Before my wife and I were engaged—before we had met—we were two ordinary people who loved God and wanted to be married. Not a crisis. Just the ordinary wish to be married.
So I asked my father confessor at the time in South Florida for help. He didn’t hand me a marriage book or a strategy. He gave me a saint. His instructions were, more or less: Pray to Saint Xenia of Saint Petersburg. Ask her to prepare your heart and bring you a wife.
Several time zones away in Arizona, Polina was having a similar conversation with her own confessor. He gave her a saint too: Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco—a bishop who spent his last years serving in California, which is where I’m from. Neither of us knew about the other’s assignment. We hadn’t met.
And then we met, and we hit it off. My first visit to Arizona to meet her, I had dinner with her family and visited their parish. And I was standing in her home parish, in the approximate area where her family had stood many times, and I looked up.
Two icons. Opposite walls. Facing each other. Saint Xenia, and Saint John.
I stood there next to Polina and thought: They’re winking at each other. They’ve been at this a while. We showed up late.
The Bible Spends a Whole Chapter Naming “Dead” People
That story only works if the saints are doing something. Participating—in an actual marriage, an actual family, an actual Tuesday afternoon. Which sounds immediately to some like a late medieval accretion, but it isn’t.
Hebrews 11 runs the roll: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Rahab—Rahab, which should encourage all of us—Gideon, Samson, David, Samuel, the prophets. Then verse 38, about the ones sawn in two and living in caves: of whom the world was not worthy.
Notice what that is. A list of names. An inspired author of Holy Scripture spent an entire chapter naming specific dead people and telling you what they did. The list is the theological work, not an aside.
Then chapter 12 turns the list into a room of saints: we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses. Compassed about. Surrounded. Present tense.
And the instinct is older than the Church. Wisdom of Sirach 44 opens, Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us, and then runs its own roll call for six chapters. A little later: their name lives to all generations.
That’s a feast day. The definition of one, written two centuries before there was an “institutional Church” to keep them. Hebrews 11 stands in an old tradition—Sirach 44 with the Resurrection added, which changes everything, because now the names on the list are alive.
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A Throne with a Court around It
There’s a harder question underneath all this, and it deserves a straight answer: What kind of universe has to be true for any of it to work?
Psalm 82:1 — God has taken His place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods He holds judgment. That’s not late embellishment, that’s the Psalter.
In 1 Kings 22, Micaiah — the prophet nobody wants to invite — says he saw the LORD enthroned with the host of heaven standing on His right hand and on His left, and God turned and asked them a question. In Job 1 and 2, the sons of God present themselves before the LORD. In Revelation 4 and 5, John sees the throne, twenty-four elders, four living creatures, ten thousand times ten thousand.
Scripture’s standing picture of heaven is a throne with a court around it. If you want to go deeper into this and other issues surrounding early Judaism and Christianity, and you should, Fr. Stephen De Young’s The Religion of the Apostles and Fr. Andrew Damick’s Lord of Spirits are where I’d send you.
Somebody is thinking it, so let’s put it on the table: Isn’t that repackaged paganism?
Watch how casually Paul uses it. Do you not know that we shall judge angels? (1 Cor 6:3). He drops that into an argument about lawsuits—as a premise, the thing everybody already accepts, which he then builds on. Nobody builds a case on a premise his readers find absurd. The Apostles weren’t borrowing furniture from the pagans. They were writing from inside the house.
Here’s the thing. That council was never a closed circle of angels. Revelation seats elders there—human beings, on thrones. And Hebrews 12, a few verses past our cloud of witnesses, gives the guest list of the heavenly Jerusalem and names, in one breath, at one address: an innumerable company of angels, and the spirits of just men made perfect.
Same sentence. Same room. The council holds more than one kind of creature, and always has.
Which is why the Church writes their lives in a distinct genre. Biography informs you about a subject, and you judge it by accuracy of detail. Hagiography introduces you to someone still alive, and you judge it by whether you’d recognize them when you meet. Read a saint’s life the way you’d read a letter about a relative you’re about to pick up at the airport. You’re not fact-checking as much as you are getting ready to recognize somebody.
Nicaea, AD 325
Now the part that took twenty years to assemble, one decision at a time.
Athanasius was in the room at Nicaea—as a deacon. Around twenty-seven, not a bishop, no vote, attending as secretary to Bishop Alexander of Alexandria. He walked in as support staff and walked out having supplied the word that ended the argument: homoousios, of one essence with the Father. Arius, for his part, was reasonable and popular and a marketer — he set his theology to music so dockworkers would hum it at work. Athanasius spent forty-five years arguing with a catchy song. Exiled five times, roughly seventeen of those forty-five years spent away from his own city. Athanasius contra mundum described the arithmetic rather than the man’s temperament. He is my patron from baptism, and the saint for anyone who has been the only one in the room who thinks the thing is wrong.
Gregory the Illuminator was not in the room. Too old, in seclusion — so he sent his son Aristakes, who carried the decrees home. Gregory’s father had assassinated the king of Armenia; the family was destroyed in reprisal and the infant Gregory was carried to Caesarea and raised Christian. He went back into the service of King Trdat, son of the man his father murdered, refused to sacrifice to the goddess Anahit, and spent thirteen years in the pit at Khor Virap, fed bread by a widow over the edge. Then the king went mad, his sister dreamt that only the man in the pit could heal him, and they hauled Gregory up alive. He baptized the king and his court in the Euphrates, and Armenia became the first nation on earth to adopt Christianity as its state religion — traditional date 301, twelve years before the Edict of Milan. Armenia was Christian before Christianity was legal in Rome. He is my son Gregory’s patron.
James of Nisibis was in the room too, as a bishop and a signatory, one of the 318. He had lived as a mountain hermit in a goat-hair cloak until the city drew him out to make him bishop, and he kept wearing the cloak. He founded the church and school at Nisibis and taught a student named Ephrem the Syrian. In 338 he stood on the walls during Shapur II’s siege—the traditional account has gnats and mosquitoes routing the Persian elephants; what isn’t in dispute is that the city held and the people credited their bishop’s prayers.
And here is the part I want to be precise about, because it would be easy to tell as a coincidence.
James of Nisibis and Gregory the Illuminator were first cousins. The traditional Armenian account has James’s mother, Khosrovidukht, as Gregory’s paternal aunt, the two boys raised and educated together at Caesarea. Years later Gregory wrote to his cousin and asked him to compose homilies on faith and love.
I found that out first. My son already had Gregory. I had Athanasius from my own baptism. And when it came time to take a name at my tonsure as a reader, I went looking for one that would tie the household to the council and to my son’s patron at once—and I took James of Nisibis on purpose. (Read more about that decision here.)
Two cousins and a deacon with no vote. One creed. Three names picked deliberately, over decades.
The Rest of the Household
Xenia of St. Petersburg, the one my confessor sent me to. Widowed young, she gave away everything she owned, then refused her own name—answering only to her dead husband’s, saying that Andrey was alive and Xenia had died—and spent forty-five years wandering Petersburg in his military coat. God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. Her feast is January 24. Our daughter was born on it.
John of Shanghai and San Francisco, the one Polina was sent to. He followed the Russian diaspora across the twentieth century—Shanghai, the Philippines, Western Europe, San Francisco—barely slept, served daily, and was found praying in bell towers at night over whichever city held his people. In anticipation of his death he wrote to his flock: “Tell everyone, even though I have reposed, I am still alive.” His relics lie incorrupt in a cathedral in San Francisco. That sentence he wrote is this entire essay, written by a man who died in 1966.
Apollinaria, Polina’s patron from her own baptism. Daughter of Anthemius, regent to the young Theodosius II—born at the top of the Roman world and chose to become a monk….not a nun, a monk. She talked her parents into a pilgrimage, gave her jewels and money to the poor in Jerusalem, slipped away from her servants near Alexandria, and entered Sketis as a monk under the name Dorotheus. St. Macarius received her as one of the brethren, not knowing the ruse. When her own sister was made to accuse her falsely, she took the blame, walked home to Rome under guard, healed her sister, and went back to her cell. Her identity came out only at her death.
Alexandra Feodorovna and Sophia of Shamordino, chosen this year for our daughter. Alexandra was born Princess Alix of Hesse and received into Orthodoxy before she married Tsar Nicholas II—and she took St. Alexandra the Martyr Empress as her own patron, keeping April 23 as her name day, never knowing that one day she too would follow her patron saint into martyrdom. Our daughter’s patron had a patron. Her chaplain’s diary records her name day in 1917, when she was under house arrest: the family in bright festive clothes, a prosphora, and he described her as smiling, despite her suffering. She was murdered with her family the following July. Sophia Bolotova was a spiritual daughter of St. Ambrose of Optina—married in obedience to the elder, later widowed, tonsured by him, and made first abbess of Shamordino, a convent that received widows, orphans, and the blind whom other houses couldn’t afford. She led it three years and died at forty-two. After her death St. Ambrose told one of the sisters, :Remember, Mother Sophia was a saint!”
An empress and a village abbess, both chosen for the same infant. She has some shoes to fill!
Benedict of Nursia, ours twice over. Benedictus means blessed, and my surname—Bennett—descends from it, so he was on my mail before I had a vote. Serbian Orthodox families keep a Slava: an annual feast for the household’s own patron saint, not a person’s but the whole house’s. Polina and I loosely adopted the practice, and Benedict with it. His Rule opens, Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and it was written for beginners, with room made for the weak. A house with a four-year-old and an infant qualifies.
You Are Already in the Room
Nine names. Every one chosen, and I just gave you the reason behind each. My point in sharing each of these is not so I can talk about my family—though I certainly enjoy that—but rather in order to give a glimpse into how the saints “work” in the Orthodox faith.
Venerating the saints amounts to noticing where you’re standing—and then choosing who you stand with. Every Liturgy the curtain goes thin and you are in the room with them. Not thinking about them. With them. And every baptism, a name gets chosen, and a household gains a member it didn’t have the week before.
Compassed about. Surrounded. Not observed from a distance—surrounded, which is a different thing entirely, and the difference is most of the faith.
Two icons, on opposite walls of a church in Phoenix, over the spot where one family stood every Sunday. A California bishop and a Petersburg fool-for-Christ, looking at each other across a nave, while a woman prayed to one of them and a man three continents away prayed to the other — each sent there by a confessor who knew exactly what he was doing.
Nine names, chosen. A council you can join on purpose.