Anninos Blog 2

 When an Old-Calendarist Woman Met Elder Ephraim of Philotheou

(An incident recounted to us by Elder Nikon of the New Skete on Mount Athos)

Once, as I was telling the Elder my thoughts, the telephone rang, and the Elder said to me:

“Shall I answer it, my boy?”

“Well, answer it, Elder,” I said. “It might be some urgent need—someone might be dying. I can find you again later.”

He answered the phone, and I heard a woman who was crying, shouting, beating herself, and screaming.

And the Elder was saying to her on the phone:

“Do you see, my girl, what I was telling you? Do you see that I told you to do this? Yes, my girl, you are right—yes, that’s how it is.”

Then the Elder hung up the phone.

“If it’s something confessional,” I said to him, “Elder, don’t tell me. But if it’s something else, what happened to her and why was she like that?”

As the Elder told me, she was a schoolteacher from Epirus who was an Old-Calendarist. When she met Fr. Ephraim—somehow—I don’t know how—she began attacking him relentlessly:

“You New-Calendarists have betrayed Christianity. You have gone over to the Pope, to Satan. Your Patriarch is a heretic. You have no grace of the priesthood. The Holy Spirit has left the Church with the New Calendar.”

“No, my girl,” the Elder told her, “that’s not how it is. Our priests do have the priesthood.”

But he could not convince her. Then he said to her:

“Go, my girl, to a church that follows the New Calendar and receive Holy Communion, and the Lord will answer you.”

And because the woman was sincere, she did what the Elder suggested. She said to herself, “What do I have to lose? At worst, I’ll just drink a little wine and eat a small piece of bread. I have nothing to lose.”

So she went. At the time when the priest was communing the faithful, and when her turn came, she opened her mouth, received Communion, and then stepped aside to the women’s area. She tried to chew what the priest had placed in her mouth with the spoon, but she felt it in her mouth like rubber.

“What did the priest put in my mouth?” she wondered.

She tried to bite it, but it would not bite. Then she put her fingers into her mouth and pulled them out covered with blood, holding in her hand a piece of flesh. Then she began to cry out:

“My Christ, my Panagia, have mercy on me! Have mercy on me, Panagia! Have mercy on me, my Christ!”

The other women saw her, understood that a miracle had taken place, and grabbed her hand so that she would not throw down what she was holding. She did not want to hold it. Then the others forced it back into her mouth. She put it into her mouth unwillingly, and then it became again like bread, and thus she was able to swallow it. And the blood on her fingers became like wine, and then they went and washed her fingers.

Thus we know with certainty that what our Church teaches us is true.

(This is an incident recounted to us by Elder Nikon of the New Skete on Mount Athos, and the Elder to whom it happened was Fr. Ephraim of Philotheou [Arizona].)