Day of the Holy Spirit

Saints commemorated

• Trans. Rel. Theodore Stratelates

  Theodore Stratelates (†319) — "the Commander," from the Greek stratelates, a general — was a Roman military officer of the early fourth century, governor and garrison-commander of Heraclea on the Thracian coast of the Black Sea, and one of the two great warrior-martyrs named Theodore whom the Church honours. A Christian in the years of Licinius's persecution, he was so loved by the city that the emperor himself came to him; entrusted with idols of gold and silver to offer in sacrifice, Theodore broke them up and distributed the pieces to the poor, then openly confessed Christ. He was scourged, racked, blinded, and — the tradition holds — crucified, and at the last beheaded on February 8, 319. His faithful servant Varus wrote down the acts of his passion. He is closely associated with, and in the calendars and iconography often paired with, Theodore the Recruit (Tyron), commemorated on February 17; the two Theodores are distinct saints. His relics were translated to his estate at Euchaita, kept as a second feast on June 8.

• St Ephraim, Patriarch of Antioch (545)

  Ephraim, a Syrian of Amida, was the imperial Count of the East (comes Orientis) under Anastasius and Justin — a soldier and administrator famous for his charity — when the great earthquake of 526 levelled Antioch and killed its patriarch. Sent back to rebuild the ruined city, he was raised from the lay state to its vacant throne in 527, and governed the see of Peter for eighteen years, until his repose in 545. He was among the firmest defenders of the Council of Chalcedon in the East, touring Syria and Mesopotamia to recover the non-Chalcedonian communities, presiding over the synod that condemned the writings of Severus of Antioch, and subscribing the condemnation of Origen in 543. The synaxarion remembers him above all for the trial by fire in which he met a heretical stylite: the pyre burnt three hours, and the patriarch's omophorion was drawn out of the ashes unharmed.

• Our Holy Mother Melania the Elder (410)

  Melania the Elder (c. 350 – c. 410) was a Roman noblewoman, widowed at twenty-two, who took ship for Egypt in the reign of Valens, spent half a year among the fathers of Nitria, followed the exiled Orthodox monks into Palestine disguised as a slave-girl to serve them, and then settled for twenty-seven years on the Mount of Olives, where with Rufinus of Aquileia she governed a house of fifty virgins and a companion monastery of men and kept open house for every pilgrim who came to Jerusalem. She was the friend of Evagrius of Pontus and Palladius, the teacher of Olympias, and a reader of Origen on a scale that astonished her contemporaries — which drew on her the anger of Jerome and set her at the centre of the first Origenist controversy. Returning to Rome in old age she carried her granddaughter Melania the Younger and half her kindred out of the world before the Gothic sack; she reposed at Jerusalem forty days after her final arrival, about the year 410.

• St Zosimas, monk, of Phoenicia (Syria) (6th c.)

• Kalliope

  Kalliope was a Christian maiden of the middle of the third century, in the reign of Decius, remarkable — as her name says — for beauty, and no less for the gifts of mind and soul she gave wholly to Christ. She refused every offer of marriage, taught the word of God, and spent herself on the care of the sick and the comforting of the afflicted. Taken in Decius' persecution and brought before the local governor, she met first his flatteries and promises and then his fury: she was scourged without mercy, scored with knives, her wounds burned, and at last beheaded. The Greek synaxarion sums her up in a couplet: overlooking the beauties of things made, she was granted the sight of the beauty of the Maker.

• Naucratius

  Naucratius was the second son of Basil the Elder and Emmelia, and so the brother of Basil the Great, Macrina the Younger, Gregory of Nyssa and Peter of Sebaste. Brilliantly gifted and already launched on a career at the bar, he abandoned it at twenty-one for a hermitage in the forests by the river Iris in Pontus, where he lived five years in extreme austerity with a single servant, Chrysapius, hunting and fishing not for himself but to feed a company of poor and sick old men whom he had taken into his care. He died suddenly, still in his twenties, about the year 357 — the death whose news, in Gregory of Nyssa's telling, became the occasion of his sister Macrina's greatest act of courage. The Greek synaxarion keeps him on June 8, with the note that his identity is not certain.

• Theodore of Rostov and Suzdal

  Theodore, a Greek by birth, was consecrated in 991 or 992 — within a few years of the baptism of Rus' — as the first bishop of Rostov, and so the first hierarch sent into the wholly pagan forest country of the upper Volga and the Kliazma. The Merya and Slav population of Rostov would not receive him and drove him out; he withdrew to Suzdal, where his preaching took root, and there he baptised and taught until his repose in 1023. He is honoured as the founder of the see that Leontius, Isaiah and Ignatius afterwards made famous, as the enlightener of the Suzdal land, and — because his body was found incorrupt — as a wonderworker. His relics rest in the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Theotokos at Suzdal.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Bron, bishop of Cassel-Irra (c.511)
• St. Levan (6th C)
• St. Muirchu (7th C)
• St. Syra (7th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings