Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Congratulations with the feast of the Resurrection of the Lord, as well as with the 30th anniversary of the blessed repose of the wonderful Georgian saint of the Soviet period, the Holy Monk and Confessor Gabriel (Urgebadze) of Samtavro! Perhaps not everyone knows about this saint; therefore, today let us briefly talk about him.

St. Gabriel was born in 1929 in Tbilisi. While still a boy or teenager, he became interested in Christianity and to learn more about Christ, he somehow raised enough money to buy himself a Gospel. After a certain amount of time he learned the text of the Gospel almost by heart. In 1955 he was tonsured a monk as well as ordained to the priesthood. Most of the following ten years he served in various churches in Tbilisi, including at the main cathedral of the Georgian Orthodox Church. He built a chapel in the garden of his parents’ home which he decorated with icons that he found, or one could say ‘saved’, from the city dump or which he cut out of magazines or newspapers. The Communist authorities razed this chapel more than once, but the saint restored it after every such occurrence. In 1965 Fr. Gabriel burnt a portrait of Lenin at a Communist rally, after which he was severely beaten, arrested, and imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for seven months. He explained his actions in the following way: “The reason for my action is that one must worship the crucified Christ and not Lenin. One must not deify an earthly man. Not ‘Glory to Lenin!’ but ‘Glory to Thee, o God, glory to Thee!’”

In 1971 the Holy Monk Gabriel was assigned as the confessor of a women’s monastery in Samtavro. Here the nuns, as other people had before, noticed the strange behaviour of their new spiritual father. He could be very rude and unpleasant and could demean the nuns, lived in an abandoned chicken coop for a while, and walked around barefoot in winter. At first this type of behaviour was naturally difficult for the nuns to understand, but they soon saw past the supposed insanity of the elder and noticed his particular Christian love for them. Of course, St. Gabriel was not crazy, but from a young age he had accepted the struggle of foolishness for Christ’s sake, that is, he willingly acted in an irrational manner so as to, in the most extreme way, humble himself for the sake of Christ’s love. With time, not only the nuns of the Samtavro Monastery and the clergy who knew of his spiritual gifts held him in high regard, but all the believers of Georgia learned of him and saw in him a special spiritual guide. While the saint was still alive, many miracles were preformed through his prayers. The Holy Monk Confessor Gabriel reposed on the 2nd of November in 1995 and was glorified as a saint by the Georgian Church in 2012.

Through the prayers of Saint Gabriel, may our Lord God grant us strength to live simply, find humility, and become habitations for the Holy Spirit, so as to fearlessly glorify our Saviour, the sweetest Jesus Christ.

priest Alexis