Editor’s note: An earlier version of this piece had a reference that appeared insensitive and inappropriate in light of recent events in the United States which the Catholic Herald deplores in the strongest possible terms. Readers are also cautioned that this series of Improbable Hagiographies offers: Scandalously irreverent and theologically imprecise briefs on heroines of the faith, written by a recovering Protestant agnostic seeker with practically no training and exactly zero filter.
Hope y’all are ready for a horny saint story … but one with a holy ending!*
So, Saint Mary of Egypt might be the first recorded nympho Saint, and y’all, I am here for it because we have to balance out all those consecrated virgin stories somehow, right?
Born in Egypt in 344, at a young age she ran away from home and went to Alexandria. When she got there I guess they were all like, “Are you traveling for business or pleasure, ma’am?” and I have to imagine she gave them a little wink and said, “both.” Because she eventually became a prostitute — only problem, she was terrible at the business part and would often refuse her johns money because it’s said, “she was driven ‘by an insatiable and an irrepressible passion’.”
This is just me, and no judgement, but I feel like any sex work business model that isn’t AT MOST 10% pleasure, and at least 90% profit is doomed to fail.
Needless to say, she was pretty destitute and had to supplement her income by also spinning flax. Hashtag, on backs and on flax.
[S]he eventually became a prostitute — only problem, she was terrible at the business part and would often refuse her johns money because it’s said, “she was driven ‘by an insatiable and an irrepressible passion’.”
After 17-years of terrible business decisions, she decided to expand her market and took an “anti-pilgrimage” to Jerusalem for the “Great Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross” where the plan was to bag some pilgrims. And by pilgrims I mean the holy kind, not the giant shoe buckle kind in case that needed clarifying. Which it probably didn’t. I just never want to miss an opportunity to throw style shade at colonizers.
Also, speaking of fashion, when you look up Saint Mary of Egypt, you quickly discover that you’ll be hard pressed to find an image of her where her dairies are covered. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was the patron saint of the “Free The Nipple” campaign. (Also, I just want to add, as a feminist I hate that campaign. If your “rally” is bringing the same audience as a wet T-shirt contest, then me thinks you might be doing feminism wrong. We’re not here to smash the patriarchy. We’re here to SMASH THE PATRIARCHY.)
After 17-years of terrible business decisions, she decided to expand her market and took an “anti-pilgrimage” to Jerusalem for the “Great Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross” where the plan was to bag some pilgrims.
Anyway, she does indeed bag a few pilgrims along the way, but when she gets to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre she receives the ultimate holy cock block. Like, literally a supernatural barrier occurs that won’t let her enter. No preying on the praying, I guess.
In that moment, she also has a personal revelation about her own wayward desires, and she feels deep remorse. Then she sees an icon of the O.G. Mary and the wheels totally fall off her poorly executed small business venture.
She basically becomes a born-again virgin, at which point she’s allowed to enter the church. After venerating the relic of the true cross, she stops by the Mary icon one last time and hears a voice telling her to cross the Jordan and she will find glorious rest.
Now, as a mom of four kids (including two teenage girls), who also runs a nonprofit in her free time, I gotta tell ya, this made me look up flights. I mean, first it caused me to Google “Where is the Jordan River?” but then I was googling flight prices to Israel, because ohmygosh, “glorious rest” sounds like the best thing in the world to me right now.
Anyway, Mary immediately goes to a monastery on the bank of the Jordan, receives absolution and Holy Communion, then the next morning she crosses it, and you won’t believe what happens next! {Note to editor: Use this line as click bait on social media} … She lived in penance as a hermit in the desert until she died at 77.
(Narr. Morgan Freeman: “Destiny’s editor did not use that line as click bait, boys and girls.”)
See, in true clickbait fashion, you absolutely WOULD believe what happened next. Gotcha suckers. Womp womp. Learn to internet better, foos!
That said, some pretty cray stuff did actually take place right before her death however.
She basically became a prairie woman who was almost unrecognizable as a human according to Saint Zosimas of Palestine when he discovered her. She’d lived on only things she could forage for all those decades, and was looking pretty rough.
A lot of paintings depict her as a bigfoot-looking broad, covered in fur. Still, when saint Zosimas found her in the woods, she was naked and asked for his mantle to cover her.
However, if these drawing are accurate, she was far from naked, and needed a razor for that matter. Like, kinda when we go to the beach and I point out really hairy men and ask my husband why that dude’s swimming with his sweater on. It always gets a laugh. Every. Single. Time.
I feel like a lot of those same jokes would be applicable here.
But either way, Zosimas gave her his mantle, then she dictated her whole life story and asked him to meet her back at the river the following year on Holy Thursday with communion.
When he returned he said she walked across the water to get to him and took communion, and then they made plans to meet again in a year for Lent. However, when he came back that time, he found her body with an inscription written in the sand near it saying she’d actually died the day he’d given her Holy Communion the year before… yet her body was uncorrupted.
He buried her with the help of a passing lion — ya know, like ya do — and that’s the story of how Saint Mary went from a total Jessica Rabbit, to the hairy Beast from Beauty and the Beast, and then died like Snow White with her woodland pals helping bury her magical body.
Destiny Herndon De La Rosa is the founder of the secular pro-life New Wave Feminists organization. She is a frequent op/ed contributor to the Dallas Morning News and a sought-after speaker.
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