First Sunday of Lent

Saints commemorated

• Ven. Alexius the Man of God

  Alexis the Man of God (died c. 411) is one of the most beloved saints of the undivided Church — a young Roman nobleman who, on his own wedding day, left his bride untouched at the bridal chamber and fled his father's palace to live as a nameless beggar. For seventeen years he begged at the doors of a church in Edessa of Syria, where a vision of the Mother of God revealed him as "the man of God"; when his fame grew unbearable he fled again, and Providence carried him back to Rome and to the very house of his father Euphemianus. There, unknown, he lived seventeen more years as a servant under the stairs of his own home, enduring the mockery of the household slaves and the daily grief of parents and wife who did not know him. Only at his death was he revealed — by a writing found clutched in his hand, which told his whole story — and Rome wept over the beggar it had trampled. He is kept on March 17, honoured as ὅσιος, "the man of God," the pattern of hidden sanctity and voluntary poverty.

• Ven. Makary of Kalyazinsk

• St Alexis, the Man of God (411)

• St Patrick, Enlightener of Ireland (ca. 461)

  Patrick (late 4th century – c. 461/493) is the apostle and enlightener of Ireland, a saint of the undivided Church honoured East and West on March 17. A Romano-British youth, the son of a deacon, he was carried off at sixteen by Irish raiders and spent six years as a slave herding flocks, in which captivity — by his own account — he was converted from a careless faith to unceasing prayer. Escaping home, he was called back to Ireland by a vision, "the voice of the Irish" begging him to walk among them again; trained and consecrated bishop, he returned to the land of his bondage and spent the rest of his life baptising a pagan people, ordaining clergy, and planting the Church across the island, with his see at Armagh. He is known intimately from his own hand, for his Confession and his Letter against Coroticus survive — the earliest documents of Irish Christianity and a rare first-person witness of a saint of that age. The Orthodox Church receives him as a father of the one Church before the schism, and many number him, with Nina of Georgia and the like, among those equal to the Apostles.

• Gertrude of Nivelles

  Gertrude of Nivelles (c. 626–659) was a Frankish abbess of the seventh century and a saint of the undivided Western Church, kept on March 17. Daughter of Pepin of Landen, the powerful mayor of the palace of Austrasia, she refused a noble marriage and, when her widowed mother Itta founded the double monastery of Nivelles in Brabant, became its first abbess while still very young. She was renowned for her hospitality to pilgrims and wandering Irish monks, for her deep knowledge of the Scriptures, and for an ascetic devotion that wore out her body by her early thirties; she resigned her office to prepare for death and reposed on March 17, 659, at the age of thirty-three. Long one of the most popular saints of the Low Countries — invoked by travellers, gardeners, and against plagues of mice — she is honoured among the Orthodox as a mother of the one Church before the schism.

• Macarius of Kalyazin

  Macarius of Kalyazin (c. 1400–1483) was one of the great monastic founders of fifteenth-century Russia — a wonderworker of the Tver land whose monastery on the Volga became a centre of the Russian North. Born Matthew Kozhin to a pious boyar family, he was married at his parents' wish but widowed within a few years and left an orphan; freed of every earthly tie, he took the monastic habit at Kashin and then withdrew into the forest between the lakes above the Volga, where he built a cell and, drawing disciples, founded the Holy Trinity monastery later called after Kalyazin. Famed for a humility so deep that he named his own monastery after the very landowner who had first opposed it, and for the gift of healing, he governed his brotherhood into great old age and reposed in 1483. His relics were found incorrupt in 1521 and he was numbered among the saints of the Russian Church; his monastery stood until it was drowned by the waters of the Volga in 1940.

• Theosteriktos the Confessor

  Theosteriktos the Confessor (8th century) was a monk — by the tradition the abbot — of the famous Pelekete monastery on the Bithynian shore of the Sea of Marmara, one of the communities that stood firm for the holy icons during the iconoclast persecution of the eighth century. When the imperial power fell upon the iconodule monasteries, Pelekete was raided and its monks scattered, tortured, and put to flight; Theosteriktos endured the sufferings of a confessor for the veneration of the icons — imprisonment and ill-usage borne without recanting — and, surviving his tormentors, ended his life in peace, honoured by the Church as one who "confessed" the faith and did not die of it. He is commemorated on March 17.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Patrick, bishop of Armagh, Apostle to the Irish (461)
• St. Beccan of Rhum (677)
• St. Withburga, hermit at Holkham and East Dereham (c.743)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings