Prophet Isaiah; Trans. Rel. St Nicholas the Wonderworker

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Prophet Isaiah

  Isaiah son of Amoz is the first and greatest of the four Greater Prophets, and the Church has never been content to call him only a prophet: from Jerome onward he is "the evangelist among the prophets," because he spoke of Christ not in figures only but almost in narrative. Called about the year 740 BC, in the year that King Uzziah died, by the overwhelming vision of the Lord enthroned in the Temple amid the six-winged Seraphim who cry Holy, holy, holy — the cry the Church has taken into the heart of the Eucharist — and cleansed for his office by a live coal carried from the altar in the tongs of a Seraph, he prophesied for some sixty years under four kings of Judah, counselled Ahaz and Hezekiah, foretold the deliverance of Jerusalem from Sennacherib and saw it fulfilled, and left the book that gives the Church the Emmanuel born of the Virgin, the Child upon whose shoulder is the government, the rod from the root of Jesse, the voice crying in the wilderness, and above all the Suffering Servant of chapter 53, led as a sheep to the slaughter and wounded for our transgressions. Tradition holds that he was sawn asunder with a wooden saw by order of the apostate king Manasseh, near the pool of Siloam, and the Church keeps his memory on May 9.

• Saint of the day

  Trans. Rel. St Nicholas the Wonderworker

  Nicholas the Wonderworker (c. 270 – c. 343), Archbishop of Myra in Lycia, is among the most beloved saints of the whole Christian world, honoured East and West as the model of the good shepherd and the ready helper of all in need. A Lycian by birth, made bishop of the coastal city of Myra while still young, he is remembered as a confessor who suffered imprisonment in the last great persecution and, by tradition, as one of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325, where his zeal against the heresy of Arius passed into legend. But it is his charity and his wonders that fixed his memory: the secret gift of gold that dowered three destitute daughters and saved them from ruin — the root of the whole Christian custom of gift-giving, and, by a long Dutch and American descent, of Santa Claus; the deliverance of three innocent men from the executioner's sword and of three unjustly condemned officers by a dream sent to the emperor; and the stilling of a storm at sea, for which sailors have claimed him as their patron ever since. His relics, laid in Myra, were carried in 1087 to Bari in Italy — where they still exude the fragrant "manna" of myrrh commemorated on his second feast, May 9 — and the churches raised in his honour are past counting; in Russian piety he stands, it is said, next after the Mother of God herself.

• Holy Martyr Christopher (3rd c.)

  Christopher, the great-martyr of Lycia, is one of the most widely venerated and most strangely depicted saints of the whole Christian world. The tradition makes him a man of enormous stature and frightening aspect, taken captive out of a barbarian people and serving in a Roman unit, who confessed Christ under Decius, was baptised — the Eastern accounts by Babylas of Antioch — and exchanged his old name Reprobus, "the rejected," for Christophoros, "Christ-bearer." His preaching converted the two hundred soldiers sent to arrest him and the two women, Callinica and Aquilina, sent to seduce him; he was tortured, shut in a red-hot bronze vessel, and at last beheaded, about the year 250. The Greek and Slavic tradition paints him with the head of a dog — an image the Christian East has kept, and the Christian West suppressed — while the Latin Middle Ages gave him instead the story of the giant ferryman who carried the Christ-child across the river and found the weight of the world upon his shoulders.

• Callinica and Aquilina

  Callinica and Aquilina were two women of Lycia, of ill fame, whom the persecutor sent in to the imprisoned Great-Martyr Christopher to break his resolve by seduction; instead they were converted by him, went out to confess Christ and to overthrow the idols of the temple, and were tortured and put to death about the year 250, under Decius. The Church keeps their memory with his on May 9, and the synaxaria never separate them from him: they are among the clearest instances of the martyr-passions' favourite pattern, in which the instrument chosen to destroy the confessor becomes the first fruit of his witness.

• Joseph of Optina

  Joseph of Optina (1837–1911), in the world Ivan Litovkin, was the closest disciple of Ambrose of Optina and his successor in the eldership. An orphan from a peasant family of the Kharkov province who came to Optina at twenty-three and never left it, he spent thirty years as Saint Ambrose's cell-attendant — the whole of the great elder's public ministry — sitting silently in the corner of the reception room, and by that obedience was formed into an elder of extraordinary discernment himself. After Ambrose's death in 1891 the burden of the Optina eldership and of the spiritual care of the Shamordino convent fell on him, and he bore it for twenty years, becoming superior of the skete in 1894. Notably reticent and few-worded, he was known for the unceasing Prayer of Jesus and for a stillness that visitors found more consoling than speech. He reposed on May 9, 1911, and was glorified with the company of the Optina elders by the Russian Orthodox Church in the year 2000.

• Shio of Mgvime

  Shio was one of the Thirteen Syrian Fathers who came into Georgia in the sixth century from the ascetic tradition of Antioch under the leadership of John of Zedazeni, and he became the greatest monastic founder among them. Sent out from Zedazeni to make his own place, he settled in the barren caves of Sarkineti in the gorge north-west of Mtskheta, where the tradition says he was fed by a dove; the conversion of a hunting nobleman, Evagre, and then the patronage of King Parsman, turned the hermitage into the great lavra of Shiomgvime, "the cave of Shio," which at its height numbered some two thousand monks and gave Georgian monasticism its first written rule. Shio ended his life in the extremity of ascetic self-effacement: his last fifteen years were spent walled into a pit or well, where he received the Holy Gifts lowered to him and where he died with the words, "O Lord, receive the soul of thy servant." He is commemorated on May 9.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Gorfor, patron of Llanover
• St. Sanctan, bishop of Kill-da-Les and Kill-na-Sanctan (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings