The
Fourty nine elders of sheheet
Friday,
November 17, 2006
The Fourty-Nine
Elders of Sheheet
26 Toubah
/ 3 February
Emperor
Theodosius the Less, the son of Emperor Arcadius, did
not have a son, so he wrote to the elders of the Sheheet
Wilderness, asking them to pray to God to grant him one. Saint Isidore, ‘the priest of the Wilderness’, subsequently wrote
back to him saying that God did not will for him to have a son who could
participate with the heretics who would come after him, and when the emperor
read this message, he offered thanks to God.
Later on,
certain people advised him to marry another wife and have offspring from her,
that his child may inherit the empire after him. He said to them, ‘I cannot do
anything except what the elders of Sheheet demanded’.
He sent an envoy whose name was Martinos to consult
with them about that, and Martinos had a son named Zius who accompanied him on his visit to the elders in
order to receive their blessings. When they arrived and the elders read the
message, they took the messenger to the body of Saint Isidore,
and he had departed. They called on him saying ‘Our
father, we have received a letter from the emperor, what shall we say to him?’
A voice came from the pure body saying, ‘What I said before, I also say now,
that the Lord will never give him a son to participate with the heretics, even
if he marries ten woman’. The elders wrote back to the
emperor recounting what they heard.
When the
messenger was about to return, the pagan Berbers attacked the monastery. Anba Youannes, one of the elders
of the monastery, called upon the brethren and said, ‘The Berbers have come to
kill us. Whoever amongst you would like to be a martyr, let him stand, and
whoever is afraid, let him hide in the fortress’. Some of them his in the fortress, but he
remained with forty-eight elders, and the Berbers slaughtered
them all. Martinos and his son were hiding, and the
boy l
looked up and saw the angels placing the crowns of glory
on the elders who were killed. The boy said to his father, ‘I see spiritual
beings putting crowns on the heads of the elders. I shall go to receive a crown
like that’, and his father replied, ‘I shall go with you my son’. Both revealed
themselves to the Berbers. They were also killed and received the crowns of
martyrdom.
After the
Berbers had gone, the monks who were hiding in the fortress came down, took the
bodies and placed them in a cave, where they chanted and said praises before
all the bodies at night.
Some
people from the city of Batanoon came and took the
body of Anba Youannes and retuned to their city, but the elders of the monastery
retuned his body after a while. Some people from Fayoum
also came and stole the body of Zius, the son of Martinos. When they had arrived at the Fayoum
lake, the angel of the Lord retuned him to the place
where the body of his father was; the elders also tried to separate their
bodies several times, but they could not. Every time they moved the boy, the
angel of the Lord would return him to his place. During one night, one of the
fathers had a vision, and heard someone saying, ‘Praise God, we were not
separated in the flash, nor are we separated when we are with Christ, why do
you want to separate out bodies?’
When
persecution became rampant and the attacks on the monastery continued, the
fathers relocated the bodies, and then placed them in a cave which they built
beside the church of Saint Macarius. At the time of Anba Theodosius, the thirty-third Pope of Alexandria, they
built a church for them. When Anba Benjamin, the thirty-eighth
pope, came to the wilderness, he established a feast on the fifth day of Amshir, which was the day of the relocation of their bodies
to this church building deteriorated, and they moved them to one of the cells
until the time of Ibrahim El-Gohary, who built a
church for them around the end of the eighteenth century, where they placed the
bodies of the saints. The church is still in existence today in the monastery
of Saint Macarius.
May their prayers be with us all. Amen.
