St. Constantine: More than a Patron

For thirty-one years I carried my name with little thought as to who else it might have belonged to. It wasn’t until I first walked into a Greek parish in 2024 that I learned it was a popular shortening of the name Constantine. A year later, before my baptism, I asked my priest which patron saint I might receive. His response: “I like your name. I want to keep it.”

“Dean” was a family name. It was passed down for generations by men who had no thought of a fourth-century Roman emperor. It was given to me a second time by a man who did. In neither case did I get to choose. Now I had to learn what to do with what I’d been given.

What I found was a man the world cannot make up its mind about. Outside Orthodoxy he is often treated as a punching bag. Inside it, there is a tendency to hurry past his life to the one thing everyone can safely agree on: the power of repentance, even at the eleventh hour. If, as one Greek Archdiocese article puts it, my patron "becomes a true hero/heroine for us to emulate," how was I to honor a saint with so much baggage?