The Sayings of Mother Sophia

St. Sophia of Kleisoura left no writings; what survives of her teaching is a small body of terse, unlettered sayings preserved in the memory of her spiritual children and gathered into the devotional Life. This file presents her recorded sayings verbatim, with a short exposition of the ascetic and spiritual content of each, and notes their compiled-sayings provenance — they reach us through Pontic and Greek transmission, at one remove from her own hand.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Pontic Greek; 20th-c. woman ascetic)

How the Sayings Reach Us

St. Sophia (1883–1974) was an unlettered Pontic Greek refugee-woman who lived hidden by the hearth of the Monastery of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Kleisoura and wrote nothing (Sanidopoulos, “Eldress Sophia the Ascetic of Kleisoura,” Mystagogy, 2010/2011; OrthodoxWiki, “Sophia of Kleisoura”). Her sayings, therefore, belong to the genre the repository treats as a compiled-sayings provenance (METHODOLOGY §2.4): utterances remembered by disciples, spoken in Pontic Greek dialect and demotic Greek, and set down after her repose in the devotional accounts — above all as her spiritual children, chief among them Kyriaki Kioskeridou (d. 2022), transmitted them. Like the apophthegmata of the desert or the sayings of the recent Greek elders, they come to us at one remove: through memory and translation, not from her own pen. This does not make them untrustworthy; it means they are reported here as her recorded sayings as transmitted by her spiritual children, cited to the devotional sources that preserve them, and not as a verbatim transcript. The English wording follows the accessible English transmissions (Sanidopoulos/Mystagogy; OrthodoxWiki); the sayings below are given only as the facts of this compendium record them, and none has been supplied beyond them.

Their character is uniform: short, concrete, unlettered, and Christ- and Panagia-centered. They teach humility, patience, fasting, mercy, and the constant remembrance of God — the whole content of her hidden ascetic life compressed into a phrase.

“One Is the Lord and One Is the Lady”

“One is the Lord and one is the Lady [the Panagia]; the rest of us are all brothers and sisters.”

The saying sets the whole order of the Christian cosmos in a single breath. There is one Lord — Christ — and one Lady — the Mother of God, the Panagia who stood at the center of St. Sophia’s devotion and, in the accounts, called her to Kleisoura and visited her by the hearth. Beneath that one Lord and one Lady, every distinction of rank, wealth, and status among human beings collapses into a single kinship: “we are all brothers and sisters” (Sanidopoulos, “Eldress Sophia,” Mystagogy, 2010/2011; OrthodoxWiki). For a woman who had lost husband, child, and homeland and lived as the least of the monastery’s dependents, the saying is a confession that the only hierarchy that finally matters is the heavenly one, and that under it all human pretension to superiority is dissolved into equality and fraternity.

“Cover Others’ Things, So That God May Cover You”

“Cover [others’] things, so that God may cover you.”

This is her teaching on non-judgment and the mercy that hides a neighbor’s sin. To cover another’s fault — not to expose, gossip about, or condemn it — is to receive from God the same covering of one’s own sins; the measure a person uses is measured back to him (cf. Matthew 7:1–2; James 5:20). The saying compresses a whole tradition of ascetic charity into a merchant’s exchange: mercy shown is mercy received, concealment given is concealment obtained (Sanidopoulos, “Eldress Sophia,” Mystagogy, 2010/2011). It is of a piece with her counsel to pilgrims toward repentance and mercy (see Clairvoyance and Counsel).

The Wednesday and Friday Fast

“Oh, if you only knew what happened to the Lord on Wednesday and Friday, you would put nothing in your mouth.”

St. Sophia kept a severe fast — taking oil only at weekends — and here she gives the reason the Church fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays: on Wednesday Christ was betrayed, on Friday He was crucified (Sanidopoulos, “Eldress Sophia,” Mystagogy, 2010/2011; OrthodoxWiki). The saying grounds the discipline not in a rule but in remembrance: fasting is grief kept with the Lord in His betrayal and His Passion. “You would put nothing in your mouth” is hyperbole in the service of compunction — if the events of those days were truly present to us, no appetite could stand before them. It expresses the whole logic of her own extreme abstinence, which was never mere self-denial but a way of keeping company with the suffering Christ.

“Patience, a Lot of Patience”

“Patience… a lot of patience… patience, a lot.”

The repetition is the teaching. Asked, in effect, how one is to live, St. Sophia answers with a single word said three times over — hypomone, endurance, the patient bearing of affliction that the ascetic tradition names as the very substance of the Christian life (cf. Luke 21:19; Romans 5:3–4). From a woman who had endured genocide, exile, widowhood, the death of her child, half a century of poverty by the ashes, and the villagers’ mockery of “Crazy-Sophia,” the word carries the weight of a life. It is not advice offered from comfort but the distilled counsel of one who had borne everything and found that patience was the whole of the road (Sanidopoulos, “Eldress Sophia,” Mystagogy, 2010/2011).

“Pride Is an Ugly Thing… Dust to Dust”

“Pride is an ugly thing… dust to dust… pride casts the soul into hell.”

Here she names the root sin. Pride is set against the memory of death — “dust to dust” (Genesis 3:19) — the ascetic’s most ancient remedy against self-exaltation: a creature of dust has nothing to be proud of. The saying ends where the tradition says pride ends, in hell, for it was pride that cast down the angels (Sanidopoulos, “Eldress Sophia,” Mystagogy, 2010/2011; OrthodoxWiki). Against it stands the humility she practiced by accepting the name of madwoman and living as the least in the house — the fool-for-Christ’s deliberate embrace of contempt (see Foolishness and Hidden Prayer).

“I Look Up”

“I look up.”

Asked how she endured her hardship — the cold hearth, the sleepless nights, the stone for a pillow — St. Sophia answered simply, “I look up” (Sanidopoulos, “Eldress Sophia,” Mystagogy, 2010/2011). The two words hold her whole spirituality: the ascetic bears the earthly by fixing the mind on heaven, lifting the eyes to God rather than dwelling on the affliction of the body (cf. Psalm 122/123:1, “Unto Thee have I lifted up mine eyes, O Thou that dwellest in the heavens”). It is the practical form of the patience she counseled — endurance made possible not by gritted teeth but by the direction of the gaze.

The Panagia Passing Through

Sweeping the corridor and asked why, she said the Panagia would pass through that night and it must be clean — “Yes… I have seen her pass through here.”

The last saying returns to the center of her life, the Mother of God. Found sweeping the monastery corridor and asked the reason, St. Sophia answered that the Panagia would pass through in the night and the way must be clean, adding, “Yes… I have seen her pass through here” (Sanidopoulos, “Eldress Sophia,” Mystagogy, 2010/2011; OrthodoxWiki). The saying joins the humblest labor — sweeping a floor — to the highest vision, and does so without any break between them: for St. Sophia the presence of the Panagia at Kleisoura was as ordinary and as near as the corridor she cleaned. Reported per the repository’s §3.5 discipline, the claim to have “seen her pass through” is her own recounted testimony, transmitted by her spiritual children, not a documented event; but as a saying it perfectly expresses the seamless devotion in which her hidden asceticism and her Marian piety were one thing (see Clairvoyance and Counsel).

The Shape of the Whole

Taken together the sayings form a coherent teaching, and a thoroughly traditional one: one Lord and one Lady above all; mercy that covers the neighbor; fasting as remembrance of the Passion; patience as the substance of the road; the memory of death against pride; the lifted gaze that bears all hardship; and the Panagia present in the humblest work. There is nothing novel in them — that is their authority. They are the desert fathers’ wisdom spoken again in a Pontic refugee-woman’s dialect by a monastery hearth, and preserved because her spiritual children found in them the compressed record of a holy life (Sanidopoulos, “Eldress Sophia,” Mystagogy, 2010/2011; OrthodoxWiki; METHODOLOGY §2.4 on compiled-sayings provenance).

References

Sanidopoulos, John. “Eldress Sophia the Ascetic of Kleisoura.” Mystagogy Resource Center / Orthodox Christianity Then and Now, 2010/2011. (The principal accessible English source preserving the sayings: “One is the Lord and one is the Lady”; “Cover others’ things”; the Wednesday/Friday fasting saying; “Patience, a lot of patience”; “Pride is an ugly thing… dust to dust”; “I look up”; the Panagia passing through the corridor. Devotional transmission standing on Greek-language material.)
OrthodoxWiki. “Sophia of Kleisoura.” (Parallel devotional biography preserving several of the sayings; aggregator source.)
Greek Orthodox Christian Society (lychnos.org) and OrthoChristian.com, devotional materials on Eldress Sophia of Kleisoura. (Greek-language and devotional accounts underlying the English transmissions.)
Testimony of Kyriaki Kioskeridou (d. 2022) and the monastery community, as transmitted in the above accounts. (The living memory in which the sayings were preserved.)
METHODOLOGY.md §2.4 (compiled-sayings provenance) and §3.5 (pinning hagiographic claims to their source), this repository.
Scripture alluded to in the exposition: Genesis 3:19; Psalm 122/123:1; Matthew 7:1–2; Luke 21:19; Romans 5:3–4; James 5:20.