We had a wonderful eight weeks with Orthodox women across jurisdictions as part of our Women Sharing the Good News course which concluded recently. The theme for this course was "Saying Yes to God: Courage and Choice in the Lives of the Theotokos and St. Mary of Egypt." Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be sharing a selection of participants’ final pieces with you, starting with this meditation by Svantje Swider on St. Mary of Egypt.
St. Mary of Egypt ran away from home as a girl and lived a promiscuous life in Alexandria. One day she saw pilgrims heading to Jerusalem for the feast of the Holy Cross, and she went with them. Once in Jerusalem she was rushing towards the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the whole purpose of the trip, and everyone in the crowd went into the church. But she was blocked from the church, she literally could not enter the church.
In her case, this was the wake-up call she needed. She spotted an icon of the Theotokos and repented, vowing to turn her life around. As a hymn from the vespers service tells it, “[g]azing at the icon of the all-pure Virgin and renouncing all sin,” she “confidently went to worship the precious cross.” At that moment, she repented, she was able to enter the church. But even then, rather than return to normal congregational Christian life, or even to join a women’s monastery, God had other plans for her. After going into the church and venerating the true cross, she set off out of the city, took communion at the church of St. John the Baptist, crossed the Jordan River and went out into the desert, to live out years of her life alone.
It seems strange that God would deliberately block someone from going into a church. Perhaps God knew that in her current state, Mary was not ready. Perhaps He knew that if he just let her go into the church, she would not actually engage in self-reflection and realize she needed to repent. Keeping her away from church got her attention. Keeping her away from church prevented her from just going through the motions of participation in Christian life. Instead, St. Mary of Egypt was forced to confront her issues and repent, and her repentance started outside the church building, not within it.
The story of Saint Mary of Egypt comes to us from the point of view of a monk named Zosimas, who met her, befriended her, learned her life story, and brought her the Eucharist. The hagiography of St. Mary of Egypt spends a lot of time describing the life of Zosimas, a curious choice considering he is not the subject of the story. Zosimas was a model monk, a monastic overachiever, the straight-A student of monks. Zosimas wonders what else there is to do, now that he has reached the pinnacle of monasticism. Then he goes into the desert and meets St. Mary, who can walk on water, who can recite the psalms despite having never read them. Saint Mary, with her past, living out in the desert with God alone, is so holy she inspires Zosimas, a monk who has lived his whole life on the straight and narrow, to praise God, “Who has shown me through this servant of Thine how far I am from reaching the measure of perfection.”
I think the stories of Mary and Zosimas are lessons for us, about the true nature of the spiritual life. The purpose of Christian life is not just to be really good at the external things of church life. Fasting, volunteering for the parish, all the good and admirable parts of life in the church community, they are wonderful but they do not exist as an end to themselves. As another famous St. Mary, Mother Maria Skobtsova, said, “piety, piety, but where is the love that moves mountains?”
I’m not trying to downplay the importance of church life. Most of us aren’t called to be hermits. And even hermits need the sacraments and fellowship with other Christians to live out our vocation – like St. Mary, who had Zosimas bring her the Eucharist after she was out in the desert for so many years. What I am trying to say is that church life is not a checklist of tasks.
The practices of our faith, which we live out in a church community, do not exist for themselves but rather to lead us to a life with God. And because the goal is to live a life in communion with God, God Himself may intervene and take us on a different path, a path that may not look like regular church life. God is still working in the lives of people even when they are at a distance from the church community.
Perhaps we will have a season where we are ill, or a family member is ill, or we are taking care of a baby, or working in a God-honoring but demanding profession, where we may need to step back from church involvement or church attendance. Or maybe the members of our church community do not understand our struggles or our vocation, and we find ourselves unable to turn to them for the support we need, so we are physically in the church but mentally and spiritually feeling like we’re out in the desert. If we find ourselves in such a situation, recall that God called St. Mary into the wilderness, and that the wilderness was where He wanted her to be. And if this does not describe you – your place in the institutional church feels secure – perhaps you can be Zosimas to someone else, bringing Christian fellowship to someone physically or spiritually isolated. Regardless of where you find yourself in relation to the church, know that God is with you on your path.