Saint of the Week: Mary of Egypt
4/2/2025
Mary of Egypt
c.344 AD – c.421 AD
Born in the Roman Province of Egypt, at 12, Mary ran away from home to the port of Alexandria and, there lived lived an extremely dissolute life. At 29, she decided to go to Jerusalem for the Great Feasts of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. She paid her way by offering sexual favors to other pilgrims, and she continued this lifestyle for a short time in Jerusalem. In Vita, St. Sophronius of Jerusalem wrote that, as she attempted to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulcher for the celebration, she was barred from doing so by an unseen force. Realizing that this was due to her impurity, she was overcome with remorse. Seeing an icon of the Theotokos (Virgin Mary) outside the church, she prayed for forgiveness and promised to “give up the world.” When she again attempted to enter the church, she was indeed permitted to do so. While venerating the relic of the True Cross, she heard a voice saying, "If you cross the Jordan, you will find glorious rest." She heeded that voice & retired to the desert, living the rest of her life as a penitent hermit. A year before she died, Mary narrated her life to St. Zosimas of Palestine, who encountered her in the desert. Sharing her life's story, she asked him to meet her at the banks of the Jordan on Holy Thursday the next year to bring her Holy Communion. Fulfilling her wish, he reports being amazed to see her walking on the water’s surface to receive Communion. Asking him to meet her again in the desert the following Lent, Zosimas returned to the same spot where he first met her--about a 20-day journey from his monastery--only to find her lying there dead. According to an inscription written in the sand next to her head, she had died the very night he had given her Communion and had somehow been miraculously transported to the place where he found her body, preserved and incorrupt. Returning to the monastery, he related her life story to the brethren, who dutifully preserved it as oral tradition until St. Sophronius recorded it in the Vita. In Goethe's Faust, Mary is one of three penitent saints who pray to the Virgin Mary for forgiveness for Faust. Her words are also set to music in Gustav Mahler’s 8th Symphony as the final saint's appeal to the Mater Gloriosa.
