The Story of Zosimas
Now Zosimas’ story is, alas, far more akin to our own lives. For we are all too glad to dissociate ourselves from Mary and her sinfulness. Hers is a story so different from our lives, after all. Here we are, in church on Sunday, in our ordinariness. We have our homes and families our spouses and children, our work, our life in the church and in the community. We try to be good Christians, to lead good lives. Even though we know our weaknesses, we know (faithfully) that at least we have nothing so spectacular as Mary’s life for which to repent. Who among us could truly identify with her story, either the degree of her wickedness, or the degree of her repentance – for who among us would drop everything (everything) and turn to a life of ceaseless and solitary prayer? But this is exactly why we are so much like Zosimas.
Zosimas was a priest and a monk, sincere, devoted, and earnest. He sought to live a good Christian life, and he did. From his childhood he had pursued the monastic vocation, with piety and discipline: a man who early on had achieved an enviable sanctity. It would be hard to imagine a life more different than Mary’s has been: the life of the monastery as opposed to the life of the city streets. But at the age of fifty- three, Zosimas came to a crisis in his life. “It was then that he began to be tormented by the thought that it seemed as if he had attained perfection in everything and needed no teaching from anyone. And so, as he himself said, he began to say to himself, “is there a monk on earth capable of affording me benefit or passing on to me anything new, some kind of spiritual achievement of which I either do not know or in which I have not succeeded as a monk?” Foolish man! For Zosimas had become a prisoner to his own idea of himself, a man who deceived himself about who he was, the life he lived and why he lived it in that way. He did not know himself honestly, and so he became captive to his own life. How far from the freedom with which Mary had lived, and loved, and lived again! But the Lord was compassionate with Zosimas, and spoke to him in a vision telling him to go to the desert beyond the Jordan, ‘so that you may know how many and varied are the ways to salvation.’
Zosimas went, expecting to find a great and holy monk who would become his teacher. When he entered the desert, he walked for twenty days into its deepest and most desolate part, where no sign of life could be found. Then he found Mary. The encounter was terrifying and wonderful. When first he saw her, the good priest could not tell whether she was an apparition, a Demon or an animal, and he crossed himself repeatedly to protect himself from the works of the devil. With a jolt, he realized this was a woman. She was naked, blackened by years of harsh desert sun, emaciated from her fasting, her hair short and pure white; and she fled from him, running away as fast as she could. Zosimas knew that here, in this utter wilderness, in this strange and frightening creature, he had at last met something he had never before known: the naked power and presence of God.
And so Zosimas, good man of God, found salvation and truth where he least expected it: in the life of a woman who had been as unashamedly sinful as he had been earnest in his life of devotion. And she, not he, was the Person in whom grace was found. Like the gospel story of the Pharisee and Publican, Zosimas’ story is above all a plea for humility in our lives – for fighting against the complacency (both spiritual and social) which is the constant danger for us as we seek to live the life of faith. It reminds us vividly that appearances and actions deceive, that only God knows the intentions of the heart, and that the moment we think we have accomplished true Christian living we have lost our way. At such moments, the penitent sinner becomes our guide and our hope.
~ Professor Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Ph. D. Doctor Harvey is a faculty member of the Religious Studies Department at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Harvey received her Doctorate in Byzantine Studies from the University of Bermingham (England). She has taught Church History at the University of North Carolina and at the University of Rochester and served a fellowship at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies. Doctor Harvey is a recognized Syriac scholar responsible for numerous translations and commentaries. With Doctor Sebastian Brock, she co-authored Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, a collection of newly translated lives of saints. At Brown University she offers courses in Orthodox Church history, monasticism and the ascetic tradition, Syriac and early Christian Literature. Coptic Orthodox Church Network, http://www.copticchurch.net/topics/synexarion/maryofegypt.htm.
