Feast day: April 1
St. Mary of Egypt
A woman of Alexandria who lived for years in reckless sin, was stopped by an unseen force at the door of a church in Jerusalem, repented, and spent forty-seven years alone in the desert.
Mary of Egypt is among the most famous penitents of Christian tradition, her story preserved in an ancient and much-loved legend of the Eastern Church. According to it, she left home in Egypt at the age of twelve and lived for seventeen years in Alexandria as a prostitute — not from need, she later insisted, but from sheer appetite for pleasure.
Out of curiosity and the hope of new conquests, she joined a crowd of pilgrims sailing to Jerusalem for the feast of the Holy Cross. But when she tried to enter the church to see the relic, an invisible force held her back at the threshold, again and again, until — struck to the heart — she wept before an image of the Virgin and vowed to change her life.
Allowed at last to venerate the Cross, she heard a voice bidding her cross the Jordan, and went out into the wilderness beyond it, where she lived utterly alone for forty-seven years in fierce penance, seeing no human face. There, near the end of her life, she was found by a monk named Zosimas, to whom she told her story and who brought her Communion.
Returning a year later, Zosimas found her dead, and — the legend says — a lion helped him dig her grave. Whatever its historical kernel, the tale has been beloved for centuries as an image of the boundlessness of God's mercy, and Mary of Egypt is honoured as the patron of penitents.
After a lifetime of sin she fled into the desert beyond the Jordan and lived there nearly half a century in penance — one of the great conversion stories of the East.
Image: Hrom.nv (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/09763a.htm
Get a story like this every Sunday.