In the Orthodox Church, we are preparing to commemorate the life of St. Mary of Egypt. Last night in our parish, we did as Orthodox parishes always do during matins of the Fourth Thursday of Lent: read aloud during evening services her biography, as written down by St. Sophronius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who lived from 560 to 638. St. Mary of Egypt died in the year 522. When Sophronius heard her story, passed down in oral tradition by the monks in the nearby monastery, he was so impressed that he wrote it down to preserve it. The story is told in Orthodox churches on the
I urge you to read the entire story, which is just bizarre and marvelous. Here’s a short version.
The Elder Zosimas was a monk living in a monastery in the desert outside of Jerusalem. One day he was out in the desert during Lent, praying, when this happened (remember, this was written down by the Patriarch of Jerusalem in the 7th century):
And as he sang thus without turning his eyes from the heavens, he suddenly saw to the right of the hillock on which he stood the semblance of a human body. At first he was confused thinking he beheld a vision of the devil, and even started with fear. But, having guarded himself with he sign of the Cross and banished all fear, he turned his gaze in that direction and in truth saw some form gliding southwards. It was naked, the skin dark as if burned up by the heat of the sun; the hair on its head was white as a fleece, and not long, falling just below its neck. Zosimas was so overjoyed at beholding a human form that he ran after it in pursuit, but re form fled from him. He followed. At length, when he was near enough to be heard, he shouted:
“Why do you run from an old man and a sinner? Slave of the True God, wait for me, whoever you are, in God’s name I tell you, for the love of God for Whose sake you are living in the desert.”
“Forgive me for God’s sake, but I cannot turn towards you and show you my face, Abba Zosimas. For I am a woman and naked as you see with the uncovered shame of my body. But if you would like to fulfil one wish of a sinful woman, throw me your cloak so that I can cover my body and can turn to you and ask for your blessing.”
Here terror seized Zosimas, for he heard that she called him by name. But he realized that she could not have done so without knowing anything of him if she had not had the power of spiritual insight.
Mary was born in Egypt and left home for the city of Alexandria at the age of 12, a runaway. There she gave herself over to a life of prostitution, which she enjoyed so much that she didn’t always ask for compensation:
Often when they wished to pay me, I refused the money. I acted in this way so as to make as many men as possible to try to obtain me, doing free of charge what gave me pleasure. do not think that I was rich and that was the reason why I did not take money. I lived by begging, often by spinning flax, but I had an insatiable desire and an irrepressible passion for lying in filth. This was life to me. Every kind of abuse of nature I regarded as life.
Plainly this version of Mary of Egypt would be considered a saint by many in our debased culture. Anyway, she set out on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem on a boat full of men, some of whom she pleasured to pay for her journey. She was just going out of curiosity. When she arrived in the holy city, she tried to enter into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but found that an invisible force would not let her cross the threshold.
She looked up and saw an icon of the Virgin Mary. She asked the Holy Virgin to have mercy on her and pray for her to be able to enter into the church and see the Cross of Christ. She said in her prayer that if she was allowed to see the Holy Cross, she would spend the rest of her life in repentance.
After that, she was able to enter the church and fulfill her desire. She then went into the desert on the other side of the River Jordan to live as an extreme ascetic and hermit. For almost half a century she lived alone without seeing another human being, until the monk Zosimas happened across her. She was a withered old woman, whose very clothes had wasted away to nothing and fallen off of her. But she was so repentant and changed by the power of God that she was a miracle worker.
Read the whole account of her marvelous life. There is reason to doubt the historicity of this particular story, as there were similar but substantially different ones going around Palestine at the time (see here for more). But this story, and the saint it glorifies, were enormously popular in the first millennium of the Church. This wild desert woman is very far from our own time in every way, but perhaps paradoxically, that makes her very much a saint for us.