Mary of Egypt

For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Little Pictorial Lives of the Saints, Volume 2, April to June, by John Gilmary Shea.

April 9, St. Mary of Egypt and St. John the Almoner.

At the tender age of twelve, Mary left her father's house that she might sin without restraint, and for seventeen years she lived in shame at Alexandria.

Then she accompanied a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and entangled many in grievous sin.

Dorothy Day had an abortion.

Mary of Egypt, like, was addicted to sexual pleasure.

I mean, God did extraordinary things through these people.

He could do extraordinary things through you and me.

Um, there's a story that is just, it is in so incredible.

It just, there's a saint named St. Mary of Egypt.

And the story of St. Mary of Egypt, just to be really, really brief is at one point, Mary was, um, a prostitute.

And the reason why she was a prostitute, and she even says this in her own like biography in her own words, essentially, um, She says, there are some people who enter into prostitution because they're forced into it.

Some because they're desperate.

And at one point there was a priest who was in the wilderness, uh, living in retreat essentially.

And he came upon this, upon this woman, Mary, and she told him her story.

And that's how we have the story of Mary of Egypt, St. Mary of Egypt, because the Lord interceded and intervened on her behalf in a miraculous way, just like the Lord interceded against Heliodorus for his sake, but also for the sake of the people.

These practices give us back the ability to direct ourselves towards what is good.

Now, St. Mary of Egypt, she gives a great example of this.

Right.

She lived in the desert for almost 50 years, pursuing a life of holiness and going to the desert.

Let's say someone's on their deathbed and they are given perfect contrition.

You look at certain saints like St. Mary of Egypt and...

She had slept with hundreds.

She

And in our own personal lives, sometimes our own vice and our lack of virtue has to also be turned over into the reality of like, for some reason, Lord, you are allowing and permitting me to fall in this way now it's not an excuse to keep sinning but i can continue to offer you myself at every moment that i fail or i struggle and the more that i unite myself with you and surrender to you and to your love and your grace the more that i am going to be transformed and prepared for eternity with you I mean, there's some canonized saints that were addicted to opiates until the day that they died.

I mean, you look at St. Mary of Egypt was like sold into prostitution and was addicted to sex.

Right.

For a long time and experience at temptation.

She's St. Mary of Egypt canonized.

Right.

So for listeners here, we're all called to be canonized saints.

Actually, we've got two very, very different female saints who are going to show up here.

So this one is St. Mary of Egypt who lived from around 344 to 421.

And hers is listed here by the Claude as a criminal past with a moral rather than legal emphasis.

Okay.

Because she ran away from home around 12 and lived for 17 years in Alexandria in Egypt in promiscuity.

She traveled to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage out of curiosity, but was unable to enter the church until she prayed to the Virgin Mary.

And then she withdrew to the desert as a hermit for the rest of her life.

She was not a martyr.

Dorothy Day, for example, she had an abortion.

Mary of Egypt was addicted to sexual pleasure.

Paul murdered people.

Bartolo Longo had been a satanic priest.

And that mission is the grandest, most noble, most ambitious, most worthy of all missions.

It's nothing less than this: to rescue, renew, and transform the entire human family into the family of God.

[gentle music] So let us ask this week in a special way the intercession of St. Ignatius, Mary of Egypt, Francis, Dominic, and whoever in the great cloud of witnesses most inspires us to encounter King Jesus ever more profoundly, and then to ask Him how He is asking us to do in our day what they did in theirs.

Hello, friends.