Committing Sins and Committing to God:
The Example of St. Mary of Egypt for a Pandemic-Ridden World
by V. Rev. Protopresbyter Stelyios Muksuris, Ph.D., Th.D.
Professor of Liturgical Theology and Languages
The Example of St. Mary of Egypt for a Pandemic-Ridden World
by V. Rev. Protopresbyter Stelyios Muksuris, Ph.D., Th.D.
Professor of Liturgical Theology and Languages
Orthodox Christianity is replete
with accounts of conversion experiences. Throughout her long history, the
Church has commemorated thousands upon thousands of men and women saints whose
former unethical and undesirable lifestyles were transformed into a wholesome
Christian existence of submission and obedience to the will of God. By God’s
grace, the one-time rulers, persecutors, tax collectors, prostitutes, thieves,
and murderers today make up our canon of saints. This reality simply bears
witness to the Church’s raison d’être,
to why our Lord established the Church within the world. The Church is God’s
ultimate vehicle for transforming people’s lives. The Church’s main purpose is
to heal, sanctify, and save all believers. In Orthodox theology, the Church is
properly called the “redeemed community” of Christ Jesus, a union of sinners
constantly struggling and growing toward God’s eternal Kingdom, of which the
Church offers only a glimpse. To suggest that the Church exists only for the
holy and worthy is to undermine its whole nature, if not ridicule Christ, who
came into this world to save sinners and established the Church to continue
this ministry of conversion and salvation.
The saints of the Church then come
right out of the ranks of us sinners. On this Fifth Sunday of Great Lent, the
Church remembers and honors one such sinner turned saint: Mary of Egypt. In
truth, her life is anything but short of extraordinary. St. Mary was an
individual who represented a cross section of the immoral, fallen world of her
day, a woman whose powerful conversion experience from a life of prodigality to
a life of holiness and purity, immersed in ascetic struggle, has been the focus
of much admiration among the Orthodox.
So what is the story behind Mary of
Egypt’s famous conversion? St. Sophronios of Jerusalem (560-638 AD), our chief
source of information, tells us that St. Mary lived during the fourth century
A.D. At the tender age of twelve, she relocated with her parents to the
prominent metropolitan city of Alexandria, in Egypt, where she lived on her own
for seventeen years as a notorious prostitute. So enveloped was the young Mary
in her sexual sins that many times out of desperation, she sought out clients
for herself without requesting any payment in return. Her fellow citizens
looked down on her lowliness as a harlot and treated her with the utmost
disrespect. Mary in turn resented her accusers, living in seclusion, and
realizing that she was willfully throwing her life away. Until one day. . . .
A group of Christians gathered to
embark on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the solemn feast of the Elevation of
the Cross. Driven by curiosity, Mary also tagged along with the group. When the
Alexandrian Christians arrived in Jerusalem, they headed immediately for the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Christendom’s most sacred shrine, built over the
place where our Lord was crucified and the tomb from which He rose. As Mary
reached the gates of the church, some invisible power was obstructing her from
physically entering the temple. Pious worshipers passed her on either side and
made their entrance, but Mary’s limbs seemed to become stiff and petrified. As
Mary peered into the church, she saw every Christian falling to his knees as
the Precious and Life-Giving Cross of Christ, still fully intact, was raised
and processed around the sanctuary. Mary’s gaze then fell upon an icon of her
namesake, the Blessed Virgin Theotokos, and immediately, Mary also dropped to
her knees in deep contrition, weeping uncontrollably for the sins she had
committed.
Leaving the church, she returned the
day after, this time able to physically enter and venerate the Precious Wood.
At that moment, Mary decided to change her life by dedicating the remainder of
it to God through repentance. Before her departure into the rugged desert, she
communed the Holy Mysteries at a church by the edge of the wilderness. She then entered the desert, where she lived
in all piety, humility, and poverty for 47 years. For almost half a century,
Mary engaged herself in strenuous fasts and prayed to God unceasingly,
repenting over her former life and praising the God whose mercy and compassion
back in Jerusalem made her aware of the seriousness of her spiritual condition
and saved her.
Toward the end of her life, St. Mary
sent word to the saintly priest Abba Zosimas to come to the desert and offer
her Holy Communion. St. Zosimas came to the dying Mary on Holy Thursday and
communed her. Returning the year after to the same place in the desert where he
had last seen St. Mary, Fr. Zosimas found her dead, asleep in the Lord.
Miraculously, he found her body undecomposed and uncontaminated, fragrant with
the grace of the Most Holy Spirit of God. Next to her body there lay a note,
written by St. Mary’s own hand, which read: “Father Zosima, in this region bury
the body of the lowly Mary. I surrendered my spirit the same day that I
communed the Precious Gifts. Please pray for me.” Edified by this miraculous
woman, St. Zosimas offered St. Mary a Christian burial. Church historians place
the date of her falling asleep as April 1, 378 or 437 A.D.
