Life in the Desert

6) Now I will relate next how a tradition of the monastery was kept. On the Lord’s day of the first week of the fast, which we calI Holy Day, the divine sacramental rites were performed in the usual way, and then they participated in the communion of the living and undefiled body of our Lord Jesus Christ, and after that, having taken a little to eat, they were then all gathered together in the oratory, and on bended knees and with humble prayer each of them greeted the other and humbly asked for the blessing of their abbot, so that they might be the more firmly strengthened for the divine struggle. When these things had been completed, the gates of the monastery were opened, and they then sang this psalm together: ‘Dominus illuminatio mea et salus mea; quem timebo?’ And so they went out together. They left one or two behind in the monastery, not at aIl for the purpose of guarding the valuables they had acquired – there was nothing of such a kind there – but so that they would not leave the oratory without the divine solemnities.

And each one of them provided food for himself according as he cou Id or wished to: one took with him a sufficient supply for the body, another fruits from the palm-trees, another beans soaked in water, another nothing except only his body and clothing: but they were nourished [when] the necessity of nature required, that is, with the plants that grew in the desert; and each one bound himself to abstinence there as seemed good to himself, in such a way that none of them knew the conduct or deeds of another. When they had crossed over the river Jordan, then each one separated himself far from the others, and none of them joined up with his companions again, but if anyone of them saw another in the distance coming towards him, he immediately tumed away from the path of his joumey and went in another direction, and lived and remained by himself in continuous prayers and fasts.

Having fulfilled the fast in this manner, then, they retumed again to the monastery before the Lord’s day of the resurrection, that is, on the feast-day that we traditionally call Palm-day. Each one kept in his own conscience within himself the witness of his own toil, as to what he had been occupied with and of what labours he had sowed the seeds; and none of them asked another in what manner he had fulfilled the struggle of his toil.

The Old English Life of Saint Mary of Egypt