St Gregory the Wonderworker

Gregory was born to a prominent pagan family of Neocaesarea in Pontus and, while traveling to study law, encountered Origen at Caesarea in Palestine. Won over by the great teacher, he studied under him for years and left a famous panegyric of thanks. Returning home, he was made bishop of Neocaesarea, which tradition says had only seventeen Christians; at his death, after some thirty years of labor, only seventeen pagans were said to remain. He received in a vision — the first recorded vision of the Theotokos, who appeared with John the Theologian — a creed setting out the doctrine of the Trinity, treasured afterward by the Cappadocian Fathers, whose grandmother Macrina handed on his teaching. The wonders attributed to him — moving a mountain, drying a marsh, halting a river's flooding — earned him the title Thaumaturgus, the Wonderworker. He guided his flock through persecution and plague.