Two aspects of St. Mary of Egypt’s
life stand out and are worth noting; First, Mary’s complete immersion in her
sins made her cognizant of just how serious her spiritual state was. And
second, God’s full-force attempt to transform Mary’s life made her abundantly
aware of just how much God loved her and how much she desired to follow Christ
and serve Him. Let us examine both aspects in greater detail.
Mary’s complete immersion in her
sins made her aware just how serious her spiritual state was. Like most harlots
and people of ill repute in her day, Mary had no time (and made no time) for
personal meditation and inner spiritual assessment. She offered herself from
client to client, blinded by her transgressions. She did not realize she was
spiritually ill. She did not know there was something really wrong with her.
Then her past struck her in the face like a brick, then was her heart pierced
with the pain of knowing how many souls she led to the gates of hell, including
her own. Mary’s immersion in sin was the final motivating force behind her
conversion. It proved, in the end, a great blessing, because it reinforced in
her heart and mind the severity of her sinfulness and the immediacy of
conversion. If Mary of Egypt had sinned only a few times, then repented, and
again fell into the same sins, her conversion process not only may have been
lukewarm, but also may never have occurred at all. A little sprinkle of rain
will not cause a person to run inside for shelter, but a violent downpour will.
St. Mary experienced this "downpour" of sins, this unrelenting storm
in her spiritual life. With God’s grace, she ran for cover and was saved. For
this reason must we never gossip or condemn or criticize others because,
believe it or not, they may very well become tomorrow’s saints, like Mary of
Egypt.
God’s full-force attempt to
transform Mary made her realize just how great God’s love for her was. Many
times God reveals His power to us in a physical, materialistic way, in a way He
knows will appeal to and be understood by a materially-minded world. Before
Christ spoke to people’s souls, He knew that He had to make known His power on
a purely sensory, or physical, level. For St. Mary of Egypt, it was an
“invisible forcefield” at the gates of the Holy Church. For St. Paul, it was a
blinding light on the road to Antioch. For Lazarus’ sisters, it was the bodily
resurrection of their brother following his four-day entombment. In each
circumstance, the recipients of the miracle do not simply become physically
healed; instead, a deep faith and devotion, once dormant in them, now becomes
alive and draws them into a deeper understanding and love for God. As Jesus
says regarding Lazarus: “This [Lazarus’] sickness is not unto death, but for
the glory of God, that the Son of man may be glorified through it” (John 11:4).
The same with the blind man (John 9:3). God’s love is mysteriously manifested
through the actions He takes in people’s lives – actions which at times are
quite harsh – to induce more faith and thus to effect within them a spiritual
as well as physical healing.
The Church today lifts up St. Mary
of Egypt as a prime example of repentance and conversion. In her life we
witness two necessary extremes, which lead her to change: her complete
sinfulness and God’s sublime revelation within the Church of the Resurrection
in Jerusalem. Sometimes such extremes, humanity going one way and God
forcefully chasing after us, are blessings in disguise, ways in which God tries
to redeem a lost situation and give to it meaning and direction.
Indeed, to know God fully in His goodness many times means we must
encounter evil in His absence, or at least hardships. Certainly, one of the
many hardships our faithful people encounter today during the Covid-19 pandemic
is their enforced abstinence from the Holy Mysteries, although Divine Liturgies
are celebrated all over the world with just a handful of people in attendance.
Like St. Mary of Egypt, we too find ourselves in a harsh desert of trials and
tribulations, abstaining from Holy Communion but earnestly seeking, like her,
that blessed day when we can commune once again the Holy Body and Blood of
Christ safely together and without fear. Hopefully, our abstinence will not
last decades and in all likelihood, it will not. In the meantime, let us
emulate her Christ-centeredness, her patience, her humility, and her demeanor,
looking to the Mother of God as our support and refuge. Our endurance will be a
test of our faith and love and trust in the Lord. Let us not give up, for God
is with us. His presence within us and among us is sufficient, which is
manifested to us in our prayer life, especially now during this time from the
church that assembles in our home (ἡ κατ’ οἶκον ἐκκλησία).
After this
pandemic is well behind us, I think more and more people can truly appreciate God’s
fatherly love and, if they’ve ever left Him, will never again want to separate
from Him. Remember once again the Prodigal Son from the Bible. At the lowest
point in his life did he “come to his senses” and return back to his father.
The road, like the one St. Mary of Egypt traveled, was a long and narrow one,
but it was also the most secure road to the Kingdom of God.