Now we are going to relate one of the miracles he made for the glory of God. A priest from the villages of Marathonia – I don`t give his name for very understandable reasons – coming back home in the afternoon of an important day after he entered the house he began to pull very insistently and troubled his sleeves as if he wanted to get rid of something which bothered him. His wife asked him what was with him and he said that on his way he had been caught by some villains who put him in chains. While he related his story he was trying to take off his imaginary chains.
They immediately took to a famous clinic from the capital and the doctors said he had a poisoning of the blood as he was suffering from a continuous sleeplessness. He stayed there for forty days feeling worse and worse.
In the end they decided to take him to to the small and peaceful shore where all the souls shrouded in the waves of this life find their salvation. One evening they took him to take part at the vigil kept for his healing. He was accompanied only by his wife and son who was about nineteen. Immediately after the community of father Nicholas saw him – consisting of five-six women – they got very frightened.
The vigil started. The priest made noise wanting to climb the pew and from there to jump outside on the window. But the window had a railing and of course he couldn`t jump. Then he wanted to leave his place and go to hit the nuns who were chanting. But his son was keeping a small rope and he threatened him with that. His wife urged him too to keep silent but he said: `I want to kill the priest. I want to put on fire those…those showing towards the nuns who were chanting.
After it was over midnight at a certain moment the sick priest got out of their hands and running to the pew where the nuns were chanting together with father Nicholas he started to sing all of a sudden the troparion of the Holy hierarch Nicholas,
`a canon of faith, an icon of meekness, and a teacher of abstinence` in an inappropriate moment for this troparion
Then father Nicholas told the nuns : `Do not interrupt him. Let him sing it till the end.`
That was it. He returned very peacefully to his place and when they morning broke he said very quietly that he was healed and he would go to sleep for a long time because he had not slept for forty days. His look was awful because of the terrible sleeplessness. His eyes were bulged, very red and wild. He went back home and slept for thirty hours without cease and woke up healed.
At a week after his healing he went to the church of prophet Elijah and sang helping the abbot and afterwards he served the holy liturgy with father Nicholas for fifteen days. The nuns and the healed one very hardly refrained their tears when they kissed his hand at the end of the Liturgy.
From that moment this priest whenever he came to Athens went first where father Nicholas served the liturgy and received his blessing and only afterwards he went to his chores.
Father Nicholas made many other miracles using his presbyteral service but now we leave these all aside for not being accused of too much talking.
Excerpt from Saint Nicholas Planas the protector of the married ones – Nun Marta, Evanghelismos Publishing House.
