St. Gregory Nazianzen

Who they were

Gregory was the quieter half of the Church's great friendship, a poet by temperament who met Basil as a student in Athens and spent a lifetime being pulled by him into public roles he did not want. Basil once strong armed him into a bishopric, and Gregory's letters do not hide the injury. He wrote the friendship's epitaph anyway, and it is the most famous funeral oration of antiquity.

He became the great voice. His Theological Orations, delivered in Constantinople to a congregation that had almost no orthodox believers left in the city, earned him the title the Theologian, which the Church has given to only three men. Then, presiding over an ecumenical council whose bishops began quarrelling about his appointment, he resigned rather than let his own position divide it, and went home to write poetry. It is one of the cleanest acts of ecclesiastical self effacement on record.

Why people turn to St. Gregory Nazianzen

Everyone leading reluctantly, and everyone who has stepped back so that something larger than them could hold together. Poets and preachers claim him too.

How to ask their intercession

Before the role you did not ask for, and before the meeting where the humble move is to withdraw.