Gerasimus and the Lion Who Lost the Donkey

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The monk at the gate saw it first.

He had been sweeping, because somebody always is, in a monastery. He looked up, the way you do when you feel the light change, and there on the track that ran up from the river was the lion. Which was normal. The lion lived there. Everyone knew the lion.

What was not normal was what the lion had in its mouth. It was the end of a rope. And on the other end of the rope was a donkey. And tied behind the donkey, nose to tail, swaying along with the air of very expensive animals who have not agreed to any of this, were three large camels, loaded with sacks.

The lion walked up to the gate. He did not drop the rope. He simply stood there, holding it, and looked at the monk with an expression that, on a person, you would have called "I believe somebody owes me an apology."

The monk put down his broom. He said, very quietly, "Abba? Abba Gerasimus? You are going to want to see this."

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is the old tale of Saint Gerasimus and his lion, a holy man who really lived beside the river Jordan in the fifth century and a legend about him that a monk named John Moschus wrote down a little over a hundred years later, and the lion's personality, the donkey's opinions and most of the conversations are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let's start with the place, because the place is half the story.

If you go down from Jerusalem towards the east, you go down. And then you keep going down. Jerusalem sits up in the hills, cool at night, breezy in the afternoons. But the road east falls away through bare, folded, honey-coloured rock, mile after mile, until you come out into the valley of the Jordan, which is one of the lowest places on the face of the earth. The Dead Sea, a little to the south, sits so far below the level of the ocean that if the ocean ever found out, it would be very concerned.

Down there it is hot. Not "pleasant summer evening" hot. I mean the kind of hot where the air feels like a blanket somebody has left on the radiator. In the middle of the day, everything sensible lies down in the shade and waits. The city of Jericho is there, a green oasis of palms and springs, one of the oldest towns anyone knows of. And a few miles from it, winding through thickets of reeds and tamarisk and willow, is the river Jordan itself.

Now, the Jordan is not, I should warn you, a mighty river. If you are imagining something the width of the Mississippi, think smaller. Think smaller again. In places, a determined person could throw a sandal across it. But it is the river where Joshua led the people of Israel into the promised land, and where Elijah was taken up, and above all where John baptised the Lord. So for Christians it has never been a small river at all. It is a small river with a very large memory.

And in the fifth century, which is roughly fifteen hundred years ago, that whole wilderness between Jerusalem and the Jordan was filling up with monks.

This was a little like a gold rush, except that instead of gold, people were looking for silence. Men came from all over the Roman world, from Asia Minor and Armenia and Egypt and Cappadocia, to live in caves and huts in the desert and pray. Some lived alone. Some lived in big communities with walls and bells and a kitchen. And some lived in a kind of arrangement in between, which was called a lavra.

The word lavra means something like a lane, or a path. Picture a scattering of small cells, little huts or caves, strung out along a path, each one far enough from its neighbour that you could not hear the man next door humming. In the middle, somewhere, is a common building with a church, a bakery, a storeroom, and the abbot.

Our saint, Gerasimus, ran one of these, a mile or two from the Jordan, near Jericho.

He was not from there. He came from Lycia, on the southern coast of what is now Turkey, a green, mountainous place by the sea. He had become a monk at home, and then, like so many others, he came to the Holy Land. We know a little about him from a careful, rather wonderful historian-monk called Cyril of Scythopolis, who wrote about the desert fathers of Palestine in the following century. Cyril tells us, quite frankly, that when Gerasimus first arrived he got himself tangled up on the wrong side of one of the great theological arguments of the day, and that an older and very holy monk named Euthymius sat him down and set him straight. Gerasimus listened, changed his mind, and the two became friends. I find this enormously encouraging. Even saints have to be corrected sometimes, and the holy ones are the ones who say "Oh. Yes. You're right," and get on with it.

So by the time our story begins, Gerasimus is an old man, the abba of a lavra, which means its father. And his lavra had a rule which was, I have to say, not for everyone.

