Memorial Saturday

Saints commemorated

• Ven. John Climacus

  John Climacus (c. 579 – c. 649) — "John of the Ladder" — was a monk of Mount Sinai who, after forty years of hidden ascetic labour, was made abbot of the great monastery there, and who at the request of another abbot composed the Ladder of Divine Ascent (Greek Klimax), the most influential handbook of Orthodox ascetic and monastic life. Its thirty "steps," one for each year of the Lord's hidden life, lead the soul from the renunciation of the world through the struggle against the passions to the summit of dispassion and love. The Church keeps his memory on March 30 and, above all, on the Fourth Sunday of Great Lent, setting him before the faithful as a guide in the ascent of the Fast.

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• Commemoration of an Uncondemning Monk

• John the Silent

  John the Silent, called the Hesychast (c. 454–558), was a bishop who became a hidden monk. Consecrated Bishop of Colonia in Armenia while still a young man, he fled the quarrels of the world, concealed his episcopal rank, and entered the Great Lavra of Sabbas the Sanctified near Jerusalem as a simple novice. When his secret was revealed and he could no longer be ordained, the Patriarch bade him live in silence — and in silence he remained for the rest of an extraordinarily long life, in his cell, in the desert (where a lion is said to have guarded him from the Saracens), and again at the Lavra, where he stood among the defenders of Orthodoxy against Origenism. He reposed at the age of 104 and is commemorated on December 3.

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• Sophronius of Irkutsk

  Sophronius, Bishop of Irkutsk and Nerchinsk — in the liturgical style "of Irkutsk and all Siberia" — was one of the great missionary hierarchs of the eighteenth-century Russian Church, a Ukrainian monk of the Poltava country who was sent in 1753 to a diocese the size of a continent and governed it for seventeen years, founding its seminary, ordaining and disciplining a scattered and half-trained clergy, and travelling to Nerchinsk, Kirensk and Yakutsk. He reposed on 30 March 1771, in Bright Week; and because the Holy Synod took six months to decide where he should be buried, his body lay unburied through a Siberian summer and was found undecayed — the beginning of a veneration that examinations in 1833, 1854, 1870 and 1909 did nothing to check. A fire in the Theophany Cathedral at Irkutsk on 18 April 1917 consumed the shrine and left only his bones; a year later the Local Council of the Russian Church glorified him, and the glorification was solemnly completed on 30 June 1918, which is the day this collection keeps as the second of his feasts.

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• Sosthenes, Apollos, and Companions of the Seventy

  On December 8 the Church commemorates a company of apostles of the Seventy, all named in the letters of the New Testament: Sosthenes, once ruler of the synagogue at Corinth and afterwards a bishop; Apollos, the eloquent Alexandrian of the Book of Acts; Cephas of Colophon; Tychicus, Paul's trusted messenger; Epaphroditus, whom Paul called his fellow-soldier; and Caesar, bishop of Dyrrhachium — together with the Apostle Onesiphorus, who is commemorated with them but whose principal feast and full entry stand under his own name. Chosen and sent by Christ among the Seventy (Luke 10), they laboured beside the Apostle Paul and became shepherds of the young Churches. Their memory is kept also on March 30 and, with all the Seventy, on January 4.

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British Isles and Ireland

• St. Osburga of Coventry, virgin (c.1015)
• St. Fergus, bishop of Downpatrick (6th C)
• St. Tola, bishop of Disert Tola in Meath (c.733)

Readings

Troparia & kontakia