The life of St Macrina the Younger
When her father died, she turned to her mother Emmelia and persuaded her to set the world aside as well, and together the two women reshaped the family's Pontic estate into a community of women given over to prayer and to the care of the poor, the hungry, and the sick.
Named for her own grandmother, Macrina the Elder, she took a direct hand in raising her youngest brother Peter, steering him from boyhood toward the ascetic life he would embrace as bishop of Sebaste. After Emmelia's death she led the community at Annisa, on the family's land along the river Iris, until her own repose on July 19.
What is known of her comes from an unusually close source: her own brother, Gregory of Nyssa, later set down a Life of Macrina describing her sanctity in the direct, eyewitness detail of a sibling who had watched her whole life unfold.