During the week, the monks lived alone in their cells. Five days a week, each one stayed in his little hut, praying, and working with his hands. The work was mostly weaving: baskets, and mats, and ropes, made from palm leaves, which the monks would later sell to buy bread. You might think basket weaving sounds relaxing. It is, for about an afternoon. By the fifth day you have woven quite a lot of baskets.

They ate very simply. Bread, a few dates, water. The old accounts say that in the cells they were not allowed to light a fire or cook anything at all, which tells you two things. One, that they took their fasting seriously. And two, that you could not, in that lavra, make a cup of tea, which would have been the end of me personally.

They each had one garment, and a mat to sleep on, and a jug for water. And here is my favourite detail: they were told to leave their cell doors open when they went out, so that anyone who needed something could come in and take it. A whole neighbourhood with the doors open and nothing worth stealing. That's a kind of freedom.

Then, at the weekend, they all came in. On Saturday and Sunday the monks gathered at the centre of the lavra. They went to the Divine Liturgy together and received Holy Communion. They ate a proper meal together, which might have included some cooked food and even, on a good day, a little wine. They handed in the week's baskets, collected their bread and their palm leaves for the coming week, and then, on Sunday evening, they all walked back out to their cells again, like people going back to a job they actually love.

That was life at the lavra of Abba Gerasimus. Prayer, palm leaves, silence, weekends. Hot days and cold, starry nights. And, as we're about to find out, one donkey.

It was an ordinary day by the river.

Gerasimus liked to walk along the banks of the Jordan. He was old, and he walked slowly, with a stick, among the reeds, praying under his breath. The river made its low brown sound beside him. Birds went about their business. Somewhere, a frog was having opinions.

And then he heard something that was not a frog.

It was a roar. Not a proud, look-at-me roar, the kind you hear at the start of old films. It was a ragged, miserable, complaining sort of roar, the noise of something big that was hurting and did not know what to do about it.

Now. What does a sensible person do, alone in a thicket by a river, when they hear a lion?

I'll tell you what I'd do. I would remember an urgent appointment, very far away, in the opposite direction.

Gerasimus, the old story says, walked towards it.

And there in a little clearing in the reeds was a lion. A full-grown lion, golden and enormous, with a big dark mane full of burrs and bits of twig. And he was not crouching, or stalking, or doing anything a lion is supposed to do. He was holding up one front paw, off the ground, and limping on three legs, and making that terrible sad noise. The paw was swollen up like a loaf. And stuck right into the soft pad of it was a sharp splinter of reed.

The lion saw the old man, and the old man saw the lion, and for a moment nobody said anything.

Then the lion did something strange. He hobbled forward, and he held out the paw. Like a child holding out a finger with a splinter in it. Like a dog at the vet who has decided, against all his principles, to trust you.

"Oh, you poor thing," said Gerasimus. "Oh, look at that. Let me see. No, hold still. Hold still, you great silly creature. I'm not going to hurt you. Well. I am going to hurt you a little bit. But then you'll feel much better. That's how this works."

He sat down right there on the ground, which, if you are keeping track, means that an elderly monk was now sitting at eye level with a lion. He took the paw onto his lap. It was the size of a dinner plate. He looked at the wound, and he took the little knife he carried for cutting palm leaves, and very carefully, he opened the swelling and drew out the splinter. All the poison and the pus came out with it, and I won't describe that part, because it's bedtime and you have just had supper.

The lion flinched. He growled, deep in his chest, a growl you could feel through the ground. And Gerasimus said, "Yes, yes, I know, I know," in exactly the voice of a grandmother cleaning a scraped knee, and he did not stop. He washed the paw clean in river water. He tore a strip off something, quite possibly his own one and only garment, and he bound it up.

Then he patted the lion on the nose, got up, brushed himself down, and said, "There. Off you go. Keep it clean. Don't walk on any more reeds."

And he went home.

And the lion followed him.

Here is a thing you should know about lions. When a lion decides it lives somewhere, the discussion is over.

The old story says that from that day on, the lion simply would not leave Gerasimus. Wherever the old man went, the lion went too, padding along behind him, a large, silent, golden shadow. When Gerasimus went into the church, the lion lay down outside the door. When Gerasimus went to his cell, the lion lay down across the threshold. When Gerasimus walked by the river, there was the lion, limping politely a few steps behind, like an extremely large and slightly embarrassed bodyguard.

You can imagine how this went down with the other monks.

The first one to find out was a young brother. The sources do not name him, so I'm going to call him Theodore. Brother Theodore had come out of his cell on the Saturday morning, yawning, carrying a stack of baskets, and walked round the corner of the bakery and directly into the lion.

The baskets went up in the air. Brother Theodore went up in the air. The baskets came down first.

"Abba," said Brother Theodore, from somewhere on top of the bakery roof. "Abba. There is a lion. There is a lion in the lavra. I want to be clear that I am not complaining. I'm simply reporting it."

"Yes," said Gerasimus. "He had a splinter."

"He had a what?"

"A splinter. In his paw. I took it out. Now he's staying."

"For how long?"

The old man looked at the lion. The lion looked at the old man. The lion's tail made a slow, contented swish in the dust.

"I don't think," said Gerasimus, "that he has a return journey planned."

Now, a lion has to eat. And this was a problem, because the lavra of Gerasimus was a place where people ate bread, dates, and water. There was not, I think it's fair to say, an enormous amount on the menu for a predator.

And here the old story gives us one of its loveliest details. It says that Gerasimus fed the lion on bread, and on soaked pulses and vegetables, the same simple food the monks themselves ate. And the lion ate it.

I want you to picture this. A full-grown lion, the king of beasts, the terror of the Jordan valley, lying in the shade of a monastery wall, chewing thoughtfully on a lump of bread and some boiled lentils. Every so often, he would look up, chew, look into the middle distance, and you could almost see him thinking: "This is not what I had in mind. But I'm told it's very good for me."

It became a sort of joke among the brothers, I imagine. Brother Theodore, once he came down off the roof, would say things like "Is that a lion of the desert, or a lion of the bean pot?" And the lion would put his ears back and pretend not to hear.

But they got used to him. People do. That's the remarkable thing about a lion. For about a week it's the most astonishing thing that has ever happened to you, and after a month you're stepping over it to get to the bread.

The lion, for his part, seems to have wanted to be useful. I'm inventing here, but I think it's in the spirit of the thing. He would follow the monks to their cells in the evening, as if seeing them home. He would lie in the middle of the courtyard on Saturday afternoons while the brothers stacked up their baskets, and every now and then he would stand up, walk over to the pile, look at it seriously, and sit back down again, like a supervisor. He did not, it's true, weave any baskets. Paws are not built for it. But he made it very clear that if baskets ever needed guarding, he was available.

And so Gerasimus, who was a practical man, gave him a job.

This is where we meet the donkey.

The lavra had a donkey. Every monastery in the desert would have needed one. You see, the cells were dry and the lavra was a mile or two from the river, and water is the one thing you absolutely cannot weave out of palm leaves. So every day, somebody had to go down to the Jordan with the donkey, fill the water jars, load them onto her back, and bring them all the way up again, so that the brothers would have something to drink.

The old story does not tell us the donkey's name. I suspect she didn't have one. When a monastery only has one donkey, you don't need a name. You just shout "Donkey!" and she knows it's her, and then she decides whether or not to come.

I've given her a personality, because I don't think it's possible to tell a story with a donkey in it and not do that. She was, I imagine, small, grey and stubborn, with a white nose and long, expressive ears, and she had firm opinions on almost everything. She had opinions about the path. She had opinions about the weight of water jars. She had very strong opinions about lions, which, when the lion first arrived, she expressed for several days without a break, at volume, from the far corner of the yard.

And it was this donkey that Gerasimus decided the lion should look after.

The arrangement, as the old story gives it, was this. After the water had been fetched, the donkey would be taken down to graze in the green places along the riverbank, where there was good grass among the reeds. And the lion would go with her, and watch over her, and bring her safely home in the evening.

"Now listen to me," said Gerasimus to the lion, on the first morning. The lion sat up very straight. "This is the donkey. She is very important. She is the only donkey we have. Without her, we have no water, and without water, we have no monks. So you're to stay with her and keep her safe. You're not to eat her."

