Saint Mary the Egyptian

Metropolitan Iosif of Prikonisos 

The fifth Sunday of Lent is dedicated to Saint Mary the Egyptian. This Mary is a unique and eternal example of repentance and of rehabilitation and perfection in Christ. As we enter the final straight towards the Spotless Passion, and the Life-Bearing Resurrection of Our Lord, the need for proper preparation through repentance, so that we can experience in a redemptive manner the Cross and Resurrection, becomes ever more urgent and imperative. This is why, on this Sunday, the Church highlights the figure and example of Saint Mary, in order to provide the help we need.

So who was this Mary that the Orthodox Church has found to be of such great importance that we celebrate her memory twice, on the anniversary of her repose (1 April) and also on the 5th Sunday in Lent? She was an Egyptian. Christian, of course, as regards baptism, faith (in theory) and name, but a long way from being a real Christian as regards her morals and actions. From when she was a mere slip of a girl, at the age of twelve, she had been trapped in the coils of depravity of the flesh, a pathetic victim of the repulsive demon of lust. She wasn’t brought to this because of some sort of wretched poverty or penury, as was the case with others in her miserable condition, but merely out of rampant debauchery and the unquenchable desire for sin. She was a veritable slave to her passion. On one occasion, this passion led her to board a ship sailing out of Alexandria, bound for the Holy Land. The ship was full of young men going on a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre and other sacred sites associated with the Lord and His mother. She wasn’t travelling as a pilgrim, though. That wasn’t her purpose at all. She’d simply seen all these young men and had her appetite whetted to lie with them. The wretched woman became a diabolical lime-rod, a snare, and caught a great many of these young men, whom she robbed of their sense of decency at the very time when they were on their way to receive the blessings of a pilgrimage. And so, because of her, the voyage which was meant to be a quest for holiness, was transformed into a shameful trip on the putrid and stinking billows of lewdness. There was great mourning in the heavens and loud lamentation among the angels at the fall of so many.

Eventually, the ship arrived at its destination and the passengers disembarked and went on up to Jerusalem. But oh, Your wondrous ways, Christ, and Your ineffable love for humankind, which cannot bear the death of sinners and finds a multitude of means to bring about their salvation! When Mary went with the others to enter the holy church of the Resurrection, where the feast of the Elevation of the Precious and Life-Giving Cross was being celebrated, an invisible force which was not apparent to anyone else, prevented her from going to reverence the “Tree of Life” as she wished to do. She tried again and again- so many times- but in vain. Then she realized that the reason was her sinful behaviour and debased view of life. She was wounded to the quick, deep in her heart, by the arrows of remorse and compunction. She became aware of her condition and began to lament and beg the Lord for mercy. She turned her gaze to the icon of the Mother of God which was in the church and fervently called upon her maternal assistance and support, vowing and promising to change her way of life immediately, and to please the Lord by repentance and a godly life. And the sweet Virgin, the hope and protection and salvation of all who flee to her in faith, attended to the cry of supplication, which was addressed to her. And so Mary was at last able to entered the church unimpeded and, along with the other people, to reverence the Precious Cross. She then went and reverenced the icon of the Mother of God and told her that she would entrust herself entirely to her and be guided by her as to how to live a life of repentance. Then a voice came from the holy icon, saying: “If you go beyond the Jordan, there you’ll find rest”. According to tradition, this very icon is now on the Holy Mountain, in the cave of Saint Athanasios, near the Monastery of the Great Lavra.

Mary obeyed the advice of Our Most Pure Lady and, on winged feet, abandoned the world and the things in it, including the empty and soul-slaying fleshly pleasures and enjoyments and made her way to the sacred River Jordan. She washed in the waters and proceeded from there to the church of Saint John the Baptist, where she made her confession, according to Saint John Chrysostom, who described her as casting her former miserable life of sin into the furnace of confession. She declared, with pain and remorse in her heart, as well as floods of tears, the repulsive life she’d led, received absolution and made her communion. And since, again according to Saint John Chrysostom, “the power of confession is great and mighty is its force”, while” the power and saving energy of the sacraments are also certainly of the highest order when we partake of them in repentance and confession”, Mary was greatly fortified by both confession and communion.

On the morrow, with the power and grace she had received, Mary left and crossed the river. She went to the most isolated part beyond the Jordan, to the desert, where she lived for forty-seven years, without any contact at all with either man or beast. In a region that was harsh, parched and forbidding. A place where we wouldn’t last forty-seven days. Forget that. Not even forty-seven hours! Yet this woman, a fragile vessel, totally unaccustomed to the hardships of life, lived there for forty-seven years on end, with the sun beating down mercilessly on her by day, the cold freezing her at night, and living off a diet of wild plants and roots.

