Venerable Mary of Egypt

According to her Life, Mary was born in Egypt and at twelve left her parents for Alexandria, where she lived a dissolute life for seventeen years. She sailed with pilgrims to Jerusalem for the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, found herself unable to enter the church, and before an icon of the Mother of God resolved to change her life. She crossed the Jordan with three loaves and lived alone in the desert, she later said, for forty-seven years.

The Life tells that the monk Zosimas, who had gone into the desert for Lent, met her there, heard her story and brought her Communion. A year later he found her dead and buried her, helped by a lion that dug the grave. The Church remembers her on 1 April and on the fifth Sunday of Great Lent.