The lion looked slightly hurt that this needed saying.

"I'm sure you weren't going to," said Gerasimus. "But I like to be clear."

And off they went, down the path to the river. The donkey in front, flicking her ears, extremely suspicious. The lion behind, walking very carefully, like someone carrying a full cup of coffee across a crowded room.

And, to everyone's surprise, it worked.

Day after day, week after week, the lion took the donkey down to the river. She grazed. He sat in the shade and watched her. Other animals, the jackals, the hyenas, the odd wandering wolf, took one look at the arrangement and decided to go and bother somebody else's donkey. In the evening, the two of them would come plodding back up to the lavra together, the donkey a little rounder, the lion a little prouder.

Over time, I like to think, the donkey stopped yelling about it. She came to regard the lion the way a small, bossy older sister regards a very large younger brother. That is to say, as something that was basically her responsibility, mostly harmless, and extremely embarrassing in front of other donkeys.

And the monks would say to visitors, a little proudly, "Oh, yes. That's our lion. He looks after the donkey."

Which, as everyone in the story was about to learn, is the kind of thing you should never say out loud.

It was a hot afternoon.

I know. They were all hot afternoons. But this was a particularly hot afternoon, the sort of day when the air above the stones shimmers and the river looks thick and slow and even the flies have given up.

The donkey was grazing. The lion was watching. And then, gradually, without ever quite deciding to, the lion was watching with his eyes closed.

Now I want to be fair to the lion here, because this is a story about being fair. The old account in John Moschus simply says that the donkey wandered off a long way from the lion. It does not say why. It may be that the lion was doing his best and the donkey, who was a donkey, simply drifted. Grass is like that. You eat one clump, and there's a better clump just over there, and then a better one past that, and before you know it you're in a different postal district. But it's also possible, and this is just me, that on a hot afternoon by a slow river, a lion who has eaten nothing but lentils for several months might lie down in the shade of a tamarisk for a moment's rest, and that the moment might last longer than intended.

Either way. When the lion opened his eyes, the donkey was gone.

What had happened was this. Along the road that ran down the valley, there came a caravan of camel drivers. The old story says they were from Arabia, merchants of the desert, the sort of men who spent their lives walking goods from one market town to another. They had their camels strung out in a line, nose to tail, loaded with whatever they were carrying to sell.

And they saw, wandering alone by the riverbank, with nobody in sight, a nice little grey donkey.

Now, I don't want to be too hard on them. I'm sure in their own minds they found a way to say it was all right. "No owner." "Finders keepers." "She practically walked up to us." You know how it is when you want something. But the long and short of it is that they took the donkey's halter, tied her onto the back of their string of camels, and went on their way, up the road, around the bend, and out of sight.

And the donkey, for once in her life, didn't have an opinion fast enough.

The lion searched. Of course he did. He went up and down the riverbank. He went into the reeds. He sniffed the grass where she'd been grazing and followed her scent, and lost it, and found it, and lost it again where the road was trampled by camels. He came back to the tamarisk and looked under it, as if she might somehow be hiding there, which she was not, being a donkey and not a cat.

And then, as the light began to go, he had no choice. He turned around and walked back up the path to the lavra. Alone.

Gerasimus was sitting by the door of the church when the lion came home.

He saw him coming from a long way off. You can see a long way in the desert. And he saw at once that something was wrong, because the lion was walking slowly, with his head low, and there was no small grey shape trotting in front of him.

The lion came right up to the old man and stopped. And he did not lie down. He did not sit. He simply stood there, the old story says, with his eyes on the ground, the way a person stands when they have done something dreadful and are waiting to be told so.

"Where is the donkey?" said Gerasimus.

The lion looked at the ground.

"Where is the donkey?"

The lion looked harder at the ground. If the ground had had a trapdoor, he would have gone through it.

And Gerasimus, seeing a lion with no donkey and an extremely guilty face, put two and two together. And, as it turns out, he got five.

"You ate her," said the old man. "Didn't you. You ate the donkey."

The lion's head went lower still.

