Memorial Saturday

Saints commemorated

• Apostle Onesimus of the Seventy

  Onesimus (Greek Ὀνήσιμος, "useful, profitable") is the runaway slave of the Epistle to Philemon: a servant of Philemon of Colossae who fled his master, reached the imprisoned Apostle Paul at Rome, was there converted and baptized, and was sent back to Colossae bearing Paul's tender letter of intercession — the New Testament's shortest and most personal epistle, in which the Apostle plays on the slave's name and begs that he be received "not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved" (Philemon 16). Freed and returned to Paul's service, Onesimus became in time a preacher of the Gospel and a bishop — by the received tradition the successor of Timothy at Ephesus — and is numbered among the Seventy Apostles. Under the emperor Trajan he was seized, brought to Rome, and tried before the eparch Tertyllus; there, about the year 109, his legs were crushed with clubs and he received the crown of martyrdom. He is kept on February 15, and with the Colossian household on November 22.

• Our Venerable Father Dalmatius of Siberia (1697)

• Our Venerable Father Anthimos of Chios (1960)

  Anthimus of Chios (1869–1960), born Argyrios Vagianos, was a Greek priest-monk, healer and spiritual father of the island of Chios, one of the best-loved elders of the twentieth-century Greek Church. Of poor and pious parents, he became a monk of the island's monasteries, served long years as chaplain to the lepers of the Chios leprosarium — among whom his prayers wrought many healings — and in 1930 founded the convent of Panagia Voithia ("Our Lady the Helper") to shelter nuns made refugees by the Asia Minor catastrophe. Renowned in his own lifetime for the gift of healing, the casting-out of demons, and clairvoyant counsel, he reposed on February 15, 1960, and was glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1992. He is a recently canonised saint, and this entry is authored accordingly (see the notes on his icon and hymns).

• Eusebius the Hermit of Syria

  Eusebius was a Syrian ascetic of the region of Antioch, remembered as one of the mountain-hermits whose lives the bishop Theodoret of Cyrrhus gathered in his Religious History. On a bare hilltop near the village of Asicha he lived under the open sky, without roof or cell, enduring the summer's heat and the winter's cold, clothed in skins and nourished on soaked pulse, and — the detail the tradition holds fast — bound with heavy iron chains that bent his body toward the ground, so that his prayer was made in a labour of the flesh as well as the spirit. His holiness drew disciples, and a monastic brotherhood grew about him. He is commemorated on February 15.

• Major of Gaza

  Major (Greek Μαΐωρ) was a martyr of Gaza in Palestine, put to death under scourging in one of the persecutions of the early fourth century. The synaxaria remember him for the manner of his confession: as the lash tore his flesh he answered his tormentors with the words of the Psalmist — "I am ready for scourges" — and so gave up his soul under the blows. His memory is kept on February 15; of his life beyond this the record transmits little.

• Paphnutius the Recluse of the Kiev Caves

  Paphnutius was a monk of the Kiev Caves who lived as a recluse in the caverns of the great monastery and is remembered above all for the gift of tears: by the unbroken remembrance of death he wept continually for his sins, and when the hour of his own death came he departed in peace, the tradition says, in the sight of angels who came to receive his soul. Nothing of his origin or of the year of his repose is securely transmitted; he is counted among the venerable fathers who rest in the Far (Theodosius) Caves, where his relics lie, and is generally placed in the thirteenth century. He is commemorated on February 15 and with the whole company of the Far Caves on August 28.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Berach of Connaught (5th C)
• St. Dochow (473)
• St. Farannan of Allernan (590)
• St. Oswy, King of Northumbria (670)
• St. Sigfrid of Glastonbury, Apostle of Sweden (c.1045)
• SS. Winaman, Unaman & Sunaman, Monk Martyrs (1040)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings