign landscape. Amidst strangers in a strange place, the parade of visitors and nurses left her frightened nearly all the time. The only face she recognized, even at the end, and the only name she could conjure, belonged to her husband. So when he was gone, as far as she was concerned, she was alone. “Where is George?” she would demand of whoever was unlucky enough to be left to watch her in his absence, “Go get George!” And then, with a conviction that now strikes me as odd for  a woman who most surely must have been completely unmoored, “George wouldn’t just leave me.”

To calm her fears, my grandfather gave her that St. Nektarios medallion, telling her to hold on to it each time he left, even for a second, until he returned to her side. “Agios Nektarios,” Pappou, steadied by faith and I think not a little bit of pessimism in the face of calamity, would tell her, “Agios Nektarios will keep you company until I get back. If you need anything, ask him.” For what it is worth, I think Agios Nektarios heard my frightened grandmother as she sat praying for her husband, the only person left in her world, to return to her side.

He heard her, I am certain, seven years before the Patriarchate of Alexandria apologized. Just like he heard Yiayia Georgelas for decades, both in the flesh and in front of  the throne of God, before Constantinople declared he was a saint, acknowledged the holiness that threatened their power. Man of God makes no room for these contradictions and that is a shame, though likely not a fatal one. Maybe we can never tell the truth about our saints because it reveals too much about us. And I think St. Nektarios would likely be okay with that and you can trust me…he’s an old friend of the family after all.