Mary of Egypt and the Three Loaves

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An old man is walking in a desert, and he has just seen a ghost.

Or that is what he thinks. It is noon. The ground is white. The air above the stones is wobbling like water over a fire, and in the middle of the wobble, a long way off, is a dark shape that is moving. It is not a rock, because rocks do not move. It is not a goat, because goats are not that shape. It is a person, a thin, brown, bent-over person, going away from him across the sand at a surprising speed.

The old man is a monk, and he is fifty-three years old, and he has been walking for twenty days. He says his prayers under his breath. He rubs his eyes. And then, because he is a monk, and has been told all his life that you do not run after things, he picks up the hem of his robe and runs after it as fast as an elderly man can run, which is not very fast, and is mostly just a loud sort of hurrying.

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 of Saint Mary of Egypt, who is honoured in both the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches, taken from her old Life, which was written down in Greek about fourteen hundred years ago, and a few of the small conversations are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let's begin with a country that is mostly stones.

If you stand on the shore of the Jordan River, near the place where the Jordan runs into the Dead Sea, and turn your back on the water and look west, you are looking at the Judean desert. It is not like the deserts in films. There are not many tall dunes. It is a country of bare hills, folded one over another like a rumpled blanket, pale brown and grey and a sort of dusty pink, cut by dry valleys that fill with a roaring flood for one afternoon every few years and are otherwise as quiet as a held breath. There is almost no shade. There is almost no water. In the day it is as hot as the inside of a bread oven, and at night, when the sky is clear, it is cold enough that you can see your breath, and so full of stars that a first-time visitor often just stops walking and says nothing.

Now, you might think that nobody in their right mind would go and live there. And you would be right. But the story of the people who did is one of the oldest and most surprising in the whole Christian tradition.

In the fourth and fifth and sixth centuries, thousands of men and women went into the deserts of Egypt and Syria and Palestine to pray. They are sometimes called the desert fathers and mothers. They did not go because they hated the world. That is the common mistake. They went, the old sayings tell us, because they thought the world was so interesting and so important that the best thing a person could do for it was to stand still, quietly, in front of God, with nothing else going on, and pray for everybody. It was a bit like going to the centre of a very large machine and sitting beside the engine, just to be nearer to where the power comes from.

By the time of our story, the Judean desert was dotted with monasteries. Some were big, with walls and a bell and a kitchen. Some were just a few caves with a wall around them. And the monks had a custom that is the start of our whole story. It went like this.

Every year, at the start of Lent, the forty days before Easter, the monks of one of these monasteries would, after a certain service, shut the monastery's gate behind them, one by one, and go out into the desert alone. Each man would go wherever he liked. They took a little bread, and some dried figs or dates, and some water, and a good deal of prayer, and they did not talk to each other. They stayed out there, on their own, for the whole of Lent. Then, on Palm Sunday, when the forty days were over, they would walk back to the gate, and be let in, and have a rather large meal. Nobody asked where anyone had been or what he had thought about. That was the rule. What you did out in the desert was between you and God.

It is as if the whole community went on a long silent walk, and came home, and nobody said a word about it, and every one of them was a bit different.

I think it is a rather lovely custom. I would like to try it, though perhaps not in the heat.

Now. One of the monks of that monastery was named Zosimas.

He was a priest, and he had lived in monasteries since he was a very small boy. His parents had given him there when he was about five. He did not remember any other life. He had learned the Psalms, all hundred and fifty. He had learned to chant the long night services. He had learned to bake, to mend, to garden, to weep gently in the right places, and to stay awake in church. And the old Life says that by the time he was fifty-three he was known as a man who knew everything there was to know about being a monk.

Which was exactly his problem.

Because Zosimas, who was good, and sincere, and not at all proud on purpose, had begun to notice a thought. It came to him in the evenings, when the bell had stopped and the lamps were going out. The thought went like this: Is there anyone left, out in the desert, who has more to teach me than I know already?

He didn't think it in a boastful way. He thought it in a sort of lonely way. The way a very good student, who has read everything, looks along the library shelf and feels there should be one more book. He was not sure he wanted to be the best monk he knew. He wanted to meet someone better, so that he would have something to aim at.

And the Life tells us that one night, while he was thinking this, a voice came to him. It said, more or less: You have done well, Zosimas, as far as a person can. But no one has reached the whole of perfection. There are great things you have not seen. If you want to see them, leave your monastery, and go across the Jordan to another monastery, and you will learn something there.

