St Sabas

5^th December is the feast day of St Sabas, which is a strange term to use for this particular saint, given that feasting would have been a very rare event on his agenda!

Sabas was a “desert father” of the 5^th/6^th centuries. Born in 439 in what is now central Turkey, he determined at an early age that he wanted to live the life of a monk and, aged eighteen, he journeyed south to seek out the famous hermit Euthymius, who lived in a desert cave between Jerusalem and Jericho. Sabas hoped to be allowed to join the small group of disciples that Euthymius allowed to live close by.

However, Euthymius thought that he was too young to make such a commitment and sent him instead to a nearby monastery run by an abbot named Theoctistus. Euthymius reckoned that Sabas would receive good training there for his intended life as a desert father.

When Sabas was thirty Euthymius gave him permission to live in a cave near his own for five days a week, returning to the monastery for the other two. While in the cave, Sabas was commanded not only to pray but to weave baskets, making ten a day. He then had to take his fifty baskets back to the monastery.

Euthymius died in 473, when Sabas was 34, and the latter spent the next four years living alone in the desert. He then built a monastery of his own, along the lines of that run by Theoctistus in that other solitaries could visit it for prayer and worship when they felt so inclined.

Eventually Sabas was put in charge of all the desert monks in the region and was also sent further afield by the Patriarch of Jerusalem. He founded several other monasteries and hospitals, one of the monasteries, Mar Saba in the Kidron Valley of Palestine, still being occupied to this day by Orthodox monks.

Sabas died in 532 at the age of 94.

© John Welford