The Daily Liturgy and the Tears

Ordained a hieromonk in the mid-1930s, St. Ephraim made the daily celebration of the Divine Liturgy the center of his hidden life at Katounakia — served, by every account, with unceasing tears. The altar, not the fame or the counsel that came late in his life, was the true heart of his priesthood: the point where his obedience and his prayer were gathered up into the offering of the Eucharist.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite

The Priest of the Desert

Ephraim was ordained to the priesthood in the mid-1930s, about a year after his advancement to the great schema — becoming a hieromonk, a priest-monk, in the little hut of St. Ephraim the Syrian at Katounakia (biography Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, trans. Vassiliadou-Christodoulou, Katounakia, 2003, on his ordination the year after his great-schema tonsure of 1935; see Coming to the Holy Mountain, 1933). This is a fact of the first importance for understanding him, and one easily lost behind his reputation as a teacher of obedience and prayer: Ephraim of Katounakia was, for more than sixty years, a serving priest, and the priesthood — specifically the daily offering of the Divine Liturgy — was the center of gravity of his whole life (Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, 2003, on the priesthood as the center of his life; on the Liturgy itself, see The Divine Liturgy and Divine Liturgy).

Not every Athonite hermit is a priest, and not every priest-monk celebrates daily; the eremitic life often means long stretches without the Liturgy, or reliance on a neighboring priest. Ephraim’s practice was different. He is remembered as celebrating the Divine Liturgy daily, in the tiny chapel of his hut, through the decades of his hidden life — a discipline that made the Eucharist the fixed daily axis around which his vigil, his Jesus Prayer, and his obedience all turned (Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, 2003, on his daily celebration of the Liturgy; the daily Liturgy is a constant of the derivative Lives, e.g. vema.com.au, “Saint Ephraim of Katounakia,” and johnsanidopoulos.com, per METHODOLOGY §2.3). For a hesychast, this daily gathering of the whole ascetic life into the Eucharistic offering is not incidental; it is the point where the private prayer of the heart is joined to the public prayer of the Church and to the sacrifice of Christ.

The Gift of Tears

What every source agrees on, and what most impressed those who knew him or heard of him, is that Ephraim served the Liturgy with tears — copious, habitual, and evidently involuntary weeping at the altar (Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, 2003, on his tears during the Liturgy; Middleton, Precious Vessels of the Holy Spirit, Protecting Veil, 2004; the tears are a fixed feature of the Lives, per METHODOLOGY §2.3). In the ascetic tradition the “gift of tears” (charisma ton dakryon) is one of the most highly esteemed of spiritual gifts — the sign of a heart softened by compunction (penthos), of genuine repentance, and, in its higher forms, of the joy-creating sorrow that the fathers associate with the visitation of grace (on tears and compunction in the tradition, cf. St. John Climacus, Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 7, on joyful mourning; see Orthodox Monasticism). Ephraim’s tears at the Liturgy were understood by those around him as exactly this: not sentimentality but the overflow of a heart pierced by the reality of what it celebrated (Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, 2003).

The sources connect these tears specifically to the Eucharist — to his sense of the presence of Christ in the Holy Gifts. He wept, they say, in the presence of the sacrifice; and this weeping was so bound up with his celebration that it became inseparable from the memory of him as a priest (Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, 2003; Middleton, Precious Vessels, 2004). The tears are thus the outward and visible sign of the inward reality treated in the companion file — the reality that, on his own testimony, he perceived at the altar something more than the eye of faith ordinarily perceives (see The Liturgical Visions). But it is important to hold the two apart: the tears are broadly attested as an observable fact of his celebration; the visionary experiences to which they were joined reach us only through his own words and are handled, per the collection’s methodology, as testimony (see Experiences Pinned to Testimony).

The Priesthood as the Hidden Center

It would be easy, given his late fame as an elder, to think of Ephraim’s counsel and his teaching on obedience as the main substance of his life, and the Liturgy as its pious background. The sources suggest the reverse. The counsel and the visits of pilgrims came mostly in his later years and were, by his own disposition, unwelcome intrusions on a life he wished to keep hidden; the Liturgy was the constant, the thing he did every day for sixty years whether anyone was watching or not (Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, 2003, on the priority of the Liturgy in his hidden life; Middleton, Precious Vessels, 2004). For a man whose whole vocation was to disappear into obedience and prayer, the daily Liturgy was the supremely fitting center: an act done not for reputation but for God, in obscurity, at the altar of a hut on a cliff at the end of the Mountain.

This is also where his two great themes come to rest. His obedience and his noetic prayer were not ends in themselves; they were the purification and preparation of a heart that could stand at the altar and offer the sacrifice. The Jesus Prayer he had received from Joseph the Hesychast and practiced unceasingly (see The Meeting and Noetic Prayer) found its summit and its context in the Eucharist, where the Name he invoked all day was joined to the Body and Blood of the One he named. The obedience he had rendered to Nikephoros for decades (see Obedience as Cross and Path) had cut away the self-will that would have made him unfit to handle the holy things. The priesthood gathered up the whole of his ascetic life and offered it (Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, 2003).

A Note on Frequency and Attestation

The collection reports the daily Liturgy and the habitual tears as the settled and uniform memory of Ephraim’s tradition, attested across the community biography and the Lives dependent on it (Elder Ephraim of Katounakia, 2003; Middleton, Precious Vessels, 2004; and the derivative Lives, per METHODOLOGY §2.3). [Disputed: the sources uniformly describe Ephraim as celebrating the Divine Liturgy daily with tears through the decades of his priesthood; the collection reports this as the consistent testimony of his tradition. Whether "daily" admits of the ordinary exceptions of the eremitic life (illness, canonical impediment, the fasts on which no Liturgy is served) is not spelled out in the devotional sources, which report the daily celebration as his characteristic practice rather than as an unbroken statistic. His stroke in 1996 curtailed the practice at the end of his life (see [The Repose, 1998](../08-repose-and-glorification/the-repose-1998.md)).] This is the disciplined form of the claim: the daily Eucharist with tears is the firmly and uniformly attested pattern of his priesthood, reported as such, without pressing the devotional language into a precision it does not itself claim.

References

Elder Ephraim of Katounakia [Ὁ Γέρων Ἐφραίμ ὁ Κατουνακιώτης]. Trans. Tessy Vassiliadou-Christodoulou. Katounakia: Holy Hesychasterion of St. Ephraim, 2003. (His ordination; the daily Divine Liturgy; the gift of tears; the priesthood as the center of his life.)
Middleton, Herman A. Precious Vessels of the Holy Spirit. Thessalonica: Protecting Veil, 2004. (His tears and his hidden priestly life.)
St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 7 (on joy-creating mourning and the gift of tears), cited for the tradition’s understanding of tears.
Derivative Lives (vema.com.au; johnsanidopoulos.com) on the daily Liturgy; per METHODOLOGY §2.3.