So he went. He packed his bread and his figs, said goodbye to his brothers, and crossed the river into a different monastery on the far side, one that sat, as these places did, with its back to the stones and its face to the sky. The monks there welcomed him. They were kind, and they were very good at their work, and Zosimas watched them closely. They prayed all night. They fasted. They worked in silence. And it was not exactly that they were less holy than he had hoped. It is more that they were holy in the ordinary way he already knew, and he spent a good while wondering if that was the thing he had been sent to learn.

Perhaps it was. The old Life does not say so, but I rather think it was part of it. Sometimes you are sent a long way to find out that the answer was in the kitchen all along. But that was not the end of the journey, because at the start of Lent, the monks of that house shut the gate and walked into the desert. And Zosimas, who had been invited, went with them.

I should say at this point that the Life of Mary of Egypt is a very odd and very beautiful piece of writing, and that it takes a careful hand to tell it at bedtime.

It is a story of a woman who lived, for a good many years when she was young, in a way that she herself later said was wrong. The old Life is quite frank about this. It tells us, in a rather sorrowful voice, that she ran away from her family when she was twelve years old, that she went to the big city of Alexandria, and that she spent about seventeen years living there in a way she afterwards deeply regretted. We are not going to dwell on that tonight. The Life itself does not enjoy it. The point of the story is not what she did wrong. The point is what happened next.

Because the whole story is really about this: what does a person do when they have wasted a great deal of their life? Is it over? Has the door closed?

And the old answer, the Christian answer, is no. The door is never closed. That is what the parable of the prodigal son is for. A young man spends the lot, and goes home in rags, and while he's still a long way down the road his father sees him and runs. The father runs. He's an old man, in a long robe, and he picks up the hem and runs. Remember that. We will see it again in a few minutes.

So that is what this story is about. It is a story about someone turned around. And I would like you to hold on to one fact about her, which is that she was not an especially wicked woman. She was a woman who had made a long series of foolish choices, each one making the next one easier, until she was a very long way from where she began. And she was not, as it turned out, too far to come back.

Now, how it happened.

When she was about twenty-nine, the Life tells us, Mary was in the harbour at Alexandria, and she saw a crowd of young men going aboard a ship. She asked where they were going. They said they were going to Jerusalem, for the great feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, which is kept every September, and which remembers how the cross of Christ was lifted up for the people to see. She thought, in her carefree way, that it would be a fine adventure. She had no money for a ticket. So she did what she had always done, which was to make the best of whatever she had on hand. She sailed with them. She made the whole voyage, and the whole journey on foot after it, without a single thought for God, and the Life says plainly that she was no pilgrim at all. She was a passenger.

But when they got to Jerusalem, a strange thing happened.

The feast day came. Crowds were pouring in the doors of the great church, the church that was built over the place of the Crucifixion and the empty tomb. It is a big, noisy, dim place, full of candles and incense and a sort of rising murmur of voices. Everyone was going in to see the relic of the true cross, which was shown to the people on that day. Mary went along with the crowd, laughing, as she had done at everything. She reached the doorway. She put her foot on the threshold.

And she could not go in.

She tried again. She was pushed back. It was, the Life says, as though a solid invisible wall had been put across the door. The crowd flowed round her on both sides like water round a post. Everybody else walked in without any trouble. She stood there alone on the step. She tried a third time, and a fourth, and finally she moved away to a corner of the courtyard, shaking, and for the first time in many years she stopped and thought.

The old text, which is not a sentimental text, tells us that what she thought was this: that she had been stopped not by a wall, but by herself. She had been walking into that church with a heart that was a long way from the place. And she knew it.

She looked up. And on the wall of the courtyard, above the door, there was an icon of the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary, holding her Son.

She began to cry. She had not cried in a very long time. She said, in the Life's own words, as nearly as we can put them: Lady, mother of God, I know that I'm not worthy to look at your icon. But you are the mother of the One who came to call sinners to repentance. Help me. Let me go in, and see the cross, and I promise I will leave my old life behind, and go wherever you tell me.

And then she went back to the doorway. And this time, there was nothing in the way. She walked in, and she knelt down in front of the cross, and she wept, and she prayed for a long time. The crowd moved round her, and she didn't notice.

When she came out, she went back to the icon in the courtyard, and thanked the Virgin, and asked what to do next. And a voice, the Life says, came to her. It did not come from the icon, exactly, but from somewhere very near. It said: If you cross the Jordan, you will find rest.

Now, I want to stop for a moment and say something about the Mother of God, because she is in this story in a very important way, and I would like to get it right.

