Our Lord and God, wishing to prepare a Living Temple and Sacred Abode for Himself, sent an Angel to the righteous Joachim and Anna with word that the barren and childless Anna would conceive the Maiden. He had fore-chosen to be His Mother according to the flesh. Soon after marital union Anna indeed found herself to be with child, and in time bore the Holy Virgin Mary, according to the Divine promise. Only Our Lord and God Jesus Christ was conceived ineffably and without seed, by the Theotokos and through the operation of the Holy Spirit. At His Incarnation, the Lord received the fullness of His human nature (that same nature which He Himself created in the beginning) from the Maiden who knew not wedlock. Saint Anna became pregnant after she and her husband came together, and she carried the Queen of Heaven within for a full nine months.

Saint Gregory Nazianzen illustrates the difficulty of a priest's work by comparing it with that of a doctor. The priest's is the harder task because he deals with souls that resist their own healing instead of bodies that co-operate; because spiritual disease is hidden, whereas physical ailments are apparent; and because he aims, not simply to preserve or restore health, but to "deify those who belong to the heavenly host". Nothing less than this was the purpose of the Incarnation. Where doctors work merely to extend a possibly sinful life, we (says St. Gregory) work for the salvation of the soul.

The Saint was desirous to visit the all-holy Sepulchre of the Lord. He was filled with longing to see and venerate those holy sites, where the feet of our Lord Jesus Christ trod. It was also his keen hope to find a place of solitude and quiet, where he might abide alone. On a clear day, Father Nicholas boarded an Egyptian vessel with fellow Christians.