First Sunday of Lent

Saints commemorated

• Martyr Conon of Isauria

  Conon of Isauria (first–second century) was an apostolic-age wonderworker of the village of Bidana near Isauria in Asia Minor, a region evangelised by the Apostle Paul. Guarded from childhood, the tradition holds, by the Archangel Michael, he was married against his will and persuaded his bride Anna to keep virginity with him; he then converted his household and, after their deaths, gave himself wholly to prayer and asceticism. God granted him such authority over demons that he is said to have compelled them to labour and sealed them beneath his house, and he converted much of his region by his preaching and miracles. In old age he was seized and tortured in a persecution, but the people of his country rose in arms and rescued him; he lived some two years more and reposed in peace. The Church keeps him on March 5, styling him martyr — indeed hosiomartyr — for the confession and sufferings he endured.

• St Mark of Athens (4th c.)

• St Mark the Ascetic (5th c.)

  Mark the Ascetic — also called Mark the Faster and Mark the Monk (fourth– fifth century) — was one of the great spiritual teachers of the desert and, in the witness of the tradition, a disciple of John Chrysostom. He is remembered above all as a writer on the ascetic life: his short treatises On the Spiritual Law and On Those Who Think They Are Made Righteous by Works are foundational texts of the Philokalia, weighing with rare balance the roles of grace and of human effort in salvation. Tradition holds that he knew the whole of Scripture by heart, was gentle and pure of soul, and lived to a very great age as a solitary. So highly were his writings valued that a Byzantine proverb ran, "Sell all, and buy Mark." He is commemorated on March 5.

• Adrian of Poshekhonye

  Adrian of Poshekhonye (†1550) was a Russian monk, iconographer, and monastic founder, and a venerable-martyr. A disciple of Cornelius of Komel — under whom he was tonsured and learned the painting of icons — he was led, after his master's death, by a mysterious elder to a remote place in the forests of Poshekhonye near Yaroslavl, where in 1540 he and the elder Leonid settled and founded a monastery dedicated to the Dormition of the Mother of God. Ordained priest and made abbot by Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow, he governed the house in strict observance and continued to paint icons, keeping a hermitage for solitude a little way off. On 5 March 1550, during Great Lent, armed robbers broke into the monastery seeking its money, beat him, and killed him. His relics were found incorrupt in 1626, and many miracles were worked at his grave; the monastery he founded bore his name thereafter.

• Conon the Gardener

  Conon the Gardener (martyred about the year 251) was a simple and guileless labourer of the town of Mandon in Pamphylia — a native of Nazareth of Galilee who tended a garden and lived, the synaxarion says, "God-fearing, sincere in heart, and without malice." When the persecution of the emperor Decius reached his country he was denounced as a Christian and refused to sacrifice to the idols; the tortures inflicted on him were fitted to his humble calling and his humble constancy — nails were driven through his feet, and he was made to run before the governor's chariot until he fell exhausted, and, praying, gave up his soul. He is one of the most beloved of the calendar's plain, unlettered martyrs, kept on March 5 together with the wonderworker Conon of Isauria, from whom he must be carefully distinguished.

• Luke of Simferopol

  Luke of Simferopol — in the world Valentin Felixovich Voino-Yasenetsky (1877–1961) — was one of the foremost surgeons of the Russian twentieth century and, at the same time, a bishop who spent eleven years in Soviet prisons and exile for refusing to be silent. He pioneered regional anaesthesia, wrote the Essays on the Surgery of Purulent Infections that trained generations of Russian surgeons, operated in a cassock with an icon in the theatre, was tonsured and consecrated in secret in 1923, was arrested three times, ran the military hospitals of Krasnoyarsk as an exile through the Second World War, was given the Stalin Prize in 1946 and gave most of it away, governed the see of Simferopol and Crimea from 1946, went blind in his last years and went on preaching, and died on 29 May (civil 11 June) 1961. His relics were uncovered in 1996 and he is venerated with extraordinary warmth in Russia, Ukraine and above all in Greece, where he is invoked before surgery as the physician-hierarch of the modern world.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Ladoca of Cornwall, virgin and missionary (5th C)
• St. Ciaran of Saighir (Ossory) (c.530)
• St. Caron of Tregaron
• St. Carthage the Elder, bishop of Ossory (c.540)
• St. Piran, hermit of Cornwall (c.480)
• St. Colman of Armagh (5th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings