“… I partook of the holy and life-giving Mysteries in the Church of the Forerunner and ate half of one of my loaves. Then, after drinking some water from Jordan, I lay down and passed the night on the ground. In the morning I found a small boat and crossed to the opposite bank. I again prayed to Our Lady to lead me whither she wished. Then I found myself in this desert and since then up to this very day I am estranged from all, keeping away from people and running away from everyone. And I live here clinging to my God Who saves all who turn to Him from faintheartedness and storms.”
Zosima asked her: “How many years have gone by since you began to live in this desert?” She replied: “Forty-seven years have already gone by, I think, since I left the holy city.”
~ The Life of St. Mary of Egypt
This Sunday was the Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt, and in this time of isolation due to the current pandemic, her life takes on new meaning.
Pia Sophia Chaudhari wrote a wonderful reflection, published last week, encouraging people to consider the trauma that likely led to Mary’s well-known prodigality in her youth.
In this post, I want look instead at her isolation.
Mary tells Fr. Zosima that the first seventeen years were a constant fight with temptation. Literarily, this mirrors her own account of living a sinful life for seventeen years in Egypt in her youth. Her seventeen years of sin require seventeen years of repentance.
To Pia’s point, it should be noted that repentance is not traditionally a strictly juridical idea. It would be easy to draw the conclusion that there is a proportion of justice implied in the parallel between Mary’s seventeen years in the world and her first seventeen in the desert. That may very well be the case, but repentance — and sin, for that matter — is much broader. The Greek word means “to change one’s mind.” The Hebrew means “to turn around.” In this latter sense, God is even described as “repenting” from punishments out of his mercy. Because he was merciful, he did not at that time give his people what they deserved as a matter of justice but rather acted according to his grace.
Mary’s whole life in the desert — like all the saints — was a matter of repentance. Let us consider again Pia’s suggestion that behind Mary’s sin was likely trauma. Psychologically, the scars of the past cannot be overcome in an instant. As creatures, change is part of our natures — we are all always “in process.” Like Mary, many have had transformative moments of conversion — my point isn’t to downplay the power of such phenomena. Rather, it is to be mindful of the Lord’s parable of the seed that the sower sowed upon different kinds of soil. The seed that fell among the rocks grew up quickly, but it had no root and withered.
Mary not only had a dramatic conversion in Jerusalem, which she earlier details, but she then, in faith, set out to lay down deep roots. To extend the parable, we may think of those seventeen years as digging up the rocks and clearing the ground so that the seed she received would have room to grow.
I have been thinking about St. Mary of Egypt all through Lent this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Early on, many protested that stay at home orders applied to churches, especially Orthodox churches due to our understanding of the vital role of the sacraments, but notice what St. Mary says: She received the sacraments once at the Church of St. John the Forerunner, then set out into the desert … for forty-seven years! According to the story, she only received them one more time, by the hand of Fr. Zosima who returned to her, before her death.
Our current state is not “normal.” We stay inside for our safety and for the vulnerable in our communities. If we must go out, we keep our distance from others — they or we may be asymptomatic carriers — and many have started wearing face masks which even prevent us from smiling at each other.
At home, the single are faced with real isolation. Those with families face other frustrations. Whoever we are, we are facing the temptations — a word, it should be noted, which can also mean “trials” — of all the scars of our pasts. Many of us have found that the fight against them isn’t as easy as we had expected. And in the midst of it all, we are deprived of the grace of the sacraments.
Or are we?
Many saints — St. Maximos the Confessor, for example — say that we receive the fullness of God’s grace at our baptisms, just as the whole tree is contained in the single seed from which it grows. This isn’t to say that we don’t need the Eucharist. I’ll take all the grace I can get! Rather it is to remind us of God’s power. He has not left us without help. For St. Mary, it sustained her for forty-seven years.
We can get through this. Hopefully it won’t take forty-seven years. But however long it takes, let us use the time to clear away the rocks — the temptations — over which we so often stumble.
I am reminded of something Fr. Roman Braga, of blessed memory, once said about his time at the Pitesti prison — a Soviet torture camp — and his time, after the prison was shut down, in solitary confinement. He spent three or four years enduring unspeakable torture meant to brainwash him away from his deepest held beliefs, his faith, his morals. He said that at Pitesti he learned that the devil was real.
After the outside world heard about the prison, the Soviets immediately shut it down — they always wanted to put on a good face for the outside world. So they transferred Fr. Roman to solitary confinement for eleven years. Not quite forty-seven — or even seventeen — but still a very long time. He said that there he discovered that God was truly real. Because when you are alone, you have nowhere to look but inside yourself. And we all are created in the image of God, so what we see, when we are able to truly look there, is God — his imprint upon our hearts.
Fr. Roman was an academic before the Soviets arrested him. But he said that he learned his books had been a sort of prison of their own. By himself, there was nothing to do but face whatever lurked inside and to meet it with prayer. I suspect that experience is quite similar to St. Mary’s. Perhaps it is becoming familiar to some of us.
Even now, I know that I find ways to distract myself. There’s nothing wrong with taking a rest when it is needed, but maybe those innocent things can be a sort of prison for me as well, like Fr. Roman’s books.
We are isolated, worried, stressed out, tempted, confused, frustrated, impatient, and so much more right now. We have good reason to be. But we also have good reason to hope. Every resurrection is preceded by death. There is a real disease that is a threat to life and health. For those we lose, we can take refuge in that hope of the resurrection. There are economic consequences to the measures we’ve taken. For those of us who lost jobs, we can take refuge in that hope. For whole industries and economies that may be disrupted and lost, we can take refuge in that hope. And as long as humanity can remember, our world has been diseased with corruption and sin. And for our own mistaken images of ourselves, our misplaced self-worth, we can take refuge in that hope.
Our value is anchored not in the foaming river of our ever-changing world, but in the immovable grace of God, who raised our Lord from the dead, who raised St. Mary from a life of prodigality, who raises us every day.
Lord, have mercy. We will rise from this, too.
Everyday Asceticism 