The life of St Bessarion the Wonderworker of Egypt
Received into monastic life under the guidance of Isidore of Pelusium, Bessarion took up the wandering, homeless asceticism practiced by a number of the desert's most extreme ascetics, keeping no fixed cell and depending on nothing beyond what each day provided. Story after story gathered around him: that on a journey with his own disciples along the shore of the Red Sea, he prayed over its salt water and made it fit to drink; that he was once seen walking on the surface of a river, and when asked how it had felt beneath him answered only that the water had reached his heels while the rest remained dry; that in a season of want he prayed, as the prophet Elijah once had, and rain came. The stories are told as the Church's own memory of an old man's heart, not as documented history, and are repeated less for their strangeness than for what they were meant to show, a poverty and trust so complete that even the created world seemed to answer it. He is remembered on both his days as one of the great fathers of the Egyptian desert.
