September 1 · Symeon the Stylite

Symeon the Stylite the Elder · Read aloud

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Long ago, in a little village called Sisan, on the border of Cilicia and Syria, there lived a boy named Symeon who kept his father's sheep.

He was thirteen, and he was good at it — not because the work was easy, but because he paid attention. He knew which lamb would stray. He knew which ewe was afraid of the dark. He stayed with them until every one was home.

One Sunday he stood in church, and the priest read the words of the Lord Jesus — the ones we call the Beatitudes.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn. Blessed are the meek…”

Symeon heard those words the way a thirsty boy hears a well. He could not let them go.

After the service he found an old monk, an Elder who had been praying longer than Symeon had been alive.

“Father,” he said, “those words. Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the ones who weep. What do they mean? How does a person actually live them?”

The Elder did not laugh. He did not say, You are too young. He explained the words simply, the way you explain something true to a child who is ready. And the words went down into Symeon and stayed there, the way a seed stays in good ground.

When he was eighteen he went to the monastery and received the monastic tonsure — the haircut and the new clothes that say, I belong to God now. He did not ask his mother and father. He simply went.

At the monastery he prayed so hard, and ate so little, that the other brothers grew afraid for him. The igumen — the father of that house — called him in.

“Symeon,” he said. “You must ease this. Or you must go. I will not watch a young monk wear himself away.”

So Symeon went. He lived for a time in an empty well in the mountains, where no one could tell him to stop. After a while the igumen was told, in a dream, to bring him home again. He did. But Symeon did not stay long.

He found a stony cave near a village called Galanissa, and he lived there three years. One Great Lent he ate nothing at all, and drank nothing, for the whole forty days — and God held him up. After that, every Great Lent, he did the same. Twenty days he prayed standing. Twenty days he prayed sitting, so that his body would not give out.

Word got out. People came walking up the hill. They came because they were sick. They came because they wanted a word that was true. The quiet cave was not quiet anymore.

Symeon did a strange thing then — a thing almost no one had done before. He built a pillar, only six or eight feet high, and he climbed up, and he made a little cell on top, and he stayed.

He was not hiding from God. He was hiding from praise. He wanted the solitude back.

The pillar grew. Year by year they built it higher, because the crowds kept coming. At last it stood eighty feet in the air — as tall as a great tree, as tall as a church. Around it they raised a double wall, so the people could not press in and steal his prayer. Women were not allowed past that wall. Not even his own mother.

The Patriarch of Antioch, Domninos, came all that way, and served the Divine Liturgy on the pillar, and gave Symeon the Holy Mysteries with his own hands.

Out in the desert, the old fathers heard about the man on the pillar. They were not sure. A new kind of holiness can be pride in a clever costume.

They sent messengers.

“Come down,” the messengers said. “The fathers tell you to come down.”

And if he would not come, they were to pull him down by force. But if he would come — if he would obey — they were to leave him there.

Symeon started down at once.

“Stay,” they said then. “Stay, and ask God to be your helper.”

He stayed.

Then his mother found him.

Her name was Martha. She was a poor woman, and she had a husband's name, Sisotian, and she had a son she had not seen since he was a boy. She had been looking for a long time. She came to the wall, and she asked to see him.

Symeon sent word down.

“If we are worthy,” he said, “we shall see one another in the life to come.”

She asked again. He asked her to wait a little, in silence.

And she did. She sat down at the foot of the hill. She did not climb. She did not call. She waited, and she prayed.

There she departed to the Lord.

When they told Symeon, he asked them to bring her body to the foot of the pillar. He prayed over his mother for a long time, and he wept. The people who were watching said a smile came onto her face.

He stood on that pillar forty-seven years. Eighty years, in all, he gave to the monastic life. Men who had never prayed to Christ were baptized, because they had seen a man who would not come down, and they knew that kind of strength does not come from a man alone.

One day he did not appear. For three days the people waited. His disciple Anthony climbed the pillar and found him stooped over, still at prayer — and he was gone. He had died the way he had lived. The Patriarch of Antioch, Martyrius, buried him near the pillar, with a great crowd of clergy and people. Anthony built a monastery there.

And today, so many hundreds of years later, on the day the Church begins her year again, we say his name once more, out loud, together — Venerable Symeon, and Venerable Martha his mother — and they are praying for us still.