Sunday of St Mary of Egypt

St Mary of Egypt lived in the fifth century. According to her hagiography, written by St Sophronius of Jerusalem in the seventh century, she was born in the Roman province of Egypt and at the age of twelve ran away to Alexandria, where she lived a dissolute life for seventeen years. Her account, transmitted through the priest Zosimas who met her in the desert and recorded her story, became one of the most influential penitential lives of the Eastern Church.

Her spiritual transformation occurred in Jerusalem at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre during the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. When she tried to enter the church she was barred by an unseen force; after seeing an icon of the Virgin Mary and praying for forgiveness, she was able to enter. She then crossed the Jordan eastward and retired into the desert, living the rest of her life as a hermit in penitence — subsisting first on three loaves of bread she had bought and thereafter on the scarce herbs of the land, enduring forty-seven years of solitude and spiritual struggle before attaining inner peace.

Her hagiography carried authority beyond her own devotion. It was read into the record at the Fourth Session of the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, where her conversion story — turning on the icon of the Theotokos that moved her to repentance — served as evidence for the veneration of icons.

Her assignment to the fifth Sunday of Great Lent is bound to the liturgical use of her Life during that week. The Great Canon, a seventh-century penitential composition of St Andrew of Crete, is chanted in full at Orthros on the Thursday of the fifth week, and the Life of St Mary of Egypt by St Sophronius is read during that service as a powerful example of repentance, linking her commemoration directly to the Sunday that follows.

Through this Sunday the Church holds up St Mary of Egypt as the supreme image of repentance placed deliberately at the close of the fast. Her life traces the full arc the Church calls every penitent to walk: from seventeen years of dissolute living to a decisive turning at the icon of the Theotokos, and then to forty-seven years of ascetic struggle in the desert until inner peace was won. The Synaxarion of Constantinople emphasizes her time in the desert as spiritual elevation through self-control.

Set two weeks before Pascha, her commemoration teaches that no depth of sin lies beyond the reach of repentance, and that repentance is not a single moment but a long and costly labor sustained to the end. Her supernatural knowledge of Zosimas's life, her crossing of the Jordan on the water to receive communion, and her death immediately after receiving the Eucharist mark the sanctity that self-denial and grace together brought forth in her.

Placed as the fifth and last of the numbered Lenten Sundays before the Church turns toward Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday, her example gathers up the whole penitential season: the faithful, having kept the fast, are shown in her a soul that renounced worldly desire wholly and was raised to holiness, and are called to make her repentance their own before the approach of Holy Week.

In iconography St Mary of Egypt is depicted covered by her long hair or by the mantle she borrowed from the priest Zosimas, reflecting the years she spent unclothed in the desert. She is often shown with the three loaves of bread she bought before her final journey into the wilderness, and in scenes of her death receiving communion from Zosimas at the Jordan.

The commemoration is inseparable from the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete, a seventh-century penitential composition of some 250 troparia arranged in four sections of nine odes, each ode drawing on one of nine biblical canticles. After each troparion the worshippers chant the refrain asking God for mercy, and the canon unfolds as a dialogue between St Andrew and his own soul, urging spiritual transformation through hundreds of scriptural references to righteous and unrighteous figures. It is apportioned across the first four nights of Clean Week and then chanted in its entirety at Orthros on the Thursday of the fifth week — the service at which St Mary's Life is read.

The Saturday preceding this Sunday is the Saturday of the Akathist, when the Akathist to the Theotokos is chanted during Matins, so that the fifth week closes with hymns both to the great penitent and to the Mother of God whose icon turned Mary from her former life.

The observance falls within Great Lent, during which the Church's practice is to abstain from meat, fish, eggs, dairy products, wine, and oil, with wine and oil permitted on Saturdays, Sundays, and a few feast days. By the fifth week wine and oil may be taken after the Thursday service of the Great Canon as a consolation following that long service. On this Sunday itself many churches bless dried fruit at the end of the Divine Liturgy in commemoration of St Mary's profound asceticism. Typikon prescriptions vary; the faithful should consult their priest.

On the moveable feast day it is customary in many churches for the priest to bless dried fruit after the Divine Liturgy, in commemoration of St Mary's desert asceticism.