Apostle Thaddeus of the Seventy; Avram, Archimandrite of Smolensk

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Apostle Thaddeus of the Seventy

• Saint of the day

  Avram, Archimandrite of Smolensk

• Saint of the day

  Apostle Thaddeus of the Seventy (44)

• Holy Martyrs Bassa and her sons Theognis, Agapios, and Pistis (4th c.)

  Bassa was a Christian woman of Edessa in Macedonia — the old royal city of the Macedonian kings, not the Syrian Edessa of the apostle with whom she shares this day — who was married to a priest of the idols and who raised her three sons, Theognius, Agapius and Pistus, secretly in the faith. When the persecution of Maximian Galerius came (305–311) it was her own husband who denounced them. The boys were tortured before their mother's eyes and put to death one after another, the eldest torn with iron claws and beheaded, the second flayed, the third scourged and beheaded; and Bassa, who had stood by them and urged them on, was carried through prison, fire, water and the beasts, and at last beheaded on the island of Halone near Cyzicus. A church was standing in her honour at Chalcedon by the middle of the fifth century.

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• Holy Forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob

• Abramius of Paleostrov

  Abramius was the disciple and successor of Cornelius of Paleostrov, the founder of monastic life on Palei Island in Lake Onega in the Olonets country of the Russian north. When Cornelius died, about the year 1420, in the cave where he had passed his last years in chains and unbroken prayer, it was Abramius who took up his relics and translated them into the monastery church of the Nativity of the Theotokos, and so established his veneration; and when Abramius himself died he was laid beside his teacher. The double burial is the reason the two are transmitted together and the ground of the local cultus: pilgrims to Palei Island came to one shrine holding both founders. He is commemorated on August 21, and almost nothing else about him has come down.

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• Abramius of Smolensk

  Abramius of Smolensk (mid-12th century – after 1224) is the greatest figure of monastic learning in the Russian principalities before the Mongols, and the most fully documented: his disciple Ephraim wrote his Life within living memory, and it is one of the finest pieces of early Russian hagiography. Born to wealthy Smolensk parents who had had twelve daughters before him, he gave away his inheritance, was tonsured at the monastery of the Theotokos at Selishche, and spent more than thirty years copying and reading books — Greek fathers in Slavonic translation, and everything the Russian north then possessed. Ordained priest in 1198, he became a preacher of repentance and of the Dread Judgement to the whole city, was slandered as a heretic and a seducer, was forbidden to serve, and was cleared and restored when a drought that would not break ended after his prayer. Bishop Ignatius built for him the monastery of the Placing of the Robe, where he governed a small brotherhood as archimandrite until his death.

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• Abramius the Lover-of-Labour of the Caves

  Abramius was a monk of the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev whose whole memory is contained in his epithet. The seventeenth-century accounts of the Caves fathers say that he toiled in the cave and worked to provide whatever the brotherhood of the Caves needed, and that he was therefore called trudolyubivy — "the lover of labour," the hardworking one. Neither his origin, nor his years, nor any word of his is transmitted; not even his century is fixed, the estimates ranging from the twelfth to the early fourteenth, with the Mongol devastation of Kiev in 1240 as the period most often proposed. His relics rest incorrupt in the Near Caves of St Antony, where they are venerated to this day, and the Church keeps him on August 21.

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• Ephraim of Smolensk

  Ephraim was the disciple of Abramius of Smolensk, and he is remembered for one act: he wrote his teacher's Life. That book — composed in the thirteenth century, within living memory of the events, by a man who had been present for many of them — is among the finest works of hagiography produced in Rus' before the Mongol conquest, and is the sole substantial source for one of the most remarkable religious careers of the period. It is also, incidentally, the best surviving evidence for what education and book-learning actually amounted to in the remote north-west of the Russian lands in that age. Of Ephraim's own life almost nothing is transmitted. He is commemorated with his teacher on August 21, and the proper service composed for the day names the two together.

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• Martha of Diveyevo

  Martha — in the world Maria Semyonovna Milyukova — came to Seraphim of Sarov at the age of thirteen and never went home. The elder kept her in the little women's community at Diveyevo which he was then building, tonsured her at last into the great schema, and set her among the first of its sisters; and she lived out the six years that remained to her in an unbroken silence and a labour — carrying bricks, grinding flour, digging the ditch of the community — that the oldest nuns could not match. She died on 21 August 1829, aged nineteen. St Seraphim knew of her death before he was told of it, arranged her burial with an unheard-of solemnity, and said of her afterwards that she was in the Kingdom of Heaven at the throne of God, near the Queen of Heaven, among the holy virgins. She was canonised in 2000, and her relics rest at Diveyevo.

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• Sarmean of Kartli

  Sarmean was Catholicos of Kartli — primate of the Church of Georgia — from about 767 to 774, in the hardest years of the Arab domination, when the emirate of Tbilisi pressed the Georgians toward Islam and the Church held its people by little more than persistence. He is remembered less for the government of his see than for a single incident of conscience: having unknowingly given the Holy Gifts to Jacobite visitors at the Monastery of Shio-Mgvime, he learned of his error, summoned his bishops, confessed it before them, burnt the presents the strangers had made him, and withdrew into a cave to weep over it — until the bishops came to tell him that St Shio had appeared to each of them in the same night with the word that the Lord had remitted his sin. He shepherded his flock in humility to the end and died in peace in 774.

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• Thaddaeus of the Seventy

  Thaddaeus — Addai in his own Aramaic — was a Jew of Edessa who came up to Jerusalem, was baptised by John the Forerunner in the Jordan, followed Christ, and was numbered among the Seventy. After Pentecost he was sent back to his own city to fulfil the promise the Lord had made in his letter to the toparch Abgar: he healed the king of his disease, baptised him and his household and at length the whole city, put down the idols, ordained clergy and founded the church of Edessa — the mother-church of Syriac Christianity and the first Christian polity in the world by its own reckoning. He preached afterwards through Syria and Mesopotamia and built a church at Beirut, where the Byzantine tradition says he reposed in peace about the year 44. He is not the apostle of the Twelve who bears the same by-name, and the two have been confounded since antiquity.

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British Isles and Ireland

• St. Moghtewe, abbot in Ireland
• St. Eardwulf of Northumbria (c.808)

Readings

Troparia & kontakia