The life of St Aninus the Wonderworker
There he found an elder named Maium and settled beside him, and the two kept a rule stark even by desert standards, taking no food at all through the whole forty days of the Great Fast.
Each day the labor of fetching water from a distant source fell to Aninas, until once he returned earlier than he expected to find the jars already full, a mercy he took to be an angel's doing. In time he was granted, by his prayers, to draw water from a well gone dry, to heal those who came to him sick, and to tame a lion that afterward kept near him like a companion. Disciples began to gather once these things became known, and he is remembered also for the quiet discernment that let him counsel a distant stylite, by letter, to bear a wrong rather than abandon his pillar to seek justice for it.
He is venerated as a wonderworker of the Euphrates desert, a hieromonk whose sanctity drew others to the same hard solitude he had first sought for himself.
