Our Holy and God-Bearing Fathers: St. Mary of Egypt


[Though the term "Holy and God-Bearing Fathers" is used for those great saints that went before us in the faith, it does not only apply to men, as this post will show.]

St. Mary of Egypt (344-421 or d. 522) was a hermitess who lived in the desert near the River Jordan after repenting from a life of prostitution.  She is patron of penitent women and reformed prostitutes, and she is also a patron asked for intercession against sexual temptation.  In the Western Church, she is liturgically celebrated on April 3, while in the Eastern Church she is celebrated both on April 1 (the day of her death) and on the Fifth Sunday of Great Lent.



At the age of twelve, St. Mary ran away from her parents in Alexandria in order to live a life of dissolution.  She became a prostitute merely for the sake of fulfilling her lustful desires, rejecting money for men, instead gaining her living by begging and spinning flax.  After seventeen years of this sinful life, she went to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Exultation of the Holy Cross as an "anti-pilgrimage," acting the prostitute for those she travelled with and continuing her life of harlotry in Jerusalem.  One day, though, St. Mary approached the Church of Holy Sepulchre in order to see the Cross of the Lord, but she was stopped by an unseen force.  After this had happened thrice, she looked up and saw an icon of the Theotokos outside the church, and she spent the night in weeping and prayers, asking the Theotokos that she might be allowed to see the True Cross, and if that occurred, she promised to spend the rest of her life renouncing her worldly desires and following the commands of Our Lady.  The next day, St. Mary entered the church and venerated the True Cross.

Upon leaving the church, she gave thanks to the Theotokos by venerating her icon, and upon doing so, St. Mary heard a voice telling her, "If you cross the Jordan, you will find glorious rest and true peace."  The saint hurried to the Monastery of St. John the Baptist on the bank of the Jordan, where she received the Mysteries of Confession and the Most Sacred Body and Blood of Christ.  She then fled to the desert across the Jordan, where she lived as an ascetic, surviving for years on three loaves of bread and scarce herbs.  After fighting temptations for seventeen years, she overcame them through the prayers of the Theotokos. 

 St. Mary of Egypt receiving the Sacred Mysteries from St. Zosima

After 47 years in the desert, St. Mary met a priest, St. Zosima.  He begged her to tell him of her life, which she did, expressing marvellous clairvoyance.  After recounted her life, St. Mary asked the priest to come back on Holy Thursday the following year to give her the Sacred Mysteries.  He did so, and she walked across the River Jordan in order to receive the Eucharist from St. Zosima.  She asked him to meet her again the next year on Holy Thursday.  The next year, St. Zosima came to the spot where he first met St. Mary, but he found her dead.  An inscription in the sand near her head recorded that the hermitess had died the day she received the Sacred Mysteries the year before.  Her body was miraculously transported from her place of death and preserved incorrupt until the priest could find it.  With the assistance of a passing lion (as the legend goes), St. Zosima buried the body of St. Mary of Egypt.  The story of her life was passed down orally until finally being recorded in writing by St. Sophronius I, Patriarch of Jerusalem (560-638).


 St. Zosima venerating the incorrupt body of St. Mary

There are no writings of St. Mary of Egypt: her legacy comes from her Life written by St. Sophronius.  She is one of the most popular of the early hermits and hermitesses.  As mentioned above, she is so well-renowned that she is celebrated on the Fifth Sunday of Great Lent, when it is customary for the priest to bless dried fruit during the Divine Liturgy.  A chapel is dedicated to her within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, commemorating the moment of her conversion.  Even outside the Church, she is well-known, appearing in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust: A Tragedy (which is not a work I recommend, philosophically or literarily).

Below are the hymns used during the liturgy of the Fifth Sunday of Great Lent:

"In you, O Mother Mary, was restored the likeness of God, for you carried your cross and followed Christ.  You taught by your deeds how to spurn the body, for it passes away, and how to value the soul, for it is immortal.  Wherefore, your soul is forever in happiness with the Angels" (Troparion, 8th Tone).

"O Glorious Mary of Egypt, you cast out the darkness of sin and followed the light of penance.  You directed your heart to Christ and offered Him His All-Pure Mother as an all-compassionate intercessor.  Wherefore, you avoided sin and now live in the joyful company of the Angels in Heaven" (Kontakion, 4th Tone).

St. Mary of Egypt, our holy and God-bearing Mother, pray for us!

  
Nota Bene: Information for this post comes from OrthodoxWiki (Mary of Egypt, Sophronius I of Jerusalem), Wikipedia, and Saints,SPQN.com.  The Troparion and Kontakion for St. Mary's Lenten feast come from the Publican's Prayer Book by the Melkite Catholic Eparchy of Newton, pp. 262-263.
 

Text ©2012 Brandon P. Otto.  Licensed via CC BY-NC.  Feel free to redistribute non-commercially, as long as credit is given to the author.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Discuss the Eastern Church: A Grammatical Primer

Image
"To count the terms used in theology as of primary importance, and to endeavor to trace out the hidden meaning in every phrase and in every syllable, is a characteristic wanting in those who are idle in the pursuit of true religion, but distinguishing all who get knowledge of the mark of our calling...The beginning of teaching is speech." --St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit I.2 I've often written here of the need to reclaim the Church's bipulmonary nature, that is, the fact that she has two lungs, as Pope Bl. John Paul II loved to say, the West and the East.  I've recently realized that just having people mention the Eastern Church is not enough (though it is certainly a great start): people must also know what they're talking about in regards to Eastern Christianity.  One of the greatest aspects that needs to be cleared up is simply the matter of terminology.  Thus I here attempt to give a quick grammatical primer on terms that are often ...
Read more

St. Gregory Palamas on the Graven Images

Image
"You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God" (Ex 20:4-5a). God's forbidding of graven images is a part of the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments) that I do not hear mentioned often among Catholics. Since the Decalogue does not have a strict division in the Scriptures themselves, there are multiple ways to divide them. The division commonly used by the Orthodox and most Protestants lists "I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before Me" and "You shall not make for yourself a graven image" as two separate commandments, while combining "You shall not covet your neighbor's goods" and "You shall not covet your neighbor's wife" into one commandment. The division commonly used by Catholics and ma...
Read more

Franciscan Fasting

Image
 "Induebar cilicio, humiliabam in ieiunio animam meam, et oratio mea ad sinum meum revertetur." "I wore sackcloth, I afflicted myself with fasting.  I prayed with head bowed on my bosom."--Ps 35:13. No Christian life is without suffering, for Christ suffered.  Even the most joyful Christian recognizes the necessity of suffering, whether voluntary or no.  The Seraphic Father, St. Francis of Assisi, was no different in this regard.  Yet so many portray him as solely a lover of God's creation (which he most assuredly was).  How many know of his tears, his tears so plentiful that they ran furrows in his cheeks, that they took away his sight?  Who knows of his public self-deprecation when he took a spoonful of meat broth while fasting?  Who knows of his flight into a thorn bush to conquer the passions of the flesh? St. Francis was not just a man of joy who loved God's creation, but he was a man who suffered for the Lord, who mortified hi...
Read more