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Catholic Saints
St. Mary of Egypt
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Dive into the lives of Holy Women You’ve Never Heard Of with Dr. Elizabeth Klein and Dr. Jessica Murdoch. St. Mary of Egypt comes from a scandalous past that led to a life of extreme penance. Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future!
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You're listening to a podcast on Catholic saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live and share their faith.
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Welcome back to form now. I am Dr. Elizabeth Klein, here with Dr. Jessica Murdaugh. We are both professors who teach here at the Augustine Institute. And this is the second episode on a series of holy women you've never heard of. So slightly more obscure female saints from the tradition, but ones that we think are important and cool and want to talk about. So in this episode, we're going to be talking a little bit about Saint Mary of Egypt. So Saint Mary of Egypt is, as her name says, from Egypt, and she lived during the fourth century. So her approximate dates are 344 to 421. I know in our previous episode with Saint Macrena, I think I like, buzzed over that really quick. So the previous saint we did, Saint Macrina, the Younger, was also from the fourth century, but lived a little bit earlier. So we're kind of just going through time, going to do some early saints and then a few medieval saints and then one modern saint. So this is number two in the fourth century. So have you ever heard of St. Mary of Egypt? I have. And St. Mary has quite the story and the dramatic conversion, doesn't she? Yeah. So Dr. Barrot thought that including St. Mary of Egypt was maybe like, not quite, quite PG enough for the formed audience. So just so you know, There are some PG13 elements of the life of St. Mary of Egypt if anyone's watching or listening to this saint's life with young kids. But she must not, she must be okay for general consumption because although Mary of Egypt is sort of not necessarily very well known in the Western church, she's a very important saint in the Eastern church. So some form watchers may know that. I go to a Byzantine church and my husband is a Byzantine rite Catholic. And so St. Mary of Egypt is actually. Her feast day is on the fifth Sunday of Lent in the Eastern calendar. So during the penitential season of Lent, all Eastern Catholics would hear the story of Saint Mary of Egypt. So she's kind of like this model of radical penance. And so she's kind of more famous in the Eastern church. But now you will know if you ever go to a Byzantine church during Lent on the Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt, you know who she is. Okay, so here goes St. Mary's story. So St. Mary of Egypt was a prostitute. But more than that, it seemed like she liked being a prostitute. She enjoyed it. And so she lived A very wild, dissolute lifestyle. And her story tells us that she would not accept pay sometimes because she was enjoying herself so much. And so this is kind of like the setting. And then there's a kind of. There's a very interesting element of her life where she takes this almost what you would call like an anti pilgrimage. So she decides she's going to go to Jerusalem, but not in order to sort of see the holy places. This is very popular thing to do in the early church, especially around this time, would be to make great sacrifices to visit the Holy Land for spiritual purposes. But Mary of Egypt decided she was gonna basically whore her way down to Jerusalem to party and have a great time and see a new place. And so there's this very interesting. And to try to corrupt the pilgrims. Yeah, yes, to tempt the pilgrims who were on the way. So she is. So she has a very impure motives for undertaking this journey to the Holy Land and sort of being by boat and land the party girl and having a good time. But then when she arrives in Jerusalem, she attempts to enter into the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. So for those of you who don't know that church, that's the church where the tomb of Christ is. So it's one of the holiest places in the Holy Land. So she. Yeah, she tries to enter into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but she experiences some kind of spiritual force that will not allow her to enter. So she isn't able to go into the church. So she's coming, she's facing this very like, God will not be marked. Exactly. This very kind of like physical resistance, really, to her entering. And she has a kind of instantaneous conversion. She realizes that this is because of her sin, that she's not able to enter. And sort of hanging at the door of the Holy Sepulcher is an icon of Mary, an icon of the Theotokos. And so she prays to Mary that she would be forgiven and that she would be allowed to enter. And so she is allowed to enter. And then afterwards she, you know, receives absolution and communion. And then she sort of hears a voice telling her to go across the Jordan. And so she. So she has this experience. She goes across the Jordan and she spends the rest of her life living a penitential life in the desert. What a dramatic conversion. Yeah, and it's interesting, you know, we think about the Desert Fathers, and I think when we think about the Desert Fathers, if we think about them, it tends like, the idea is Kind of like, I don't know, they're doing spiritual combat with demons, and they're really brave, and they're living this heroic ascetic life, which they are. But I think all of them see this as a kind of penitential life, right? This idea of the desert as a place where you're totally deprived. You're deprived of food, you're deprived of cool things to look at, things to hear people to converse with. Like, you're just completely giving up everything. And so she does. She. She does