Today is the Sunday in the Orthodox Church in which we commemorate St. Mary of Egypt. I had no idea who she was until I became Orthodox, though the Catholic Church also recognizes her. Anybody who thinks that Christianity is a nice, settled, bourgeois religion will have their minds blown by this story, and this woman, who died probably in the fifth century.
Her life, written by St. Sophronius, a 7th century patriarch of Jerusalem, is read during matins on an appointed day in the Orthodox Church during Lent. It had been maintained as oral tradition in a Palestinian monastery since the events it recounts, until the patriarch wrote it down.
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