The Fifth Sunday of Great Lent: The Sunday of St Mary of Egypt
Categories: hymns, feast-days, lives-of-saints
Date: 21 March 2010 11:15:38
Icon from OCA.
Troparion - Tone 8:
The image of God was truly preserved in you, mother,
for you took up the Cross and followed Christ.
By so doing, you taught us to disregard the flesh, for it passes away,
but to care instead for the soul, since it is immortal.
Therefore your spirit, holy mother Mary, Rejoices with the angels!
Kontakion - Tone 3:
Having been a sinful woman,
you became through repentance a Bride of Christ.
Having attained angelic life,
you defeated demons with the weapon of the Cross.
Therefore, most glorious Mary, you are a Bride of the Kingdom!
Today, the Fifth Sunday of Great Lent, we commemorate the most extraordinary life of St Mary of Egypt. Her life, as recorded in a wonderful text by St Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem (560 - 638), is set to be read in full during the fifth week of Great Lent as part of the reading of the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete. I do hope to be able to read the entire text during the coming week, for it is a most amazing story of a life transformed in Christ; the reading from the Prologue from Ochrid, a compilation of lives of saints, hymns, reflections, and homilies by Bishop St Nikolai Velimirovic in 1926, is a shorter read but still shows her most amazing life.
To give a very basic overview, St Mary repented of a life of prostitution and fled into the desert to live as an ascetic for 47 years. After this time she met a priest, St Zosima, in the desert and asked for him to return next Holy Thursday [the day before Good Friday, or Great and Holy Friday as it is known in Orthodoxy] to give her the Holy Eucharist, which he did. After giving her the Holy Eucharist, she asked him to return a year later. When St Zosima returned as instructed, he found Mary's body with a message written on the sand asking him for burial and revealing that she had died immediately after receiving the Eucharist the year before.
The joy, to me, of such a life transformed is not only that God is indeed wondrous in His Saints, but also it shows that it is never too late to repent and that no amount of past sin can keep us from a relationship with God, who calls all to repentance.
A blessed Feast Day to Unordered, to all named for St Mary and to all; through her prayers, and the prayers of all the Saints, may the Lord have mercy on us and save us.