Love One Another

The heart of St. Gabriel’s message reduced to two words he repeated to the end of his life: love one another. This file gathers his recorded sayings on love, self-sacrifice, kindness, and humility — pinning each to the official monastery “Edifications” collection or to the named witness who set it down — and describes the radical hospitality in which the teaching took flesh: the wine kept for guests, the open table for the despised, the man who ate almost nothing and said he was nourished with Divine love. His last testament makes the teaching explicit: “God is Love… all man’s acquisition of the Kingdom consists of love.”

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox (canonized 2012)

The Whole Teaching in Two Words

Almost everything St. Gabriel is remembered for saying gathers around a single center. He was not a systematic teacher; he left no treatise; what survives is a set of short, hard sayings, recorded by his spiritual children and the Samtavro nuns, and a life lived as their commentary. But the sayings converge, and the center they converge upon is love — not as one virtue among several, but as the whole of the Christian life, the measure against which everything else is weighed and found to be nothing without it.

The Samtavro tradition reduces his preaching to a refrain. “Love each other,” he said; in the fuller form recorded in the official monastery “Edifications” collection (monkgabriel.ge), “Love each other. Georgia will be saved by love” (the official monastery “Edifications” collection, monkgabriel.ge). The same collection preserves the saying that places love above the whole apparatus of religious observance: “Love dominates all rules and laws” (monkgabriel.ge “Edifications”). This is the Pauline note — love as the fulfilling of the law (Rom. 13:10) — pressed to its sharpest edge, and it is the key to his folly as much as to his counsel: a man for whom love stands above the rules will break the rules for love’s sake, and be taken for mad.

“If You Have Everything Else, But Love, You Have Nothing”

The starkest of the love-sayings is a near-paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 13: “If you have everything else, but love, you have nothing” (the official monastery “Edifications” collection, monkgabriel.ge). It is paired, in the same collection, with two sayings that name love’s cost and love’s hunger. “You can not inherit love without self-sacrifice,” he taught — love is not a feeling to be enjoyed but an inheritance to be bought, and the price is the self (monkgabriel.ge “Edifications”). And, in one of his most vivid formulations: “One ought to have a greater hunger for love than for food, and a greater thirst for love than for wine” (monkgabriel.ge “Edifications”). Coming from a man who, the witnesses agree, ate almost nothing, the saying is not a figure of speech but a literal account of how he lived.

He did not require that the love be perfect, only that it begin. “Love everyone,” he said; “if you can’t, at least show a goodwill” (monkgabriel.ge “Edifications”). The concession is characteristic: a teaching pitched to the height of the commandment, but bent down to meet the weakness of the one who hears it.

The cost of love runs through the sayings recorded by Larisa Khrustalyeva in her life of the elder, where it widens from love of neighbor to the whole spiritual life. “Without sacrifice for the Lord and neighbor, nothing spiritual develops,” she records him saying; and, against any merely verbal piety, “God accepts deeds, not empty words” (Larisa Khrustalyeva, OrthoChristian art. 65883). The same source preserves what may be the most quoted of all his maxims on the social face of holiness: “Live so people love you — there is no greater thing” (Khrustalyeva, OrthoChristian art. 65883). It is a saying that could be sentimental in another mouth; in his, set beside the somersaults and the provocations, it is a demand that one’s whole life be ordered to the good of others rather than to one’s own reputation.

Kindness, Humility, and the Last Days

In St. Gabriel’s teaching love does not stand alone; it keeps company with kindness and humility, and the three together form what he understood as the path of salvation for ordinary people in a hard age. “Kind deeds mean love for the neighbor,” he said — kindness is not a lesser thing than love but its working form (monkgabriel.ge “Edifications”).

The fullest statement of this triad comes in a saying preserved in the monastery materials and in the American Carpatho-Russian Diocese life: “In the End Days a man will be saved by love, humbleness and kindness. Kindness will open the gates of Heaven; humbleness will lead into the Heaven; a man whose heart is filled with love will see God” (American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese life, acrod.org; cf. the monastery “Edifications,” monkgabriel.ge, which carries the shorter form, “In the Last Days a man will be saved by love, humility and kindness”). It is worth marking the contrast between this saying and the more sensational “Last Days” prophecies that circulate under his name. The end-times sayings about not looking to the sky, about salvation “from the cosmos,” about Georgia rising like Lazarus, travel widely but without a named first-hand recorder behind them [Disputed: the apocalyptic prophecies popularly attributed to St. Gabriel circulate in devotional retellings without a named first-hand witness, and are not carried by the restrained primary sources; they are excluded here in favor of the attributable sayings]. The “love, humility and kindness” saying, by contrast, is attributable to the monastery collection and to the published life, and it is the one that actually states his “Last Days” teaching: not a map of catastrophe, but a rule for being saved within it.

On humility he was especially insistent, both in his sayings and against himself. “A humbled man is protected from temptations,” he taught; “Humbleness will tame even the fiercest lion”; and, absolutely, “No one can enter the Kingdom of God without humbleness” (monkgabriel.ge “Edifications”). He turned the teaching first upon himself. “Always remember, Vasiko, that you are nothing but refuse,” he said — naming the disciple and naming himself in the same breath (monkgabriel.ge “Edifications”); and when he was mocked, by his own account, “I’d be humbled and see that I’m garbage” (American Carpatho-Russian Diocese life, acrod.org). The self-abasement is not a pose. It is the inner ground of the folly: a man who genuinely reckons himself refuse can afford to be despised, and being despised, can carry the contempt of others as a healing burden (see Folly That Reveals).

