Venerable Luke of Hellas

Life

Luke was a native of Kastoria. Even as a child he never wanted to taste meat, and always lived a life of purity and prayer. Once he went to the field with grain seed to sow. But along the way he distributed to the poor the greater part of the seed, and the lesser part, which remained to him, he sowed. God gave that from that little seed a greater harvest was gathered than earlier from all the seed. After this Luke fled from his widowed mother to a monastery. The grieving mother fervently prayed to God that He reveal to her the secret of where her son was. And God heard the mother's prayer. The abbot of that monastery dreamed for three nights in succession that some woman sharply attacked him for having taken her only son. Then the abbot ordered Luke to go immediately to his mother. Luke went, saw his mother, but again withdrew from her, now irrevocably. He lived ascetically on the so-called John's Mountain. By night he prayed to God, and by day he worked in the garden and in the field, not for himself, but for the poor and visitors. He himself fed only on barley bread. God endowed him with the gift of wonderworking. He reposed peacefully in the year 946. From his relics from time to time myrrh flowed.