St. Macarius the Great

A camel driver from the Nile delta who went into the desert of Scetis at thirty and stayed sixty years, and around whom one of the four great monastic settlements of Egypt grew. The Sayings preserve him as the desert’s most quoted father after Antony, and as the one who answered a brother asking how to be saved by telling him to go and speak to the dead, praise them and insult them, and learn from their silence. The Spiritual Homilies that circulate under his name are of disputed authorship and are read for their teaching on the heart as the place where God is met, which is one of the springs of the hesychast tradition. Feast: January 19.