Even Saints Aren't Above Asking For A Handout


Now if my account has explained the work in detail, I hope it may be possible for your holiness, on perceiving what is needed, to relieve us completely from anxiety so far as the workmen are concerned… I know that we shall appear to most people to be higglers, in being so particular about the contracts. But I beg you to pardon me; for mammon-- about whom I have so often said such hard things-- has at last departed from me as far as he can go, disgusted, I suppose, at the nonsense that is constantly talked against him, and has fortified himself against me by an impassable gulf--poverty--so that neither can he come to me, nor can I pass to him.


-St. Gregory of Nyssa's witty request for money from Bishop Amphilochus.