The Story of Mary and Zosimas Together
~ Professor Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Ph. D., Brown University
And so we come to the Story of Mary and Zosimas together. It is above all a story of giving gifts to one another. From the moment they met, their lives were found to be reversed. Mary, the sinful woman, became teacher and giver of grace; Zosimas, the venerable priest and monk, became disciple and suppliant.
When Zosimas first found Mary, she fled from him while he ran after her, begging for an audience. Finally, she stopped. He did not know who she was, and she had never seen him. But she knew him before he had even spoken to her, and addressed him by name, “Father Zosimas, forgive me.” The priest was struck with dread: was she an angel? Mary, for her part, was alarmed because of her nakedness, and begged him to lend her his cloak so that she could stand in modesty before him. But it was not simply that she knew his name; with no word from him to explain who he was or why he had come, Mary new. She asked for his blessing, reminding him that this was his proper role and recalling his years of priestly service. Then, the story goes, “these words threw Zosimas into greater dread, and he trembled and was covered with a sweat of death. But at last, breathing with difficulty, he said to her, “O Mother in the spirit, it is plain from this insight that all your life you have dwelt with God and have nearly died to the world… But since grace is recognized not by office but by gifts of the Spirit, bless me, for God’s sake, and pray for me out of the kindness of your heart.” And so Mary gave the blessing.
Eventually, with great difficulty, Zosimas extracted her story from her. He was alternately terrified and wonderstruck as he watched and listened to her. She knew about him – about his life as a priest and the monastery in which he lived, and she clearly understood it all better than himself. When she prayed she levitated. Although illiterate and unschooled in Christianity (she had, after all, fled to the desert as soon as she converted) she quoted scriptural proofs for her teachings. But most of all, there was the enormity of her story. Zosimas drew out from her (much against her will) the details of her former life and her conversion; and he questioned her closely on the hardships of her desert life through those many years. She was as honest with him in the telling as she had been in her living. Not only was she blunt about her harlotry, she was also poignantly forthright about her life in the desert – how hard it had been, the suffering from cold and heat, hunger and thirst; temptation, longing for company and comfort; and yet her determination to live out her repentance in a manner suitable to her sin. She did not see, though Zosimas could, that she had attained a degree of sanctity that could only be measured by the degree of sinfulness she had known. For unlike him, she had no illusions about her accomplishments. She knew only the truth of God, and her love for him.
Then she asked a favor, for she understood that the Lord had sent Zosimas for a purpose. She asked him to return to his monastery and tell no one about her, but in a year’s time return to her on Holy Thursday, the night of the Last Supper, and bring her the Eucharist, of which she had not partaken since her conversion so many years before. Reluctantly, Zosimas left. He had become her disciple. Her presence and story renewed him, giving him life he had lost in the complacency of the monastery. At last he returned at the appointed time, yearning for her presence. She came to him, walking on water to cross the Jordan while he again gave way to awe. As he knelt to reverence her she reproved him, ‘What are you doing, Father Zosimas, you who are a priest of God and carrying the holy mysteries?’ And at once he obeyed her, resuming his priestly duties with fumbling fervor. Then, the story says, “Mary received the life-giving gifts of the sacrament, groaning and weeping with her hands held up to heaven, and she cried out, ‘Lord now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word: for my eyes have seen your salvation.”‘
Again she sent him away, to return again the following year at the same time. But when the time came and Zosimas hastened on his journey, he found his beloved guide dead, with a letter to him written in the sand beside her body. From this he learned that she had died within an hour of receiving the sacrament the previous year – the fulfillment of her hope. He learned, also, for the first time her name: she signed herself “Mary the sinner.” Grieving and marveling, Zosimas buried the holy woman, helped by a lion who came to venerate the body of the saint. Then, he went back to the world to give the gift of her story to others, even as she had given it to him. And so we, too, know it.
Here we have a story in which the sinner knows the heart of the saintly monk: in which a humble woman gives blessing to the worthy priest because he has seen that her own gifts of the Spirit exceed the ranks of ecclesiastical office; in which sanctity is found outside the monastery more than within; in which the desert, the place of death, becomes the place of life; in which the peace of God’s kingdom is restored as the lion and the man become partners in piety. It is a breathtaking story, and it moves us accordingly.
~ Professor Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Ph. D. Doctor Harvey is a faculty member of the Religious Studies Department at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Harvey received her Doctorate in Byzantine Studies from the University of Birmingham (England). She has taught Church History at the University of North Carolina and at the University of Rochester and served a fellowship at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies. Doctor Harvey is a recognized Syriac scholar responsible for numerous translations and commentaries. With Doctor Sebastian Brock, she co-authored Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, a collection of newly translated lives of saints. At Brown University she offers courses in Orthodox Church history, monasticism and the ascetic tradition, Syriac and early Christian Literature. Coptic Orthodox Church Network, http://www.copticchurch.net/topics/synexarion/maryofegypt.htm.
