Daily Devotional

Scripture Readings

Movable Calendar (Paschalion)

Wednesday of the Fourth Week of the Great Fast

There is No Divine Liturgy This Day Because of the Great Fast.

No readings given.

Menaion — Fixed Calendar

The commemoration of the holy Martyr Conon of Isauria.

No readings given.

Lives of the Saints (Prologue)

March 18th – Civil Calendar
March 5th – Church Calendar

1. The Holy Martyr Conon of Isauria.

Conon was instructed in the Christian Faith and baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity by the Archangel Michael himself, and he was accompanied by this archangel of God right up to his death. He was so enlightened and fortified by grace of the Holy Spirit that his heart was kept from all things earthly and clave to the spiritual and heavenly. When his parents forced him to marry, he, on the first evening, took a candle and put it under a vessel, then asked his bride: ‘Which is better, light or darkness?’ She answered: ‘Light,’ and he then began to speak to her of the Christian Faith, and of the spiritual life as better and finer than the physical. He succeeded in bringing first her and then his parents to the Christian Faith, and he and his wife lived as brother and sister. His wife and parents soon died, and he withdrew himself entirely from the world and gave himself to prayer, fasting and pondering on God. He performed great wonders, which brought many to Christianity. Among other wonders, evil spirits were forced to serve him. During a persecution he was arrested and tortured, and stabbed all over with knives. The sick anointed themselves with his blood and were healed. He lived for two further years in his own town, and went to the Lord. This wonderful saint lived and suffered in the second century.

2. The Holy Martyr Conon the Gardener.

From Nazareth, he was mild and virtuous, and pleasing to God in all things. During the persecution under Decius he was tortured for Christ, but he remained firm in the Faith and sharply denounced the judges for their folly. With nails through his legs, this good and virtuous saint was bound behind the prince’s chariot and was dragged on and on, until he was utterly spent. Then he made his last prayer to God and gave his soul into His keeping, in 251.

3. Our Holy Father Hesychios the Faster.

He was born near Bursa in the eighth century, but withdrew to a mountain called the hill of Maion, a place with an evil reputation for diabolical apparitions. He built himself a hut there, and a church dedicated to St. Andrew, and also made himself a garden which he cultivated in order to live by his own toil. Miracles were worked through his prayers. He foretold that there would be a women’s monastery in that place after his death. A month before he died, he foretold the day and hour of his death, and at midnight on the day foretold, people saw his hut illumined with an unusual light, and when they came to it, they found him dead. He was buried in the church of St. Andrew, but later Theophylact, the bishop of Amaseia, took him to the town of Amaseia. He departed this life peacefully and went to the kingdom of his God in 790. (In the Greek Synaxarion, he is commemorated on March 6th.)

4. Our Holy Father Mark the Ascetic.

An ascetic and wonder-worker, he was made a monk at the age of forty by his teacher, St. John Chrysostom. Mark spent sixty more years in the Nitrian desert in fasting, prayer and the writing of instructive books. He knew the whole of the holy Scriptures by heart. He was very merciful, and wept for the distress of any one of God’s creatures. He was once weeping for the blind whelp of a hyena when the whelp received its sight. In gratitude, the mother hyena brought him a sheepskin, and the saint forbade the hyena in the future to slaughter the sheep of poor people. He received communion at the hands of an angel. His homilies on the spiritual law, on repentance, on sobriety and so forth fall into the first rank of ecclesiastical literature; the great Patriarch Photius himself held them in high esteem.

FOR CONSIDERATION

Why do some people, well-educated, baptized as Christians, fall away from Christianity into philosophy and learned theories, alleging them to be something truer than Christianity? For two main reasons: either from an utterly superficial knowledge of Christianity, or from sin. A superficial knowledge of Christ rejects Him, and sin flees from Christ like a felon from judgement. Superficial and guilty Christians have often become as bitter enemies of Christianity as are pagans. To the superficial and the guilty it is more comfortable to bathe in the shallow pool of human thought than in the dangerous depths of Christ. Those who sincerely set themselves to follow Christ are constantly invited by Christ to a greater and greater depth, as He once said to the Apostle Peter: ‘Launch out into the deep.’ St. Mark the Ascetic writes that one understands the law of God insofar as one fulfills His commandments. ‘Ignorance urges a man to speak against that which is helpful, and insolence breeds vice.’

Daily Scripture Readings taken from The Orthodox New Testament, translated and published by Holy Apostles Convent, Buena Vista, Colorado, copyright © 2000, used with permission, all rights reserved.

Daily Prologue Readings taken from The Prologue of Ochrid, by Bishop Nikolai Velimirovic, translated by Mother Maria, published by Lazarica Press, Birmingham, England, copyright © 1985, all rights reserved. Edited by Dormition Skete.