St. Mary of Egypt

A girl who ran away to Alexandria at twelve and lived seventeen years there in dissolution, and who joined a pilgrim ship to Jerusalem for the feast of the Cross out of nothing better to do. At the door of the church an invisible force held her back while everyone else went in, and in that moment she saw her life. She prayed to the icon of the Mother of God in the porch, was let in to venerate the Cross, and went out across the Jordan into the desert, where she lived alone forty-seven years. The monk Zosimas found her there, heard her story and brought her communion, and a year later found her body. St Sophronius wrote the Life, and the Church reads it in Lent with the Great Canon and gives her a Sunday. Feast: April 1, and the Fifth Sunday of Great Lent.