The life of St John of Ancient Caves in Palestine
There he gave himself to fasting, vigil, and constant prayer, and in time was ordained to the priesthood, his life among the community earning him a name for holiness that outlasted the few details preserved about him individually. The same Lavra had received, more than a century before John's time, the young Cyriacus, sent there by Euthymius the Great, and it was within the same wilderness of caves near the Dead Sea, at the place associated with Chariton's memory, that Cyriacus himself would later die. Little beyond the fact of his priesthood, his labors, and this lasting association with one of Palestine's oldest monastic sites survives to tell of John's own particular life, which the Church remembers chiefly through the ancient community that shaped it.