In both the Orthodox and the Catholic traditions, Mary the mother of Jesus is greatly loved. In neither tradition is she a goddess, and in neither is she a rival to her Son. When Christians ask for her prayers, they are doing what they do when they ask a friend to pray for them, only she is the best friend of all, and the one who stood by the cross. In this story, Mary of Egypt does not ask the Virgin to save her. She asks her to help her, to pray with her, to open a door. God is the one who saves. The Virgin Mary is the one who says, in effect, yes, come, there's room.

It's a very old pattern. At the wedding at Cana, in the Gospel of John, it is the mother of Jesus who notices that the wine has run out, and it is she who says to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you." That's all she ever says in the story, and that's all she ever says in our story too. In the end it is the same sentence. Do whatever he tells you.

So Mary of Egypt went out of the church. A kind person, a stranger, gave her a coin, and she used it to buy three small loaves of bread. Then she asked a man at a stall how to find the Jordan, and he showed her the road, and she walked the whole day. And that evening, at a little church on the bank of the river, dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, she knelt and prayed. She received Holy Communion. She ate half a loaf of her bread. She slept on the ground by the river. And early the next morning, she found a small boat, and she crossed the Jordan.

She never went back.

I'm going to tell you what the old Life says about the forty-seven years that followed, but I'm going to tell it quickly, because the Life does too. It is the part where nothing happens, and that's the point.

She went into the desert on the far side of the river with her three small loaves. She lived on them for a while. When they went hard, she ate them dry, and when they ran out she ate whatever she could find, which was not much. The Life tells us that for the first seventeen years she had a very hard time. She was hungry. She was frightened. She was haunted, the Life says, by the memories of her old life, the songs and the foods and the old company, which came back at her in the long nights like a crowd of noisy visitors who would not go home. She fought them off the only way she knew, which was by throwing herself on the ground and calling on the Mother of God again. It was always the same prayer. Help me. And, the Life says, after seventeen years, it got quiet. A deep calm came over her, like the stillness after a storm. And that, apparently, was how she lived for the next thirty years: in a quiet so deep that we cannot imagine it, with nothing to do but pray and watch the light move over the hills.

Her clothes wore out and fell off in the first few years. Her hair turned white. Her skin turned the colour of the earth. And she was never, the Life says, once afraid again. When she thought of the people she had known, she prayed for them. When she thought of the people she did not know, she prayed for them as well. She talked to God the way a child talks to a parent in the dark, without any tidy words at all. And the desert, which is a place that is hard on everything, was somehow gentle to her.

That's the whole of it. Forty-seven years of praying. No audience. No book. No one to see.

I find it hard to hold that in my head. Most of us want to be seen doing something good. Mary of Egypt did the most good she ever did, and no one saw it for nearly half a century. I think that is the part of the story that I would tell if I only had a minute: that hidden prayer is not wasted.

And now we go back to the old man, running across the sand.

It was, as we said, the middle of Lent. Zosimas had been walking for twenty days, farther and farther from the monastery, and he had not found a thing. No monk. No cave. No sign of anyone at all. Then, on the twentieth day, at about noon, as he stood in the middle of the burning white plain to say the Psalm for midday, he glanced to one side and saw a figure.

It was a shape like a man, but it was dark, and its hair was white, and it seemed to have almost no clothes. He thought it must be a phantom. He made the sign of the cross. He looked again. It was still there, and now it had turned, and was walking quickly away from him toward the south. And so Zosimas, who had been praying for twenty days to meet someone who knew something he did not, found that he'd actually got his wish, and that his first reaction was to chase it.

The old Life tells this part rather well. He ran. The figure ran faster. She was, after all, forty-seven years used to those stones. He called out, "Why are you running away from an old sinner? Wait for me, for the Lord's sake!" And the figure came to a dry stream bed, a wadi, as they say, and stopped on the far side, and called back across the gap in a cracked, quiet voice: "Abba Zosimas, forgive me, but I can't turn round. I am a woman, and I have no clothes. If you want to speak to me, throw me your cloak."

Zosimas stopped dead. He had never told her his name.

He took off his cloak, which was a plain, rough, patched garment, and he laid it on the ground, and stepped back, looking at the sky. The woman came and picked it up and wrapped herself in it. And then she turned, and he saw her face for the first time. It was thin, and burnt dark by the sun, and very old and very bright. And she said, "Abba, why did you come all this way to see a sinful woman? What did you hope to learn?"

He knelt down. He found he couldn't speak for a moment. Then he said, "I don't know. But I think it was you."

And she said, "Get up, Father. You're a priest. It's not right for you to kneel to me. Bless me."

