By Yuri Ruban,
PhD in History, PhD in Theology
PhD in History, PhD in Theology
The fifth and penultimate Sunday of Great Lent has arrived (there are two weeks left until Pascha). Today the Orthodox Church invites us to look at the life of one beautiful woman from Alexandria, Egypt, as an example. In her youth, she was a well-known harlot in this port city, or, in literary terms, a courtesan. At first glance, this may seem strange and even provocative! Are there really few other role models in the treasury of Christian holiness – such immaculate virgins as Barbara, Katherine (whose very name translates as “always pure”) and others who have remained faithful to their Heavenly Bridegroom since childhood? Moreover, it was not need that pushed her “to the streets”, as, for example, with Sonia Marmeladova! She herself admitted that, having left her parents at the age of twelve and having lost her purity, she “unrestrainedly and insatiably gave myself up to sensuality.” “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... I had an insatiable desire and an irrepressible passion for lying in filth.” It is all the more important to understand why the former harlot entered the trinity of saints (along with Gregory Palamas and John Climacus) , who became symbols of the Lenten “School of Piety”!
The dissolute life of the fallen girl lasted for 17 years. Once, for fun, Mary joined the pilgrims heading to Jerusalem, paying the sailors with her body. Walking around the Holy City and "hunting for young men," as the life says, Mary saw people going to the Church of the Resurrection of Christ. The greatest Christian relic, the Cross of Golgotha, was kept here.
Together with the crowd of worshipers, Mary entered the vestibule, but her attempts to penetrate into the church were in vain. Some invisible force threw her back from the threshold. Finally, she gave in and retreated to a corner of the vestibule. “And only then,” she said later, “with great difficulty it began to dawn on me, and I began to understand the reason why I was prevented from being admitted to see the life-giving Cross. The word of salvation gently touched the eyes of my heart and revealed to me that it was my unclean life which barred the entrance to me. I began to weep and lament and beat my breast, and to sigh from the depths of my heart. And so I stood weeping when I saw above me the icon of the Most Holy Theotokos.” Having addressed it with prayer, the sinner was able to enter the church unhindered, and then, returning to the icon, she received a revelation, hearing a voice: “Cross the Jordan, and you will find blessed peace!”
In the Church of Saint John the Baptist by the Jordan, she received communion, then crossed to the eastern bank of the river and disappeared from the world. Struggling with temptations, Mary spent another 17 years in the desert before she met her first living person – Hieromonk Zosimas, who had providentially retired to this very place during Lent. (The monks of the Lavra of Saint Savvas had a custom of spending the Holy Forty Days alone and returning to the monastery for the Feast of the Entry of the Lord into Jerusalem.) He asked Mary, who had now become an ascetic, to tell him the story of her life. During their joint prayer, the Saint was lifted an elbow off the ground. The elder was filled with reverent awe, embraced her feet with tears and asked her blessing. But Mary called herself a sinner, lacking virtues, and asked his blessing.
They agreed to meet at the Jordan, closer to his monastery, the following year so that Mary could receive communion. By God's providence, this happened on Holy Thursday. The elder standing on the western bank of the river saw Mary make the sign of the cross over the Jordan and "walk on the water with her head down." Having accepted the Holy Mysteries brought from his hands, "she raised her hands to heaven, began to lament and weep, and cried out: 'Now let Your servant depart in peace, O Master, according to Your word. For my eyes have seen Your salvation!'" The secret meaning of this prayer of Symeon was hidden from Zosimas, because the Saint herself asked him: "Now go to your monastery, and next year come again to the place where I saw you the first time... And again, by the will of God, you will see me." The elder returned to his monastery, “filled with jubilation and great fear, reproaching himself for not having asked the name of the saint; however, he hoped to do this the following year.”
Arriving in the desert a year later, he saw at the mouth of a dried-up river “that holy woman lying dead; her hands were folded according to custom, and her face was turned towards the sunrise.” After mourning her and saying a funeral prayer, he suddenly saw an inscription written in the sand: “Here bury, Abba Zosimas, the remains of the humble Mary, and commit the dust to dust, continually offering prayers to the Lord for me, who died on the night of the Passion of the Savior, after receiving the Holy Mysteries.” This meant that she had died a year earlier, a few hours after their second (and last) meeting, on April 1, 522, on Great Friday. A huge lion, guarding the body of the Saint, helped the elder dig a grave for her burial.
The legend about the life of the Holy Sinner was kept in the monastery of Zosima, and later it was written down as "The Life of Mary of Egypt, a Former Harlot, Who Honorably Lived in the Jordan Desert" (the author of this masterpiece of early Byzantine hagiography is Patriarch Sophronios of Jerusalem, + 638). The popularity of the life is attested to by numerous adaptations and its inclusion in the service of Thursday of the fifth week of Great Lent (in the Canon of Saint Andrew of Crete). The plot of the life was used by Ivan S. Aksakov in the poem "Mary of Egypt".
The life of Saint Mary of Egypt is regarded as a dual symbol of active repentance that transforms the entire being of a person, and of God's responding mercy. Authentic Christianity is profoundly "optimistic": there is no place here for haughty disdain towards individuals with "irreparably damaged reputations" (as in secular society), or towards the "untouchables" (as in caste society), and what seems to be an incredible ascent from the irretrievable abyss of sin to the aura of sanctity is openly available to every contemporary colleague of Mary before her conversion. It is precisely for this reason that this former sinner is commemorated on the last Sunday of the Great Lent, the most significant penitential period of the Orthodox liturgical year.
Mary of Egypt is revered by us as a "Venerable". Her commemoration according to the fixed calendar is April 1.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
