The life of St Syncletike
When her parents died she cut her hair, distributed her inheritance to the poor, and left the city together with her younger sister to take up a hermit's life outside its walls. Word of her holiness spread, and in time a considerable number of women settled nearby, placing themselves under her guidance.
She was remembered for teaching drawn less from abstract theology than from the ordinary work of daily life, especially images of sailing, of housework, and of the sea, using them to describe the inward labor of the ascetic struggle, and for a particular skill in discerning which women were genuinely ready for the desert's rigors and which needed gentler counsel toward that same end. She is thought to have died around the age of eighty, near the year 350. What survives of her teaching comes mainly through a later biography, written a century or so after her death and traditionally though doubtfully credited to Athanasius of Alexandria, together with a separate collection of sayings gathered among those of the other desert fathers and mothers.
