St. Savas the Sanctified: Day 21: 40 Days of Blogging
December 5, 2011 § Leave a Comment
December 5
Memory of our venerable and God-bearing Father Sabbas the Sanctified (439-532).
Saint Sabbas was born in 439 in Mutalascus in Cappadocia. While still very young, he embraced religious life in the monastery of Flvinia in Cappadocia. In 457, at the age of eighteen, he went to the monastery of Passarion in Jerusalem. Saint Euthymius, who had remarked about him for his eminent virtue and called him the “young old man,” directed him to Saint Theoktistos in 458. After Saint Euthymius’ unexpected death in 473, he spent five years in solitude. He then went to take up his abode in 478 in a grotto on the left bank of the Cedron River opposite the monastery which today bears his name. As several monks came to place themselves under his direction, he erected a tower on the right bank of the torrent and made the water gush forth over this arid land by his prayer. A vast grotto transformed into a church was blessed in 491 by Sallustos, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who conferred priestly ordination upon Saint Sabbas at the same time and named him the archimandrite of all the hermits of Palestine. The Saint undertook upon the request of the Patriarchs of Jerusalem two ambassadorships to Emperors Anastasius I, in 512, and Justinian, in 531. Reaching a great old age, he died on December 5, 532, at the age of ninety-three. The Typikon of Ecclesiastical Offices and the Typikon of Monastic Life which were preserved in his name still come from his famous laura. Pope Paul VI returned Saint Sabbas’ relics to the monastery of Massaba in Jordan on October 24, 1965.
–From the Synaxarion