Now here, as I tell it, is a very interesting moment. Because Gerasimus did not shout. He was not cruel. He did not drive the lion out into the desert with sticks, which a lot of people would have done. What the old story says he did instead was this. He said, "Blessed be God." And then he said, "Very well. From now on, whatever the donkey used to do, you are going to do."

I think that's rather wonderful, actually, even though he had the facts entirely wrong. Because notice what he doesn't do. He doesn't give up on the lion. He doesn't say "I knew it, once a lion always a lion." He just says: you broke something, so now you're going to help mend it. It's the kind of justice you'd want if you were the one who'd done the wrong thing. It's just that the lion hadn't done it.

So the next morning, the monks brought out the donkey's harness. And it did not fit, because a lion is a different shape from a donkey in almost every way that matters. So they made a new one, of rope and leather and a great deal of muttering, with a frame on each side to hold the water jars. And they put it on the lion. And they led him down to the Jordan, filled the jars, loaded them up, and walked him back up again.

And the lion carried the water.

He did not complain. That's the thing that got to the brothers in the end. He did not roar, or sulk, or bite anyone. Every day he went down to the river, and stood still while they filled the jars, and walked back up the long hot path with the water sloshing on his back and the harness rubbing his mane flat, and he set it down at the door of the lavra, and he lay down in the shade and waited for the next day.

Brother Theodore, who had once spent a morning on the bakery roof, found himself bringing the lion extra bread.

"I don't know," he said to one of the older brothers. "He doesn't look like someone who ate a donkey."

"What does someone who ate a donkey look like?"

Theodore thought about it. "Fuller?"

It was during this time that a soldier came by the lavra. The old story tells us this, a little throwaway detail that I love. He was some officer passing through on the road, and he came to ask the old man for his prayers, and while he was there he saw the lion, in his harness, plodding up the hill with the water jars on his back.

The soldier stood and stared for some time.

"Abba," he said eventually, "with the greatest respect. Why is your lion dressed as a donkey?"

So they explained. And the soldier, who seems to have been a kind man, felt so sorry for the lion that he took out some gold coins and gave them to the monks. "Here," he said. "Buy yourselves a new donkey. And let that poor animal go back to being a lion."

The monks bought a new donkey, and the lion was let off water duty. Which tells you something about how the brothers were starting to feel. But the old man, I think, was still not quite sure what had become of the first one. And the lion still went about with his head a little lower than before.

Sometimes, the worst thing about being blamed for something you didn't do isn't the work. It's the way people look at you.

Time passed. Seasons, in the Jordan valley, don't change very much. It goes from very hot to slightly less hot and back. But the reeds grew and were cut and grew again, and the monks wove their baskets, and the lion lay in the shade by the gate and watched the road.

And then one day, along that same road, came a caravan.

It was the same camel driver. The old story is quite specific. He was on his way up to Jerusalem to sell grain, and his camels were loaded down with sacks, three of them strung together. And at the front of the string, being led along by her halter, small and grey and stubborn, with her white nose and her long, expressive ears, was the donkey.

The lion was down by the river, as it happens, when they passed. I like to think he smelled her before he saw her. I like to think there was one of those long, slow moments, the kind you get in films, where a large golden head comes up out of the reeds, and the nostrils flare, and the ears turn, and then the eyes go very wide indeed.

And then the lion roared.

This was not the miserable roar of the splinter. This was not the guilty silence at the church door. This was the full, real, proper roar of a lion who has been carrying water jars for months for a crime he did not commit and has just seen the evidence walk past on a rope.

The camel drivers, the story says, took one look at what was coming out of the reeds and ran. They dropped everything and fled, and I don't blame them for a second. I wouldn't have stopped to take a receipt either.

And the lion came bounding up onto the road. And he did not attack the camels. He did not harm the donkey. He went straight to the front of the line, took the donkey's halter in his great jaws, gently, the way a cat picks up a kitten. And he turned around and began to walk home.

The donkey came with him. Of course she did. Behind the donkey came the first camel, because it was tied to the donkey. Behind the first camel came the second camel. And behind the second came the third. So up the long hot path to the lavra, in the late afternoon sun, came the strangest procession that valley has ever seen: one lion, one donkey, three camels, and a great many sacks of grain, all of them moving at the stately pace of a lion who knows exactly what he is doing and would like everybody to watch.

