The life of St Euphrosyne
She quietly gave away what she owned to the poor and left her father's house, and fearing he would come looking for her in any convent of women, she took on a man's dress and name instead, calling herself Smaragdus, and was received into a monastery of monks who never suspected her true identity.
She lived there in a solitary cell for thirty-eight years, given over to fasting, obedience, and unbroken prayer, and grew in that hidden life to a depth of spiritual maturity the other monks came to admire without knowing its full cost. Her own father, grieving her disappearance, eventually came to that same monastery seeking counsel for his sorrow, and unknowingly received it from his own daughter, who guided him gently without revealing who she was. Only as she lay dying did she finally tell him the truth, asking that he alone prepare her body for burial. Her father later gave himself to the monastic life as well, and mother and father are both remembered by the Church, each in their own right, for the paths that hidden meeting set them on.