How can we well-nourished Christians of the 21st century even begin to imagine that? Yet she dared to do it. She renounced Satan and all his works, the whole life of sin, and left. She took an enormous step, the great step towards salvation: “For you took up the Cross and followed Christ. By your actions you taught us to look beyond the flesh, for it passes, and to be concerned, rather, about the soul which is immortal”, as her dismissal hymn so felicitously puts it. She walked in the steps of Christ in the desert of fasting, prayer and the strictest ascetic life. “In patience, she awaited the Lord and through the words of His lips kept to difficult paths.”

She watered the desert with the streams of her tears and, through the sighs from the very depths of her heart, she reaped a hundredfold the rewards of her sacrificial asceticism. As the psalm puts it, her throat became rough, because she called out and shouted day and night to the Lord to forgive her sin and to grant her and the whole world His great mercy. The name of her new, now sole, legitimate, spotless, pure and most holy Lover, that is the Saviour Jesus Christ, the Crucified Love of the Church, became one with her breathing. She was an inextinguishable candle of continuous prayer of the heart. A burning flame, an unquenchable torch.

But her body also took part in her prayer, through her harsh, merciless asceticism. Saint Basil the Great said that we slay the outlook of the flesh, which is not able to submit to the law of God, in order to strengthen the outlook of the spirit, because it’s through this that we acquire life and peace. As the psalm says, her knees became weak with fasting and her heart was altered through oil. She became as shrivelled as a raisin as her flesh fell off her. She became no more than a skeleton covered with skin, grew her hair unnaturally thick and long, so that it served in a sense as a substitute for clothing, and took on an entirely different aspect, like that of a wild bird.

She became like a night-owl on the rooftops. Sober in all things, in accordance with the apostolic exhortation, she kept her mind and heart clear and lived every night and day in extreme mourning before God. But in this way she fortified the outlook of the spirit and strove courageously and boldly against the passions, which the devil attempted to kindle in the depths of her heart. Because, of course, when the hater of good, that murderous serpent of old who lurks in the fathoms, sees people fighting honourably and systematically the good fight of repentance, he doesn’t sit with them saying the komboskini on their behalf, but strives rabidly either to bring them back to their former way of life or to lead them astray with delusions and fantasies that will destroy their souls, or impel them towards despair and hopelessness, so that, one way or another, he can snatch them away as a prize to that outer fire which was actually prepared for him and for his dark and filthy angels, that is the demons.

But Mary who, by the grace of God, now belonged exclusively to Christ, crucified her flesh, as the Apostle says, together with her passions and desires. She slew, or better, with God’s unstinting assistance and grace, transformed the human passions. “Dwelling in the desert you expunged the image of the passions from your soul and wrote the most Godlike depiction in your soul, the imprint of the virtues”, as one tropario puts it.

In Mary’s spiritual struggle, a central role is played by the cleansing of the imagination. External stimuli and the practice of sin stamp evil images on the soul, impure imaginings, which pollute the world within us and make us susceptible to sin. They fox our reason, emasculate our outlook on life and debilitate our spiritual powers, so that we slide easily into sin again and again. The imagination is purified through the “retention” of the mind, which is achieved through the restriction of external stimuli (through the senses), by sobriety, study of God’s word, attentiveness, practical observance of the commandments and continuous prayer. Then, by God’s grace, the holy virtues are “imprinted” on the soul, and these are the exact opposites of the passions.

Because Christ is to be found concealed in every virtue, He then becomes the very substance of the heart and the object of our innermost contemplation and the incontestable desire of those who strive well in repentance. This is precisely what occurred with the former prodigal, Mary the Egyptian, who not only became the chastely restrained, but actually most virginal bride of Christ.

With her desire for God and fervent faith, Mary was completely transformed. She turned her back on the unnatural, which is the state of sin, to the natural, which is purity and cleanliness and then proceeded to the next stage- beyond nature- which is sanctification and the vision of God.

Because it’s only in this way, through the fact that she was granted the vision of God, that she saw the uncreated light of Christ, that she was inundated and shone entirely in the uncreated light, that she was warmed, illumined, nourished spiritually and enriched in the experience of this divine and uncreated light, that we can explain how she managed to experience, for forty-seven years, all alone in the pitiless Jordan desert, the agony of Gethsemane, the furnace of the Cross and the mortification of the flesh. God, Who accepts the repentance of sinners, enabled her to experience events which only the Apostles Peter, James and John, as well as the great Moses and the Prophet Elijah, would really be able to understand.

