On the trendy island of Santorini, Greece, tourists crowd souvenir shops. Couples chase the perfect Instagram sunset outside the Monastery of St. Catherine. Little do they know that inside the convent, 13 nuns are praying for them.
The convent sits just steps from Santorini’s world-famous volcanic cliffs. Every year, around two million visitors throng the half-moon-shaped island famous for its fertile volcanic soil and white-painted villages standing on red cliffs.
“In such a touristy island, the last thing one thinks about is praying—so we are the ones who do it,” says Sister Lucía María de Fátima.
The sisters live mostly in silence and meditation. “In a world of consumption, of diversions, they give witness that God alone is enough,” says Reverend Félix del Valle, a Spanish priest who leads spiritual exercises at the convent.
St. Catherine’s nuns came to Santorini mostly from the Caribbean (Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo), while others hail from Angola, Korea, Argentina, Greece, and Spain. When not praying or practicing music and hymns, the nuns do housework. They also grow tomatoes, lemons, and grapes in the garden and make communion wafers for most of the Catholic churches in Greece.
If you’ve read anything about ancient Greece, you know its people worshipped many false gods. You can read the stories Greeks wrote about these fictional deities, which depict the Greek gods as powerful, capricious characters playing with Earth and its people like big toys.
But you can also read something else written in ancient Greek: the New Testament. Clearly, Greece went through a major change. The Apostle Paul preached about the one true God there. Paul’s God (our God!) is totally different. He loves people and gave up His own life for them. Instead of changing His mind, He enacted a perfect plan for His world and people from the beginning of time. People in Greece believed Paul’s message. Churches started, and Greece was never the same. Neither was the rest of the world.
The whole Christian Church got started in the time of the apostles, which you can read all about in the book of Acts. History books tell the rest of the church’s story: Over time, Christian groups developed significant doctrinal differences. Some became part of the Greek Orthodox Church, some joined the Roman Catholic Church, and the Protestant Reformation set the stage for the many additional denominations we have today.
The nuns on Santorini may be rooted a theological tradition different from yours. But their example still inspires. Are you “constant in prayer”? (Romans 12:12) Do you pray even for strangers?
Why? The world has many needs, and God calls us to pray without ceasing. We can even pray for strangers.
