Macrina was born around the year 327 into one of the most remarkable families in the history of the church, a Christian household of Caesarea in Cappadocia, in the Roman East, today central Turkey. Her grandmother had learned the faith from a disciple of the apostolic generation; two of her brothers would be numbered among the Fathers of the church, Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa. And the one who shaped them all, by the testimony of Gregory himself, was their elder sister Macrina.

She was betrothed as a girl, but her intended husband died before the wedding, and Macrina refused every other suitor, declaring that she was still betrothed, for her promised husband was not dead but living with God, and she would keep faith with him until the resurrection. So she gave herself wholly to God. When her father died she persuaded her widowed mother, Emmelia, to lay aside the showy life of their rank and to live alongside their own servants as equals, mistress and maid sharing one table and one prayer, on the family estate at Annesi, on the river Iris in Pontus. It became one of the first communities of monastic women in the Christian East.

She was the rudder of the whole family. When her brilliant younger brother Basil came home from the university swollen with his own learning, it was Macrina who, in Gregory's words, "took him in hand," and "with such speed did she draw him also toward the mark of philosophy," meaning the life given wholly to God, the life that would make Basil a Father of the church. To her youngest brother, Peter, she was father and teacher and mother all at once.

She wrote nothing; we know her only through Gregory, who came to her as she lay dying in 379, not long after Basil's death, and found her on a bed of boards with no possession but an iron cross. There, wasted with fever, she spoke to him of the soul and the resurrection with such rising clarity that he set it all down afterward as a dialogue, casting his sister in the part Plato had given Socrates: the teacher who, at the gate of death, is most alive. He called her, simply, "the Teacher." Her last words were a prayer, that the God who had freed her from the fear of death would receive her soul, for, she said, "thou hast made the end of this life the beginning to us of true life."

She is one of the great hidden figures of the church, a woman who founded no school and wrote no book and yet stands behind two of the greatest theologians it has ever known, having taught them first how to pray. The church remembers her not for what she left in writing but for whom she made, and for the witness of a life so wholly given that her own brother, a Father of the church, knelt to call her his teacher.