Saint Mary of Egypt

Saint Mary of Egypt was a penitent who, after years of sinful life in Alexandria, was converted in Jerusalem and spent the rest of her days alone in the desert beyond the Jordan. In East and West she has for centuries been regarded as a model of conversion and of trust in God’s mercy. The Church commemorates her on April 1.

Almost everything known about her comes from the Life attributed to Saint Sophronius, bishop of Jerusalem in the seventh century. Earlier, in the sixth century, Cyril of Scythopolis had written down a short account of a hermit named Mary. We do not know the dates of her life: some place her death in the fifth century, others a hundred years later. What follows, then, is the story as tradition has handed it down.

According to the Life, Mary came from Egypt. As a girl of twelve she left her parents and for seventeen years led a dissolute life in Alexandria. One day she joined pilgrims sailing to Jerusalem for the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, and not at all out of piety. On the feast day she wanted to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with the crowd, but an unseen force stopped her several times at the threshold. She understood that it was her own sins that barred the way. She wept and, seeing an image of the Mother of God, begged for her intercession and promised to change her life. Then she entered without hindrance and venerated the wood of the Cross.

Afterward she heard a voice saying that she would find peace if she crossed the Jordan. That same evening she reached the river, received Holy Communion in the church of Saint John the Baptist, and the next day went away into the desert. She lived there alone for forty-seven years. Then Zosimas met her, a monk and priest who, following the custom of his monastery, was spending Lent in the wilderness. She told him the story of her life and asked him to bring her the Body of the Lord at the Jordan a year later, on Holy Thursday. Zosimas did as she asked. The Life relates that Mary came to him walking on the water, and that after Communion she prayed in the words of the canticle of the aged Simeon.

When Zosimas returned to the desert a year later, he found her body, and beside it words written on the ground asking him to bury her. From them it was clear that she had died on the very night she received Communion. According to legend, a lion helped him dig the grave. Mary lived long before the canonization process existed and has been venerated as a saint since ancient times. The Churches of the Byzantine tradition commemorate her on April 1 and on the fifth Sunday of Lent. The former Roman Martyrology listed her on April 2; the present one gives the same day as the East.