And so, in the end, the devil was defeated. The woman who had once been his apprentice, his loyal servant, was freed from the bonds of sin through the power of Christ and she utterly routed the serpent, triumphantly put the blood-stained murderer to shame, ridiculed his ploys, and undid his plots, to the glory of God and the inspiration of us in our daily struggle. For now there’s no room for despair; rather, on the contrary, we have in her holy person a most excellent teacher of the spiritual struggle and the best possible example of repentance and pleasing service to God. Mary is now an Amma, that is, a spiritual mother, for all of those who wish to gain their salvation.

Towards the end of her life, during Lent, by God’s dispensation, it happened that an outstanding and holy ascetic, Abba Zosimas, “the greatest of the fathers and wise” came to the place where the daughter of repentance had laboured so long in asceticism. As was the custom at that time, he went far out into the desert during Lent in order to find greater stillness, in accordance with the instructions of Saint Efthymios the Great. Mary addressed Zosimas by name! This holy man (whose memory we celebrate, by the way, on April 4) immediately realized that before him stood a sanctified vessel of exceptional grace from God; a God-bearing soul, who had acquired significant spiritual gifts and was close to perfection.

He asked for her blessing and for a few words for the benefit of his soul and his salvation. She, on the other hand, insisted on receiving his priestly blessing, since she knew from her spiritual foresight that he was a priest, even though he wasn’t wearing anything to indicate this. She made a general confession to him concerning her life and works, with floods of tears. She also asked that that they meet the next year on the banks of the River Jordan and that he bring the Holy Sacraments so that she could make her communion. And, indeed, Zosimas appeared the next year at the Jordan with Holy Communion.

Mary was on the other side, but made the sign of the Cross and walked across, on the water, as if it were dry land, just as Christ had once walked on the waves. In this wondrous manner she crossed the river and came to Zosimas. She partook of the Body and Blood of the Lord, “for the remission of sins and life everlasting” and then spoke the words of Saint Symeon, when he received Christ in the Temple: “Now, Lord, you let your servant depart in peace, in accordance with your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation…” She left the monk priest and requested him to return the next year. When he did, he saw and experienced astonishing things. He found the relics of the saint, who, in the meantime had fallen asleep in the Lord, properly laid out with her arms folded cross-wise over her chest and her face turned towards the east.

Next to her, written in the sand, were the words: “Father Zosimas, bury here the body of lowly Mary. Give the earth what belongs to it, after you’ve prayed for me. I died on 1 April, the same day as the Passion of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, after you gave me the Spotless Sacraments”. For a whole year, the precious relics of this great saint had not decayed, to the glory of God and the encouragement of Father Zosimas and us. The priest was wondering how he was going to accomplish this, since he had no digging tools with him and he’d have to walk three weeks to the monastery and back to get them, when a lion appeared. It licked the soles of the saint’s feet and scooped out a hole, into which Abba Zosimas laid her.

The lion then undertook the task of covering her with earth. Rationalists will no doubt say: “But do things like this really happen? Isn’t that a bit over the top, too much of a tall story?” We would reply: the principle always applies that where God so wills, the order of nature is overcome. In our Faith, there’s room for miracles. Believers aren’t surprised, because they live constantly in the realm of miracles. They accept miracles and rejoice in them, encouraged by any exceptional intervention of Grace. They glorify God Who has intervened in this miraculous way. Be that as it may, in this particular case there is something else that we should look at: through her profound repentance, her great love for God and her generous struggle, Mary had reached the prelapsarian state, when all creatures were friendly towards Adam and Eve; because then our sin wasn’t in the way, since it was this that made the animals wild and hostile towards us. It was sin that left the whole of creation in pain, groaning with those who broke God’s commands.

This, in brief, is the picture of a person who, having once been in drudgery to sin, went on to please God through her perfect and exemplary repentance. She was then rewarded richly, in accordance with the saying “Where sin abounded, grace was given even more abundantly”. Since we’re all sinners, in word, in deed and in thought, every day, either in an obvious manner or potentially, sometimes wittingly, at others unwittingly, and thus run the risk of finding ourselves eternally and horrifically separated from our sweet Lord; and since “sloth is dire but repentance great”, it would be well for us to imitate Saint Mary, as far as we’re able, and bow down to the ground before Our Lord Jesus Christ and to plead with Him, through the prayers and intercessions of the formerly debauched but now all-virtuous Mary the Egyptian, so that we may make a start with our repentance, for our soul’s salvation.Bishop Iosif A. Harkiolakis, Metropolitan of Prikinisos, Κεράμιον Ύδατος, published by the Transfiguration of the Lord, Milesi 2014, pp. 183-95.