The Pitcher Without a Bottom

The most memorable image he gave for a loveless life was a vessel that cannot hold what is poured into it. “A man without love is like a pitcher without a bottom,” he said — in some retellings “a jug” — and the saying is among the best-attested of all his words. It is recorded in Khrustalyeva’s account, which traces it to Dali Mshvenieradze’s Beris Diadema [“The Elder’s Diadem”] and to Otar Nikolaishvili’s collection Miracles and Healings Given by God (Larisa Khrustalyeva, OrthoChristian art. 65883, citing Beris Diadema and Nikolaishvili). What makes the saying remarkable is that he did not merely speak it. His cell-attendant Nun Parasceva (Rostiashvili) attests that he turned the image into a living parable: he would wear a bottomless jug or pitcher on his back and a sign on his chest, walking as the very thing he warned against — the man who receives every grace and holds none of it, because he has no love at the bottom to keep it in (Nun Parasceva (Rostiashvili), OrthoChristian art. 173714). The folly and the teaching are here the same act; the lesson on love is delivered by a man making a spectacle of himself, which is the subject of the companion file.

The Radical Hospitality

If love was the whole of the teaching, hospitality was the whole of its practice. The witnesses are unanimous that St. Gabriel received everyone who came to his cell, and that he received most warmly exactly those whom respectable piety kept at arm’s length — the drunk, the fallen, the despised, the ones who arrived in shame. To love everyone, in his hands, was not an abstraction; it was an open door and a set table.

The most concrete sign of this was the wine. Khrustalyeva records that he kept wine for his guests — he called it, with his characteristic humor, “the professor” — and pressed it on them while he himself ate almost nothing; asked how he lived on so little, he answered that he was “nourished with Divine love, not just food” (Khrustalyeva, OrthoChristian art. 65883). The detail joins two of his sayings into a single observed fact: the man who taught that one should hunger for love more than for food, and who kept wine for the stranger while fasting himself, was living the “greater thirst for love than for wine” he preached. Hospitality, for him, was self-sacrifice made visible — the host who empties himself so that the guest may be filled, the very shape of the love that “you can not inherit without self-sacrifice” (monkgabriel.ge “Edifications”).

This open reception of the despised is the practical face of “Love everyone; if you can’t, at least show a goodwill.” It is also the ground on which his folly stood. A man who eats with the rejected and is taken for one of them has already surrendered the reputation that pride defends; he is free to be a fool, because he has nothing left to protect. The hospitality and the folly are two expressions of one renunciation.

“All Man’s Acquisition of the Kingdom Consists of Love”

The teaching received its final form in his testament. In the last will he left, St. Gabriel made love the explicit summary of the whole — and, in the same breath, confessed himself to have failed of it: “God is Love, but I have not attained love according to the Lord’s commandments… All man’s acquisition of the Kingdom consists of love” (Khrustalyeva, OrthoChristian art. 65883; the official testament). The confession is not false modesty but the logic of his humility carried to the end: the man who reduced the Kingdom to love would not claim to have reached it. He asked to be buried without a coffin, in his monastic vestments, and asked the pilgrims who would come to his grave to ask his forgiveness there (Khrustalyeva, OrthoChristian art. 65883; the official testament) — a last act of the same hospitality, the host who keeps his door open even from the grave.

His spiritual children pressed the same word as their inheritance from him. The Georgian actor David Giorgobiani — the star of Tengiz Abuladze’s film Repentance, and Gabriel’s spiritual child — recalled the elder’s charge in a single sentence: “Preserve love and you’ll be saved” (David Giorgobiani, interview by Alina Sergeichuk, OrthoChristian art. 157685). It is the whole teaching in a final, portable form: not a doctrine to be mastered but a thing to be kept, the one possession that, held to the end, is salvation.

References

Edifications of Saint Gabriel (the official monastery “Edifications” collection). monkgabriel.ge/eng/edifications.htm. The recorded sayings: “Love dominates all rules and laws”; “You can not inherit love without self-sacrifice”; “One ought to have a greater hunger for love than for food…”; “If you have everything else, but love, you have nothing”; “Love each other. Georgia will be saved by love”; “Love everyone; if you can’t, at least show a goodwill”; “Kind deeds mean love for the neighbor”; the humility sayings; “Always remember, Vasiko, that you are nothing but refuse.”
Khrustalyeva, Larisa. Elder Gabriel (Urgebadze): His Life, Miracles, and Service after his Death. Trans. Dimitra Dwelley. OrthoChristian.com, art. 65883. The “pitcher without a bottom” saying (citing Beris Diadema and Otar Nikolaishvili); “Without sacrifice… nothing spiritual develops”; “God accepts deeds, not empty words”; “Live so people love you”; the wine (“the professor”) and “nourished with Divine love”; the testament (“God is Love… all man’s acquisition of the Kingdom consists of love”) and the burial without a coffin.
Nun Parasceva (Rostiashvili). Cell-attendant memoir. OrthoChristian.com, art. 173714. The bottomless jug worn on his back and the sign on his chest as a living parable on love.
Giorgobiani, David. Interview by Alina Sergeichuk. OrthoChristian.com, art. 157685. “Preserve love and you’ll be saved.”
“St. Gabriel Urgebadze.” American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese of North America. acrod.org. The full “End Days… love, humbleness and kindness” saying; “I’d be humbled and see that I’m garbage.”
Mshvenieradze, Dali. Beris Diadema [“The Elder’s Diadem”], 2 vols. Tbilisi, 2006–2007 (cited via Khrustalyeva). Nikolaishvili, Otar. Miracles and Healings Given by God (cited via Khrustalyeva).