The life of St Zacharias the Recluse of Egypt
The older ascetics were slow to trust that a boy brought up this way, rather than one who had chosen the desert for himself, could truly mean his vocation. To answer their doubt he is remembered as having plunged himself into the stinging brine of a nearby salt lake and stayed there until the elders were satisfied he was in earnest, a hard and almost reckless proof of sincerity rather than any ordinary act of piety. Having settled the question, he stayed on among them for the rest of his days.
What later generations remembered him for was not this early trial but a lifelong tenderness toward those with nowhere else to turn: the poor, the homeless, and all whom the wider world had simply set aside. Among the many ascetics of that desert century, he came to be named, almost as a title of honor, the one who belonged especially to the outcast, and it is chiefly in that light that the Church still keeps his memory.