And he said, "No. You bless me."

They went back and forth a bit, quite politely, for a minute, like two people at a door each insisting the other go first. The Life seems to enjoy this, and so do I. Finally, they both stood up. And the woman, who had not seen another human face for forty-seven years, began, a little shyly, to talk.

I'm going to tell you the rest in a shorter way, because it is late, and because the best of the story is quiet.

She told him that her name was Mary, and that she came from Egypt, and she told him the plain outline of her life, and she did not make it prettier or uglier than it was. She told him about the church door, and the icon, and the voice. She told him about the desert. She said she had never since seen a human being, nor an animal that frightened her, nor anything that was not made by God. And then, to his astonishment, she began to pray.

While she prayed, the Life says, Zosimas saw her rise a little way into the air, and hang there, still, as she prayed, the way a leaf can hang on the surface of a pond. Now, the Life is quite clear about this. It does not say that she was doing it. It says she was lifted, as a thing is lifted by a hand. Every story of this kind in the whole Christian tradition makes the same point, and I will make it too. Saints do not do miracles. God does miracles. A saint is the person to whom God has done something, so that the rest of us might look up. And Zosimas, very sensibly, wasn't sure if he could believe his eyes, and he said so, and the woman said, kindly, that he didn't have to. Then she asked him to do one thing for her.

She asked him to come back next year. She said, "Next Holy Thursday, bring me the Body and Blood of Christ in the holy vessel, and wait for me on the bank of the Jordan, at the monastery's side. I have not received Communion since the day I crossed the river, forty-seven years ago. I long for it more than I long for bread."

He promised. She asked him one other thing, which was to say nothing to anyone of what he had seen until she was dead. He promised that too.

And then, with his cloak around her shoulders, she turned and went away into the stones, and he stood and watched her go until she was a speck, and then not even that.

A year passed.

Zosimas went home with the monks at the end of Lent, and ate the large meal, and told nobody. This was hard. He was bursting with it. He very much wanted to tell the abbot, and the cook, and the young monk at the gate who always asked how his Lent had gone. But he kept his word. He said, when asked, that he had prayed, and that he'd seen nothing remarkable, and in a way that was true: he had seen only what God had done, which is not remarkable to God.

The next Lent, he went back with the other monks, and when Holy Thursday came, he went to the bank of the Jordan carrying a small chalice with the Holy Mysteries, and a basket of figs and dates and lentils soaked in water, because he thought she might be hungry. And he waited, in the dusk, with the river sliding past in the dark.

After a while, he saw her. She was standing on the far bank, a small figure in a patched cloak, looking across the water. There was no boat. There was no bridge. And the thought passed through Zosimas's mind that she could not possibly get across, and that he'd have to find a way to fetch her, and he looked around in a flurry for a boat.

And then she made the sign of the cross over the river, and walked across.

The old Life says so plainly. She walked across the water, as calmly as a person crossing a kitchen, and stepped onto the bank in front of him. Zosimas, who had seen a woman rise in the air and had somehow coped with that, now found that he was on his knees again. She stopped him. She said, "Father, what are you doing? You are the priest. You hold the holy things." And so he stood. And together, in the dark, by the water, they said the Creed, and the Lord's Prayer, and she received Communion. Then she lifted her hands and said the old words of Simeon in the Temple: "Now, Lord, let your servant depart in peace, according to your word."

It was, I think, the happiest she had ever been.

Then she asked Zosimas to come back once more, the following year, to the dry stream where they'd first met. And she crossed the river again, and was gone.

And so, in the last year of our story, Zosimas walked out to the dry stream bed, and found her.

She was lying on the ground, with her hands folded, and her face turned toward the east. She had died, the Life says, at peace, on the very night he'd last seen her. Beside her, scratched in the sand, were some words. They said: Abba Zosimas, bury the body of the humble Mary on this spot. Give back dust to dust. Pray for me. I died on the first day of April, on the night of the saving Passion of Christ, after I had received the holy Communion.

Zosimas sat down and wept. And then he did what any monk would do, which was to sort out the practical matter, and he looked around, and discovered that he had nothing to dig with.

I would like to say that he improvised. What the Life says is that he began to pray, and as he prayed, a large lion came out of the desert and sat down beside the body.

Now, I'm afraid that I must be firm about this, because I know how it sounds. This is the part that listeners often doubt. A lion. In the Judean desert. In the fifth or sixth century. Well, lions did once live in that part of the world, though I would not want to swear to the Judean desert in that century. But the Life does not mean it as a statement about zoology. It means it as a statement about the way the desert, which was hard on everyone, had been gentle to her. It is the same family of story as Gerasimus and his lion, which we told in an earlier episode, and as the lion at the grave of Paul the Hermit. When the old writers wanted to say that the whole creation had been at peace with a person, they put a lion in the story, who then does something quiet and polite.

