The life of St Gerasimus of the Jordan
He gave the community a demanding rule: five days of each week were spent alone in a cell, working at handicrafts and praying, eating nothing cooked and lighting no fire, subsisting on dry bread, roots, and water, before the brothers gathered again for the weekend's common worship and meal. Tradition remembers him as well for a story that made him one of the desert's best-loved saints: coming upon a lion in pain from a large thorn caught in its paw, Gerasimus drew it out and tended the wound, after which the animal is said to have stayed near the monastery, carrying water and guarding a donkey until, at the elder's death, it lay down at his grave and would not be moved. Centuries later a strikingly similar story attached itself to Jerome, who had lived not far away near Bethlehem, and modern readers have generally judged that this later version borrowed Gerasimus's own tale rather than recording a separate event. He reposed in 475, and the community he founded endured on the same site for many centuries afterward.
