St Gregory the Wonderworker; Ven. Nikon of Radonezh

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  St Gregory the Wonderworker

  Gregory the Wonderworker (c. 213 – c. 270), bishop of Neocaesarea in Pontus, was the great missionary hierarch of third-century Asia Minor and the most celebrated miracle-worker of the ante-Nicene Church, whose very epithet — Thaumaturgus, "the Wonderworker" — became his name. A pagan lawyer converted under Origen at Caesarea, he returned to his native city as its first bishop and, by preaching and by an unbroken chain of miracles, all but converted the whole region: tradition holds that he found seventeen Christians in Neocaesarea and left only seventeen pagans at his death. To him belongs the first recorded apparition of the Theotokos, who appeared with John the Theologian to give him a creed of the Holy Trinity, and the famous wonders of the moved mountain and the dried marsh.

• Saint of the day

  Ven. Nikon of Radonezh

  Nikon of Radonezh (c. 1352–1426) was the disciple, chosen successor, and second abbot of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, the foremost monastery of Russia. Called by his brethren a "zealot of obedience," he took up the governance of the community six months before the repose of its founder, Sergius of Radonezh, rebuilt it from the ashes after the Tatar raid of Edigei in 1408, uncovered the incorrupt relics of Sergius in 1422, and raised over his master's grave the stone Trinity Cathedral for which Andrei Rublev painted his icon of the Holy Trinity. He is venerated among the wonderworkers of Radonezh and commemorated on November 17.

• Our Holy Father Longinus (4th or 5th c.)

• Our Holy Mother Hilda, Abbess of Whitby (680)

• Gennadius I of Constantinople

  Gennadius was Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from 458 to 471, in the reign of Leo I the Great, in the difficult generation after Chalcedon when the settlement of 451 was being contested across the East. A learned exegete before he was a bishop — a commentator on Daniel, on Genesis and on the Pauline epistles, of the Antiochene school — he is remembered chiefly as a pastor and a disciplinarian of extraordinary mildness and extraordinary firmness together: he held a synod at Constantinople that condemned simony, refused to ordain any man who did not know the Psalter by heart, and left a reputation for gentleness that survives in the anecdotes John Moschus gathered a century and a half later. He received the Robe of the Theotokos into the shrine at Blachernae, climbed the ladder of Daniel the Stylite to ordain him priest on top of his pillar, and died in 471 having warned that the Church would be troubled after him — as, under his successor Acacius, it was.

• Lazarus the Iconographer

  Lazarus the Iconographer (c. 810 – c. 857) was a monk, priest, and painter of holy images at Constantinople who confessed the veneration of icons through torture in the last iconoclast persecution. Under the emperor Theophilus his painting hands were seared with red-hot iron, and he was saved from death only by the intervention of the empress Theodora; after the restoration of the icons in 843 he returned to his art, and he died while returning from an embassy to Rome. He is honoured as one of the confessor-iconographers of the Triumph of Orthodoxy and is venerated as a patron of icon-painters.

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