And that is how, at the start of tonight's story, the brother at the gate came to put down his broom.

"Abba," he said. "Abba Gerasimus. You are going to want to see this."

The old man came out. He stood at the gate and looked at the lion, and at the donkey, and at the camels, and at the lion again. The lion did not drop the rope. He just stood there, looking up at him.

And Gerasimus understood.

He understood that the donkey had never been eaten at all. That she had been stolen. That for all those months, while the lion had carried the water and borne the harness and the looks and the jokes about lentils, he had been completely innocent. And that he had never once tried to explain, because, of course, he couldn't.

The old story says that Gerasimus realised then that he had blamed the lion wrongly. And I imagine he did what a holy person does when they find out they've got it wrong, which is the same thing he'd done all those years before, when Euthymius set him straight. He said so.

He knelt down in the dust of the gateway, an old man in front of a lion, and he put his hands on either side of that big shaggy face.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry. I thought the worst of you. And you said nothing. You just carried the water."

The lion, I imagine, leaned his great head against the old man's chest, and let out a long breath, the kind that goes all the way down to the paws. And then, because he was a lion and not a saint, he gave the camels a very smug look.

The old story tells us that Gerasimus gave him a name. It doesn't say exactly when, so I like to think it was then. He called him Jordanes. Jordan. After the river where he'd found him, and where the donkey had been lost, and where, I suppose, the whole thing had begun. And from then on, that's what the brothers called him. Not "the lion." Not "the donkey eater." Jordanes. A name is a strange, small thing to give somebody. But it's not nothing. It means: you belong here. You're one of us.

Now, what happened to the camels?

The old story doesn't say. So, and I want to be very clear that this part is ours, I like to think it went something like this. A few days later, a small, sheepish group of men turned up at the gate of the lavra, keeping a careful eye on the shade where the lion was lying. And their leader, twisting his headcloth in his hands, said that he believed the brothers might have some camels of his.

And the brothers said yes, they did. And they also had a donkey of theirs, which he'd had for some time.

And there was a long pause.

And the camel driver said he was very sorry about the donkey. He said it had been a bad business and he was ashamed of it. And Gerasimus looked at him for a while, and then said, "Well. You've said so. That's the hard part." And he gave him his camels back, and his grain, and, because it was a monastery, a basket of bread for the road. Several baskets, actually. They had a great many baskets.

And as the merchants led their camels away down the hill, there by the gate lay the lion, Jordanes, with his chin on his paws, and the small grey donkey standing beside him, grazing on a tuft of grass right between his front feet, perfectly unafraid, as if to say: I knew he'd come. I always knew.

The old story says that Jordanes stayed with Gerasimus for five years after that.

I picture them as they got older together. The abba walking slower now, on his stick, along the riverbank in the cool of the early morning. The lion walking slower too, his mane going grey and patchy, keeping close at the old man's side. The donkey, greyer about the nose, still having opinions. Brother Theodore, no longer young, still slipping the lion a bit of extra bread on Saturdays.

And then, as it must for all of us, the time came for Gerasimus to go home to God. The historians tell us it was around the year four hundred and seventy-five. He died in peace, an old man in the place he had built, and the brothers buried him there, near the church.

The lion was not there when it happened. He was away, somewhere out in the reeds, the way lions sometimes are.

When he came back, he went looking for the old man. He went to the cell. He went to the church door. He went down the path to the river and back again. And he could not find him anywhere.

One of Gerasimus's disciples, a monk named Sabbatius, saw him searching. And he went to him, and he knelt down, the way the old man used to, and he said gently, "Jordanes. Our elder has left us. He has gone to the Lord."

The lion would not believe it. He would not eat. He kept on searching, and calling out in that low, sad voice, up and down the lavra, all the places they had been together.

So Sabbatius took him by the mane, and led him to the grave. And he said, "This is where our elder is."

And the lion lay down on the grave. And he mourned there, the old story says, and would not be moved, and there, on that spot, before many days had passed, he died.