that, and she lives that very dramatic life. And so she's kind of the only desert mother. Not that she has a lot of sayings of the desert mothers. There's no sayings of Mary of Egypt, but they're her actions of this dramatic life of penance. And so the way this story comes down to us, because it's like, well, if she just lived in the desert, then how does anyone know? Her story is that many years later, a priest who's also kind of doing a penitential sort of journey in the desert, comes across Mary of Egypt, who he apparently thinks she's like an animal because she's like, you know, she's naked, she has no clothes. She's just out there all crazy. And then, you know, meets her, realizes who she is as she tells him her story, and asks for him to bring her communion, which he does. And then she says if she asks him to come back again the following Easter, so this is around Easter time, the following Easter, to give her communion again. And so he returns, but he finds that she's dead and that she's been buried. And a sort of note left for him indicates that she died the very day that he gave her communion. And so she kind of has this, like, whole, you know, almost like that whole period of penance to receive last rites. Right. You know, her life seems to be very hopeful for our times, don't you think? Yeah, I think it is. Because I. I don't know, sometimes we, like, get down about the world or whatever, and we think our times are so bad and people are so simple and there's all this sin everywhere. And, you know, nobody's experienced conversion. Nobody sees God. But if you are a historian like me, you've read the stories of other time periods. You know, there's nothing we're doing that the ancient Romans didn't do. There's nothing you can find stories, stories like the Life of Mary of Egypt, where you think that's a really dissolute life. It's almost fantastical, but we know from our times that it's not that fantastical. There could be someone to live a life like that, and then to see someone have a conversion like that, it's just such a palpable experience of grace. And I'm sure that many people have had this experience, I know I have, with people in my life whom I think couldn't be religious or never would be or whatever, but you still pray for them, and then they have. They experience a conversion, and it's. It's just miraculous. It is like a mini. It is really like a mini miracle. I mean, most people don't, like, talk to the icon of the Mother of God and experience a spiritual force keeping them out of the Holy Sepulcher, but it is. It is a kind of miracle. And even if you're at arm's length, kind of like involved in a conversion, like, you know, I'm a theologian, so whatever I talk about doctrine, when you actually experience that person's conversion, you don't see that causality really at all. It really just feels very gratuitous for someone to have a change, a turn like that. And so St. Augustine says never to despair of the salvation of anyone because that person may convert and make faster progress than you. And so I think that that's like Mary of Egypt. She exemplifies that. Right? You might think this is the last person in the world who's ever going to live a holy life. And she just. She turns it around real fast. Right. You know, even besides the dramatic conversion and the sign, the wonderful evidence of God's grace, it also says something about holy places, don't you think? Yeah, I think like with Mary of Egypt, you know, she entered into that church or tried to enter the church with the completely, completely wrong motivations. You know, she came there with impure motives. She came there with no desire to sort of, you know, see it as holy, and yet she still experienced God's grace there. And so I think that it gives us a lot of confidence in our churches in, you know, Christ's presence in the Eucharist or even something like an icon, these kinds of things that we are sacraments or maybe what we think of as sacramentals, that these really are effective sources of grace. And of course, not everybody is receptive. They don't. It's not like magic, but we can have a kind of confidence that, you know, maybe it is worthwhile bringing our friends to church, or maybe it is worthwhile bringing someone to a beautiful Christian space, and maybe it could be an opportunity for them to encounter God, even if they're not thinking about it or open to it or that kind of thing. Indeed. So Mary of Egypt, this is her story. And I think that she, although it's a little, I don't know, maybe it was a little risque for formed, I think it's still a very good story to tell. I think it also helps remind us that there's no sin to grave for God and that there's no sin in our modern times that other saints haven't overcome. And I think also since our topic is sort of women, these more obscure women, I think Mary of Egypt is also a really good example of how women are always called along with men to these like radical forms of holiness. So even though maybe you've heard about the desert fathers, there is also a desert mother and that there's sort of never been a time that women haven't responded lavishly to the love of God and haven't sort of acted every bit as heroically as their male counterparts. And obviously the priest who served her last communion was very moved by the story of Mary of Egypt. And so he's the one who sort of passed on this story that was eventually sort of written down in his monastery. And so thank you for joining us for this story of Mary of Egypt. And maybe you'll be encouraged to visit a Byzantine church in the fifth Sunday of Lent to celebrate the Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt. But in the west, her feast day is April 1st. And so I hope you look to St. Mary of Egypt maybe as an intercessor for your hopeless causes. We'll ask St. Mary of Egypt, please pray for us.
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