The Prophet Elijah

The Tishbite, who shut the sky for three years against the idolatry of Ahab and Jezebel, was fed by ravens at the brook and by a widow at Zarephath whose son he raised, and called down fire on Carmel before the prophets of Baal. Fleeing for his life, he went forty days to Horeb and found God not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire but in a still small voice. He did not die: a chariot of fire took him up, and he appeared again with Moses on Tabor, speaking with Christ of His departure. The monks of Carmel and of every desert took him as their father, and in Greece and Cyprus his chapels stand on the tops of hills, as near the sky as he went. Feast: July 20.