In ours, the lion did the digging. Zosimas, who was not the sort of man to argue, said, "Well, thank you," and he stood back. And the lion dug a grave with its great paws, and Zosimas laid Mary of Egypt in it, wrapped in his old cloak, and said the prayers, and covered her over. And the lion, who had done what it came to do, walked away over the stones, and was not seen again.

That is the end of the story as the Life tells it. And I would like to say what Zosimas did next, which is a thing I have always found moving. He went back to his monastery. And this time he told everybody. He told the abbot, and the cook, and the young monk at the gate. And the story, as he told it, was written down, and passed on, and read aloud in monasteries for the next fourteen hundred years. It is still read, in the Orthodox Church, in the fifth week of Great Lent, in a long service in the middle of the night. People stand in the dark with candles, and listen to it, from the beginning to the end. And they go home to bed afterward a bit quieter than before.

Let's slow down now.

The desert has gone quiet. The lion has gone. The old monk has walked home along the same stones, and he is tired, and he is happy, and he is thinking about something he has not expected to think about. He is thinking that he went out to find someone holier than himself. He had been hoping to find a great teacher. And what he had found, in the end, was a woman with a cloak, who had been, for most of her life, quite unlike a saint. And she had been transformed, not by a clever argument, but by one very small turning-around at a church door.

The feast day of Saint Mary of Egypt is the first of April, which is the day she is said to have died, and in the Orthodox Church she is also remembered on the fifth Sunday of Great Lent, when the whole of her Life is read. The prayers of that week say that she is a picture of repentance, which means, in the Greek, a change of mind. The word in Greek is metanoia. It does not mean feeling awful. It means turning round. Mary of Egypt, who stood for years at a doorway and could not go in, turned round, and went the other way, and found she'd been going the right way all along.

And I would like you to think, tonight, of anything you have been carrying that you wish you hadn't done. A cross word. A friend you let down. A long stretch of time you spent badly. It's all right. You don't have to walk across the desert for it. You only have to turn round. The father in the parable is already on the road, with the hem of his robe in his hand.

The door is never closed. That is the whole of the news. That is what Mary of Egypt knew, after forty-seven years, and what she might have told you herself if you'd met her on the sand.

Let your breathing slow down now. Let your shoulders drop. And let the day go, with everything in it, the good and the clumsy. It has all been seen, and forgiven, and loved.

Notes for the curious.

What we know: Saint Mary of Egypt is honoured in both the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches. The Life that tells her story is traditionally ascribed to Saint Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, who died in six hundred and thirty-eight, and it was very widely read from the seventh century onward, in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Slavonic and many other languages. Her feast on the first of April is old, and the Life is still read in Orthodox churches in Great Lent.

What is legend: nearly everything in the story. The Life comes down to us as one text, and we cannot check it against another source. Scholars have long argued about how much of it records events, and how much is a told story, shaped to teach about repentance. We have told it as the old story says. The details of her early life, which the Life gives with a heavy heart, we have kept to a single sentence, because the point of the Life is not what she did wrong, but what happened afterward. The crossing of the Jordan, the rising in the air and the lion are all told as the old story says, and as signs of God's work, not of any power of the saint's own.

What we invented tonight: Zosimas's small thoughts and jokes, the picture of the monks' Lenten custom as a silent walk, the details of the desert, and a good deal of the conversation. The words in her message in the sand, and the words of the voice, follow the sense of the old Life, but the wording is our own. If you would like to read it for yourself, Benedicta Ward's book, Harlots of the Desert, has a good English translation. The psalm to read with it is the fifty-first, and the story to read beside it is the parable of the prodigal son, in the fifteenth chapter of Luke.

That's the story of Saint Mary of Egypt for tonight. She is honoured by Orthodox and Catholic Christians alike, and her feast is the first of April, with a special remembrance in the fifth week of Great Lent. 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.

Here is a short prayer for tonight, our own, drawing on the fifty-first psalm.

Lord, have mercy on us, in your great kindness. Wash us, and make us clean. Give us a new heart, and a steady spirit, and the courage to turn round. Where we have wasted time, give it back as peace. Where we have hurt others, mend what we cannot. And through the prayers of your servant Mary, who found the door open after all, let us rest in peace tonight, and wake in peace. Amen.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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