The brothers buried him close by.

John Moschus, who wrote all this down, adds a little reflection at the end, and I want to share it with you, because I think it's the heart of the matter. He says that none of this happened because the lion had a soul that could reason, like a person. It happened, he says, because God wished to honour those who honour him, in their life and after their death, and to show us how the animals were subject to Adam, before Adam fell, back in the garden, when everything was the way it was meant to be.

I find that a lovely thought to fall asleep on. That once, for a little while, by a small brown river at the bottom of the world, an old man and a lion lived the way things were always meant to be: with kindness going in both directions. A splinter taken out. A job given. A wrong forgiven, by the one who'd done the wronging. And a name.

The lavra is still there, in a way. Monks kept the place for centuries after Gerasimus. It was ruined and rebuilt, more than once, as the long history of that land rolled over it. Today there is a Greek Orthodox monastery of Saint Gerasimus out in that same hot valley near Jericho, rebuilt in the nineteenth century on the old site. People still go there. And here is the thing that I think the old abba would like best: in its icons, and its little carvings, there he is, an old man with a white beard. And there, curled up at his feet, is a lion.

Saint Gerasimus is a saint of both East and West. The Orthodox churches keep his feast on the fourth of March, and the Roman Martyrology, the Catholic Church's great calendar of saints, names him on the fifth.

And now a small, gentle aside, before we finish. If you have ever been to an art gallery in Europe, you may have noticed a painting of an old scholar in a study, with a book and maybe a cardinal's red hat, and, for no obvious reason, a lion lying on the floor beside him. That's Saint Jerome, the great translator of the Bible into Latin. And the lion has a story too: that Jerome took a thorn from its paw, and it guarded a donkey, and lost it, and found it again. Sound familiar?

The usual explanation is a very human one. In Latin, Jerome's name is Hieronymus. And if you say "Hieronymus" and "Gerasimus" quickly, a few times, in a cold church, with a cold, you can hear how a story might wander from one old man to the other, the way a donkey wanders from one clump of grass to the next. So Jerome got the lion. Gerasimus, I'm sure, doesn't mind. He was always very generous with his things. He left his door open.

Some notes for the curious.

The story of the lion comes from a book called The Spiritual Meadow, by John Moschus, a monk who travelled the monasteries of Palestine, Egypt and beyond in the late sixth and early seventh centuries, collecting stories from the elders, and writing them down. The lion is in chapter one hundred and seven. Moschus says he heard it from the fathers of the lavra of Gerasimus. So it is a legend, a monastery story, told and retold for more than a hundred years before it was written, and we've told it as one.

Gerasimus himself, though, is history. Cyril of Scythopolis, writing in the sixth century, mentions him in his Life of Euthymius, including the story of how Euthymius corrected him, and the way of life of his lavra: the cells, the palm-leaf work, the weekend gatherings, the open doors. A good modern book on all of this is Derwas Chitty's The Desert a City. And if you'd like more stories of saints and animals, Helen Waddell's old book Beasts and Saints is a delight.

What did we invent? The lion's personality, the donkey's personality and her white nose, Brother Theodore and his time on the roof, almost all the dialogue, and what the soldier said. Moschus has a soldier give money for a new donkey, but his exact words are ours. In Moschus, the camel driver simply flees, and the camels are brought back with the donkey. The merchants coming back to the gate to apologise, and getting their camels and a basket of bread, is our own addition, told in the spirit of the old abba. And the idea that the lion fell asleep in the shade is ours too. Moschus just says the donkey wandered off.

That's the story of Saint Gerasimus and his lion Jordanes for tonight. His feast is kept on the fourth of March in the Orthodox churches, and he is remembered on the fifth of March in the Roman Martyrology. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

Let's close with a short prayer.

Lord God, who made the lion and the donkey, the river and the reeds, and saw that they were good: bless all your creatures tonight, wild and tame, and bless everyone who cares for them. Give us gentle hands for the wounded, patience with the stubborn, and the humility to say sorry when we have judged too quickly. Through the prayers of your servant Gerasimus, and of all your saints, keep us in your peace, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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