Prophet Ezekiel

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Prophet Ezekiel

  Ezekiel, son of Buzi, priest and prophet, is the prophet of the exile: carried away to Babylonia with King Jehoiachin in 597 BC and settled with the deportees at Tel-Abib by the river Chebar, he was called there in his thirtieth year by the overwhelming vision of the fiery chariot — the four living creatures, the wheels full of eyes, and above the crystal firmament the sapphire throne with the likeness of a man upon it. For some twenty-two years he preached to a broken people, first that Jerusalem must fall and then that the dry bones would live; and the Church has read him ever since as the seer of two mysteries above all — the valley of dry bones, chanted over the tomb of Christ at the Matins of Great and Holy Saturday, and the closed gate through which the Lord alone has passed, read at the Vespers of every feast of the Theotokos. Tradition holds that he was put to death in Babylonia by a prince of his own people whose idolatry he had rebuked.

• Our Righteous Fathers John and Symeon, the Fool for Christ's Sake (570)

  Symeon of Emesa — the Syrian city of Homs, in the patriarchal territory of Antioch — is the archetype of the whole Eastern vocation of folly for Christ's sake. With his lifelong friend John he abandoned the world on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was tonsured near the Jordan, and spent twenty-nine years with him in the desert by the Dead Sea; then, having attained dispassion in secret, he came down into the crowded provincial city "to mock the world," dragging a dead dog behind him through the gate. For the rest of his life he played the lunatic — overturning tables, feigning gluttony and lechery, beaten and insulted daily — while in hiding he healed the sick, cast out demons, converted prostitutes and unbelievers, and foretold plague and earthquake. His Life, written about 641–649 by Leontius, bishop of Neapolis in Cyprus, is the foundational text of the fool-for-Christ tradition, and Symeon is the pattern to whom Andrew of Constantinople and the whole later Russian lineage of iurodivye look back.

• Marcella, Virgin-Martyr of Chios (ca. 1500)

• Anastasia of Serbia

  Anastasia — Ana in the world — was the wife of the Serbian Grand Prince Stefan Nemanja and the mother of the three men who made mediaeval Serbia: Stefan the First-Crowned, Vukan, and Rastko, who became Sabbas of Serbia. In 1196, when Nemanja abdicated at the council of Ras, the two took the monastic habit on the same day and by the same act — he as Symeon, she as Anastasia — and she withdrew to the monastery of the Theotokos, where she reposed in 1200. She is venerated as venerable in the Serbian Church, the mother of a saint and herself a monastic, and her relics rest at Studenica. She is commemorated on June 21.

• Anna of Kashin

  Anna of Kashin (c. 1280–1368) was Grand Princess of Tver in the worst years that principality ever knew, and the only saint in the history of the Russian Church to have been formally de-canonised. Daughter of the prince of Rostov and wife of the martyred Grand Prince Michael of Tver, she outlived husband, sons and grandson, all destroyed in the long ruin of Tver by the Horde and by Moscow; and at the end she was tonsured a nun — as Sophia at Tver, and in the great schema as Anna at Kashin, in the monastery her youngest son had built — and reposed there on October 2, 1368. Her relics were uncovered in 1649 and translated with great solemnity on June 12, 1650; in 1677 a council under Patriarch Joachim annulled the whole veneration, because the Old Believers were appealing to the two-fingered blessing of her incorrupt hand; and her people went on venerating her regardless until, on June 12, 1909, she was glorified a second time. She is invoked as the patron of widows.

• Onesimus the Recluse of the Kiev Caves

  Onesimus was a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra who enclosed himself in the Near (Antonian) Caves and lived out his life there as a zatvornik, a recluse, in the twelfth or thirteenth century. Nothing of his history is transmitted beyond the vocation and the place: his relics were buried where he had struggled and are venerated in the Near Caves still. He is commemorated on July 21, together with Onuphrius the Silent of the Kiev Caves, and again on October 4 with the venerable Elladius of the same caves.

• Onuphrius the Silent of the Kiev Caves

  Onuphrius, called the Silent (molchalivy), was a monk of the Near (Antonian) Caves of the Kiev Caves Lavra in the twelfth century, whose whole recorded ascesis is the one contained in his epithet: he kept silence. Nothing else of his history survives. His relics rest in the Near Caves among the incorrupt relics venerated there, his name is read in the Canon to the Venerable Fathers of the Near Caves, and he is commemorated on July 21 and with the whole company of that house on September 28.

• Praxedes of Rome

  Praxedes was a Christian woman of second-century Rome, honoured with her sister Pudentiana as one of the earliest of the Roman virgins: daughters, by the received tradition, of the senator Pudens of the Seventy in whose house the Apostle Peter had lodged. In the persecutions they spent their inheritance on the Christians, sheltered the hunted in their own house, ministered to the imprisoned, and gathered up and buried the bodies of the martyrs — the office from which comes the image that fixed Praxedes in Roman art, of a woman wringing out a sponge of the martyrs' blood into a well. The great basilica of Santa Prassede, rebuilt by Pope Paschal I in 817–824 over the site of the family house, keeps her name and her relics. The era of her death is unknown; the veneration is certainly ancient, going back to the fourth century.

• Victor of Marseilles

  Victor was a Christian soldier of the Roman garrison at Massilia — Marseilles — put to death there about the year 290 for going among the imprisoned Christians by night to strengthen them and for refusing, before the prefects Asterius and Eutychius, to offer incense to Jupiter. Racked, dragged through the streets and imprisoned, he converted the three soldiers set to guard him — Alexander, Longinus and Felician — who were beheaded at once; Victor himself, after kicking over the altar-image set before him, was crushed beneath a millstone and, the stone breaking while he still lived, beheaded. Over the cave that held their bodies John Cassian founded in the fifth century the abbey of Saint-Victor, the mother-house of Provençal monasticism.

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