Reading Souls in the City

What actually happened in the small chapel beside the Athens Polyclinic across more than three decades: the hours upon hours of confession, given to each penitent as though to the only one; the consolation of the sick, the dying, and the bereaved in the wards of a hospital through war, occupation, and the hard postwar years; the slow gathering of a circle of spiritual children — laypeople, families, students, professionals, eventually writers and scholars — drawn to an obscure chaplain who seemed to know them better than they knew themselves; and the charism of insight, given on Athos, now at work amid the suffering of a great city, hidden in plain sight.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 2013)

The Confessional in the Hospital

The visible center of St. Porphyrios’s life at the Polyclinic was the confessional. As he had in Evia, so now in Athens, he heard confessions for hours on end — long days bent to the souls who came to the little Chapel of St. Gerasimos, giving each one his full attention as if that person were the only soul in Athens (Wounded by Love, trans. Raffan, Denise Harvey, 2005, “The Polyclinic years”; Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com). The same discerning mercy that had marked the young confessor governed him here: he was gentle with the burdened, precise with the self-deceived, and merciful by the principle of St. Basil, weighing the manner of repentance rather than the letter of the canons (see The Young Confessor).

A hospital chapel is a particular kind of confessional. The people who came to it were often there because someone they loved was sick or dying down the corridor; they came frightened, grieving, at the end of their resources. To these St. Porphyrios was, the accounts agree, an extraordinary consolation — not because he offered easy comfort, but because he met them with a love so evidently real, and an insight so disarming, that they left lighter than they had come. Through the war years, the famine of the Occupation, and the grinding poverty of postwar Athens, the hospital filled with suffering, and the chaplain in his chapel became, for thousands, the place where that suffering could be brought to Christ.

Consoling the Sick and the Dying

Much of St. Porphyrios’s labor at the Polyclinic was not in the chapel at all but at the bedsides of the sick and the dying. He moved among the wards as a chaplain does, but with the added gift of being able to perceive what a patient most needed — the word of comfort, the call to confession, the simple presence — and to give it. The accounts of these years are full of the sick consoled, the dying prepared, the despairing turned back toward hope (Wounded by Love, “Among the sick”; Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com).

His own lifelong suffering of illness — the residue of the pleurisy, and the long sequence of grave maladies that would afflict him for the rest of his life — gave him a particular authority among the sick. He was not a well man ministering to the ill from a safe distance; he was himself, throughout these decades and after, a patient as much as a chaplain, and his teaching on illness reflects it. He came to regard sickness not as a punishment to be merely endured but as something that, embraced with love and offered to Christ, could become a means of grace — a teaching set out in the excerpt “On Illness” widely circulated from Wounded by Love (orthodoxinfo.com, “Excerpt from Wounded By Love: On Illness”). The sick of the Polyclinic heard this not as theory but from a man who lived it in his own broken body.

The Gathering of Spiritual Children

What began as a hospital chaplaincy slowly became something larger. Word spread — quietly, by the testimony of those who had encountered him — that there was a priest at the Polyclinic who could see into people, who met them with overwhelming love, who gave wise and often startlingly precise counsel, and who asked nothing for himself. People began to come not because they were patients at the hospital but because they had heard of the chaplain. A circle of spiritual children gathered around him: laypeople and families, students and young professionals, and, as the decades passed, doctors, academics, writers, and clergy who found in this near-illiterate former shepherd a depth of wisdom they had not met in the learned (Wounded by Love, “My spiritual children”; Saint Porphyrios: A Saint for Our Times, fatherlywords.com).

Among them were the two women who, over more than three decades of knowing him, kept the notes and recordings that would become Wounded by Love — the very archive on which our knowledge of his teaching rests (see The Books and the Influence). The book is, in a real sense, the fruit of the Polyclinic years: a record of what those who sat with the hidden chaplain heard him say.

The Charism at Work, Hidden in Plain Sight

Through all of this, the charism of insight given on Athos was at work — but, as always with St. Porphyrios, hidden in the service of love rather than displayed. In the confessional it surfaced as an uncanny knowledge of what a penitent had come to say, or had failed to say; at the bedside, as a knowledge of what a patient most needed; in counsel, as advice that reckoned with facts the Elder could not naturally have known. The documented accounts of this insight — pinned, where possible, to named witnesses — are gathered in their own place (see Accounts of Clairvoyance), and are reported there as what the witnesses attest, not as bare fact, per the methodology of this collection (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

What must be stressed here is the hiddenness. For most of these years St. Porphyrios was not a famous elder. He was an obscure hospital chaplain whom the crowds of Omonia passed without a glance, who supported himself by raising chickens and making incense, and who used his extraordinary gift only ever to help the particular soul in front of him. The fame came late and largely against his will; the substance came first, in three decades of unwitnessed labor. The “saint of Omonia” (athens-times.com) was, for almost all of his working life, a secret kept by the few who had found him.

War, Occupation, and Famine

The first years of St. Porphyrios’s Athens chaplaincy coincided with the most catastrophic period in modern Greek history, and the hospital chapel stood at the center of the suffering. He began at the Polyclinic in October 1940, the very month Greece entered the Second World War; within months the country was overrun, and Athens endured a brutal German-Italian-Bulgarian occupation (1941–1944). The winter of 1941–1942 brought the Great Famine of Athens, in which tens of thousands of people in the capital starved to death — a catastrophe whose scale is given by historians in ranges, but which on any account killed many tens of thousands in Athens and Piraeus alone over the occupation years (a contested figure given as scholarly ranges; the famine’s severity is not in dispute). The hospitals filled with the starving and the dying; the streets of central Athens, around the very Omonia where St. Porphyrios served, became a scene of mass death.

It was into this that the hidden chaplain poured his ministry. The accounts do not make him a relief administrator or a public figure of the resistance; they show him doing what he always did, but now amid unimaginable suffering — hearing confessions, consoling the dying, bringing the sacraments to the starving and the bereaved, and quietly helping where he could. The man who would later teach a generation that “Christ is everything” and that the soul must turn from darkness to light had his teaching forged, in part, in the darkest years his country ever knew. That his Christianity emerged from those years so luminous, so full of joy and beauty and love rather than bitterness, is itself a kind of testimony: he had seen the worst that the world could do, in the wards of an occupied city’s hospital, and had come through it convinced that the answer was not to fight the darkness but to fill the soul with Christ (see Wounded by Love).

The City as a School of Love

The deepest fruit of the Polyclinic years was the teaching itself. St. Porphyrios’s luminous doctrine of love — that the whole of the Christian life is to turn to Christ and to love, that one should not fight evil head-on but fill the soul with Christ, that beauty and joy are ways to God (see Section 05 and Section 06) — was not worked out in a study. It was forged in a hospital, among the sick and the grieving and the burdened of a hard city, across thirty years of confession and consolation. The elder who would tell a generation to “look toward Christ and He will save you” had spent those decades watching what the love of Christ could do to actual, suffering people — and what fear, scolding, and the head-on war with one’s own sins could not. The city was his school of love, and the chapel by the wards his classroom.

References

Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios. Translated by John Raffan. Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey (Publisher), 2005. The Polyclinic years; the confessions; the ministry to the sick; the spiritual children; the teaching on illness.
Elder Porphyrios (Bairaktaris): A Short Biography. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/66300.html). The hours of confession; the consolation of the sick and dying at the Polyclinic; the gathering of spiritual children.
“Excerpt from Wounded By Love: On Illness.” orthodoxinfo.com (praxis/elderporphyrios_illness.aspx). The Elder’s teaching on sickness embraced and offered to Christ.
Saint Porphyrios: A Saint for Our Times. fatherlywords.com (Knowing Orthodoxy). On the circle of spiritual children and the reach of his counsel.
Saint Porphyrios: The Saint of Omonia. athens-times.com. The hidden chaplain in the heart of Athens.