St. Mary of Egypt

Who they were

Her story reaches us through the seventh century life by Sophronius of Jerusalem, and is told here as the tradition it is. It is also one of the most fearless stories the Church tells.

Mary left home for Alexandria at twelve and lived seventeen years in a life she herself, in the account's own telling, later named without excuse as sin. Out of restless curiosity she joined a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and at the church of the Holy Sepulchre found she could not enter, held at the threshold by a force the crowd passed through. Undone, she turned to an icon of the Mother of God, asked for entry and amendment, entered, and kept the bargain totally. She crossed the Jordan that night and spent forty seven years in the desert alone, fighting the old habits, which she described to the one monk who ever found her with unsparing honesty: seventeen years of war, she said, before peace. The monk, Zosimas, brought her Communion once, and a year later he buried her. The East reads her life aloud every Lent.

Why people turn to St. Mary of Egypt

Anyone whose past feels disqualifying, since she is the outer boundary case and is kept on the calendar on purpose. And people in long recovery: her seventeen years of struggle before peace is the most honest timeline in hagiography.

How to ask their intercession

At the threshold, since hers is the patronage of the door you feel barred from. One decade before the Blessed Mother, which was her own first move, asking for entry and amendment in the same breath.