The life of St Alexander the Unsleeping
In time he brought the ruler of a nearby city to the Christian faith; that man, Rabbula, went on to serve for thirty years as bishop of Edessa, and together the two men turned Alexander's own cave into the seed of a monastery. Alexander gave the growing community a rule and an appointed superior before withdrawing yet again, and in time some four hundred monks gathered under the pattern of life he had set in motion. After years spent seeking to know how such a community ought to pray, he settled on dividing the monks into twenty-four watches, so that between them the Psalms were sung without a break, day and night, save for the hours of the divine services themselves. This unbroken chain of prayer gave the community its lasting name, the Unsleeping Ones. Alexander later founded a further house of the same pattern near Constantinople and reposed there in deep old age, around the year 430, after some fifty years given wholly to that work.
