The Fifth Sunday of Great Lent is dedicated to St. Mary of Egypt, one of the Church’s most powerful examples of repentance. Her feast day is actually April 1st, but we commemorate her on this Sunday because her life shows us what Lent is really about.
Mary’s story is extreme. She left home in Egypt at twelve and spent seventeen years in Alexandria living as a prostitute. She didn’t charge money. She just wanted the sin itself. When pilgrims headed to Jerusalem for the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, she went along, paying for her passage by seducing the sailors. She had no interest in the holy sites. She just wanted more men.
But something happened at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. She tried to enter with the crowd and couldn’t. An invisible force held her back while everyone else walked through. Three times she tried. Three times she failed.
She saw an icon of the Theotokos near the door and it hit her: she was filthy, and she couldn’t enter because of what she’d become. She prayed to the Mother of God, weeping, promising to change her entire life if she could just venerate the Cross. She tried the door again. This time she walked right in.
After venerating the Cross, she heard a voice telling her to cross the Jordan and she’d find rest. She received communion at a church dedicated to St. John the Baptist, bought three loaves of bread, and walked into the Judean desert. She stayed there forty-seven years.
The first seventeen years were hell. She was tormented by memories of her former life, by the same passions that had ruled her in Alexandria. She survived on wild herbs. Her clothes disintegrated. But she prayed constantly, and slowly the passions lost their grip. The last thirty years brought peace she’d never imagined possible.
An old monk named Zosimas found her during one of his Lenten retreats into the wilderness. He saw a figure in the distance, dark from the sun, hair white and wild. When he approached, she asked him to throw her his cloak because she was naked. Then she told him her name and asked him to pray for her. She knew who he was without being told. She recited the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer perfectly, though she’d never learned to read and hadn’t seen another human in decades.
She asked Zosimas to return the next year on Holy Thursday and bring her communion. He did. She met him at the Jordan, made the sign of the cross, and walked across the water to receive the Holy Mysteries. Then she walked back across and disappeared into the desert.
When Zosimas returned the following year, he found her body prostrate in prayer, already dead. Next to her, written in the sand: “Abba Zosimas, bury the body of humble Mary here. I died on the very day I received the Holy Mysteries.” The date she’d written was April 1st. A lion appeared and helped him dig her grave.
We read this whole story during Lent, usually on the Thursday evening before the Fifth Sunday when we sing the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete. Then on Sunday we celebrate the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil and remember her again. It’s a lot of Mary of Egypt in one week, and that’s intentional.
Her life answers the question every one of us carries into Lent: Can I really change? We’re not talking about minor adjustments. We’re talking about the kind of transformation that seems impossible. Seventeen years of deliberate, chosen sin, and then forty-seven years of repentance so complete that she became a saint. If that’s possible, then none of us is beyond hope.
The Church puts her story right here, in the final stretch before Holy Week, because we need to see what repentance actually looks like. It’s not feeling bad about yourself. It’s not making promises you’ll break by Pascha. It’s a total reorientation of your life toward God, sustained over years, through suffering and temptation and the slow work of grace.
Mary shows us that the door is never locked. She couldn’t enter the church because of her sins, but the moment she turned to the Theotokos in genuine repentance, the door opened. That’s how it works. God doesn’t bar the door. We do, by clinging to our sins. And the moment we let go, we’re in.
If you’ve never heard her full story read aloud, try to make it to the service when we sing the Great Canon. Fr. Thomas Hopko has a wonderful podcast about her on Ancient Faith Radio if you want to hear more. Her life is long and strange and beautiful, and it’ll change how you think about Lent.
We’re almost to Holy Week. St. Mary of Egypt walked into the desert with three loaves of bread and stayed forty-seven years. We can make it another couple of weeks.
