St. Gabriel of Georgia

He was born in 1929 in Tbilisi, in Soviet Georgia, and named Goderdzi. From childhood, in a land where the churches were being closed and the faith mocked, he was seized by the love of God, and against all the spirit of the age he gave himself to Christ, and in time was tonsured a monk with the name Gabriel.

On a plot by his mother's house he labored for years to raise a church with his own hands, gathering the materials the world had thrown away, broken tiles and scraps of metal and stone and discarded icons, and building of them a strange and beautiful temple of many chapels, a sign in the midst of the atheist city that God was not dead.

His confession was open and without fear. On a day of the great Soviet festival, when a vast portrait of the chief of the godless state was raised over the rejoicing crowds, Gabriel set fire to it before them all, crying out that one must worship God and not idols. He was seized and beaten almost to death, and was held thereafter for a madman and confined, the prison and the asylum becoming the price of his witness.

He took up the folly of Christ, doing things that seemed senseless to the worldly but pierced the hearts of those who had eyes to see, hiding his great gifts of prayer, foresight, and love under the appearance of a beggar and a fool. He settled at last at the Samtavro convent in Mtskheta, the ancient holy city of Georgia, where the suffering and the searching came to him in crowds, and he received them with a love that burned and consoled.

He reposed at Mtskheta on the second of November, 1995. The Georgian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints in 2012, and his veneration has spread far beyond his own land. The Church keeps his memory on the second of November, honoring Gabriel, the fool for Christ and confessor of Georgia.