31st Sunday after Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Ven. Xenophon and Mary

  Xenophon and his wife Mary were a wealthy and devout senatorial couple of Constantinople in the reign of Justin I and Justinian (early sixth century) whose whole household was sanctified. They sent their two sons, Arcadius and John, to Berytus (Beirut) to study law; on the voyage the ship was wrecked, and the brothers, cast ashore separately and each believing the other and their parents drowned, both renounced the world and became monks in the Holy Land without knowing the other had survived. When after long silence the grieving parents came on pilgrimage to Jerusalem to learn their sons' fate, the family was reunited — the boys living as ascetics — and Xenophon and Mary in their turn gave away their fortune to the poor and received the monastic habit, so that all four ended their lives in the desert, adorned with the gift of wonders. They are kept together on January 26 as a beloved image of a whole family made holy.

• St Ammonas of Egypt, disciple of St Anthony the Great (350)

  Ammonas (died early fifth century) was a disciple of Anthony the Great and, at Anthony's withdrawal to the Inner Mountain, his successor as father of the monks at the Outer Mountain of Pispir. Trained in the ascetic life first in the desert of Scetis, he became one of the great elders of the Egyptian desert, remembered above all for a meekness so complete that he seemed not to know evil — the abba who, shown wrongdoing, would not see it. Later ordained bishop, most likely by Athanasius the Great, he continued a shepherd of souls; several of his letters and a number of his sayings survive among the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, teaching unceasing self-examination, the guarding of the thoughts, and the hidden warfare of the heart. He is commemorated on January 26.

• Our Holy Mother Paula of Rome (404)

• Ananias, Peter and the Seven Soldiers

  Ananias, a presbyter in the province of Phoenicia, and with him Peter, the keeper of the prison, and seven soldiers, were martyred in the persecution of Diocletian, about the year 295. Ananias, arrested for his confession of Christ and for the destruction of idols by his prayer, endured his tortures with such constancy — and, the tradition holds, with such attendant wonders — that his jailer Peter and a company of seven soldiers were themselves converted and confessed Christ. Refusing to sacrifice, all were condemned together and cast into the sea, receiving the crown of martyrdom. They are commemorated on January 26.

• David the Builder

  David the Builder (c. 1073–1125), David IV of the Bagrationi dynasty, was the greatest of the kings of Georgia and is venerated by the Georgian Orthodox Church as a holy and right-believing sovereign. Coming to the throne at sixteen over a land broken by the Seljuk Turks, he rebuilt the kingdom in a reign of thirty-six years: reforming and cleansing the Church at the Council of Ruisi-Urbnisi, resettling and converting Kipchak warriors to form a standing army, shattering the Turkish coalition at the Battle of Didgori in 1121, recovering Tbilisi in 1122, and uniting Georgia for the first time in centuries into the realm that would flower in the Golden Age of his great-granddaughter Tamara. A man of deep personal repentance who carried a Gospel-book everywhere and composed his own Hymns of Repentance, he founded the monastery and academy of Gelati and asked to be buried beneath its gate, that all who entered might tread upon his grave. He is kept on January 26.

• Joseph of Thessalonica

  Joseph the Confessor (c. 762 – c. 832) was Archbishop of Thessalonica, the younger brother of Theodore the Studite and, with him, a leading figure of the Studite reform and of the resistance to iconoclasm. Formed in monasticism under their uncle Plato at Sakkoudion, he was raised to the see of Thessalonica, but is remembered less for his brief settled episcopate than for his long confession: with Theodore he broke communion over the "Moechian" scandal, and under the renewed iconoclasm of Leo V the Armenian he was deposed, imprisoned, and repeatedly exiled for his defence of the holy icons, dying at last worn out by his sufferings. He was also a gifted hymnographer, who with his brother furnished many of the canons of the Lenten Triodion still sung today. His relics were translated, with Theodore's, to the Stoudios monastery, and he is commemorated on January 26.

• Symeon the Ancient

  Symeon "the Ancient" (died c. 390) was one of the earliest and most venerable of the ascetics of the Syrian mountains, whose life the historian Theodoret of Cyrrhus recorded from living memory in his History of the Monks of Syria. He withdrew as a young man into a mountain cave and then to the wilderness of Mount Amanus, living on wild plants, given to unceasing prayer, and — the tradition loves to tell — so at peace with creation that wild beasts grew tame before him. He made the long pilgrimage to Mount Sinai, and afterward gathered disciples and founded two monasteries, ruling them as their spiritual father into a great old age. He is called "the Ancient" to mark him as one of the fathers of Syrian monasticism and to distinguish him from the later Symeons of the same land. He is commemorated on January 26.

• Theodore the Studite

  Theodore the Studite (759–826) was the great abbot of the monastery of Stoudios at Constantinople, the foremost monastic reformer and confessor of the Byzantine Church, and the most uncompromising defender of the holy icons in the second iconoclast controversy. Through his Rule, his catechetical instructions, and his vast correspondence he refounded coenobitic monasticism on a footing of common life, manual labour, and daily obedience that shaped Eastern monasticism ever after; the Stoudite typikon governed the worship of Constantinople and passed to Mount Athos, Kiev, and the whole Slavonic world. Thrice exiled and scourged for his resistance to imperial interference in the Church, he died in confession on November 11, 826.

• Xenophon of Robeika

  Xenophon of Robeika (died 1262) was a Russian monastic of the Novgorod tradition, a disciple of the school of Varlaam of Khutyn who, after serving as abbot of the great Khutyn monastery, withdrew to seek a stricter solitude and founded a monastery of Saint Nicholas on the Robeika river, some miles from Novgorod. He is venerated as the founder-abbot of that house and is commemorated among the saints of Novgorod. His feast is kept on January 26 (the day of his name, shared with the ancient Xenophon of Constantinople) and his repose on June 28.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Conan, bishop of Sodor and Man (648)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings