SAINT Sophia of Kleisoura

The Ascetic of the Panagia:

Tragedy Transfigured

Fr. Michael Shanbour

”One is the Lord and one is the Lady (Theotokos), the rest of us are all siblings.”

This saying of the relatively unknown Eldress (now Saint) Sophia provides us with a fitting summary of her simple and singleminded sanctity, her complete devotion to our Savior, incarnated as humility and love for all. But this sanctification and experiential knowledge of God was forged in the fire of suffering and loss, a “forced” self-denial followed by voluntary asceticism. Instead of being overcome by sadness and despair, Sophia gathered her spiritual energies, as light intensifies to form a laser, and offered all to the Lord, blessing Him who gives and who takes away (Job 1:21). As with the Apostle Paul, her earthly loss became a heavenly gain:

“But what things were gain to me, these I have counted loss for Christ. Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ” (Phil. 3:7–8).

After seven years of marriage, her two small children died one after the other in 1914. Then her husband “disappeared,” never to be heard from again after being drafted in the First World War. This was the crucible from which sprang this newly canonized ascetic and fool sometimes known in her own time as “Crazy Sophia.”