Saint Mary of Egypt

From the Lives of the Fathers, vol. 1.

At twelve years old she ran away from her parents and went to Alexandria, where she led a notoriously sinful life and became the scandal of the city. After sixteen years in sin she drifted to Jerusalem, and on the feast of the Holy Cross she went to enter the church, more out of curiosity than devotion. At the threshold some invisible force pushed her back.

She tried a second time, and was repelled again, and a third and a fourth time the same thing happened. She withdrew into a corner of the portico, and there she was enlightened within and understood that God had barred her from the church because of her wicked life. Raising her eyes, she saw a picture of the Blessed Virgin in the vestibule. Weeping, she turned to it and begged the Mother of God to take pity on her. She admitted that her sins made her unworthy even to be looked at, but pleaded that Our Lady was the refuge of sinners, and promised that if she could only enter, she would change her life and do penance wherever she was sent.

Then she heard an inner voice, as though the Virgin answered her, telling her to enter, since she had called on her and wished to amend. She went in, knelt before the cross, and wept, then returned to the picture and asked where she should go to do penance.

The voice told her to go beyond the Jordan, where she would find her rest. She made her confession, received communion, crossed the river, and went into the desert. For the first seventeen years the evil spirits assailed her fiercely, trying to make her fall again, but she kept commending herself to Mary, who gave her the strength to resist until the struggle finally ceased.

After fifty-seven years in the desert, in the eighty-seventh year of her age, she was found by the abbot Saint Zosimus, to whom she told the whole story of her life, asking him to return the following year and bring her communion. He did. She asked him to come once more, and when he returned the third time he found her dead, her body surrounded with light, and words written in the sand asking that she be buried there and prayed for. A lion came and dug her grave, the abbot buried her, and he went back to tell of the wonders of God's mercy toward this happy penitent.

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Source:

Simplified retellings of the "example" stories that St. Alphonsus Liguori placed at the end of each section of The Glories of Mary. These are paraphrased in plain modern prose, faithful to the substance of the 1888 English translation. Liguori himself, in his author's "Protest," noted that the miracles and apparitions in the book are offered on human authority only, not as articles of faith.