25th Sunday after Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Ven. Alypius the Stylite

  Alypius the Stylite (c. 522–640) was the great pillar-saint of Adrianopolis in Paphlagonia, who is said to have stood upon his column for more than six decades until his repose at a very great age. A deacon of his native city, he founded a church over a haunted pagan burial-ground and there raised his pillar, driving off the demons of the place by his endurance and drawing to himself two monasteries — one of men, one of women — which he governed from the column. The foremost stylite of the middle Byzantine period, he continued in his own person the way of life inaugurated by Symeon the Stylite, and is commemorated on November 26 within the Nativity Fast.

• Our Holy Father Innocent, Bishop of Irkutsk (1731)

  Innocent of Irkutsk (c. 1680–1731), in the world John Kulchitsky, was the first bishop of the Siberian see of Irkutsk and is honoured as a wonderworker and enlightener of Siberia. Educated at the Kiev Academy and appointed to lead the Russian ecclesiastical mission to Peking, he was refused entry by the Chinese and left to years of hardship and uncertainty on the Mongolian frontier; named bishop of Irkutsk in 1727, he governed his vast and impoverished diocese for barely four years, maintaining its schools and toiling amid extreme want until his early death. His incorrupt relics, discovered later in the century, made him the first canonised saint of Siberia; he is commemorated on November 26.

• St Nikon Metanoite ("Repent!") (ca. 1000)

• Holy New Martyr George of Chios (1897)

  George the Trophy-bearer (†303) is the most universally venerated of the martyrs of the East, honoured from Ethiopia to England as Μεγαλομάρτυς and Τροπαιοφόρος — "great-martyr" and "trophy-bearer," the soldier who carried off the prize. Born in Cappadocia of a martyred father and a Palestinian mother from Lydda, he rose young to the rank of comes in the guard of Diocletian, and when the persecuting edict was published at Nicomedia in 303 he gave away his goods, freed his slaves, and denounced the emperor's decree to his face before the council. There followed the long cycle of tortures for which his passion is famous — the spiked wheel, the pit of quicklime, the red-hot iron shoes, the poison of the magician Athanasius — through which the martyr was preserved, so that the sorcerer himself, and the Empress Alexandra, and many of the court confessed Christ. He was beheaded on 23 April 303 and buried at Lydda (Diospolis) in Palestine, where his shrine became one of the great pilgrimage places of Christendom. To him the later tradition attached the celebrated miracle of the dragon, and he is the patron of Georgia, England, Greece, Ethiopia, Portugal and Catalonia, of the city of Beirut and of Christian soldiers everywhere.

• James the Hermit of Syria

  James the Hermit of Syria was a solitary of the fifth century who struggled on a mountain near Cyrrhus in northern Syria, a disciple of the great teacher of hermits Maron. Wearing iron chains, eating only after nightfall and praying without ceasing, he attained through these labours to a high measure of spiritual perfection, receiving from the Lord power over demons, the gift of healing, and even, it is said, the raising of the dead. He fell asleep in peace, and is commemorated on November 26.

• Nikon Metanoeite

  Nikon Metanoeite (c. 930–998) — "Preach Repentance" — was the great missionary monk of the tenth-century Byzantine world, whose whole preaching was compressed into the one cry with which he opened every sermon, "Repent!" (μετανοεῖτε). Born in Pontus and tonsured at the monastery of the Golden Rock, he travelled through Armenia, Crete newly recovered from the Arabs, Euboea, Aegina and the whole Peloponnese, recalling Christians to the Church and confirming the faith. He settled at last at Lacedaemon (Sparta), where he built a church of Christ the Saviour and a monastery, and where his relics remained a source of healing. He is commemorated on November 26.

• Stylianos of Paphlagonia

  Stylianos of Paphlagonia was a hermit of Asia Minor, honoured across the Orthodox world — and most warmly in the Greek tradition — as the patron and protector of children. Having given away the fortune he inherited from his parents, he became a monk and then withdrew to a cave in the wilderness, where his holiness drew the sick and the troubled to him for healing. The Lord granted him a special grace toward the young: mothers brought their ailing children to him and he cured them, and after his death the pious continued to invoke him for sick children and for the gift of offspring. He is commemorated on November 26.

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