The life of St Moses of Ethiopia
For years the group he led was feared across the region for killings and thefts committed under his command.
What changed him came slowly, and by grace rather than any force of his own: he left the robbers behind entirely and made his way to a monastery in the Egyptian desert of Scetis, where he was baptized and taken into the community. Ordained a priest, he spent fifteen years in that office and gathered some seventy-five disciples of his own around him. When raiders known as the Mazices descended on Scetis around the year 405, Moses, mindful that his own hands had once taken lives, would not raise a weapon against them; he urged the rest of the monks to flee to safety, but he and seven others stayed to meet the attackers unarmed, and all eight were killed together.
He is remembered too for a smaller, quieter lesson: pressed once by his fellow monks to judge a brother's fault, he came instead carrying a basket of sand with a hole worn through its bottom, its contents trailing out behind him the whole way, and said only that his own sins followed him just as unseen as that spilling sand, even as he was being asked to weigh a failing that was not his.
